Avoid offence, make a fence

An Avot mishnah for Shabbat (perek 1: parashat Pinchas)

It’s back to the beginning again as we return to Perek 1 for another round of pre-Shabbat posts.

The first Mishnah in the first chapter of Avot begins by establishing how the chain of Torah tradition passed all the way down from the Giving of the Law at Sinai to its being received by the Men of the Great Assembly in the fifth century BCE. This was a tough time. Prophecy was fading away and the Jewish people had come to understand that, from now on, they were to navigate through life with the guidance of only their own understanding of the Torah. This being so, it was apparent that the Torah needed to be protected if it was to protect those to whom it was given. Our Mishnah therefore concludes with the third of three instructions from the Men of the Great Assembly:

עֲשׂוּ סְיָג לַתּוֹרָה

Make a fence around the Torah.

What sort of protection does the Torah need? Essentially, there are two main threats to its integrity. One comes from its deliberate or inadvertent misinterpretation; the other, which our mishnah addresses here, is the concern that its adherents will transgress Torah laws though their failure to perform or obey them properly. A classic example relates to observance of the rule that one must not do creative work on Shabbat, the seventh day of the week. This holy day is “fenced in” by adding to it a little bit of both the day before and the day after, to give a little leeway for those good souls who seek to work right to the very last minute and may, in doing so, slip up. This is presumably why, in its Avot page online, Chabad.org actually translates סְיָג (seyag, “fence”) as “safety fence”.

Here's an additional and perhaps surprising explanation: fence in your words so that they do not become a burden on the people who have to listen to you. This is especially the case when speaking words of Torah: one’s words should be carefully suited to match the subject matter, the occasion and the audience to whom they are addressed. This is not a modern attempt to make the Mishnah more meaningful to contemporary readers. It comes from the Me’iri (1249-1315) in his Bet HaBechirah. The Me’iri also cites a tale from the Mishlei HaArav concerning a certain wise man who was excessively long-winded. When asked why he spoke at such length he replied: “So that simple folk will understand”, to which he received the retort: “By the time the simple folk understand, the intelligent folk will be bored out of their minds”.

In reality, while a teacher of Torah (or indeed of anything else) can with relatively little effort adapt his words to a single talmid and will hurt no one else even if he repeats himself 400 times (see the story of Rav Perida, Eruvin 54b), the task becomes exponentially harder with each additional addressee. When dealing with a class full of students, each with their specific aptitudes and requirements, it is hard to establish a fence round one’s words that protects those who are quick on the uptake without imposing an insurmountable barrier for those who are less fortunate. I recall a piece of advice I received from a junior colleague early in my own teaching career: “The trick is to say everything three times without repeating yourself even once”.

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Making a fence: do we really need 5,000 commandments?

For those readers who like to ponder a point and reflect on the perhapses and possibilities of life, Eternal Ethics from Sinai by Rabbi Yaakov Hillel can make quite scary reading. Rabbi Hillel’s detailed and forthright account of Pirkei Avot is not for spineless speculators or doubting Thomases. He writes for those who want confident, no-nonsense and reliably authentic orthodox pronouncements on the meanings of the mishnayot of Avot, for those who are troubled by questions but comforted by answers.

An example of what I mean can be seen in Rabbi Hillel’s approach to Avot 1:1, in which the Men of the Great Assembly advise us to “build a fence round the Torah”. Citing the Shelah HaKadosh he writes:

“Moshe Rabbenu gave our people the basic 613 commandments as he received them at Sinai, among them 365 negative commandments. He added a few precautionary decrees as necessary. In succeeding generations the Prophets, and later the Tannaim, instituted additional enactments and decrees in keeping with the needs of their times, a process that has continued throughout the centuries. An increasing number of humrot have become part of our accepted practice.

Why is this so? Surely we are not more pious than our saintly ancestors.

The imposition of additional strictures was essential precisely because of the ongoing deterioration in our nation’s spiritual level. A variety of decrees and restrictions were introduced not because we of the later generations are more meticulous in our religious observance, but because we face challenges more difficult than our ancestors ever knew. As we said, the closer we come to the era of Mashiach, the more virulent the attack of the Forces of Impurity.

At the time of the Giving of the Torah, 613 commandments were enough to keep the evil inclination at bay. Today we would need at least 5,000. Our only defense against the onslaught is humrot: the numerous stringent pious practices, customs, and observances that safeguard our fulfiillment of Hashem’s commandments. These stringent practices all attain the status of Torah-ordained commandments”.

On one level this trenchant summary of our position and of the utility of additional stringencies is unassailable. Almost every word of Rabbi Hillel can be sourced and supported by sound and respected rabbinical authority (I don’t know where the figure of 5,000 commandments comes from. Can anyone let me know?) But this should not preclude us from encouraging debate.

For one thing, the Torah itself cautions against adding anything to it. This does not mean that the rabbis have not been given a fair measure of discretion but, rather, that the rabbis themselves should be careful to do so only where and when a positive outcome can be predicted. We know that this has not always been the case: the Talmud itself records rabbinical decrees that were not accepted by the very people they were supposed to benefit.

For another thing, it is not only the rank and file corpus of the Jewish people that has declined. The same has happened to the rabbis. We no longer have a Knesset Gedolah (Great Assembly) or an authoritative religious court in the form of a Sanhedrin. In its place we have many individual rabbis who, though some are extraordinarily learned and exemplary in their piety, would never themselves claim to be a par with the Tannaim, Amoraim, Rishonim or even the Acharonim of earlier generations. Even the best and greatest of our rabbis, given their humility and their increasing distance from the sort of world in which most non-rabbis face their greatest challenges, lack the authority to make decrees that bind the entire body of the Jewish people. Where such attempts have been made, their acceptance has been patchy at best and may be said to have fostered division and dissent rather than a greater degree of piety or probity. If examples are needed, just look at the different customs and practices adopted even within the most committed communities towards smartphones, the internet and the pursuit of professional qualifications in secular institutions.

There is a final point to ponder. While an increase in humrot and restrictions may indeed achieve the desired result of keeping Jews within the flock, as it were, it also means that those who leave the flock are infringing an increasing number of rules of conduct that have achieved the status of Jewish law. Apart from the obvious impact that this will have on such judgement as they may face when their lives reach their end, there is also the worrying possibility that the increased quantity of laws and stringencies may serve as a bar to repentance and return to Jewish practice.

Rabbi Hillel is right. Fences round the Torah have an important part to play in preserving Jewish observance, culture and identity. But they must be the right fences, and they must not serve as a barrier to re-entry for those who have strayed “off the derech”.

"How to handle a woman" -- or oneself?

Last Sunday Beit Knesset Hanassi hosted the second of its three “meet and greet” sessions at which one of the triumvirate of candidates for a rabbinical vacancy had the chance to field questions from the synagogue’s members. In the course of this informative and entertaining session one questioner asked the candidate for his opinion on the presence of women on synagogue management boards and committees.

The answer started off, as expected, with the candidate explaining that there were female representatives on the board of his synagogue and that he had never found any difficulty in working with them. He then added something quite unexpected: “But I never call or message women board members after 10 pm”. In his view the initiation of late-night conversations with women other than his own wife was inappropriate and that it was proper to draw an arbitrary time-line beyond which he would not contact them.

This rabbi’s best practice reflects an application of two maxims of Pirkei Avot working in tandem. First, there is the principle of al tirbeh sichah im ha’ishah… (“don’t chat excessively with a woman…”: Avot 1:5 per Yose ben Yochanan Ish Yerushalayim). At its best, this guidance governs a married man’s relationships with his wife (i.e. don’t insult her intelligence by confining conversation to mere trivia) and with other people’s wives (i.e. avoid suggestive chat-up lines and inappropriate expressions of interest).

The second principle comes at the very beginning of the tractate at Avot 1:1, where the Men of the Great Assembly teach that one should build a fence around the Torah. There is no rule in the written or oral Torah that prohibits calling or texting a woman who is not one’s wife after 10 pm.

By the very nature of their role, communal rabbis deal with women far more frequently than those rabbis who learn and teach Torah within the environment of the yeshivah or Kollel. These dealings can be quite intense, may go on for a long time and, in the case of counselling, they may involve matters of a personal and emotionally powerful nature.  Bearing this in mind, an arbitrary cut-off point for communication between male rabbis and female congregants has much to commend it.

Rabbis are neither more nor less human than the rest of us, but they are different in that we expect them to behave in accordance with halachah and propriety at all times. Fortunately they generally do. However, from my own time as a senior administrator of the Court of the Chief Rabbi in the early days of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks’ tenure, I recall with sadness a small number of cases in which there was no self-imposed barrier, where an initially sincere and well-meaning relationship between rabbi and congregant resulted both in the termination of a marriage and in damage to a career.