TALKIN’ ABOUT OUR GENERATIONS…

There is a pair of mishnayot in Avot that look totally out of place in a tractate that is concerned with the criteria that our Sages lay down for good behaviour. They read like this (Avot 5:2-3):

עֲשָׂרָה דוֹרוֹת מֵאָדָם וְעַד נֹֽחַ, לְהוֹדִֽיעַ כַּמָּה אֶֽרֶךְ אַפַּֽיִם לְפָנָיו, שֶׁכָּל הַדּוֹרוֹת הָיוּ מַכְעִיסִין וּבָאִין, עַד שֶׁהֵבִיא עֲלֵיהֶם אֶת מֵי הַמַּבּוּל

עֲשָׂרָה דוֹרוֹת מִנֹּֽחַ וְעַד אַבְרָהָם, לְהוֹדִֽיעַ כַּמָּה אֶֽרֶךְ אַפַּֽיִם לְפָנָיו, שֶׁכָּל הַדּוֹרוֹת הָיוּ מַכְעִיסִין וּבָאִין, עַד שֶׁבָּא אַבְרָהָם אָבִֽינוּ וְקִבֵּל שְׂכַר כֻּלָּם

There were ten generations from Adam to Noah. This is to teach us the extent of God's tolerance; for all these generations angered Him, until He brought upon them the waters of the Flood.

There were ten generations from Noah to Abraham. This is to teach us the extent of God's tolerance; for all these generations angered Him, until Abraham came and reaped the reward for them all.

Since the Mishnah is not a work of history, it is implicit that there is more to these teachings than the transgenerational narrative suggests.  Much attention is paid to important philosophical issues such as the withholding of punishment from generations that were deserving it or the fairness of giving Abraham the reward for meritorious acts of others, as well as theological issues relating to the imputation of human qualities such as forbearance and anger to an inscrutable Deity whose characteristics are beyond human comprehension. But there is one topic that is generally ignored: the counting of generations.

The problem these mishnayot raise is this. Counting Adam as 1 and Abraham as 20, as the genealogical chronology of the Torah suggests, there are only 19 generations (you can try this yourself with a box of matches: if you lay out 20 in a row, the number of gaps, representing the generations, will only total 19).

Paul Forchheimer (Maimonides’ Commentary on Pirkey Avoth) asserts that Noah belongs only to the first mishnah. He brings no support for this assertion, but Tosafot Yom Tov, the Maharal in his Derech Chaim and the Anaf Yosef see provide it for him. The Torah itself challenges this view, though since, though the first mishnah ends with God bringing his punishing Flood, we discover at Bereshit 9:28 that Noah lived for another 350 presumably quite unrewarding years—thus taking him well beyond that cataclysmic event and placing him firmly in the second mishnah.  Another reason for including him in the second grouping is that, at the end of this period, God is not in punishment mode but is distributing rewards. Noah, whom the Torah describes as a tzaddik and who is the instrument through which God saves humanity, would appear to belong more to the generations that earned rewards—even if they were withheld—than the generations that deserved to be wiped out.

Ultimately the question that should concern us is not which mishnah or mishnayot contains Noah but, rather, what the anonymous author of these teachings is trying to teach us. This should not be hard to establish. The main actor in each mishnah is God. It is an oft-repeated axiom that we are supposed to emulate His ways. Just as He is merciful, so too should we be merciful, and so on (Shabbat 133b). Transposing this axiom to our pair of mishnayot, the lesson is clear: just as He is patient and tolerant, we too should be patient and tolerant; and just as He is not hasty to hand out rewards to those who are not fit to receive them, so too should we exercise the same caution.

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Av, Avot and Anger

A central theme of the solemn date of Tisha be’Av (the ninth day of the month of Av) is the causative link between what we lost—two Temples and two thousand years’ occupancy of the land God gave us—and the things we did in order to lose it. Put simply, we did wrong; God warned us to stop but we persisted. God, who alone knows how to regulate the scale of His anger in light of His divine wisdom, became blazingly angry and punished us. While we mourn our losses, the takeaway message of the day is not about the past but the present as it affects the future: that we should get our act together now and act in accordance with God’s will, not contrary to it. This message is alluded to in the fifth chapter of Avot, at 5:24, in a mysterious passage cited in the name of Yehudah ben Teyma:

“The brazen [go] to Gehinnom; the meek [go] to the Garden of Eden. May it be Your will, Lord our God and God of our fathers, that the Holy Temple be rebuilt speedily in our days; and grant us our portion in Your Torah”.

The status of this Mishnah has been challenged on the view that it originally marked the end of Avot, with the sentence that refers to the rebuilding of the Temple being tacked on as a prayer. However, this passage is an integral part of Avot as we have it today and, taken as a whole, it suggests that if we are meek, not brazen, and do God’s will rather than openly flout it, we are entitled to call upon Him to restore the Temple that was wiped out when we flouted it in the first place.

God’s destructive response to our disobedience was not a cold, calculated one but was accompanied by a blaze of anger. So what does Avot say about anger? For us humans it is something to avoid. A person who is irascible should not be a teacher (2:6), and anyone who is quick to anger and hard to placate is a rasha—someone who is evil. Yet anger is a divine attribute and God is twice praised as being slow to anger (5:2, 3), even though the full impact of his anger, once unleashed, can be devastating.

Avot teaches that, both at the time of Noah and the Flood and in the era of Abraham, God patiently waited a full ten generations before allowing Himself to become angry, even though each generation as a whole behaved less well than its predecessor. Is there any significance in our knowing this? If God punishes us for our sins, should it matter to us whether he has unleashed His anger on earlier generations of miscreants or not?

The loss of each Temples came some somewhere in the region of 400 years after it was established. Now, though there is no single way to measure the duration of a generation, we do see the word used colloquially for a period of 40 years in the context of the Generation of the Midbar—the refugees from Egypt who died in the desert, barred from entering the land of Canaan after they accepted the false testimony of the Spies. Taking 40 years as a generation we see that, in the case of both the First and the Second Temple, God delayed His anger for ten generations before He acted in accordance with it—just as He did so in the mishnayot of Avot.

What message does this have for us? First we must accept that, if we cannot actually eliminate our anger when dealing with one another, we should seek to emulate God’s example and be as slow as possible before giving in to it. Secondly, before choosing whether to do God’s will or to defy it, we might consider stopping to think whether we perhaps are a “tenth generation” on whom God’s anger might be vented, and then act accordingly.