Patience!

A problem familiar to anyone involved in learning Pirkei Avot today is that of coming up with a translation that both does justice to the original text and makes it relevant to contemporary readers.  This problem is particularly troublesome with abstract nouns that describe human qualities.

“Patience” is a good example. There is no doubt that the sages of the Mishnah valued patience in their time just as highly, if not more so, than we do today. However, there is no word in the vocabulary of the Tanach, the Mishnah or Midrash that appears to correspond precisely with that value as we understand it today. The use of word סבלנות (savlanut) in Ivrit today when referring to patience is a modern usage; its etymology carries overtones of putting up with a load rather than with biding one’s time while one seeks or awaits a hoped-for outcome.   

Does patience feature in Pirkei Avot among the qualities a Jew should seek to acquire and practise? Writing in Eternal Ethics from Sinai, Rabbi Yaakov Hillel discusses the requirement that judges be “deliberate in judgment” (Avot 1:1) and adds:

“There is another element to being deliberate in judgment. Our Sages tell us that patience is one of the forty-eight means through which Torah is acquired [Avot 6:6]. Patience in Torah study means allowing every topic the time and unrushed, in-depth learning required for full comprehension”.

This suggests that patience is part of being “deliberate in judgment”. But where in Avot 6:6 does patience appear? A survey of popular English translations of Avot 6:6 suggests that, in two of the most popular of them (ArtScroll and Chabad.org), patience is not listed among the 48 elements of Torah acquisition at all.

Among those translations in which patience is listed, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks and Paltiel Birnbaum both use “patience” as a translation of אֶֽרֶךְ אַפַּֽיִם (erech apayim), although this term is more commonly translated as “slow to anger”. These translators are consistent within Avot in so far as they use the same translation in Avot 5:2 and 5:3 to describe God’s attitude towards two sequences of sinful generations, but both translate the same term as “slow to anger” when used elsewhere in their prayerbooks (at Shemot 34:6-7).

Two non-Jewish scholars (Herbert Danby and R. Travis Herford) translate erech apayim as “long suffering”. This actually supports the “erech apayim is patience” theory because the word “suffering” has itself changed meaning. In the 19^th and early 20^th century it was common for “suffer” to bear the meaning of “allow” or “tolerate”. It is this nuance that may have led Irving M. Bunim (Ethics from Sinai, vol 3) to render the term “long-suffering patience”.

So far we have seen that the virtue of patience may be a subset of being deliberate in judgment or as an alternative rendering of “slow to anger”. But might Avot have more to say on the subject?

There is a Baraita at 6:1 which lists 29 elements that pertain to a sincere and committed Torah scholar. One of these is that the scholar should be erech ru’ach (literally “long-spirited”). How do we render “long-spirited” into English today? While there is no actual consensus, one gets the impression that “patient” is the most popular option: Rabbi Sacks, Paltiel Birnbaum, Chabad.org and some ArtScroll publications offer “patient” (others prefer “long suffering”). This was not however the way earlier commentators understood the term: both Rabbenu Yonah and the commentary attributed to Rashi take erech ru’ach to be a synonym for erech apayim and warn of the danger of losing one’s temper, while the text of Avot on which the Maharal based his Derech Chaim seems to have read erech apayim and not erech ru’ach. The Abarbanel (Nachalat Avot) treats the term as being part of the overall concept of modesty and humility.

It seems to me that Avot, like much of the Mishnah, often speaks in terms of actual instances rather than general principles. Thus at Avot 5:9 we learn of the seven attributes of the chacham, the wise person, whom we contrast with the golem, someone whose behaviour remains unpolished.  Two of the seven attributes offer practical examples of (im)patience: a person should not interrupt others while they are speaking and should not answer questions off the cuff but should think before answering. From this wise counsel we can begin to construct a principle that one should be patient. Indeed, Rabbi Menachem Mordechai Frankel-Teumim appears to be edging towards something like this in his Be’er Ha’Avot when, commenting on erech ru’ach in Avot 6:1, the two examples he brings are those of Avot 5:9: not interrupting someone while they are asking you a question and not rushing to give an answer.

So, to summarise, “patience” definitely seems to be lurking within the body of Avot. But to work out exactly where is a task that takes a fair bit of … patience.

Noah and the limits of patience

Does Noah have a place in Pirkei Avot? The Torah describes him as a man who is righteous in his generations, but its narrative does not elaborate on the reason why this might be so. We know that he found favour in God’s eyes, but most of Avot addresses character improvement and interpersonal relationships rather than the relationship between man and God. All the Torah tells us of his dealings with other mortals is that, of his three sons, he gave one an unqualified blessing, a second one a more circumscribed one and the third a curse. We also learn that he discharged a heavy burden of responsibility for the survival of the livestock within the Ark. But we see no obvious evidence of the sort of middot—character qualities—that is the main focus of Avot.

As it turns out, Noah gets two name-checks in Avot and they are both somewhat pejorative. At 5:2 we are taught that there were ten generations from Adam to Noah (Adam, Seth, Enosh, Kenan, Mahalalel, Yered, Enoch, Mathuselah, Lemech, Noah). Each generation angered God more than its predecessor to the point that God finally lost patience with humankind, as it were, and sent a flood to wipe them out. The next mishnah repeats this theme, referencing the ten generations from Noah to Abraham (Noah, Shem, Arpachshad, Shelah, Ever, Peleg, Re’u, Serug, Nachor, Terach, Abraham). This time God did not send a flood, but rewarded Abraham for such righteousness as he and the preceding nine generations had accrued. These two mishnayot tell us nothing about Noah, the man and his middot. Rather, they use his name as a convenient shorthand for a literal watershed in Biblical history—the transition from antediluvian to postdiluvian culture. We might characterise the Adam-to-Noah era as a sort of “wild west” anything-goes free-for-all period, while Noah-to-Abraham marks the commencement of an era in which some form of law and order are manifested (the seven so-called Noahide laws), even though it appears that most humans before the time of Abraham did not live in accordance with them.

Some interesting timeline points arise from these two mishnayot.

According to Tosafot Yom Tov, the first mishnah presumably embraces Noah’s entire lifespan, since the second Mishnah—though it mentions Noah by name—would contain not ten names but eleven if it included him. While the Maharal (Derech Chaim) and the Anaf Yosef appear to agree, this view is open to challenge because the first mishnah refers to those ten vexatious generations continuing to annoy God “until He brought upon them the waters of the Flood.” Noah however lived on for a further 350 years after the Flood abated. If account is taken of that mainly quiet and unrecorded part of his life, which in any event overlaps the generation of his three sons, Noah’s last three and a half centuries must surely form part of the ten-generation span that leads to Abraham.

For the record, the Torah gives very much longer lifespans for the generations between Adam and Noah than it does for Noah’s descendants. Thus the number of years that the Bible records from the Creation to the Flood is 1,656, while the ten generations from the Flood to the death of Abraham account for just 467 years. The Alshich (Yarim Moshe) notes that the average age of a first-time father from the time of Adam to the birth of Noah’s first-born Japheth was 165 years; however, from the generation of Shem to that of Abraham, the average age of a first-time father was just 40. Likewise, the average lifespan of the generations from Adam to Noah was 857 years, while that from Noah to Abraham dwindled to 317. The Alshich attributes these statistical diminutions to the fact that the 20 generations from Adam to Abraham angered God increasingly, to the point at which God decreased their lifespans. There is however a problem with this explanation: it would seem to contradict the force of this pair of mishnayot because it implies that God was becoming increasingly impatient as the generations passed since He was giving them less and less time in which to repent, while we are supposed to learn here about the magnitude of His patience and slowness to anger.

Does this analysis have any take-home relevance for us today? On the basis that we should seek to emulate God’s actions where this is possible, we can see how much less patient God appears to be in the later mishnah before acting on His anger. Though the first ten generations were far from righteous, they had yet to receive any warning as to what the consequences of their misconduct might be. Far from destroying Adam and Eve after they ate the forbidden fruit, God performed for them an act of kindness when made them clothing before He sent them on their way. It was not until the cataclysmic flooding of the natural world and everything in it that the physical consequences of bad behaviour were truly manifested. But from Noah onwards, the Flood—and the rainbow that was set in the sky to remind us of the reason for it—served as a warning that God’s expectations are matched by His acts. Perhaps this teaches us that we too should feel morally justified in being less patient with those whom we have cautioned than with those whom we have not.