Sponges, funnels, strainers and sieves

 According to a mishnah in the first chapter of Avot (5:18),

There are four types among those who sit before the sages: the sponge, the funnel, the strainer and the sieve. The sponge absorbs everything. The funnel takes in at one end and lets it out the other. The strainer lets the wine pass through but retains the sediment. The sieve lets the coarse flour pass through but retains the fine flour.

Most commentators take the view that the sponge, the funnel and the strainer are unfavourable metaphors and that we should all be sieves. There is however another way of understanding this mishnah: maybe all four metaphors are designed to sing the praises of four different types of student.

On the principle that we should never be dismissive of any item since there is nothing in the world that does not have its place (Avot 4:3) let us look for a place for them in the world of learning.

The sponge

Here is a person who literally mops up the contents of each class. This is a wonderful asset. Almost every reader of these words will have attended a lecture, a seminar or a tutorial where the discussion was scintillating, stimulating and well worth further thought – but the rapidity with which each idea followed another, and with which the cut-and-thrust of argument generated fresh sparks, made it impossible to take accurate notes of what precisely was said, who said what, and which responses were given in return for which propositions. Who would not pay handsomely for a clear and accurate record? But here we have the sponge! He may not understand all or indeed any of the finer points of what he has absorbed, but there he is, nonetheless – a priceless asset and a thoroughly useful learning partner at times like this.

The funnel

Now we have another valuable utensil in the family of students. One of the salient features of a funnel is that what goes in at the top is identical to what comes out at the bottom. In other words, output is a faithful reproduction of input. There is no variation, adulteration, change of quality or quantity. How many of us have toiled to get students to transmit with pinpoint accuracy that which is drummed into them? How many times do people need to be told that there is nothing to be gained from paraphrasing a statute or a Torah verse? Only the original version is valid and -- in the case of Torah learning -- that is the word of God. With our funnel, what goes in is what comes out: you can depend on that.

The strainer

Here we find another precious resource for serious study. The need to separate out the relevant from the irrelevant, the essential from the peripheral, is beyond doubt. The only question we need to decide now is how and where this straining process takes place. This mishnah postulates a student of Torah who sits before the chachamim and listens assiduously to their every word. However valuable those words may be as a whole, not every one of them will be relevant and applicable in the course of every discussion, so our strainer filters them before discussing them with his fellows. This means that he will take great care to retain the so-called “dregs” rather than cast them at his colleagues in the course of their subsequent analysis and revision of what they have learned.

The sieve

Like the strainer, the sieve separates that which is relevant and desirable from that which is not. The text of our mishnah is however problematic since it tells us that the sieve retains the fine particles of fine flour (solet) but lets the larger particles of coarse flour (kemach) fall through. This is surely impossible.

Maybe the fact that it is impossible for a sieve to retain the small but let the large pass through is the precise point that the mishnah is trying to make. Yes, this sort of sieve is impossible – but even so, at the end of the day and after all the discussions and arguments are over, we are left with a sieve full of fine flour. In other words, one of the four types of Torah student we learn of here is the person who achieves the impossible: he starts with the same materials as the rest of us – a bag of flour, a sieve – and ends up with a result that none of us could predict, replicate or explain.

On this reckoning the sieve is therefore a metaphor for the creative and imaginative Torah scholar who can think outside the box and produce results that are quite beyond the rest of us.

If this counterintuitive explanation of the mishnah can be upheld, it provides a positive and upbeat conclusion to a succession of mishnayot that depressingly represent most people in negative terms. It also provides a context in which this mishnah is taken to refer to different types of chachamim who have come to sit before chachamim greater than themselves in order to learn from them (Rabbi Shmuel de Uçeda again, this time citing Rabbi Moshe Almosnino, Pirkei Moshe): If the sponge, funnel, strainer and sieve were not all “positives,” this view would be quite insulting.

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The idea of taking this mishnah positively is not mine. Rabbi Shmuel de Uçeda, Midrash Shmuel, explains the apparently superfluous words in the Hebrew text as an invitation to explain the four utensils twice over, once as praise and once as criticism. This approach is followed by Rabbi Avraham Azulai in his lovely commentary, Ahavah BeTa’anugim