Rabbi Dosa ben Horkinas teaches (Avot 3:14):
שֵׁנָה שֶׁל
שַׁחֲרִית, וְיַֽיִן שֶׁל צָהֳרָֽיִם, וְשִׂיחַת הַיְלָדִים, וִישִׁיבַת בָּתֵּי
כְנֵסִיּוֹת שֶׁל עַמֵּי הָאָֽרֶץ, מוֹצִיאִין אֶת הָאָדָם מִן הָעוֹלָם
Morning sleep, noontime wine,
children's talk and sitting at the meeting places of amei ha’aretz [basically
unlearned people] drive a person from the world.
The traditional view of this mishnah is that it addresses a
lifestyle issue. This is not how a talmid chacham, a serious and committed
Torah scholar, would behave. There’s a narrative here along the following
lines: sleep in and get up late and you will miss the prescribed time for
prayer. Full of self-pity or empty of any self-respect, you will then turn to
the bottle for your comfort. Little learning and too much alcohol make you poor
company for any real Torah scholar so you hang around making small talk with
other losers. Since they will reinforce your choice of lifestyle and comfort
you in your distance from Torah values, you will seek out their company and
keep it. Your aspirations for self-betterment, if they ever existed, will be
extinguished and you will drown under the weight of your own apathy and
inertia.
R’ Ephraim Luntschitz (the ‘Kli Yakar’), in the introduction
to the first volume of his Olelet Ephraim, breaks away from the literal
approach when he sees in this mishnah an allusion to the morning of a person’s
life, when he is young. The doors of wisdom are open to him—but he sleeps deeply
through the opportunities that await him. An earlier version of this approach,
by Rabbi Moshe Alkashkar, is preserved in Midrash Shmuel where the
compiler, Rabbi Shmuel di Uzeda, adds that in one’s youth the yetzer hara, the
inclination to do evil, is less cogent.
With a nod to the “morning
of the life” idea, R’ Abraham J. Twerski (Visions of the Fathers) takes
the mishnah further and takes it as a warning against setting a bad lifestyle
example for others, especially the young. The punchline here is that, by the
time a person recognises the vacuous and dissolute nature of his lifestyle it
may be too late to do anything about it.
R' Menachem Mordechai Frankel-Te’omim (Be’er HaAvot) comments
that the meaning of the Tanna’s words in this mishnah is so obvious that it
needs no explanation. The fact that people live dissolute lifestyles is a
well-known phenomenon too. But it cannot be that this teaching is included in
Avot if there is no chiddush, no new point to it. Perhaps the justification
for repeating this words lies in the fact that they should sensitise us to the difference
between humans, who should be able to appreciate their ability to lead a better
life, and animals, which do not.
Curiously, one of the most pointed comments derived from
this teaching is arguably the most strictly literal of all of them. Rabbi Shlomo P. Toperoff (Lev Avot)
notes that the word שַׁחֲרִית (shacharit) is the name for the
daily morning service to which, in the absence of a good reason, every male Jew
is obliged to attend in synagogue. He simply says:
“…our mishnah specifically deals
with shenah shel Shacharit, sleep indulged in during the period of morning
prayers”.
In other words, we are not here concerned with the lazybones
who curls up under the duvet with his pillow and his teddy, to steal another
hour’s sleep from the awaiting day. Rather, we are looking at the man who gets
up, dresses, hauls himself off to shul and then dozes his way through the
davening—perhaps daydreaming about the pleasures or the past or anticipating
the delights of the future, but definitely asleep to the meaning of the words
that may or may not be passing his lips.
For comments and discussion of this post on Facebook,
click here.
