For rabbinical consumption only?

Is Pirkei Avot just a bunch of stuff written by rabbis for other rabbis? Sometimes it might just feel that way.

We learn in Avot 5:17:

אַרְבַּע מִדּוֹת בְּהוֹלְכֵי בֵית הַמִּדְרָשׁ: הוֹלֵךְ וְאֵינוֹ עוֹשֶׂה, שְׂכַר הֲלִיכָה בְּיָדוֹ. עוֹשֶׂה וְאֵינוֹ הוֹלֵךְ, שְׂכַר מַעֲשֶׂה בְּיָדוֹ. הוֹלֵךְ וְעוֹשֶׂה, חָסִיד. לֹא הוֹלֵךְ וְלֹא עוֹשֶׂה, רָשָׁע

There are four types among those who attend the study hall (Bet Midrash). One who goes but does nothing gets a reward for going. One who does [study] but does not go to the study hall gets a rewards for doing. One who goes and does is a chasid. One who neither goes nor does is wicked.

This teaching, at face value, has nothing to offer the ordinary man or woman in the street. Rather, it appears to have something only to those who have elected to spend their days in learning Torah and who manifestly have contrasting attitudes towards the nature of their commitment.

The Kozhnitzer Maggid offers an imaginative explanation that has nothing to do with Batei Midrash in the physical sense at all.

Torah learning, indeed all forms of learning and spiritual growth, take place inside a person’s heart and mind. That is the “study hall” of our mishnah. Now let’s look at the four types of person it describes.

The first has the necessary skill and ability to touch the heart of others, regardless of their level of knowledge or commitment. But he fails to capitalise on the opportunity to do so. Maybe he is just unsuccessful; maybe he never really tries.

The second doesn’t make the effort to plumb the depths of another person’s psyche or intellect. However, whether through his behaviour or his demeanour he manages to influence that person just the same.

The third has the ability to touch another’s heart and mind—and does so successfully, contributing to that other’s spiritual, emotional or intellectual growth. He is the chasid (for our purposes, chasid basically indicates a really good person).

Finally we find the person who has no empathy with others, does not understand them and has no real interest in doing so. He or she never even makes the effort. This is not the sort of person we should seek to be.

As can be seen, this breakdown of inspirational and non-inspirational characters works well not only for Torah educators but for parents, counsellors, role models and close friends. We can all learn from it and, in doing so, be of great assistance to those we have the power to encourage or inspire.

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Sponges, funnels, strainers and sieves

 According to a mishnah in the first chapter of Avot (5:18),

There are four types among those who sit before the sages: the sponge, the funnel, the strainer and the sieve. The sponge absorbs everything. The funnel takes in at one end and lets it out the other. The strainer lets the wine pass through but retains the sediment. The sieve lets the coarse flour pass through but retains the fine flour.

Most commentators take the view that the sponge, the funnel and the strainer are unfavourable metaphors and that we should all be sieves. There is however another way of understanding this mishnah: maybe all four metaphors are designed to sing the praises of four different types of student.

On the principle that we should never be dismissive of any item since there is nothing in the world that does not have its place (Avot 4:3) let us look for a place for them in the world of learning.

The sponge

Here is a person who literally mops up the contents of each class. This is a wonderful asset. Almost every reader of these words will have attended a lecture, a seminar or a tutorial where the discussion was scintillating, stimulating and well worth further thought – but the rapidity with which each idea followed another, and with which the cut-and-thrust of argument generated fresh sparks, made it impossible to take accurate notes of what precisely was said, who said what, and which responses were given in return for which propositions. Who would not pay handsomely for a clear and accurate record? But here we have the sponge! He may not understand all or indeed any of the finer points of what he has absorbed, but there he is, nonetheless – a priceless asset and a thoroughly useful learning partner at times like this.

The funnel

Now we have another valuable utensil in the family of students. One of the salient features of a funnel is that what goes in at the top is identical to what comes out at the bottom. In other words, output is a faithful reproduction of input. There is no variation, adulteration, change of quality or quantity. How many of us have toiled to get students to transmit with pinpoint accuracy that which is drummed into them? How many times do people need to be told that there is nothing to be gained from paraphrasing a statute or a Torah verse? Only the original version is valid and -- in the case of Torah learning -- that is the word of God. With our funnel, what goes in is what comes out: you can depend on that.

The strainer

Here we find another precious resource for serious study. The need to separate out the relevant from the irrelevant, the essential from the peripheral, is beyond doubt. The only question we need to decide now is how and where this straining process takes place. This mishnah postulates a student of Torah who sits before the chachamim and listens assiduously to their every word. However valuable those words may be as a whole, not every one of them will be relevant and applicable in the course of every discussion, so our strainer filters them before discussing them with his fellows. This means that he will take great care to retain the so-called “dregs” rather than cast them at his colleagues in the course of their subsequent analysis and revision of what they have learned.

The sieve

Like the strainer, the sieve separates that which is relevant and desirable from that which is not. The text of our mishnah is however problematic since it tells us that the sieve retains the fine particles of fine flour (solet) but lets the larger particles of coarse flour (kemach) fall through. This is surely impossible.

Maybe the fact that it is impossible for a sieve to retain the small but let the large pass through is the precise point that the mishnah is trying to make. Yes, this sort of sieve is impossible – but even so, at the end of the day and after all the discussions and arguments are over, we are left with a sieve full of fine flour. In other words, one of the four types of Torah student we learn of here is the person who achieves the impossible: he starts with the same materials as the rest of us – a bag of flour, a sieve – and ends up with a result that none of us could predict, replicate or explain.

On this reckoning the sieve is therefore a metaphor for the creative and imaginative Torah scholar who can think outside the box and produce results that are quite beyond the rest of us.

If this counterintuitive explanation of the mishnah can be upheld, it provides a positive and upbeat conclusion to a succession of mishnayot that depressingly represent most people in negative terms. It also provides a context in which this mishnah is taken to refer to different types of chachamim who have come to sit before chachamim greater than themselves in order to learn from them (Rabbi Shmuel de Uçeda again, this time citing Rabbi Moshe Almosnino, Pirkei Moshe): If the sponge, funnel, strainer and sieve were not all “positives,” this view would be quite insulting.

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The idea of taking this mishnah positively is not mine. Rabbi Shmuel de Uçeda, Midrash Shmuel, explains the apparently superfluous words in the Hebrew text as an invitation to explain the four utensils twice over, once as praise and once as criticism. This approach is followed by Rabbi Avraham Azulai in his lovely commentary, Ahavah BeTa’anugim

Taking positives from the am ha'aretz

According to the anonymous Mishnah at Avot 5:13 there are four types of people:

(i) The person who says "What is mine is mine, and what is yours is yours"—this is a middle-of-the-road type; but there are those who say that this is the character of someone from Sodom;

(ii) The person who says, "What is mine is yours, and what is yours is mine" is an am ha’aretz;

(iii) [The person who says] "What is mine is yours, and what is yours is yours" is a chasid;

(iv) [And the person who says] "What is mine is mine, and what is yours is mine" is wicked.

I prefer to leave the terms am ha'aretz and chasid untranslated since they carry so much baggage with them. For convenience, we can say that an am ha'aretz -- literally, "people of the land" -- has relatively low behavioural standards and intellectual aspirations, while a chasid is a bit of an enthusiast when it comes to meeting and even exceeding his commitments to God and man. To call someone an am ha'aretz is rather an insult; to call someone a chasid is usually praise.

The am ha’aretz can however be viewed in positive terms too, because this term can also apply to people who literally work the land. Before the era of mechanised agriculture it was the am ha'aretz who tilled the soil and brought in its harvests—and this sort of work could be done by one man on his own. Cooperative effort is demanded and this is what happens when each am ha’aretz helps his fellows. Only if every man contributes his skill, his strength and his equipment for the good of others, and receives the effort of others in return, can the good order of the world be established and maintained.

Like the motto of the Three Musketeers, "One for all and all for one", the mishnah's text of “what’s mine is yours, and what’s yours is mine” can be read in a positive light -- and it can almost be described as a sort of partnership (this view has been offered by Rabbi Yitzchak Magriso, Me’am Lo’ez, and Rabbi Menachem Mordechai Frankel-Teomim, Be’er HaAvot).

As the Jewish calendar creeps towards the New Year and the Yom HaDin -- the Day of Judgement -- it's worth reflecting that even the am ha'aretz can be viewed in a positive light. After all, we subscribe to the position that there is no-one who does not have his time (Avot 4:3) and that, where possible we should judge others favourably (Avot 2:6). That is the way we'd like to be judged too.