Life with the lions

One of the shortest and most memorable mishnayot in the fifth perek is Yehudah ben Teyma’s one at Avot 5:23:

הֱוֵי עַז כַּנָּמֵר, וְקַל כַּנֶּֽשֶׁר, רָץ כַּצְּבִי, וְגִבּוֹר כָּאֲרִי, לַעֲשׂוֹת רְצוֹן אָבִֽיךָ שֶׁבַּשָּׁמָֽיִם

Be bold as a leopard, light as an eagle, swift as a deer and strong as a lion to do the will of your Father in Heaven.

We can all get the gist of this teaching, even without the assistance of learned scholars and commentators: when doing God’s will, we should do our best and measure our performance against those who excel, in whichever field of activity we seek to do His will.

Some commentaries go further. They discuss, for example, the choice of these four creatures and the quality of their assigned attributes. Some look at other verses from Tanach and the Gemara that enrich this mishnah by developing its animal-based theme.

But can one go too far when offering an explanation of that which, superficially at least, we can understand without one?  Arguably, yes.

On our mishnah Rabbi Shlomo P. Toperoff (Lev Avot) writes:

“The lion possesses a number of features which make it conspicuous. The head and neck are covered with a thick, long and shaggy mane, considered by some as a crown. His great strength, thunderous roar and majestic appearance inspire his enemies with dread. The lion will devour when he is hungry but he is not naturally cruel. He will aid weaker animals and procure food for them, and is known to spare human beings. He will not chase his prey, but will wait patiently and time his attack”.

Taken at face value, this paragraph is frankly bizarre. Lions do not procure food for other animals. Nor do they aid weaker ones. When they hunt, they hunt in families and most certainly do chase their prey (her prey, not his—since the hunt is led by the female of the species. Lions in aggadic literature and in Greek mythology spare humans (think of Daniel in the lions’ den, and of Androcles), but in the real world they kill an average of five humans a week, making them the third most prolific human-killers after hippopotamuses and elephants. I could go on.

I very much doubt that the author of this paragraph intended it to be read literally. My feeling is that what he meant was that the lion is a symbol of nobility, a metaphor for all that is good in human behavioral norms. If you do the things which are ascribed here to this symbolic beast, one might say that you are a lion among mortals, a person who leads by example and by good conduct.

It would have been good, if that is what Rabbi Toperoff meant, if he had spelled it out too.

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Binary Choices and Missing Metaphors

Lawyers, and those who think like them, can easily slip into a conveniently binary frame of mind when navigating their passage through life.  Actions are either permitted or forbidden, good or bad; there is a right way and a wrong way, and so on.  One of the most frequently-used metaphors for this binary approach to life is that of “light” as a symbol of that which is good or right, and “darkness” for that which is bad or wrong.  Indeed, it is difficult to read through Psalms, the Book of Proverbs or the aggadic parts of the Babylonian Talmud without spotting this.

Uniquely among Mishnaic tractates, Avot does not concern itself with the elucidation of any Biblical laws. Its concern, as Rabbi Ovadyah of Bartenura reminds us, is with matters of morality—and these are matters where the binary approach breaks down. More recently, Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz has observed that the choice of an ethical path, in one’s personal life and in business, is often a choice between different options that cannot be described in absolute terms as good because they are in reality an exercise in damage limitation: which path do I take that is the least bad and causes the smallest amount of harm to others?

Without a binary perspective of good-or-bad, right-or-wrong, the light-versus-darkness metaphor is at best ineffective, at worst completely inappropriate. In the world of moral choices, light and dark are replaced by shades of grey. Could this be why Avot, a tractate that is more richly endowed than any other with metaphor and simile, makes no mention at all of light or darkness?