MIDDOT IN ONE’S DNA—AGAIN

Last month I posted a piece that expressed some dismay at the proposition, espoused by Rabbi Yaakov Hillel (Eternal Ethics from Sinai, on Avot 2:11), that good middot—behavioural qualities—are hereditary. I had assumed that this was a lone opinion, but I am wrong. The same notion is also expressed in another contemporary commentary on Avot, Rav Schachter on Pirkei Avos, based on the thoughts and shiurim of Rav Hershel Schachter as adopted by Dr Allan Weissman. This work comments on Avot 5:3, an anonymous mishnah in praise of Avraham:

עֲשָׂרָה נִסְיוֹנוֹת נִתְנַסָּה אַבְרָהָם אָבִֽינוּ, וְעָמַד בְּכֻלָּם, לְהוֹדִֽיעַ כַּמָּה חִבָּתוֹ שֶׁל אַבְרָהָם אָבִֽינוּ

With ten tests our father Abraham was tested and he withstood them all—in order to make known how great was our father Abraham's love.

Rav Schachter on Avos comments thus:

“Avraham Avinu’s success in passing the ten nisyonos indicated that his level of yiras Shamayim became part of his DNA makeup, and this could then be transmitted genetically to future generations. Thus, Avraham paved the way for his descendants, who have since stirred themselves to make aliyah, for example, and to accept difficulties in life with emunah and without question”.

I wonder if has ever occurred to the author that the vast majority of Avraham’s descendants are from Yishmael and not from Yitzchak. Moreover, a very large proportion of our ‘minority’ branch consists of people who have not made aliyah and appear to have little wish or intention to do so. The descendants of Yishmael, however, seem to be quite eager to occupy the whole of the land of Israel.

It's apposite to note that DNA in the context of our mishnah cannot be taken literally. It is suggested that it was only once Avraham had passed the ten tests that his DNA was perfected. Both Yishmael and Yitzchak were of course already born before then.

I remain uncomfortable with the notion that our behavioural choices in life are somehow conditioned by our genetic composition, especially in the absence of any evidence to that effect and when there does seem to be at least circumstantial evidence to the contrary.

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IS GOOD BEHAVIOUR HEREDITARY?

I have just come across an astonishing proposition from one of the most powerful proponent of focusing on Torah-true values, Rabbi Yaakov Hillel. It troubles me greatly and I shall explain why.

In his Eternal Ethics from Sinai, an uncompromising no-holds-barred commentary on Avot, Rabbi Hillel takes a position on one of the less discussed parts of the tractate: the two words of praise that Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai accords to his talmid, Rabbi Yehoshua ben Chananya. At Avot 2:11 he says just two words: אַשְׁרֵי יוֹלַדְתּוֹ (“Happy is the one who bore him”). This is taken to refer to the pleasure Rabbi Yehoshua gave his mother by becoming a great talmid chacham, and tales are told of how she sought to place her baby son where he would hear and absorb words of Torah even before he could consciously understand them.

Rabbi Hillel, commenting on this teaching, writes this:

The parents of this exceptional child were truly fortunate. The Bartenura writes that Rabbi Yehoshua ben Hananyah was blessed with such good middot that everyone said “‘What lucky parents to have such a son”. This is more than a matter of nahat from a good child. Middot are hereditary. The very fact that one has good middot is a compliment to his parents, because these fine qualities came from them.  … Sadly a child born to parents with bad middot is all too likely to inherit their negative traits.

To be fair to Rabbi Hillel, he later writes that even people born with these good middot should still work on them and improve them—a concession to the possibility that an individual may have some sort of choice in the matter, at least on the assumption that the urge to improve oneself is itself also a good middah that one has inherited from one’s parents. However, my discomfort with his words remains.

Let us start with a case recorded in the Torah: the children born to Yitzchak and Rivkah. Eisav and Yaakov were twins and no commentator has dared to cast aspersions on the legitimacy of their parentage. One, Yaakov, is credited with excellent middot: he is held up as the epitome of truth (Micah 7:20), a man of honesty and integrity in even the most trying of circumstances (the Torah records more tests of Yaakov than of Abraham).  The other is written off as a violent, egotistical degenerate, a person of no worth and who possesses just one redeeming feature in the way he honours his father. Heredity is hard to accommodate here but not impossible. Perhaps Yaakov inherited his parents’ pure and perfect middot while Eisav inherited those of the family from which his mother descended.

More tellingly, a lifetime’s experience has shown me that children with very different middot appear to be almost routinely born the same parents and that, while there are some families in which all the members have outstanding middot, such families do seem in our generation to constitute a minority.

I wonder what benefit a reader may extract from the proposition that middot are hereditary. This message may be read as a disincentive to do anything about one’s own middot on the basis that they are in one’s genes, as it were. It may also cause people to judge harshly and unfairly those families whose children display poor behaviour, not least because it discounts the impact of social influence and peer pressure—phenomena that are demonstrably easier to prove than moral heredity.

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