Creating worlds with words

The fifth chapter of Avot opens with a mishnah that addresses the topic that begins the Torah: the Creation. It reads:

The World was created with ten utterances. What does this teach us? Isn’t it the case that it could have been created with a single utterance? Rather, this is to punish the wicked for destroying the World that was created with ten utterances, and to give a good reward to the righteous for sustaining the World that was created with ten utterances.

Taken at face value, the world to which this mishnah refers is the world that God created as a habitat for all living creatures. Some scholars have however preferred to take the view that we have here a metaphor for the “small world” that is each human being.

Can this interpretational device, deployed by the Maharal elsewhere in Avot (at 1:2), work here too? At first glance our answer must be "no". Many commentaries on Avot (e.g. example Rambam; Machzor Vitry; Commentary ascribed to Rashi; Rabbi Ovadyah Bartenura; Tiferet Yisrael) explain that, in the Torah’s account of the Creation, nine acts of divine creativity are preceded by the utterance “And the Lord said…” Added to this is the first word in the Torah, “Bereshit” (“In the beginning”) which also constitutes a utterance, making up the full complement of ten. However, in the account of the creation of man in Genesis, Adam appears to have been created with not ten utterances but just one (Genesis 1:26).

Does this mean that we must abandon the "world-as-each-individual" explanation? Not necessarily. There is a verse in Isaiah (51:16) that reads as follows:

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 (see e.g. Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, quoted in Pirkei Avot im Sha’arei Avot).

Going back to our Mishnah, armed with this verse, we can now postulate that it does indeed refer to the creation of the “small world” which is man, but not just any man. Here we have an individual who is initially incomplete but is created in his final form through the “matter of 10,” the Ten Commandments that God uttered on Mount Sinai. With the ultimate perfection of man comes the conclusion of the Creation which began with the Heavens and the Earth—mentioned here in our verse from Isaiah and also in the very first verse of the Torah itself.

We can learn an important message from this. When a person destroys another human being, 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 commensurate with this.

Right content, wrong focus? Creation of the World revisited

The first mishnah in perek 5 of Avot is a puzzling one. In English it reads:

The world was created with ten statements. What does this come to teach us? Could it not have been created with just a single statement? But this is in order to punish the wicked for destroying a world that was created with ten statements, and to reward the righteous for sustaining a world that was created with ten statements.

A small puzzle lies in the connection between the world being created with ten statements and God's policy of punishing those who would destroy it and rewarding those who keep it running smoothly. Would God not do the same if the world had been created with one, three or five statements?

But there is a bigger puzzle: why do so many of the commentators on this mishnah spend so much time and effort counting out the ten statements? It is well established that, in its account of the Creation, the Torah states nine times "And God said ...", and that each time these words are spoken they relate to something that He creates. The words "In the beginning", being taken as a statement of creation, make up the total of 10.  In contrast, the commentators spend rather less time and focus on the real message of this mishnah, which relates to God's policy on reward and punishment.

There is nothing wrong in explaining which were the 10 statements, of course -- but the function of the Oral Torah is not to summarise or repeat what anyone can read in the Written Torah. It is to lead in other directions, which is what almost all Pirkei Avot does.

To give a secular example of the popular approach, take a popular proverb, "Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise". The point of this proverb is that a person will benefit from keeping sensible sleeping hours and this is what we would expect the commentators to discuss. We would not expect them to expend time and effort explaining what is meant by "early" and what precisely constitutes a "bed".