Mishnah, motive and mind-games: can you make the right decisions?

At Avot 3:1 Akavya ben Mahalalel delivers one of the sternest, grimmest, most frightening teachings to be found in the whole of the tractate:

הִסְתַּכֵּל בִּשְׁלֹשָׁה דְבָרִים, וְאֵין אַתָּה בָא לִידֵי עֲבֵרָה. דַּע מֵאַֽיִן בָּֽאתָ, וּלְאָן אַתָּה הוֹלֵךְ, וְלִפְנֵי מִי אַתָּה עָתִיד לִתֵּן דִּין וְחֶשְׁבּוֹן. מֵאַֽיִן בָּֽאתָ: מִטִּפָּה סְרוּחָה. וּלְאָן אַתָּה הוֹלֵךְ: לִמְקוֹם עָפָר רִמָּה וְתוֹלֵעָה. וְלִפְנֵי מִי אַתָּה עָתִיד לִתֵּן דִּין וְחֶשְׁבּוֹן: לִפְנֵי מֶֽלֶךְ מַלְכֵי הַמְּלָכִים הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא

Reflect upon three things and you will not come to the hands of transgression. Know where you came from, where you are going, and before whom you will give an account of yourself. Where did you come from? A putrid drop. Where are you going? To a place of dust, worms and [other] worms. And before whom will you give an account of yourself? Before the supreme King of Kings, the Holy One, blessed be He.

The plain meaning of these words is not hard to detect. In case we should feel tempted to give ourselves airs and graces, we should recall that we start our lives as random bits of biological effluent and end them as nutrients for invertebrate nematodes. Notwithstanding our humble beginnings and maggot-ridden end, we will still have to answer, after our deaths, for the things we did when we were still alive.

As with practically all of Pirkei Avot, this teaching—while it cannot be misunderstood—is built up as a springboard for quite different messages. Some see it as a deliberate frightener, a way to encourage sober thought about our existence in this world and our trial in the next. The worms are there to add to the reader’s discomfort. Their teeth are as sharp as needles and the reference to two different types of worm embraces both those who burrow in from outside and those who burrow out from within. But Jewish tradition and modern science have parted company: it is now generally accepted that the body feels neither pain nor pleasure once it is dead, and any vermeologist will tell you that worms do not have teeth.

A more sophisticated explanation, offered by R’ Elimelech of Lizhensk (Noam Elimelech) and R’ Avraham of Slonim, does not turn on worms but creatively addresses the duplication of the three questions. This duplication relates to two types of Jew. One is in awe of the majesty of God and the wondrous World He has created; the other remains in terror of the punishment God may inflict on him if he errs. Both have the potential to sin. If you ask Akavya ben Mahalalel’s three questions to each of these two individuals in turn, they will process them in entirely different ways. How so?

The first type of Jew, whose eyes are fixed on God’s awesome nature and his place within the great order of things, has no need to be told the answers since he already has his own: his soul comes from right under the Throne of Glory of God on high; his body comes from the same earth as Adam. He is heading for the World to Come, a place where all Jews are guaranteed a share and where their souls can bask in the eternal gleam of the Shechinah (God’s presence). There he will stand in judgement before God, who is all-wise and ever-merciful, the true judge who has always loved His creatures and His chosen people.

 The second, whose gaze is firmly fixed on the ground before him in abject terror of transgressing God’s will, has his answers provided for him by the words of this Mishnah.

For R’ Menachem Mendel of Vitebsk, this mishnah is designed to help us view ourselves as being on a journey, since all of life is a journey. Just as one traveller might ask another where he has come from and where he is going, so we too should ask ourselves the same questions when working our way through the journey of life.

Stretching even further from the plain meaning of our mishnah we find Gila Ross (Living Beautifully), having offered a conventional explanation, uses it as a basis for more general advice:

These questions can also be asked about an action that you are about to take. Know where you’re coming from and what your motive is; examine that motive. Sometimes it’s easy to say, “I’m doing this for the good”, but really there’s a niggling, deeper motive in there that’s not healthy. Second, where are you going? Where will this action take you? Is it going to take you where you want to go? Or is it going to take you away from your goals? Third, know that you will have to give an account. Don’t think that your action doesn’t have an effect on the people around you; it influences the people with whom you come into contact...

When we ask these three questions about the action that we are about to take, it develops within us a healthy attitude t help us make the right choices.

The treatment of the “giving account” part of the mishnah as addressing our need to look to the consequences of one’s actions in this world is a theme picked up back in the classic commentary of Irving M. Bunim in Ethics from Sinai where he writes:

Consequences may spread out from our action or failure to act; and like ripples spreading from a pebble dropped into a pond, the consequences may accelerate in speed and increase in speed and pressure as they move outward.

However, we already have a mishnah in the second perek (Avot 2:13) in which R’ Shimon ben Netanel urges us to see the consequences of our actions, so why the repetition of this message?

I believe that all the explanations of this mishnah have something to offer contemporary students of Avot, but that not every explanation will meet the needs of every Jew. We cannot pick and choose our own halachot, the laws that bind us, but we can choose the explanation of a middot-driven mishnah that is most compatible with our individual personalities and characteristics.

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Do it deliberately!

Ahead of Yom Kippur -- the Day of Atonement and the occasion on which we think of God's judgement of us as being irrevocably sealed -- here's a short thought on the exercise of one's judgement, taken from Rabbi Reuven Melamed's Melitz Yosher.

The first actual teaching in Pirkei Avot, one that emanates from the Men of the Great Assembly themselves, is הֱווּ מְתוּנִים בַּדִּין, be deliberate in judgement. These words have a judicial flavour to them and many commentators emphasise how important it is for judges to be cautious and meticulous when seeking to reach a decision in the cases before them. This is because a judge's long experience of similar cases can lead him to favour a decision that is similar to those reached in previous cases even though the facts before him may be slightly but significantly different; there is also a danger that long-time familiarity with the relevant laws will result in them being misremembered if their words are not carefully rechecked.

Rabbi Melamed observes that being deliberate in one's judgement is actually the foremost principle that a person should employ in every walk of life. When thinking about performing a mitzvah, avoiding the transgression of a prohibition or just making routine decisions in one's life, we should stop and think, weighing up the wisdom and the real meaning of what we do.

In his seminal work, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman explains that we cannot in practice cogitate upon every action we undertake. Much of the time we act on autopilot. If we have to stop and think each time we take a step, life becomes intolerable, normal existence impossible. This does not however affect Rabbi Melamed's view of the advice of the Men of the Great Assembly, which is clearly addressed only to the sort of decisions we should make consciously (but often do not).

One final thought: can we presume that the decisions we make as to which decisions are the ones that we have to think carefully about are themselves decisions that require us to think carefully?

Pinchas and Moshe: Thinking, Fast and Slow

Imagine the scenario. Right there, in the middle of the Israelite camp, one of the most prominent members of the establishment is locked in a passionate, uncontrollable embrace with a foreign princess. Shocked, horrified but unable to avert their gaze, the Israelites look on. Around them in the camp a plague breaks out. Rooted to the spot, they cannot move. Suddenly a young man springs into action. He grabs a spear and, with one firm thrust, skewers the pair of lovers. They instantly die and the plague ceases. This is the story of Pinchas (Phineas). It is also a tale of Pirkei Avot.

Moshe (Moses) is at this time the undisputed leader of the desert tribe. Why does he not act? We know that Moshe does not shrink from committing necessary act of violence, as we see from his killing of the Egyptian who was beating an Israelite slave (Shemot 2:11-12), and there is no reason to believe that, with his unsurpassed Torah knowledge, he had less idea than Pinchas as to what to do.

While the narrative of the killing of the Egyptian is sparse, it reveals a great deal. At Avot 2:13 Rabbi Shimon ben Netanel teaches that the “good path” to which a person should keep is one where he looks towards the outcome of his actions. Before killing the Egyptian, Moshe is already calculating the consequence of his act, looking this way and that before striking the fatal blow. Moshe exhibits this same trait when, in his encounter with God on Mount Sinai (Shemot 3, 4), he is unwilling to accept his mission to redeem his people without first working through a sequence of “what-if”s.

Pinchas is a very different character. He acts spontaneously. No-one else steps forward to kill the lovers and stop the plague—so he does. As Hillel teaches (Avot 2:6), where there is no-one else to take the initiative, whoever can do so must rise to the occasion. This principle is also seen in the decision of Zipporah to circumcise her son Gershom, spilling blood in order to save her husband Moshe’s life (Shemot 4:24-26), as well as in the aggadic and midrashic first steps into the Sea of Reeds taken by Nachshon ben Aminadav (Sotah 37a, Bemidbar Rabbah 13:7).

We cannot say that Moshe’s approach is wrong while that of Pinchas is right. This is because we are not dealing with mitzvot—commandments that usually have clearly delimited parameters. What we are talking about here are middot, ways of behaving, and their application is far less clearly defined. The performance of mitzvot ideally requires thought, understanding and an intention to fulfil God’s will. Middot, in contrast, are generally performed most efficiently when a person can train himself to perform them without any specific intention or forethought.

Although it is not a commentary on Avot, Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking, Fast and Slow, sheds much light on how we practise our middot. Some, like judging other people according to their merits (Avot 1:6), can only be done by thinking slowly, inhibiting one’s instinct to make a superficial snap judgment (as in Avot 1:1), and weighing up the evidence. Moshe, as a seasoned judge, might thus well have paused to consider not only the religious and political consequences of killing the high-status lovers but also whether there might have been any extenuating circumstances. Pinchas, in contrast, may have intuited what needed to be done. As a student of Moshe and his grandfather Aharon, his awareness of Jewish values would have been ingrained from youth, as was his understanding of God’s wishes (Avot 4:25). This being so, the instinctive reaction of Pinchas to the crisis before him is quite understandable.