Having a good shout?

In my secondary schooldays I got shouted at a great deal. In this I was not alone. Most of my classmates got shouted at too. Our teachers—most of whom had served as officers in the British army during the Second World War—appeared to be enraged by even minor infractions of school rules, of which inevitably there were many. Only in later years did I come to appreciate that my teachers were not angry at all. In fact, they were quite jovial souls at heart. However, they had become accustomed to barking out orders to the soldiers under their command and assumed that this was the normal, indeed the best, way of achieving not just obedience but educational excellence in Latin, Greek, History and other subjects which, having read at University before the War, it was now their lot to teach.

Pirkei Avot cautions us with regard to anger. Being demonstrably slow to anger is an attribute of God himself (5:2, 5:3). Rabbi Eliezer (2:15) and an anonymous Tanna (5:14) both recognise that we do sometimes become angry but teach that we should not allow ourselves to anger easily, while being slow to anger is listed as one of the qualities a person needs in order to master Torah (6:6). Anger is regarded as a corrosive character trait and is even equated with idolatry (see eg Rambam, Mishneh Torah, Hilchot De’ot 2:3). But what of displaying anger, even when one is not particularly angry?

In his commentary in Tiferet Tzion on Avot 6:6 R’ Yitzchak Ze’ev Yadler reminds us that, even when it is necessary to display anger, one should first ensure that there are grounds upon which that display is justified. And even then, unlike my school teachers, one should first speak softly to see if that has the desired effect, rather than starting at maximum volume and blazing away as though one is still on the battlefield.

Next week Ashkenazi and Sefardi Jews alike will be reciting Selichot, penitential prayers, ahead of the High Holy Days.  A key feature of Selichot is that of reminding God that he is slow to anger. If we are to make an issue of this, we should at least make an effort to be as slow to be angry with others as we hope God will be with us.

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'Some thoughts on exile' revisited

On 12 January I posted a piece, ‘Some thoughts on exile’, in which I discussed some of the mishnayot in Pirkei Avot that deal with exile. In that post I mentioned the idea, raised in an article by Rabbi Pinchas Winston, that exile was not purely a physical phenomenon because it also had a psychological dimension: a person might be “exiled” in their mind, their conscious thoughts and their emotions. He summarized the position thus:

There is no greater exile than not being yourself. It may sound trivial because, how can you be anyone but who you are? But the very fact that psychological depression is a national disease and anti-depressants are such a lucrative prescription drug today answers that question head-on. It is exhausting to watch how hard people have to work just to maintain an image they want to project, but which has little to do with who they really are.

I liked this idea but questioned whether it was truly sustainable.

Since writing my post I have found that Rabbi Winston is not alone in examining exile in terms of its mental element. Rabbi Shalom Noach Berezovsky’s Netivot Shalom commentary on the Torah, on parashat Vaeira, contrasts two species of exile: communal (galut haperat) and personal (galut hayetzer hara). Communal exile can be remedied by taking the Children of Israel out of Egypt, while personal exile demands that each individual is detached from his negative traits and vested with a fresh set of positive values. Without this process, a person cannot switch his commitment from servitude to Egypt to service of God. In popular parlance, we might say that it’s not enough to take the Children of Israel out of Egypt: we must also take Egypt out of the Children of Israel.

The Netivot Shalom does not claim to be the originator of this idea. He cites the Toledot Yaakov Yosef of Rabbi Yaakov Yosef of Polonne on parashat Vayishlach, which in turn cites the Ba’al Shem Tov in support of the proposition that personal redemption should precede the communal. He also describes the same concept in his partial but eloquent commentary on Pirkei Avot, at the end of Avot 5:11, but without citing his predecessors. To my embarrassment I must have read this many years ago without it ever sinking in.

Dealing with anger

No-one who follows the narrative of the Torah at this time of year can miss the theme of anger. Pharaoh is angry with the Children of Israel, then rebukes his midwives; both God and the Children of Israel become angry with Moses; the taskmasters are angry with the slaves; the slaves are angry with one other; Jethro tells his daughters off for not inviting Moses home, and so on. It is not a happy time.

Much the same can be said of Israel today, where the politics of anger is reflected in outbursts of abuse, name-calling and demonisation of real and imagined opponents to the extent that extreme views on both sides of the current debates are regarded as normative and prospects for cooperation, compromise and consensus continue to fade.

Pirkei Avot teaches us about anger. It is assumed that we cannot suppress our anger entirely and maybe do not need to do so, but we should at least be slow to anger. Avot 5:2 and 5:3 illustrate how God, as a sort of divine role model, is extremely slow to anger, waiting up to ten generations before making a final decision as to what to do. Avot 5:14 also praises the person who is slow to anger but swift to regain composure while stigmatising as wicked the person who is quick to anger but slow to calm down. Rambam (Hilchot De’ot) recognises the need to keep anger under control rather than attempt to eliminate it completely—the position that Ramban appears to adopt in his much-published letter to his son, the reason being that only by distancing oneself from anger can one internalise the virtue of humility.

Frustratingly, Avot does not offer any simple solutions. Rabbi Shimon ben Elazar (Avot 4:23) warns us not to make things worse by trying to calm someone down when they are in mid-rage. Then, at Avot 4:1, Ben Zoma teaches that the person who is truly strong is one who curbs his yetzer, the evil inclination. Even if one assumes that expressions of anger are the consequence of yielding to one’s yetzer, there can be no catch-all technique for resisting it since every individual feels things differently and responds in his or her own unique manner to the sort of provocations that lead to rage. However, a few thoughts spring to mind.

1. Does your anger correspond to someone else’s happiness? It is common for people to lose their temper on losing a game, an argument or an election. This is potentially a sort of zero-sum rage since, if the outcome was the other way round, the loser might be just as angry in turn. In any situation in which there must be a winner and a loser, anger of this nature is predictable and unproductive.

2. Can your anger only be expressed in one way? Screaming, flailing our limbs and having a tantrum are the first ways we humans demonstrate our anger but, as we grow older and develop a wider range of emotional responses and social skills, we do have options. It is not always possible to do so but, where it is, we should seek to ask ourselves which outlet for our anger is the most effective, constructive or capable of giving the greatest relief or personal satisfaction.

3. Have we identified the object of our anger? In crude terms, anger can be said to be directed at one of three targets: (i) oneself; (ii) other humans and social institutions; and (iii) God. Once we know the target of our anger, we can consider how best to handle it. Anger that is directed against oneself—particularly when we are forced to take responsibility for our own mistakes—can be counterproductive but can also be addressed by looking at the cause of our self-anger and considering how we can avoid repeating it. Millennia of experience indicate that we have no reliable means of measuring how God responds to our anger, but that prayer might sometimes provide a more comforting and constructive substitute for railing against Him. That leaves anger which is directed against fellow humans, and this is the zone which is principally governed by Avot. No, Avot does not offer perfect solutions for all instances of other-directed anger, but it does encourage us to keep a lid on it to stop it boiling over—something that we can aim to achieve by practising the difficult task of self-control.

In raising this topic, I hope to stimulate thought and generate constructive suggestions about anger. Please share them if you have them.

Noah and the limits of patience

Does Noah have a place in Pirkei Avot? The Torah describes him as a man who is righteous in his generations, but its narrative does not elaborate on the reason why this might be so. We know that he found favour in God’s eyes, but most of Avot addresses character improvement and interpersonal relationships rather than the relationship between man and God. All the Torah tells us of his dealings with other mortals is that, of his three sons, he gave one an unqualified blessing, a second one a more circumscribed one and the third a curse. We also learn that he discharged a heavy burden of responsibility for the survival of the livestock within the Ark. But we see no obvious evidence of the sort of middot—character qualities—that is the main focus of Avot.

As it turns out, Noah gets two name-checks in Avot and they are both somewhat pejorative. At 5:2 we are taught that there were ten generations from Adam to Noah (Adam, Seth, Enosh, Kenan, Mahalalel, Yered, Enoch, Mathuselah, Lemech, Noah). Each generation angered God more than its predecessor to the point that God finally lost patience with humankind, as it were, and sent a flood to wipe them out. The next mishnah repeats this theme, referencing the ten generations from Noah to Abraham (Noah, Shem, Arpachshad, Shelah, Ever, Peleg, Re’u, Serug, Nachor, Terach, Abraham). This time God did not send a flood, but rewarded Abraham for such righteousness as he and the preceding nine generations had accrued. These two mishnayot tell us nothing about Noah, the man and his middot. Rather, they use his name as a convenient shorthand for a literal watershed in Biblical history—the transition from antediluvian to postdiluvian culture. We might characterise the Adam-to-Noah era as a sort of “wild west” anything-goes free-for-all period, while Noah-to-Abraham marks the commencement of an era in which some form of law and order are manifested (the seven so-called Noahide laws), even though it appears that most humans before the time of Abraham did not live in accordance with them.

Some interesting timeline points arise from these two mishnayot.

According to Tosafot Yom Tov, the first mishnah presumably embraces Noah’s entire lifespan, since the second Mishnah—though it mentions Noah by name—would contain not ten names but eleven if it included him. While the Maharal (Derech Chaim) and the Anaf Yosef appear to agree, this view is open to challenge because the first mishnah refers to those ten vexatious generations continuing to annoy God “until He brought upon them the waters of the Flood.” Noah however lived on for a further 350 years after the Flood abated. If account is taken of that mainly quiet and unrecorded part of his life, which in any event overlaps the generation of his three sons, Noah’s last three and a half centuries must surely form part of the ten-generation span that leads to Abraham.

For the record, the Torah gives very much longer lifespans for the generations between Adam and Noah than it does for Noah’s descendants. Thus the number of years that the Bible records from the Creation to the Flood is 1,656, while the ten generations from the Flood to the death of Abraham account for just 467 years. The Alshich (Yarim Moshe) notes that the average age of a first-time father from the time of Adam to the birth of Noah’s first-born Japheth was 165 years; however, from the generation of Shem to that of Abraham, the average age of a first-time father was just 40. Likewise, the average lifespan of the generations from Adam to Noah was 857 years, while that from Noah to Abraham dwindled to 317. The Alshich attributes these statistical diminutions to the fact that the 20 generations from Adam to Abraham angered God increasingly, to the point at which God decreased their lifespans. There is however a problem with this explanation: it would seem to contradict the force of this pair of mishnayot because it implies that God was becoming increasingly impatient as the generations passed since He was giving them less and less time in which to repent, while we are supposed to learn here about the magnitude of His patience and slowness to anger.

Does this analysis have any take-home relevance for us today? On the basis that we should seek to emulate God’s actions where this is possible, we can see how much less patient God appears to be in the later mishnah before acting on His anger. Though the first ten generations were far from righteous, they had yet to receive any warning as to what the consequences of their misconduct might be. Far from destroying Adam and Eve after they ate the forbidden fruit, God performed for them an act of kindness when made them clothing before He sent them on their way. It was not until the cataclysmic flooding of the natural world and everything in it that the physical consequences of bad behaviour were truly manifested. But from Noah onwards, the Flood—and the rainbow that was set in the sky to remind us of the reason for it—served as a warning that God’s expectations are matched by His acts. Perhaps this teaches us that we too should feel morally justified in being less patient with those whom we have cautioned than with those whom we have not.

Av, Avot and Anger

A central theme of the solemn date of Tisha be’Av (the ninth day of the month of Av) is the causative link between what we lost—two Temples and two thousand years’ occupancy of the land God gave us—and the things we did in order to lose it. Put simply, we did wrong; God warned us to stop but we persisted. God, who alone knows how to regulate the scale of His anger in light of His divine wisdom, became blazingly angry and punished us. While we mourn our losses, the takeaway message of the day is not about the past but the present as it affects the future: that we should get our act together now and act in accordance with God’s will, not contrary to it. This message is alluded to in the fifth chapter of Avot, at 5:24, in a mysterious passage cited in the name of Yehudah ben Teyma:

“The brazen [go] to Gehinnom; the meek [go] to the Garden of Eden. May it be Your will, Lord our God and God of our fathers, that the Holy Temple be rebuilt speedily in our days; and grant us our portion in Your Torah”.

The status of this Mishnah has been challenged on the view that it originally marked the end of Avot, with the sentence that refers to the rebuilding of the Temple being tacked on as a prayer. However, this passage is an integral part of Avot as we have it today and, taken as a whole, it suggests that if we are meek, not brazen, and do God’s will rather than openly flout it, we are entitled to call upon Him to restore the Temple that was wiped out when we flouted it in the first place.

God’s destructive response to our disobedience was not a cold, calculated one but was accompanied by a blaze of anger. So what does Avot say about anger? For us humans it is something to avoid. A person who is irascible should not be a teacher (2:6), and anyone who is quick to anger and hard to placate is a rasha—someone who is evil. Yet anger is a divine attribute and God is twice praised as being slow to anger (5:2, 3), even though the full impact of his anger, once unleashed, can be devastating.

Avot teaches that, both at the time of Noah and the Flood and in the era of Abraham, God patiently waited a full ten generations before allowing Himself to become angry, even though each generation as a whole behaved less well than its predecessor. Is there any significance in our knowing this? If God punishes us for our sins, should it matter to us whether he has unleashed His anger on earlier generations of miscreants or not?

The loss of each Temples came some somewhere in the region of 400 years after it was established. Now, though there is no single way to measure the duration of a generation, we do see the word used colloquially for a period of 40 years in the context of the Generation of the Midbar—the refugees from Egypt who died in the desert, barred from entering the land of Canaan after they accepted the false testimony of the Spies. Taking 40 years as a generation we see that, in the case of both the First and the Second Temple, God delayed His anger for ten generations before He acted in accordance with it—just as He did so in the mishnayot of Avot.

What message does this have for us? First we must accept that, if we cannot actually eliminate our anger when dealing with one another, we should seek to emulate God’s example and be as slow as possible before giving in to it. Secondly, before choosing whether to do God’s will or to defy it, we might consider stopping to think whether we perhaps are a “tenth generation” on whom God’s anger might be vented, and then act accordingly.