The mishnah that opens the fifth perek of Avot is so totally unlike those what precede it that it appears not to belong in the tractate at all. It reads like this:
בַּעֲשָׂרָה
מַאֲמָרוֹת נִבְרָא הָעוֹלָם, וּמַה תַּלְמוּד לוֹמַר, וַהֲלֹא בְּמַאֲמַר אֶחָד
יָכוֹל לְהִבָּרְאוֹת, אֶלָּא לְהִפָּרַע מִן הָרְשָׁעִים שֶׁמְּאַבְּדִין אֶת
הָעוֹלָם שֶׁנִּבְרָא בַּעֲשָׂרָה מַאֲמָרוֹת, וְלִתֵּן שָׂכָר טוֹב לַצַּדִּיקִים
שֶׁמְּקַיְּמִין אֶת הָעוֹלָם שֶׁנִּבְרָא בַּעֲשָׂרָה מַאֲמָרוֹת
The world was created with ten
utterances. What does this come to teach us? Could it not have been created
with a single utterance? However, this is in order to make the wicked
accountable for destroying a world that was created with ten utterances, and to
reward the righteous for sustaining a world that was created with ten
utterances.
Commentaries on Avot generally assume that our teaching at
Avot 5:1 addresses the Torah’s account of the creation of the universe. The ten
utterances are therefore made up of nine acts of divine creativity that begin
with an utterance, “And the Lord said…” They then add the first word in the Torah, “Bereshit”
(“In the beginning”) and classify that too as an utterance. This gives them a
full complement of ten utterances to which the mishnah refers (see Rambam, Machzor
Vitry, the Commentary ascribed to Rashi, the Bartenura and the Tiferet Yisrael).
Proof that “Bereshit” is an utterance is inferred from Tehillim
33:6, “By the word of the Lord were the Heavens made”.
It is however possible to explain the ten utterances in a
completely different way. There is a verse in Yeshayah that reads as follows:
וָאָשִׂם דְּבָרַי
בְּפִיךָ, וּבְצֵל יָדִי כִּסִּיתִיךָ; לִנְטֹעַ שָׁמַיִם וְלִיסֹד אָרֶץ, וְלֵאמֹר
לְצִיּוֹן עַמִּי-אָתָּה
“And I have put My words into
your mouth, and have covered you in the shadow of My hand, so that I may plant
the Heavens, and lay the foundations of the Earth, and say unto Zion: You are
My people.”
The Hebrew word for “My words” in this verse is דברי (divarai). If you insert a space between the
letter י (the yud) of דברי and the rest of the word, you change the meaning. This
is because the yud represents the numerical value 10. You now have דבר י (devar yud, “a matter of 10”). Revisiting our
verse, we can now learn it as:
“And I have put a “matter of 10”
into your mouth, and have covered you in the shadow of My hand, so that I may
plant the Heavens, and lay the foundations of the Earth, and say unto Zion: You
are My people.”
The number 10 is rich with Jewish symbolism, and one of the
things it alludes to is the Ten Commandments, the quintessence of the Torah and
the acceptance of which can be said to complete the creation of man. Linkage of
the ten utterances of Creation with the Ten Commandments is not new: it is
found in the Zohar and has influenced Torah commentators ever since. Thus Rabbi
Menachem Mendel Schneerson, Pirkei Avot im Sha’arei Avot, explains that
it was unnecessary to mention the Ten Commandments among the lists of 10 in
Avot because they were implicitly within the ten utterances.
Going back to our mishnah and reading it in the context of this
verse from Yeshayah, we can now maintain that it does indeed refer to creation—but
not creation of the universe. Instead, we can read it as referring to the olam
katan, the “small world” which is man (see the Maharal, Derech Chaim, on
Avot 1:2).
In light of this reading of our mishnah, when a person
destroys another human being, someone who has been “created” through acceptance
of the Ten Commandments, his punishment is in proportion to his having broken
the link between his victim and all ten of them. Conversely, someone who saves
another is taken to have affirmed all ten and his reward is commensurately
great.
So far as I am aware, there is no support among commentators
on Avot—traditional or otherwise—for the explanation that I have offered. I can
only say in its defence that it can run in parallel with the usual explanations
because it does not contradict them and that it does at least focus on human
behaviour in the world of social and interpersonal relations, which is what
Avot is all about.
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