CONTENTED -- BUT DISCONTENTED?

The concept of being satisfied with one’s portion in life is deeply ingrained in Pirkei Avot. At Avot 4:1 Ben Zoma teaches:

אֵיזֶהוּ עָשִׁיר, הַשָּׂמֵֽחַ בְּחֶלְקוֹ, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר: יְגִֽיעַ כַּפֶּֽיךָ כִּי תֹאכֵל, אַשְׁרֶֽיךָ וְטוֹב לָךְ, אַשְׁרֶֽיךָ בָּעוֹלָם הַזֶּה, וְטוֹב לָךְ לָעוֹלָם הַבָּא

Who is rich? One who is happy with his lot. As it states (Tehillim 128:2): "If you eat of the effort of your hands, you are fortunate and it’s good for you"; "you are fortunate" in this world, "and it is good for you" in the World to Come.

This sentiment is echoed by a Baraita at Avot 6:4:

כַּךְ הִיא דַּרְכָּהּ שֶׁל תּוֹרָה: פַּת בְּמֶֽלַח תֹּאכֵל, וּמַֽיִם בִּמְשׂוּרָה תִּשְׁתֶּה, וְעַל הָאָֽרֶץ תִּישָׁן, וְחַיֵּי צַֽעַר תִּחְיֶה, וּבַתּוֹרָה אַתָּה עָמֵל, אִם אַתָּה עֽוֹשֶׂה כֵּן, אַשְׁרֶֽיךָ וְטוֹב לָךְ, אַשְׁרֶֽיךָ בָּעוֹלָם הַזֶּה, וְטוֹב לָךְ לָעוֹלָם הַבָּא

Such is the way of Torah: Bread with salt you shall eat, water in small measure you shall drink, and upon the ground you shall sleep; live a life of hardship and toil in Torah. If you do so, “you are fortunate and it’s good for you"; "you are fortunate" in this world, "and it is good for you" in the World to Come.

Being contented with one’s lot is highly praised as the highest form of acceptance of God’s will. Anything less might be viewed as a criticism of His assessment of what you need or deserve—a point made by Rabbi Shalom Noach Berezovsky in his Netivot Shalom. But this itself raises concerns about the danger of complacency, which demotivates a person and causes us to rest on our laurels rather than seek self-betterment.

An approach towards establishing the parameters of contentment is found in the Si’ach Tzvi, a commentary on the siddur by Rabbi Tzvi Hirsch Ferber. There, he refers to our request in the blessing for a good and prosperous year:

שבְּעֵנוּ מִטּוּבָהּ

“Satisfy us from your goodness”

There he observes that there are two areas in which one might be satisfied to the point of contentment: one is in one’s material aspirations, the other in one’s personal growth in terms of one’s human qualities.

The point of this blessing, he explains, is to seek contentment with one’s material wealth and not to keep demanding more, since man by his very nature is an acquisitive animal: the more we have, the more we want. We invoke God’s assistance in this blessing in curbing our constant desire to accumulate. But when it comes to one’s spiritual, emotional and intellectual development, one should never be satisfied with one’s lot. We should always seek to grow in knowledge, wisdom, emotional understanding and so on.

The truly happy person, Rabbi Ferber concludes, is the one who is truly at peace of mind with what he or she owns, while nonetheless striving to grow into a better person. The person we should avoid becoming is the poor soul who is comfortable with what sort of person he is and has no concern for his betterment, while simultaneously questing for more money and everything that goes with it.

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IS GOOD BEHAVIOUR HEREDITARY?

I have just come across an astonishing proposition from one of the most powerful proponent of focusing on Torah-true values, Rabbi Yaakov Hillel. It troubles me greatly and I shall explain why.

In his Eternal Ethics from Sinai, an uncompromising no-holds-barred commentary on Avot, Rabbi Hillel takes a position on one of the less discussed parts of the tractate: the two words of praise that Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai accords to his talmid, Rabbi Yehoshua ben Chananya. At Avot 2:11 he says just two words: אַשְׁרֵי יוֹלַדְתּוֹ (“Happy is the one who bore him”). This is taken to refer to the pleasure Rabbi Yehoshua gave his mother by becoming a great talmid chacham, and tales are told of how she sought to place her baby son where he would hear and absorb words of Torah even before he could consciously understand them.

Rabbi Hillel, commenting on this teaching, writes this:

The parents of this exceptional child were truly fortunate. The Bartenura writes that Rabbi Yehoshua ben Hananyah was blessed with such good middot that everyone said “‘What lucky parents to have such a son”. This is more than a matter of nahat from a good child. Middot are hereditary. The very fact that one has good middot is a compliment to his parents, because these fine qualities came from them.  … Sadly a child born to parents with bad middot is all too likely to inherit their negative traits.

To be fair to Rabbi Hillel, he later writes that even people born with these good middot should still work on them and improve them—a concession to the possibility that an individual may have some sort of choice in the matter, at least on the assumption that the urge to improve oneself is itself also a good middah that one has inherited from one’s parents. However, my discomfort with his words remains.

Let us start with a case recorded in the Torah: the children born to Yitzchak and Rivkah. Eisav and Yaakov were twins and no commentator has dared to cast aspersions on the legitimacy of their parentage. One, Yaakov, is credited with excellent middot: he is held up as the epitome of truth (Micah 7:20), a man of honesty and integrity in even the most trying of circumstances (the Torah records more tests of Yaakov than of Abraham).  The other is written off as a violent, egotistical degenerate, a person of no worth and who possesses just one redeeming feature in the way he honours his father. Heredity is hard to accommodate here but not impossible. Perhaps Yaakov inherited his parents’ pure and perfect middot while Eisav inherited those of the family from which his mother descended.

More tellingly, a lifetime’s experience has shown me that children with very different middot appear to be almost routinely born the same parents and that, while there are some families in which all the members have outstanding middot, such families do seem in our generation to constitute a minority.

I wonder what benefit a reader may extract from the proposition that middot are hereditary. This message may be read as a disincentive to do anything about one’s own middot on the basis that they are in one’s genes, as it were. It may also cause people to judge harshly and unfairly those families whose children display poor behaviour, not least because it discounts the impact of social influence and peer pressure—phenomena that are demonstrably easier to prove than moral heredity.

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WHY BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE

While the topic of why bad things happen to good people—and vice versa—has occupied a place in the thought of religious people of many faiths across the millennia, it is plain that there is no consensus answer. We are faced with a palette of answers from which to choose, and each is open to objection. Sample explanations might run like this:

• The good person to whom bad things happen isn’t really good—and you aren’t in a position to assess their quantum of goodness;
• That person obviously didn’t pray hard, well or frequently enough to merit good things happening;
• That person may be good in this life but be possessed by a soul that was bad in an earlier existence, and which deserved a tough time;
• That person is really and truly good, and the bad things that happen are only to clear the way for them to enjoy a more pleasurable life in the World to Come;
• Bad things happen to this person so that some other person can have the opportunity to good things to them;
• The infliction of bad things has a cautionary effect, warning that worse things may come if the good person does not do—or desist from doing—a particular thing;
• Being made to experience bad things is only a test of how strong is that person’s faith in the face of adversity.

There are also correlative explanations as to why good things happen to bad people.

At Avot 4:19 Rabbi Yannai raises the question but then appears to deflect it:

אֵין בְּיָדֵֽינוּ לֹא מִשַּׁלְוַת הָרְשָׁעִים, וְאַף לֹא מִיִּסּוֹרֵי הַצַּדִּיקִים

Neither the tranquility of the wicked nor the suffering of the righteous are in our grasp.

Rabbi Yannai is quite correct. We cannot understand why the wicked enjoy the good things in life while the good do not, or why people who commit evil can sleep soundly in their beds at night while tzaddikim, the righteous, are unable to rest. One might venture to suggest that the thrust of his mishnah is not to tell us that we don’t have an answer but, by implication, to persuade us to let go of these issues and not waste valuable time speculating about them since we have neither the necessary data nor the Divine perspective that make an assessment in each case possible.

As one might imagine, this issue has attracted the serious attention of many of our Sages over the generations, none of which impressed Rabbi Baruch HaLevi Epstein

In his Baruch She’amar al Pirkei Avot, he expresses his astonishment that many have laboured over this issue when the answer is so obvious. He cites a gemara at Niddah 16b that runs like this:

Rabbi Chanina bar Papa made the following exposition: The name of the angel who is in charge of conception is 'Night', and he takes up a drop [of semen] and places it in the presence of the Holy One, blessed be He, saying, 'Sovereign of the universe, what shall be the fate of this drop? Shall it produce a strong man or a weak man, a wise man or a fool, a rich man or a poor man?' Whereas 'wicked man' or 'righteous one' he does not mention, in agreement with the view of Rabbi Chanina. For Rabbi Chanina stated: ‘Everything is in the hands of heaven except the fear of God, as it is said, And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God require of you, but to fear him …

This gemara answers the question entirely. God determines what is going to happen to a person in terms of his or her health, wealth, status and aptitudes—but it for that person to exercise free will and choose whether to be a God-fearing (= good) person or not.

The same gemara is picked up in a recently published commentary on Avot, Rav Schachter on Pirkei Avos (2023). The Rav Schachter in question is Rav Hershel Schachter and much if not most of his commentary is based on the teachings of his own revered rabbi, HaRav Yosef Dov HaLevi Soloveitchik. Curiously, the passage from Niddah quoted above is brought in a discussion of an entirely different mishnah, Avot 4:4, at which Rabbi Levitas teaches that one should be exceedingly humble. This is because, as the gemara explains, a person’s skills and talents are God-given gifts and therefore nothing to boast about.

So how does Rav Schachter tackle the good-person/bad-things issue? In truth he doesn’t—but he does write about the fact that we live an imperfect world in which we have failed to eliminate Amalek and the forces of evil, and about the importance of accepting God’s decree with equanimity as a means of demonstrating one’s own emunah.

Maybe the Baruch She’amar’s approach comes close to sweeping a complex philosophical issue under the carpet, but I can’t help preferring it to a lengthy, learned and well-sourced response that seems to avoid answering it full-on.

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THE CURSE OF COMPLACENCY

Earlier this week I took a little time out from my busy schedule to go downtown with my son to a Jerusalemite bar with a big screen. There, over a pleasant beer or two, we cheered on Israel’s national football (soccer) team as the took on the might of Italy in a World Cup qualifying match. It was a real thriller: Israel looked to have taken the lead but their goal was disallowed. They then twice did take the lead, only to be overhauled by the stylish Europeans. Ultimately having scored a late equaliser, they conceded an even later goal that proved to be decisive. We lost 5-4 but we made a real contest of it and could hold our heads high.

What has this to do with Pirkei Avot? The tractate pinpoints many character failings, but on a casual reading it seems that none of the sages who contributed to it had anything to say about complacency. The Israel team, reflecting what some people have unkindly suggested is a national characteristic, appeared to be afflicted by a tendency to concede a goal very soon after scoring one of their own. It is as though the players, having greatly exerted themselves to secure the lead, relaxed a little and slid down from the peak of intense concentration to which they had previously ascended.

So where in Avot do we find any discussion of complacency and the need to avoid it? If we are honest with ourselves, there isn’t one. Neither Biblical Hebrew nor the modern version spoken in Israel today have a word that exactly matches it. The closest we get to it is arguably the modern usage of שַׁאֲנַנוּת (sha’ananut), which suggests smugness verging on indifference.

However, Avot does nudge us towards a recognition of the need to guard against complacency. In Avot 5:24 Yehudah ben Teyma teaches:

הֱוֵי עַז כַּנָּמֵר, וְקַל כַּנֶּֽשֶׁר, רָץ כַּצְּבִי, וְגִבּוֹר כָּאֲרִי, לַעֲשׂוֹת רְצוֹן אָבִֽיךָ שֶׁבַּשָּׁמָֽיִם

Be as brazen as a leopard, light as an eagle, swift as a deer and strong as a lion to do the will of your Father in Heaven.

We are all supposed to do the will of our Father in Heaven. For every practising Jew that comes with the territory, and it’s so well embedded in the Written Torah that it would be otiose to repeat that obligation in the Oral Law. In other words, we are supposed to look at the animals and see what we can learn from them.

The leopard is a phenomenally successful feeder because, unlike many other predators, it is not territorial. Lions, who are territorial, feed well when migratory herds pass through their patch but can go seriously hungry when their food doesn’t come to them. The leopard, in contrast, does not complacently wait for its prey to arrive but seeks out—which is why it is so frequently found in areas of human habitation where prey is more readily available.

The deer cannot afford to be complacent either. As a popular and nourishing repast for predators, the deer must be ever vigilant and ready to flee at a split-second’s notice if it is not to be a big cat’s dinner. According to Rabbi Menachem Mordechai Frankel-Teomim (Be’er HaAvot) this mishnah goes further, with the deer epitomising the epithet zerizim makdimim lemitzvot (“Enthusiasts are first to fulfil the commandments”), a middah that is quite incompatible with an attitude of complacency.

There is also an overarching mishnah at Avot 1:13 in which Hillel teaches: 

דְלָא מוֹסִיף יָסֵף

The one who does not increase will decrease.

Complacency suggests holding to where one is, resting on one’s laurels rather than contemplating how to better oneself, whether in material or—more importantly for the committed Jew—spiritual terms.

To conclude, the mussar of Avot does address complacency, albeit in a somewhat indirect matter which is results from the lack of an apt term with which to describe it.

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UNEXPECTED LESSONS AND A TRIP TO IKEA

In a recent blog post (referenced at the foot of this piece), Rabbi Steven Ettinger wrote this:

While describing his early yeshiva years …, Rabbi Wein ztz’l fondly recalled what he learned in ninth grade from Rabbi Mendel Kaplan. Along with Talmud, this famed disciple of the Mir Yeshiva and Rabbi Elchanan Wasserman taught his young student “how to actually read the newspaper, spotting its unintended lessons in life.” 

Spotting unintended lessons in life was something Rabbi Berel Wein got down to a fine art. He was a kindred spirit of Dayan Gershon Lopian ztz’l, who quipped that one good Sunday newspaper would provide him with enough divrei Torah for the entire week. Learning unintended lessons is very much within the spirit of Pirkei Avot, where Ben Zoma opens the fourth perek with this advice:

אֵיזֶהוּ חָכָם, הַלּוֹמֵד מִכָּל אָדָם, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר: מִכָּל מְלַמְּדַי הִשְׂכַּֽלְתִּי, כִּי עֵדְוֹתֶֽיךָ שִֽׂיחָה לִי

Who is wise? One who learns from everyone. As it states (Tehillim 119:99): "From all my teachers I have grown wise, for Your testimonials are my meditation."

The Babylonian Talmud goes even further, where the Amora Rabbi Yochanan teaches (Eruvin 100b) that, had the Torah not been given, we could have learned the principles of good behaviour from animals, birds and even insects.

I had a small insight into how a Torah teacher might pluck instruction out of the most unexpected opportunities when I managed to do it myself last Shabbat. The occasion was the making of announcements at the end of mussaf concerning davening times and events for the coming week. Our shul’s Women’s League had organized a trip to an art museum followed by lunch (and a little browsing time) at IKEA, the legendary home of stylish flat-pack, self-assembly furniture. It suddenly occurred to me that there was a lesson to be learned. I said (more or less) the following:

“I’d like to say something about this trip to IKEA, because there is so much that this chain of flat-pack furniture emporiums can teach us as Jews. Indeed, IKEA carries a great message as we head towards the Yamim Nora’im [the Days of Awe—Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur].

 If you have ever purchased any self-assembly furniture from IKEA, you will know that it comes with a set of instructions. You never see these instructions or have a chance to read them till after you have bought the product, taken it home and removed the packaging. This is what it means to say na’aseh venishma: just as we agreed at Sinai to follow the instructions in the Torah even before we heard what was in it, so to do we commit ourselves to following the self-assembly instructions even before we have even read them.

Now, like the laws of the Torah, the IKEA furniture assembly instructions are not always easy to understand. Some don’t appear to have any purpose. And sometimes, even when they are easy to understand, it’s actually quite hard to follow them.  But we have been given free will. It’s up to us to follow those instructions or to ignore them and do our own thing. And just as with the instructions in the Torah, so too with the IKEA instructions, if you don’t carry them out to the letter, you may well come literally unstuck.

On the Yamim Noraim we confirm the validity of God’s instructions and then atone for those we have failed to carry out, whether deliberately, negligently or through our own incompetence. Most importantly we have to accept the reality that, with our Torah observance no less than our flat-pack assembly, it is we who are responsible for the consequences of our own acts. Please bear this mussar in mind when you visit IKEA and your trip will not have been an idle one”.

I was speaking on an impulse—and admittedly I might not have said any of this if our Rabbi had not been on holiday. But the temptation was too great to resist.

If any readers have had similar experiences, I do hope they will feel confident to share them with us here.

Rabbi Steven Ettinger’s piece, “Learning to Read the Torah”, can be accessed in full here.

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