What the blazes! The fox, the scorpion and the snake

One of the three teachings of Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus in Avot 2:15 runs as follows:

Warm yourself by the fire of the sages, but be beware in case you get burned by its embers; for their bite is the bite of a fox, their sting is the sting of a scorpion, their hiss is the hiss a snake, and all their words are like fiery coals.

This is a curious mishnah because of its change of metaphor. If the words of the chachamim ("sages") are like fiery coals, the fire metaphor could have been sustained through a three-fold reference to pain that fire can generate: being burned, scorched or scalded. Instead, Rabbi Eliezer opts for metaphors from the animal kingdom. Why might he have done this?

The three creatures chosen by Rabbi Eliezer – the fox, the scorpion and the snake – are not exclusive to this mishnah: they also populate the books of the Jewish Bible as well as the oral traditions recorded in the Mishnah, Talmud and Midrash. Apart from the fact that the addressees of this teaching 2,000 years ago would have been considerably more familiar with them than we are today, the fox, scorpion and snake are redolent with symbolic significance. It is possible therefore that Rabbi Eliezer’s decision to select them for this mishnah is based on metaphorical or symbolic considerations.

If this is so, what might those considerations be, bearing in mind that snakes and scorpions are sometimes bracketed together (see e.g. Avot 5:7; Rashi at Bereshit 37:24 citing Bereshit Rabbah) while the author of this mishnah clearly distinguishes between them in terms of their threat to the person who is not wary of the words of the sages?

One possible explanation is that the choice contrasts the respective symbolic responses of the fox, scorpion and snake. The fox represents a crafty and resourceful mind. While we are cautioned about foxes elsewhere in Avot (“Be a tail to lions rather than a head to foxes”: Avot 4:20), they are favourably portrayed in the Talmud (Rashi to Sanhedrin 39a). The bite of the fox here may thus be taken as an allusion to the mental agility of the Torah scholar who, when arguing with others, baits his trap, waits for his adversary to fall straight into it – and then bites.

In contrast with the cunning of the fox, whose position is carefully thought out with a view to getting the better of an opponent, the sting of the scorpion is a spontaneous reflex action, something that is so deeply ingrained in its nature that the urge to use it cannot be resisted. This sting is in the tail – you just don’t see it coming. In this mishnah we can imagine this to be the sharp response or penetrating repartee that we recognize in the unanswerable put-down or “one-liner” that leaves its recipient literally speechless, a verbal knock-out blow that may be out of the speaker’s mouth almost before he even realizes that he is saying it.

This leaves us with the snake. Bible readers will need no reminder that this is the creature which the Torah describes as “more cunning than any of the beasts of the field” (Bereshit 3:1), whose seductive arguments led to the Fall of Man. The punishment of the snake included the loss of its legs (Bereshit 3:14) but, notably, not to the loss of its cunning. In the context of this mishnah we can learn that one should not take liberties with the chachamim: with their carefully-chosen words they will get the better of you even if it first seems that, in pressing their case, they “don’t have a leg to stand on".

Incidentally, the “cunning” snake in Bereshit is termed in Hebrew a nachash, essentially a hissing snake, while this mishnah refers to a saraf, a snake which ‘burns’ with its venom. The nachash may however also be venomous, as is implicit from Avot 5:7, and a reference to a chacham as being a nachash might be taken disparagingly, as suggesting that what is assumed to be his Torah learning is in fact no more than his cunning. To call a chacham a saraf does not import the same implication.

Fire that the rain won't extinguish

As I watch the rain trickle down my window on this wet Jerusalem morning, I am reminded of the teaching in Pirkei Avot (5:7) that ten miracles enhanced our enjoyment of the Temple in times gone by. Number 5 in this list is this:

“The rains did not extinguish the wood-fire burning upon the altar’s woodpile.”

Miracle or no miracle? Water and fire are “opposites” in that they do not naturally share the same space. This is why the plague of hail, inflicted on Pharaoh and the Egyptians for refusing to release the Children of Israel from slavery, was miraculous (the Torah describes the hail as descending together with fire: Exodus 9:23-24).

But is this truly a miracle? Readers may have personal experiences of their own regarding bonfires and camp fires that have continued to burn notwithstanding the rain. They are not alone. The same phenomenon has been noted on a far larger scale too (see Jake Spring, “Rain will not extinguish Amazon fires for weeks, weather experts say,” Reuters, 27 August 2019, here).

Only if there is sustained and heavy rain will a well-established fire be at risk of being extinguished. The fire on the altar’s woodpile, being carefully prepared and dutifully tended, should therefore stand a good chance of surviving any given downpour. Be that as it may, the persistent survival of this fire in the two Temples for an aggregate of nearly a thousand years does rather suggest something more than chance or coincidence: this mishnah therefore attributes it to divine intervention.

There is surely a bigger message in this mishnah, and I would suggest that it is this.

The symbolism of fire and water in this miracle cannot be ignored. Some commentators have taken the Temple to be a metaphor for man, or even as an allegory of man’s relationship with God. Fire represents flaming desire, a passion in man’s heart: where those flames are kindled on the altar of man’s service to God, they cannot be extinguished.

A second explanation is founded on the symbolism of the word used here for wood, עץ (etz, “wood” or "tree"), together with that of גשמים (geshamim, “rains”). The etz here is an allusion to Torah, described as “a tree of life to those who grasp it,” (Proverbs 3:17) and the גשמים here allude to גשמיות (gashmi’ut, “materialism,” “non-spiritual matters”). Employing this symbolism, the dedicated student who lays himself out, as it were, on the altar of Torah will be ablaze with the fire of Torah, a fire that the waters of materialism and the pleasures of the physical world cannot extinguish.

This imagery is both powerful and attractive. However, even though it is accepted that learning Torah is something that requires divine assistance as well as human effort, some may be a little sad to think that, if a serious Torah student pursues his studies so enthusiastically that he cannot be derailed by the distractions of gashmi’ut, we should have to regard that as a miracle.