Greeting others with genuine happiness: what is expected of us?

Rabbi Yishmael, at Avot 3:16, teaches a three-fold message. There is no consensus as to what the first two parts mean, but the third part is both simple to comprehend and hard to put into practice: a person should receive everyone besimchah, literally "in happiness". What did Rabbi Yishmael mean by this?

On one view, a person should be genuinely happy to meet others. After all, every human is created, as it were, in God's image and there is no-one on the planet who does not have the capacity to improve the lot of family, friends or the wider community.

Another view is that, however miserable or angry another person has made you, it is still incumbent on us all to grit our teeth and put on a show of good cheer, to demonstrate that we can rise above the behaviour of others and not let them dictate how we respond to others.

Classical commentators have no doubt that Rabbi Yishmael meant his words to be taken literally and applied across the board. Rambam sees them as an upgrade on Shammai's teaching at Avot 1:15 that we should greet others with a cheerful face: now we should genuinely feel the happiness we show. The commentary in Rashi's name adds that we must speak pleasantly to all comers. Me'am Lo'ez takes the mishnah's words literally, as does Midrash Shmuel, who holds that even people who come to hurt you are in one way or another emissaries of God. Rabbenu Yonah does not even explain the teaching but merely repeats it, presumably because he regards its meaning as being self-evident.

Modern commentators, acknowledging the realities of contemporary society, are more nuanced in their advice to readers. Thus Rabbi Marc D. Angel (The Koren Pirkei Avot) prefers to apply this mishnah to 'the whole person' rather than 'every person'. He writes:

"...[Rabbi Yishmael] surely knew that it was unrealistic to expect people to cheerfully receive all human beings. Perhaps his statement should be understood as advising the maintenance of an optimistic overall view of humanity..." Receive the 'whole person' optimistically -- knowing that the good and evil will be judged by God".

Rabbi Shimshon Raphael Hirsch also qualifies the mishnah, but by reference to time, not the person being encountered:

"Do not reject anyone from the outset; instead, receive everyone gladly, and then consider whether or not he is suitable for you and your endeavours".

In the wake of the Holocaust and the many dreadful sufferings faced by Jews in both hospitable and inhospitable lands, one can appreciate the temptation to qualify Rabbi Yishmael's words. One contemporary rabbi has however held out against this temptation and his words are all the more poignant for his being a survivor of the Buchenwald death camp. Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau (Yachel Yisrael, ArtScroll translation) writes:

"We must gladly greet 'everyone': each human being... Although not everyone possesses this natural ability to empathize with others, it can be acquired, 'until gladness becomes part of one's nature' [citing Rabbeinu Yitzchak ben R' Shlomo]"".

In a world in which it is so much easier to hate than to love, and to distance oneself from one's fellow humans, but where we have come to accept that there are limitations on the extent to which we can live out the ideals of earlier generations, we should think carefully before imposing limits on any encouragement to do or to be good, so those limitations do not become norms in their own right.

A time to be happy -- in the long run

The festival of Simchat Torah (literally "Happiness of the Torah") is fast approaching. No matter how it came into existence and never mind that it is piggy-backing on to a day that is already a festival -- Shemini Atzeret (the Eighth Day of Solemn Assembly) --Simchat Torah is a well-established fact on the ground. It is a day for rejoicing in the giving of the law on Sinai and for both reaching the end of Deuteronomy and immediately starting all over again at the beginning of Genesis.

This happy event is generally celebrated by singing and dancing with the Torah scrolls and by indulging (sometimes over-indulging) in the pleasures of the material world -- in particular food and drink.

Pirkei Avot offers a more ascetic route to happiness via the Torah. A baraita at 6:4 states:

This is the way of Torah: eat bread with salt; drink water in moderation; sleep on the ground; live a life of hardship and toil in Torah. If you do so, "you will be happy and it will be good for you” —happy in this world, good to you in the World to Come.

This raises the obvious question: if this is a recipe for happiness, should we not, at least on this one day of the year, reduce our alcoholic and gastronomic intake, sleep on the ground, actually open the Torah and learn a bit of it rather than cavort around with a rolled-up version of it, and generally focus on its content?

This question is strengthened when one considers that Simchat Torah falls at the end of a three-week festive season that culminates in Sukkot (a.k.a. the Feast of Tabernacles), a full week of celebratory eating, drinking and being merry. In Temple times Sukkot was also the time for a remarkable event, the Simchat Bet HaSho'evah, an all-night spectacular with burning torches, acrobatic rabbis and mass festivity. Would not a day of self-denial and serious study be an appropriate antidote to all this protracted partying?

There are of course many answers to this question (readers are invited to submit their favourites) and most of them are surely correct. One is that the happiness celebrated on Simchat Torah marks our own sense of achievement when we get to the end of our reading of the Torah each year. In Avot 2:21 Rabbi Tarfon says, of Torah learning, "It's not for you to finish the task -- but nor are you free from undertaking it". On Simchat Torah we do not in any sense finish learning the Torah, but we can at least take heart at the fact that, from start to finish, we have had one more opportunity to do so". A bit like an runner who is competing in a long-distance race, we are encouraged by each lap we complete -- even though we are effectively back where we were when we complete the previous lap. We feel that, if we have not actually proved Rabbi Tarfon wrong, we have tasted what it would be like to do so.

The happiness of Avot 6:4 is of a different order. This is analogous to the case of the runner who has tackled a cross-country marathon. He does not take heart at each lap he accomplishes because he is not going round in circles. As he continues to run, his scenery is ever-changing and often unfamiliar. His happiness, his comfort, comes from the fact that he knows in his heart that every step he takes will bring him to his final goal and that, in a way he cannot yet fully experience or understand, he will be a better person for it. But to reach his goal he must stay fit, keep focused, disdain the pleasures of the dinner table which would only slow him down.

In wishing all the members of this Group a happy and joyous Simchat Torah, I respectfully remind them not to let their simchah be at the expense of the Torah.

Chag same'ach!