Idolatry and Avot: a Tisha be'Av afterthought

The emotional intensity of Tisha Be’Av makes it difficult for me to keep track of what I fondly imagine to be my normally rational thought-processes. However, the intellective functions that drive my brain’s engines keep ticking away even when I’m not conscious of them. That, I suppose, is why so many ideas come to me as afterthoughts. Here, by way of example, is something that struck me only after several days had passed since the great fast.

On Tisha Be’Av we recited a kinah, Vayekonen Yirmeyahu al Yoshiyahu, which bewails the tragic and premature loss of Josiah (Yoshiyahu), the last and possibly the most righteous “good kings” of Israel. Basing its text on the midrash of Eicha Rabbah 1:18, the kinah recounts how Josiah searched the length and breadth of the land for idols, to root them out and destroy them. In this he was so very nearly successful. But

“[A] stubborn minority persisted in the pagan beliefs that had taken such firm root over the generations. They invented an ingenious method for concealing their idols. They split their doors in two and they split their idols in two, down the middle. They attached one half of the idol to each half door in such a way that when the doors were closed the two idol halves came together to be whole, but when the doors were opened the idol was split in half and each piece was concealed inside the open door. When Yoshiyahu’s detectives came to search for idols they opened the doors and found nothing”: ArtScroll Kinot).

So what does this have to do with Pirkei Avot?

There are two mishnayot in the first perek that address the way a householder should deal with strangers.

The first is 1:4:

יוֹסֵי בֶּן יוֹעֶֽזֶר אִישׁ צְרֵדָה אוֹמֵר: יְהִי בֵיתְךָ בֵּית וַֽעַד לַחֲכָמִים, וֶהֱוֵי מִתְאַבֵּק בַּעֲפַר רַגְלֵיהֶם, וֶהֱוֵי שׁוֹתֶה בַצָּמָא אֶת דִּבְרֵיהֶם

Yose ben Yo’ezer of Tzeredah says: Let your home be a meeting place for the wise; wrestle in the soil of their feet, and drink their words thirstily.

The second is 1:5, which opens like this:

יוֹסֵי בֶּן יוֹחָנָן אִישׁ יְרוּשָׁלַֽיִם אוֹמֵר: יְהִי בֵיתְךָ פָּתֽוּחַ לִרְוָחָה, וְיִהְיוּ עֲנִיִּים בְּנֵי בֵיתְךָ

Yose ben Yochanan of Jerusalem says: Let your home be wide open, and let the poor be members of your household...

Now, who were these midrashic travelling detectives that Eicha Rabbah 1:18 mentions? It’s not unreasonable to suppose that they were learned men, well versed in the distinctions between idolatry and true Torah practice. If so, they should have been invited in, so that home-owners could learn from them, as Yose ben Yo’ezer suggests. If they had been invited in, it is unimaginable that their hosts would not have closed the front doors, with the result that the detectives would have seen the idols when they turned to face the front door at their point of departure. From this we can infer that these wise men were not invited in in accordance with Yose ben Yo’ezer’s guidance.

But maybe these unsolicited callers were not sages, or didn’t look like them. Perhaps they were garbed as weary travellers, hot and thirsty as they trekked across the kingdom in search of idolators. Here Yose ben Yochanan calls for us to open our doors to all comers and to give them space. Again, it is apparent that the idolatry detectives were not being invited in since, had they been, they would have seen the double doors from the inside and would have realised what was going on.

The moral of the story is that, if you are travelling the country and calling door-to-door on home-owners in search of illicit idol worship, if you are not invited in as a guest you should begin to wonder if your would-be host has something to hide.

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