MUSSAR: DOES MOTHER KNOW BEST?

Parents don’t get much exposure in Pirkei Avot. Though God is described as our Father in Heaven (Avot 5:23), biological parents are not explicitly mentioned at all. Since Avot means “fathers”, many commentators across the generations have explained its content by the occasion reference to fathers—but of mothers there is just one small, oblique trace. This is found in Avot 2:11, where Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai, praising each of his star talmidim in turn, says of Rabbi Yehoshua ben Chananya אַשְׁרֵי יוֹלַדְתּוֹ  (ashrei yoladeto, “happy is the one who birthed him”).  This can only refer to his mother.

How did Rabbi Yehoshua ben Chananya make his mother happy, and why is this facet of his existence singled out for praise? The commentary ascribed to Rashi, supported by Yevamot Yerushalmi 1:6, explains that his mother, while pregnant, made the rounds of all the local Batei Midrash and asked each of those who learned Torah there to pray for her unborn son to become a chacham. Following his birth, she would place his cradle within earshot of chachamim who were learning, so that he might imbibe the sweet incantation of their Torah learning even before he could understand it. This seems to be the most frequently cited explanations, but I want to look at another.

According to Rabbi Shmuel di Uceda (Midrash Shmuel), Rabbi Yehoshua’s mother taught him mussar, those principles of morality and good conduct that complement the mitzvot of the Torah. This explanation clearly appealed to Rabbi Tvi Hirsch Ferber (Si’ach Tzvi, vol.2) who wove it into his commentary on Eshet Chayil (“A Woman of Worth”)—the famous acrostic at Mishlei 31:10-31 that concludes the Book of Proverbs.

Writing on the verse קָמוּ בָנֶיהָ וַיְאַשְּׁרוּהָ בַּעְלָהּ וַיְהַלְלָהּ (“Her children rise up, and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praises her”) Rabbi Ferber references our mishnah of Rabbi Yehoshua’s mother and the explanation of Midrash Shmuel, which is itself based on another verse in our chapter of Mishlei, the line that opens it:

דִּבְרֵי לְמוּאֵל מֶלֶךְ מַשָּׂא אֲשֶׁר-יִסְּרַתּוּ אִמּוֹ

The words of king Lemuel [a.k.a. Solomon]; the mussar with which his mother corrected him (Mishlei 31:1).

I have two problems with the explanation of our mishnah based on these verses in Mishlei. First, the words ashrei yoladeto seem quite remote from the meaning taken here and are not obviously allusive to the case of the mother who taught her son mussar. Secondly, elsewhere in Proverbs there is a far better-known verse than 31:1 which suggests something quite different. At 1:8 we encounter a verse that is known to many as the lyrics of a song:

שְׁמַע בְּנִי מוּסַר אָבִיךָ וְאַל-תִּטֹּשׁ תּוֹרַת אִמֶּךָ

Hear, my son, the mussar of your father, and do not forsake the Torah of your mother.

This verse suggests, at the very least, that it is the mother’s job to teach Torah, that mussar is a task for the father, and that we should not imbue the Lemuel verse cited above with too much meaning.

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Here are some sample versions of “Shema Beni Mussar Avicha”:

·       Idan Dahari: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aaQozNe4tZg

·       Eli Herzlich: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCGOYpY_hIg (animated version)

·       Shlock Rock: https://www.zemirotdatabase.org/view_song.php?id=878

·       Mendy Worch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7WDcUFK4qB4

IS GOOD BEHAVIOUR HEREDITARY?

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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