A good deed a day...

Take a look at the following propositions.

“He who finds a friend finds a treasure”.

“A good deed is never lost”.

“A person should do a good deed every day”.

“The true test of patience is how you act when you are impatient”.

“A person without ethics is like a vessel without contents”.

“Kindness is the mark of a true leader, gentleness is the mark of a true warrior”.

“Treat the present as if it were the last moment. Make it count”.

“It is easier to carry a mountain on one’s shoulder than to be humble”.

“Freedom is the most precious thing in life. The wise man must sacrifice everything in order to avoid being enslaved”.

These are all wise observations or words of guidance for anyone seeking to live a good life. They have something else in common. None of them will be found in Pirkei Avot.

 If these statements are not found in Avot, why am I listing them here? The answer is that they have all been attributed to Avot in an online publication, GB Times, in an article by Olivia Moore titled “A Hundred Jewish Proverbs to Enrich Your Life” (here). Each of them is accompanied by an apparently authentic but actually quite erroneous reference to a mishnah or baraita from Avot.

The statements listed above are all capable of being construed in accordance with the words of our sages. Some resonate with teachings from Avot and might be described as generalisations or paraphrases based upon them. At least one of them has a source in Jewish literature: you won’t find “He who finds a friend finds a treasure” at its quoted source, Avot 6:6—the baraita that lists the 48 ways of acquiring Torah—but you will find it in Ben Sira (a.k.a. Ecclesiasticus) 6:14. Others may be traced to other traditions. Thus “A good deed is never lost” will not be found at its stated location in Avot 4:17 but in the writings of St Basil of Cappadocia (330-379 CE).

I am at a loss to understand the objective of this exercise. The statements listed above could just have easily been published without the attribution of any sources. Avot is already the go-to place for people who want to sound wise when quoting something but don’t know where it comes from. The most frequent example of this is the aphorism derech eretz kodmah leTorah (“good behaviour precedes the Torah”), which comes from midrash sources. Another example is Talmud Torah keneged kulam (meaning that the study of Torah is of equivalent value to the aggregated performance of all other mitzvot), from Shabbat 127a; Pe’ah 1:1.  Is it just sloppiness, indifference, or a need to sound more scholarly than one is?

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Never too early to repent!

A recent Jewish Journal post features a tweet that reads, in relevant part,

Teshuva, or the possibility of change, "precedes the world" says Pirkei Avot, the Sayings of the Fathers".

Not quite.  You won't find this proposition anywhere in Avot -- but you will find it in the Pirkei d'Rabbi Eliezer. This is the same Rabbi Eliezer who has something incisive to say about teshuvah in the second chapter of Avot, at 2:15. "Repent one day before your death!"  His pupils were puzzled at this and asked him how they could know which day was the day before their deaths. That, he explained, is the point. If you repent every day, you will certainly repent the day before you die.

Who is wise? It depends who you ask

Yesterday I was confronted with a common

attribution to Pirkei Avot of a quote that isn't there. "Who is wise? The person who sees what is coming". This answer is actually found in the Babylonian Talmud (Tamid 32a), where they are spoken by the Elders of the South, in reply to Alexander of Macedon.

The version that is found in Avot opens the fourth perek and is learned in the name of Ben Zoma. It goes like this: "Who is wise? The person who learns from every man".

You don't say!

Here's yet another false citation, this time in a reader's letter to the Tryon Daily Bulletin. The author cites a proposition concerning lashon hara (inappropriate speech about another person, whether it be true or false). He writes:

In my faith tradition, we have The Ethics of The Fathers where they wrote,“ Slander kills three people, the one who speaks it, the one who listens to it and the one about whom it is spoken.”

This proposition is indeed part of our Jewish tradition, as Maimonides makes clear in Mishneh Torah, Hilchot De'ot 7:3 -- but it is not to be found anywhere in Pirkei Avot, The Ethics of the Fathers.

Loving thy neighbour: the Torah got there first

Here's one from COLLive: in a piece entitled 'Crown Heights Jews “Stand With Our Black Neighbors" the text reads, in relevant part:

"Jews of all types held signs supporting the Black Lives Matter movement and proclaiming 'Human decency should be a frum value', 'Crown Heights Jews Stand With Our Black Neighbors' as well as the saying from Pirkei Avos, "Love Thy Neighbour"'.

While the sentiment about loving one's neighbour is laudable, this statement actually comes from Vayikra (Leviticus) 19:18.

Half-quotes, misquotes and false attributions

Here are a couple of small and, some would say, trivial episodes in the life of Avot and Jewish thought which are worth looking at.

The first is a recent post by Times of Israel blogger Michael Harvey ("Judaism vs. American Individualism"). He writes:

"As Pirkei Avot tells us, “For if one destroys one soul it is as if one destroys an entire world, ..."

The sentiment is sound, but the attribution is not: the quote comes from a mishnah in tractate Sanhedrin (4:1). 

The second is a piece in Communal News, in which David Wexelman (on the subject of responses to Covid-19) writes: 

 "The natural order of priorities is first yourself like it says in the ethics of the fathers, “If I will not be for myself, who will be for me.'” 

Pirkei Avot does indeed say this (Avot 1:14), but the quote is somewhat out of context because its author, Hillel, then appears to counterbalance it by adding ""And if I am for myself, what am I?" This addition appears to urge a person to find a happy medium, a path between being only for himself and not for himself at all.

Does any of this matter?

There is a principle, itself enshrined in Avot (6:6), that citing a teaching in the name of the person who teaches it is one of the 48 ways by which Torah is acquired -- and that, moreover, one who does so is viewed as bringing redemption into the world.  People are generally quite good at doing this, but there is a tendency to assume that any general principle that is repeated often enough somehow comes from Avot.  Other examples include "derech eretz kadmah leTorah" (i.e. good behaviour comes at the beginning of the Torah) and the maxim "if you chase after honour, honour runs away from you".  

I believe that we owe it to our readers, our friends, our families and our communities to be more careful with the words of our sages.  A correctly-cited axiom will more accurately reflect its author's meaning than an incorrectly-cited one, and will also spare the annoyance and frustration that can be inflicted on the poor soul who trawls through Avot in search of something that is not there at all.  Good habits of citation also enhance the credibility of the person who cultivates them. So let's get Avot right if we can!