Hedgehogs, Foxes and the "one great thing"

During the First Temple period, shortly after the wicked king Menashe ascended the throne, an obscure Greek poet living on the tiny island of Paros was busy composing his verses. His name was Archilochus and some fragments of his work have survived until today. One such fragment reads πόλλ' οἶδ' ἀλώπηξ, ἀλλ' ἐχῖνος ἓν μέγα ("a fox knows many things, but a hedgehog knows one big thing").

On one level this is a trite observation, drawn from nature. The fox, an opportunist omnivore who shares with the Jewish people a fondness for chicken, finds its food wherever it can. This task requires resourcefulness, cunning and the ability to learn from both successful and failed experiences. As its potential prey, the hedgehog need only know one crucial thing: how to roll into a prickly ball in order to ward off whatever stratagem the fox or any other predator might use.  

But there is a higher level too.  In The Hedgehog and the Fox, a celebrated essay published in 1953, the eminent philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin wrote of the contrasting characteristics of these animals. He then proceeded to categorise many well-known personalities as sharing the outlook of one or the other. Sir Isaiah and his followers classed Plato, Nietzsche, Marx, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Sir Winston Churchill as “hedgehogs”, while Aristotle, Shakespeare, Freud, Warren Buffett and Benjamin Franklin were “foxes”.

Should a practising Jew be regarded as a fox or a hedgehog? In parashat Ekev (Devarim 10:12-13) Moshe says:

“And now, Israel, what does the Lord your God require of you? Only that you fear the Lord your God, to walk in all His ways, and to love Him, and to serve the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul. To keep the commandments of the Lord, and His statutes, which I command you this day for your own good”.

There are 613 mitzvot in the Torah and a good many more beyond it, so a statement that one must obey them for love and fear of God would appear to reflect the policy of the hedgehog. An extreme version of the same reductionist position appears in the Talmud (Makkot 23b-24a) where we learn that King David was able to reduce this total of 613 to a mere 11. Not to be outdone, the prophets Isaiah, Micah (and Isaiah again) whittled down the number of principles of Jewish faith to 6, 3 and 2. Habakkuk (at 2:4) then founded the entire Torah on a single grundnorm: “But the righteous shall live by his faith”. This fragment of prophetic verse could very well have been a summary of the words of Moshe quoted above, since it is faith in God that generates every part of that great leader’s advice. Both offer us just one great rule to fit every situation—and that is very much the territory of the hedgehog.

But there is more. The considerations we have reviewed above all represent the Tanach, the fixed and immutable truths of the Written Torah. Is the Oral Torah for hedgehogs too?

A reading of the tractate of Avot as a whole suggests that the life of a morally responsible, ethically sensitive Jew requires the skills and the reflexes of the fox. Its dynamics reflect the tension of when to speak and when to remain silent, when to give respect and when to avoid it, when to act and when to stand aside, and so on. Three of its key mishnayot (Avot 2:1, 2:12 and 2:13) open with a Tanna asking which is the right path to choose (or avoid); they conclude with answers that tell us how to find those paths but not what they are in purely factual terms. The overriding principle in Avot is the exercise of discretion and personal initiative when ducking and weaving to escape the problems that block one’s passage through life.

Putting the Written and Oral Torah together, we can now see that we do not live in a binary world in which everyone is either a hedgehog or a fox. A Jew must be both. He or she must know when to emulate the hedgehog, batten down the hatches and take the path of security and caution, and when to take the path less travelled, or not yet travelled at all, sniffing out fresh sources of inspiration in prayer and learning, innovative solutions and creative devices for growing in one’s service to God.

Is any proof needed? Let us turn again to the animal kingdom. Since the dawn of creation the great knowledge of the hedgehog has been a brilliant and simple solution to the problem of fending off predators. However, it little avails the bold animal that, venturing beyond the hedgerow, aspires to fend off passing traffic as it crosses the road. Without innovation the hedgehog is just an endangered species, another victim of roadkill. In sharp contrast, the fox’s initiative and ability to learn on the job, as it were, have provided it with a host of new and exciting opportunities for urban living while its rural habitat diminishes. This is not merely survival: it is prosperity and growth.

To conclude: when we study the Torah and seek to implement its ways within our lifestyle, we seek to respect and observe the Torah’s eternal values and mitzvot while living in a world of constant change, change that lies beyond our power to control or prevent. In doing so, it appears that there is no alternative. We must be both hedgehogs and foxes.

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Historical postscript: Sir Isaiah Berlin was a direct descendant of Shneur Zalman of Liadi, the Ba’al HaTanya and author of the Shulchan Aruch HaRav. It would have been interesting to know whether he classed his illustrious ancestor as a hedgehog or a fox—or as both.

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.

The Fantastic Mister Jackal, or "Let sleeping foxes lie"

Foxes feature prominently in two mishnayot in Avot. In Avot 2:15 Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus warns against getting over-familiar with the Chachamim since (among other things) their bite is like the bite of a fox. Later, in Avot 4:20, Rabbi Masya ben Charash teaches that it is better to be the tail of a lion than the head of a fox. 

The meaning of each mishnah is quite easy to accept at face value. In the first, we are warned to expect a sharp, snappy response from a learned rabbi if we speak with him in a manner that is less than respectful. In the second, we understand that it is better to be even an insignificant part of a noble enterprise than to lead a crafty, perhaps disreputable one. Foxes, after all, bite and are cunning. 

Professor Yehuda Felix however puts the metaphorical cat among the pigeons when he argues (HaChai BaMishnah, 1972, cited by Avigdor Shinan, Pirush Yisraeli Chadash at Avot 4:20) that the word shu'al -- normally translated as "fox" -- in mishnaic times referred to the jackal. While both are members of the canine family, the jackal is larger, carries a far more powerful bite that can deliver rabies, and was found widely in the area in the era of the Mishnah and Talmud. 

It has been accepted for close on two thousand years that "fox" means "fox" and not "jackal". While the jackal would fit well in Rabbi Eliezer's mishnah, he is not a byword for cunning and would therefore seem somewhat out of place in Rabbi Masya's mishnah.  Maybe it is best to let sleeping foxes lie ...