Avot 5:9 is an anonymous mishnah and it reads like this:
שִׁבְעָה
דְבָרִים בְּגוֹלָם וְשִׁבְעָה בְּחָכָם, חָכָם: אֵינוֹ מְדַבֵּר לִפְנֵי מִי
שֶׁגָּדוֹל מִמֶּֽנּוּ בְּחָכְמָה וּבְמִנְיָן, וְאֵינוֹ נִכְנָס לְתוֹךְ דִּבְרֵי
חֲבֵרוֹ, וְאֵינוֹ נִבְהָל לְהָשִׁיב, שׁוֹאֵל כְּעִנְיָן וּמֵשִׁיב כַּהֲלָכָה,
וְאוֹמֵר עַל רִאשׁוֹן רִאשׁוֹן וְעַל אַחֲרוֹן אַחֲרוֹן, וְעַל מַה שֶּׁלֹּא
שָׁמַע אוֹמֵר לֹא שָׁמַֽעְתִּי, וּמוֹדֶה עַל הָאֱמֶת, וְחִלּוּפֵיהֶן בְּגוֹלָם
There are seven things that
characterize a golem, and seven that characterize a wise man. A wise man
does not speak before one who is greater than him in wisdom or age. He does not
interrupt his fellow's words. He does not hasten to answer. His questions are relevant
and his answers are to the point. He responds to first things first and to
later things later. As for what he did not hear, he says "I did not learn
[this]." He concedes the truth. With the golem, the reverse of all
these is the case.
No doubt there is a perfectly good reason why we do not
learn this mishnah in the name of the person who taught it. Perhaps it was
unclear which of several Tannaim had authored it. Maybe it is a composite
mishnah culled from a variety of sources. Nowadays such a mishnah might be best
taught under cover of anonymity for fear of its author being tarnished with the
broad brush of political rectitude. Would the woke brigade permit the
stigmatising of the golem?
The golem in this mishnah is best left untranslated,
since the word even in its untranslated form is so redolent of secondary shades
of meaning.
For Rambam, however, this mishnah may mean more than this.
The following passage in Menachem Kellner’s Maimonides’ Confrontation with
Mysticism caught my eye:
“Maimonides’ radical intellectual
elitism … is another example of a position forced upon him by the epistemology
of the theory of the acquired intellect. … [I]ndividuals born of human parents
who have not achieved a minimum level of intellectual perfection are subhuman”.
Kellner then quotes Rambam’s Moreh Nevuchim i.7:
“You know that whoever is not
endowed with this form [of the intellect] … is not a man, but an animal having
the shape and the configuration of a man”
Kellner then quotes further from the Moreh Nevuchim
at iii.51, where Rambam states that such people, whose intellect has not been
perfected,
“…do not have the rank of men but
have among the beings a rank that is lower than the rank of man but higher than
the rank of apes”.
But what does Rambam say specifically about the golem
in his commentary on the mishnah?
Rambam is clearly concerned to distinguish from one another
the various characters who have either failed to perfect their intellects or
have succeeded in doing so. While most of his comments on Avot are short and
to-the-point, he opens his discussion of our mishnah by distinguishing the boor,
the am ha’aretz, the golem, the chacham and the chasid—of
whom only the golem and the chacham are of immediate relevance.
The golem is someone who possesses some ethical and
intellectual virtues, but neither are perfected: they are confused, mixed up
and somewhat lacking and Rambam labels him as “crude” (translation of R’ Eliahu
Touger), rather like a utensil made by a craftsman but still in an unfinished,
incomplete state. A possible English rendition of this is that such a person is
a “rough diamond”. Thus the golem stands in contract with the chacham,
the wise man, is a person who has perfected both his intellectual and his moral
qualities.
The golem cannot therefore be equated with the subhuman
entity described in the Moreh Nevuchim. Could that role be designated
for the boor (fortuitously the word means roughly the same in English
and Hebrew)? Of him Rambam writes, in
our mishnah, that he possesses neither intellectual nor moral virtues—but nor
does he demonstrate any intellectual or moral vices. He is to all intents and
purposes empty, like a field that lies fallow. But being empty of intellectual
vices and virtues does not make him subhuman. This is because being empty of a behavioral
quality or characteristic is surely not the same as being unable to acquire it
at all.
In the modern world the exercise of dividing humanity up
into different types has become more nuanced and we ask questions that did not
trouble most of our earliest scholars. For example, what does this mishnah teach
us about the person who ticks only three or four of the ‘golem boxes’?
Is it possible that a person is part golem, part chacham? And are
all seven indicators of equal weight or are some of greater, if not critical,
importance? We would probably agree today that any given person will possess
signs of both the chacham and the golem, and that we are all located
at different points on the ‘chacham-golem spectrum’.
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