In praise of thieves and infants?

Ben Zoma controversially teaches (Avot 4:1):

אֵיזֶהוּ חָכָם, הַלּוֹמֵד מִכָּל אָדָם

Who is wise? One who learns from every man.

“Can this be right?” Our sages and commentators on Avot have long affirmed the principle but many have questioned the practice. Is it right to learn from non-Jews, idolators, apostates, criminals, animals—or even women? The answer, essentially, is yes. Wherever something of value can be learned, we should take the opportunity to learn it. Rambam is a leading exponent of this principle, even to the extent that he refuses to comply with the requirement in Avot 6:6 of citing his sources by name. As he writes in his introduction to the Shemonah Perakim:

“It is important to know … that I did not originate the ideas expressed or the explanations offered in these chapters or in my commentary [to Pirkei Avot]; rather, they have been collected from the words of the Sages in midrashim, the Talmud, and in their other works, as well as from the words of earlier and later philosophers [Jewish and non-Jewish], and from the works of many others. Accept the truth from whoever utters it. … I will .. not say, "So-and-so said this" or "So-and-so said that" because that would be unnecessarily wordy. Furthermore, it might make a reader who does not accept the author think that what he said is harmful or has a sinister intent that he is unaware of. Therefore I decided to leave out the author's name, for my aim is to help the reader and explain what is hidden away in this tractate”.

To illustrate how widely the net of prospective and potentially objectionable sources can be spread, Reb Zusha of Anipoli is said to have taught his followers that he learned seven things from a thief and a further three from an infant—all of which being lessons that could be put into practice in the service of God.

The seven lessons learned from the thief are as follows (as listed in R’ Tal Moshe Zwicker, Ma’asei Avos: Pirkei Avos through the eyes of the Baal Shem Tov and their disciples):

·       He works at night when he can see but not be seen;

·       If he fails today, he is not discouraged and tries again tomorrow;

·       He loves his fellows and would never harm them;

·       He is willing to sacrifice and even place himself in danger for any job, large or small;

·       He will sell his wares even for a small profit so long as he covers his tracks;

·       He does not reveal his past and he does not tell what he will do in the future;

·       He loves his job and would never switch to another profession.

The three things learned from the infant run like this:

·       He is always busy and never idle for a moment;

·       If he lacks anything he asks for it, crying and begging, shedding tears;

·       If he does not lack anything, he is joyful and happy, full of glee, peace and contentment.

The lists may seem a little contrived and one is entitled to ask whether they are the result of an exercise in reverse engineering. To me as a teacher I can’t help wondering whether Reb Zusha started with the message to be learned and then cast around for a surprising source from which one might learn it. This pedagogic device, in the guise of shooting the arrow first and then painting the target around the place it reaches, is a highly successful didactic technique, as described by the R’ Yaakov Krantz, the Dubno Maggid. Reb Zusha and the Dubno Maggid were almost exact contemporaries and, while there is no record of their having met, the measure of their fame and the popularity of their stories suggests that they would quite likely have known about each other.

Having said this, I have some disquiet over the content of Reb Zusha’s thief list. Are these all things even true? And are they things that are useful in our service to God?  If it was ever true that a thief “loves his fellows and would never harm them”, I doubt that many of us would be able to extract that message from the thieves of today, and it is hard to see how the fact that a person “does not reveal his past and he does not tell what he will do in the future” aids in serving an omniscient God who exists beyond time. The infant list, though much shorter, seems far more appropriate.

I’m curious to know what readers of Avot Today think about this. Do please share your views—and do offer some original suggestions as to what we might learn from other occupations.

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Handle with care! Learning from tales of the Sages

The other day I found myself reading and re-reading the following passage:

How do we relate to opportunity? Let us learn from the Vilna Gaon, who appreciated the endless potential that comes with every moment of one’s stay on earth… The Gaon had a sister whom he had not seen for nearly 50 years. Travel was not easy in those days, but on one occasion she was able to make the trip to Vilna to visit her illustrious brother. He greeted her and, after a few minutes of conversation, excused himself to return to his Torah study. The Gaon’s sister was disappointed. “I don’t understand”, she told him. “It’s been so long since we’ve seen each other and I’ve travelled so far to come here. Can’t you give me another fifteen minutes of your time?”

He pointed out to her that his hair had already turned grey—a sign, he said, from the Heavenly Court that he was running out of time in this world. How could he spend the little time he had left on conversation unrelated to Torah? [R’ Yaakov Hillel, Eternal Ethics from Sinai, discussing Avot 1:14, “If not now, when?”, with citations].

On the principle of Ben Zoma at Avot 4:1 (that a person is wise who learns from everyone) we are obliged to learn something from this episode, and the Vilna Gaon is justly renowned at a phenomenal Torah scholar so we are bound to seek to learn not just from his writings but from his words and deeds. But what do we learn from the tale related here? Various possibilities present themselves and the are not all mutually exclusive. For example:

·         If one wishes to learn Torah properly, one should not allow oneself to be distracted from domestic and family considerations;

·         This episode illustrates the extent to which the Vilna Gaon’s greatness exceeds our own. Only a person of his stature should behave in this manner but those of us who are not so great should not trouble themselves to do so;

·         The learning of Torah is so great a mitzvah that it trumps the commandment of hachnasat orchim (entertaining visitors), even though hachnasat orchim is so great a mitzvah that one can turn one’s back on God, as it were, to look after them;  

·         The learning of Torah is so great a mitzvah that a person should not feel entitled to assert a claim on the time of someone who is learning Torah, even though they may be closely related;

·         One should ascertain that a person who is learning has not yet began to go grey before seeking to disturb him while he learns. 

With Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur looming fast towards us, time to set our thoughts in order is limited and diminishing fast. Regret and repentance have to compete for our attention with dinner plans, trips to the dry cleaners, shaking the dust off machzorim untouched for a year and remembering to send one’s regards to distant family and friends. Perhaps the best lesson we can take from the Gaon is this: whatever your objective, you should devote both your time and your full attention to it until it is fulfilled. Torah, being effectively infinite, can never be fully mastered, however much time is set aside for it—but if we can sweep aside distractions for the short time that remains between the moment you read these words till the New Year begins, we can at least hope to achieve something.

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Learning from the lives of Torah sages

Ben Zoma famously asks (Avot 4:1) “who is wise” and answers his own question: “the person who learns from others”. Within the context of Torah learning, we tend to look strongly to our rabbis for our learning. We attend their shiurim, we seek their advice and bind ourselves to follow it, and we watch and imitate the things they do. Because of their obvious function as role models, rabbis are frequently—and tellingly—the subject of stories from which we learn. Some of these stories are plainly biographical; others are midrashic. All have the capacity to inspire and to instruct.

With this in mind, I make mention of one of my favourite little stories, which I came across this week when perusing Rabbi Abraham J. Twerski’s  Visions of the Fathers. There, giving a blow-by-blow account of the 48 things through which Torah is acquired (Avot 6:6), Rabbi Twerski fleshes out the requirement of mi’ut sechorah (minimising one’s business activities) by relating a tale of the saintly Torah giant Rabbi Meir Simchah Kagan (the ‘Chofetz Chaim’):

The Chofetz Chaim supported himself by operating a small store. When he had earned enough for that day, he closed the store and devoted the rest of the day to Torah study.

The image conjured up in my mind was that of a benign, bearded figure beaming with blissful contentment as he dropped the last few kopeks into the till, then ambled towards the door of the store upon which he hung the ‘CLOSED’ sign, the words of his beloved Talmud already forming on his lips. What a splendid ideal, what better way to impress upon the reader’s mind the principle that, whatever one does in life, priority ultimately belongs to the study of Torah.

Today my mind conjured up another image. This was a perspective on the story untold, doomed to be forgotten, its possibility denied. This was the image of the hard-pressed, harassed housewife, worn out from the toil of taking in extra washing in order to support her husband in learning, reaching the store ten minutes after it closed and being confronted by that same ‘CLOSED’ sign, unaware that the store-keeper, blessed with extra customers earlier that day, had reached his daily quota far sooner than might usually have been the case.

This scenario is of course the fruit of pure imagination. From what I have learned of the Chofetz Chaim, his remarkable reputation and his ahavat Yisrael, it could never have happened. But then I found myself wondering about the truth of the original story. Would the Chofetz Chaim have so preoccupied himself with domestic economy and cash-flow that he would have taken time from his Torah study to calculate how much he needed for any specific day? And did I not once hear another version of the shop-keeper story, in which the Chofetz Chaim only opened his store a couple of times of week so that the other stores would not be put out of business, a likely consequence of all the townsfolk flocking to his store to enable him to make enough sales to get back to his learning?

I have never read an authoritative biography of the Chofetz Chaim and cannot vouch for the truth of either of these tales, or of any other version of them. In one sense it does not matter. The Chofetz Chaim was a man of unimpeachable credentials in terms of Torah and middot, someone whose life and writings marked him out as an inspiration and a role model. To show how, even in matters of daily commerce, he took the trouble to place the value of Torah study ahead of the pursuit of personal wealth. It can also be argued that, if this message is a valid one, no harm is done in embellishing or amending the tale in order to make a greater impression on the recipient, to make it more memorable, or to make it more understandable or relevant to modern students.  Against that, there is the view that every story should be told exactly as it happened, without modification or embellishment, on the basis that to do otherwise is to inject falsity into the world, contrary to the principle that truth is one of the three things on which the continued existence of the world is based (Avot 1:18, per Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel).

Rabbi Meir Simchah Kagan is not the only sage who to be affected by this phenomenon. Rabbi Baruch HaLevy Epstein (the ‘Torah Temimah’) was also a brilliant and deeply committed Torah scholar who supported himself. How did he do so? In the various accounts of his life he did so as (i) a banker, (ii) a bank manager and (iii) a bank clerk. The choice of profession cannot but influence our view of him. If he was a banker, we imagine a person of great wealth and material substance who did not let his wealth go to his head but focused firmly on Torah study. If he was a bank manager, we envisage a man who was able to pursue his Torah despite shouldering the responsibilities of his local business community. If he was a bank clerk, we see a man of humility, accepting a lowly and poorly-paid position rather than using his great gifts to secure a more lucrative but time-consuming form of employment.

It is generally accepted that a story does not have to be based on fact in order to convey a valuable message. Thus, when Rabbi Akiva tells the story of the fox who seeks to persuade the fish that they should leave the sea for the dry land where they will be safer, we recognise this instantly as a parable or fable and do not ask: “who ever heard of a talking fox?” But, where rabbis are named, the value of the stories may be measured by the yardstick of veracity, and this in turn can detract from their didactic force.s

Seniors and juniors

Still on the subject of teaching and learning, Ben Zoma famously asks (Avot 4:1) “Who is wise?”, then answers his own question: “The person who learns from everyone”. Some commentators take this literally, while others limit its scope of application. However, the principle is clear: we should keep an open mind that enables us to learn from every situation in which we find ourselves and should certainly not exclude the possibility that someone who is junior to us in terms of age, experience or knowledge might nonetheless be able to enrich our understanding.

For many years I acted as a consultant to a major London-based law firm.  My role was to provide a level of academic or theoretical understanding of my subject to supplement the highly practice-based expertise of my practising colleagues. During the course of my time there, I had a long conversation with one, a relatively senior lawyer with aspirations to become a partner. This lawyer was a bit of an enthusiast and enjoyed discussing developments in the law for its own sake and not necessarily because those developments affected any of the firm’s clients.

One might have assumed that the best people to go to, when asking deep and meaningful questions about the law, were the partners. They, after all, were the lawyers at the top of the tree and had got there by demonstrating their legal expertise. But this was not usually the case. While the partners were unquestionably the most skilled and seasoned lawyers in the department, they often had relatively little to say about recent developments and theoretical perspectives in their field. Why was this? Because they had usually studied the law quite a long time earlier and had found little time to keep up with subsequent changes in the law. Many followed developments only on a need-to-know basis. The most junior lawyers, in contrast, having most recently studied the law, were closer to it and a good deal more up-to-date. So, paradoxically, the lawyers with the greatest knowledge of the current law were generally those at the bottom of the tree, not their elders and betters. There should therefore be no shame or embarrassment in a senior lawyer seeking advice or information from a fresh-faced trainee.

Incidentally, it has been my experience that, in many law firms, trainee lawyers do not receive the respect they deserve. This is certainly contrary to the principle laid down by Rabbi Elazar ben Shammua (Avot 4:15) that a person should let the honour of his student be as dear to him as his own. Every senior lawyer was a junior lawyer once, and that alone should remind them what it feels like to be an apprentice who lives at the mercy of his master.