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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