Truth, Science and Metaphor: where mishnah meets midrash

We live in an age in which truth has, for many people, ceased to be an absolute quality but the product of individual choice. You have your truth, I have mine. This choice between competing truths is often based on an earlier choice as to which of a number of competing narratives one accepts. The concept of the relative truth needs no further explanation here, but there is one truth-related issue that affects some of the mishnayot in Avot: the use of metaphor and parable in establishing the meaning of a teaching.

An obvious candidate for explanation via non-literal devices is Avot 5:23, where Yehudah ben Teyma says:

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 mighty as a lion to do the will of your Father in Heaven.

The basic idea is that someone who wants to serve God should do so in the optimum manner, doing His will with speed, efficiency and good grace, even if it involves a good deal of effort. But, rabbis being what they are, many have mined aggadic material in order to bring out further meanings.

R’ Shlomo Toperoff does this in Lev Avot in a manner which, though traditional and well precedented by many commentators from earlier eras, may make uncomfortable reading for the modern reader who might mistake aggadic traditions for scientific truths. Here are a couple of examples:

“[A] characteristic of the eagle is that it flies with its young on its back, and this serves a dual purpose. The eagle teaches its young to fly at a tender age, but it also shows gentleness and concern for its young by protecting it from the arrows of missiles … The eagle carries its young above its wings so that no harm befall it…”

and

“The Rabbis add, ‘As the gazelle, when it sleeps, has one eye open and one eye closed, so when Israel fulfils the will of God He looks on them with two eyes, but when they do not fulfil the will of God He looks at them with one eye’…”.

As for eagles’ wings, we have a reference point in the Torah itself where, at Shemot 19:4 and Devarim 32:11 we read of being carried on eagles’ wings as being the epitome of safe, protected travel; we also understand the contrast between the eagle’s fierce and predatory attitude towards its prey and the care it expends on its young. But, unless there has been a dramatic change in nature or in the behaviour of birds, we can see that eagles do not actually carry their young on their backs as they fly through the air. If the egrets could even mount the parent bird’s back, they would fall off in the course of its flight. This would have been known to the Tannaim too, since eagles were far more common in earlier times when humans occupied less of the planet and the environment was more favourable to their lifestyle.

As for deer, the few mammals that sleep with an eye (or two) open include dolphins, whales, and fruit bats. Giraffes enter a state of semi-somnolence in which their eyes remain half open and their ears twitch. The deer family, however, do not. No matter, the midrash on Shir HaShirim (‘Song of Songs’) is not teaching us nature studies: it contains a different, more profound message. The notion of God’s oversight of our lives being proportionate to our attention to His will is important and it does not depend on the literal truth of the midrash.

We face a dilemma when dealing with metaphors that apparently contradict science. Do we teach them as they stand, as countless generations of our forebears have done, do we explain the moral they encapsulate but make excuses for their factual accuracy—or do we take them as literal truths?

I ask this question because I have had some troubling conversations on this topic. One was with a friend who became angry and disaffected with his Judaism when it was pressed upon him by a friendly and respected rabbi that the gestation period for snakes was seven years (Bechorot 8a; sadly, the object of this aggadah was not to teach anything about snakes but to illustrate the wisdom of our sages). The other was with a contemporary rabbi who insisted—and still insists—that birds can fly on a single wing, notwithstanding all practical and theoretical considerations to the contrary (see Tosafot to Shabbat 49a on the tale of Elisha ba’al kanofayim).

My feeling is that we should not throw the baby out with the bathwater and discard a colourful if sometimes literally inexact body of aggadic scholarship that has served us so well throughout our history. We should however be on our guard and make it plain, when teaching it, that what we are concerned about is the message, not the factual scenario through which the message is transmitted.

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When two giants meet: a modern midrash?

It is axiomatic that our Torah learning should always be fresh and exciting. Even when we are reviewing the same passages of biblical text, the same laws, the same parables and tales for what seems like the thousandth time, they should be as new and challenging to us as if we had never met them before. If they feel stale and boring, it is for us to make the effort to generate a tangible sense of excitement when we encounter them. This is why, at Avot 1:4, when Yose ben Yo’ezer Ish Tzeredah urges us to open our homes to Torah scholars, he says: “drink in their words with thirst”.

To illustrate this, R’ Chaim Druckman (Avot LeBanim) cites a story told of the celebrated American composer and conductor Leonard Bernstein visiting the iconic Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, whom he found painting the railing (ma’akah) at the studio where he worked. Calling in on Picasso for a second time on the following day, Bernstein was surprised to find him painting the same railing again. When Picasso was doing exactly the same thing when Bernstein called in on him a third time, the composer asked him what was the point of painting the same railing every day. Responding with great feeling, Picasso said: “So they say you are an artist—but don’t you understand anything about art! Can’t you see with your own eyes that I’m not painting the same railing at all!”

The point, explains R’ Druckman, is that, if Picasso could find some chiddush, something new, when painting and repainting the same ma’akah, how much more so do we need to learn Torah in a way that is fresh to us every day. I am curious to know the provenance of this strange story, since there appears to be no factual basis for it. Though the lives of both Bernstein and Picasso are both well documented, I have found no evidence that they ever met at all.  I even tried to trace the tale on the hypothesis that it was not Leonard Bernstein but another musical Bernstein, Elmer (composer of the movie themes for The Great Escape and The Magnificent Seven), who may have visited Picasso, but to no avail.

That Picasso was painting a railing can however be explained. In 1953 he painted a picture, La Balustrade, which is illustrated here. La Balustrade is the French word for ma’akah and in English this work is known as The Railing. If Picasso was painting and repainting the railing that forms the most prominent feature of that work, his repetition and quest for a fresh visual image would be perfectly explicable.

I suspect that this is a made-up tale, a sort of modern midrash that is designed both to provide a powerful illustration of an important point and to show that it is understood not only within the world of Jewish scholarship but in secular society too. If any reader can assist me in finding out where it originated, or how R’ Druckman got to hear of it, I should be most grateful.

There is a further issue to consider: is it right to tell a story involving real people in order to illustrate a point that one is validly making, if it never actually happened. On the one hand, there are those who oppose this practice on the basis that it is bringing sheker, falsehood, into the world. Against that, there are those who feel that the end justifies the means and that if that is the best way to teach a principle -- and particularly a Torah-based principle -- there should be no objection to it. In our own tradition we have midrashim that contain tales that are powerful and vivid aids to our understanding. Some may be true, some may not -- and some certainly cannot since they cannot be reconciled with other midrashim or even the Tanach. But these midrashim were composed by scholars of a bygone age who were far closer to the giving of the Torah than we are, and whose words have received the approbation of Torah scholars ever since. Does that mean that we have a precedent that permits us to do the same thing, or that we certainly should not?

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The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth?

Anyone spending all or most of the day in synagogue on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, will have noticed how often the word emet (“truth”) and its derivatives crop up in the extensive liturgy that addresses the issues of confession, repentance and the quest for forgiveness. In short we are to acknowledge the truth of who we are and what we have done, to strip away the sheker(“falsity”) that can so easily insinuate its way into playing a major part in our lives, and to stand before God as our true selves with the sincere aspiration that we will seek to do better, to be better, in the year ahead.

Emet plays a key role in Pirkei Avot. It is one of the three qualities upon which the continuation of civilised life depends (1:18). Acknowledgement of the truth, however inconvenient it may be, is one of the seven signs of a wise person (5:9); setting oneself on the path of truth is listed as one of the 48 steps to acquiring Torah (6:6).

While the Yom Kippur liturgy contrasts emet and sheker, Pirkei Avot makes no mention of sheker at all. This is unsurprising if we remember that Avot is not a philosophical tract on the nature of abstract concepts but a set of practical guidelines for moral Jewish decision-making. Thus, while truth and peace are both shortlisted as values upon which the world’s survival depends, a mishnah in the first perek (1:12) advocates following the path of Aaron in loving peace and pursuing peace. Aaron famously accomplishes this path midrashically by falsely telling each of two adversaries that the other was sad to be in dispute and wanted to make peace.

If truth is accepted as a relative value rather than an absolute, we can accommodate the concept of the partial or incomplete truth, when words that are spoken are literally true but do not tell the whole story. But how far can not-quite-truth be acceptable? There is a countertrend towards promoting the absolute value of truth. This can be seen in the Sefer Chasidim, where Rabbi Yehudah HaChasid disapproves of the practice of improving even a true story by embellishing it—even if the story has didactic value which is enhanced by the embellishment. It can also be seen in the Chafetz Chaim’s important work on lashon hara (improperly telling tales of others, whether true or false). This work covers much of the same ground as Rabbeinu Yonah’s Sha’are Teshuvah, but effectively converting what were previously regarded as middot(discretionary canons of behaviour) into mitzvot (binding commandments).

A related area of truth and falsehood is that of midrashic teachings, many of which are fanciful and, in real-world terms, impossible. Are they emet because the message they convey is true, or sheker because they did not happen, could not happen or clash factually with other midrashim on the same subject? Here the range of opinions is wide, spanning those who accept as a matter of faith that all midrashim are true and those who discount their veracity—however plausible they may be—on the ground that they are midrashim. Many people adopt the position that many midrashim are literally false but metaphorically true, and that the metaphorical truth trumps the literal falsehood. However, this convenient solution is not, so far as I am aware, flagged by their authors except where the tales are described as mashalim (“parables”), such as Rabbi Akiva’s famous citation of a dialogue between a cunning fox and some remarkably self-aware fish (Berachot 61b).

This leaves us on Yom Kippur with a difficult decision: do we repent telling an untruth or half-truth because we have lied and thus introduced more sheker into the world? Or do we decide not to repent, even if by doing so we are effectively judging our own actions and pre-empting the decision of the heavenly court? Readers of this post now have a year to decide before Yom Kippur comes around again.