Finding our way in the dark

The mishnah that opens the second perek of Avot concludes with a theme that we have often discussed: God’s ability to see and hear whatever we do and say, and then to keep a record of it. At Avot 2:1 Rebbi (R’ Yehudah HaNasi) teaches:

הִסְתַּכֵּל בִּשְׁלֹשָׁה דְבָרִים, וְאֵין אַתָּה בָא לִידֵי עֲבֵרָה, דַּע מַה לְּמַֽעְלָה מִמָּךְ, עַֽיִן רוֹאָה וְאֹֽזֶן שׁוֹמַֽעַת, וְכָל מַעֲשֶֽׂיךָ בְּסֵֽפֶר נִכְתָּבִים

[Translation] Contemplate three things, and you will not come into the grips of transgression. Know what is above you: a seeing eye, a listening ear, and all your deeds being inscribed in a book.

This message is clear: God knows everything you do. If you want to keep on His good side, and literally in His good books, all you have to do is behave in accordance with His wishes.

There is another, quite different message. In his Avot Yisrael, the Kozhnitz Maggid gives this teaching a historical perspective.

From the days of Moshe Rabbenu till the beginning of the Second Temple era we had the benefit of prophetic guidance from above; our lives were permeated by the light of the Torah as refracted through the prism of prophecy. Our sages and seers could clearly discern God’s will and guide us accordingly. This is the mishnah’s seeing eye.

Later in the Second Temple period, when prophecy was removed from the world, we were metaphorically in the dark. Our sages however, through their ruach hakodesh—holy spirit—could still tune in to the sound of a bat kol, a Heavenly voice that steers us along the path God marks out for us. This is the mishnah’s listening ear.

Now, for our sins, we have the benefit of neither prophecy nor bat kol. But all is not lost. We still have something special to guide, strengthen and inspire us in our attempt to get closer to God. That is the written text of the Tanach, the 24 canonical books of the Jewish Bible, together with their commentaries. Here we find a reference to the final part of the mishnah. By implication, the deeds to which Rebbi refers are those we should be doing if we correctly discern the message.

So even without the light of prophecy or a Heavenly voice to guide us, we can’t just give up the task of doing God’s will in a changing world. It’s up to us to do the best we can—and it is for us to provide a seeing eye and listening ear of our own when seeking to trace God’s will through exposition of His literature.

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Fire, worms -- and a book that never came in from the cold

The fourth chapter of Avot contains one of its shortest and most powerful messages when Rabbi Levitas of Yavneh teaches: “Be exceedingly humble, since the hope of man is the worm” (Avot 4:4). Where does this salutary and sobering message come from?

Nearly 400 years before Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi included this teaching when compiling the Mishnah (c.180-200 CE), we find broadly similar words in the original Hebrew version of the Book of Ben Sira from which the Greek translation (a.k.a. Ecclesiasticus) was produced. This Greek translation adds a little heat to the Hebrew:

“Humble yourself to the uttermost, for the doom of the impious is fire and worms”.

The Book of Ben Sira never made it into the canon Jewish holy books (the “Tanach”). It is possible that this work was excluded from the canon because it contained no explicit endorsement of the notion of a World to Come—a fundamental tenet of Jewish belief. For readers of Ecclesiasticus, the worms may have appeared to be the final port of call for the dead, with nothing to come beyond them. If this is correct, the addition of “fire” in the Greek translation may have been an attempt to make Ben Sira’s teachings more palatable to Jewish readers, presumably on the basis that even a World to Come that was stoked by purifying fire was preferable to no such World at all.

By the time of Rabbi Levitas (c.100 CE) there was no longer any serious rabbinical argument over the existence of a World to Come, so his Mishnah would not have been considered a statement that had anything to do with it. Rather, it would have been read as a message regarding the imperative importance of shiflut ruach, “lowliness of spirit.”

Text and tradition: their place in "acquisition of the Torah"

The huge baraita in the sixth chapter of Pirkei Avot (6:6) lists no fewer than 48 elements that, in aggregate, are said to represent kinyan HaTorah ("acquisition of the Torah"). The list is an impressive one and, if we are honest, most of us are doing pretty well if we even manage half of them in today's world. Still, they represent an ideal -- and a challenge for us too, even if it is quite daunting.

Some of the items on the list are a little puzzling, since they seem obvious. Two that stand out in particular are Mikra (the text of the Torah and indeed the prophets and writings that comprise the rest of the Tanach) and Mishnah (the tractates that comprise the Six Orders of Mishnah and their accompanying Talmud). Why single these items out for special mention in this list? After all, they together add up to the content of our Torah learning -- and it is not possible to learn Torah without learning Torah (there is a small exception in Eruvin 100b, that one can learn Torah from animals such as cats, ants and cockerels, but the amount that can be learned from them is strictly limited). 

Perhaps the intention of the author of the baraita, when including Mikra and Mishnah, is to stress that it is only the text of Mikra and only the tradition of Mishnah that lead to acquisition of Torah learning.  They are listed in our baraita only to exclude writings that are not part of the canon of Tanach (works of apocrypha and pseudepigrapha and those which fell out of favour such as Ben Sira/Ecclesiasticus) as well as extraneous writings such as ancient Jewish fiction.

Exclusion of anything that falls outside the scope of the Tanach and the Six Orders of the Mishnah and their derivatives still leaves one question open: how does one categorise midrashic literature? While this falls outside the narrow interpretation of Mikra and Mishnah, in general it provides explanations and discussions based upon them. The author of the baraita, being a Tanna, would have been familiar with Midrash and may even have authored midrashim himself so I would like to assume, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, that the term Mishnah embraces Midrash too.

Narrow focus

A good many of the mishnayot in Avot -- particularly later in the tractate -- offer propositions that are supported by proof verses from the Tanach.  This is an interesting practice, in that the proposition contained in the mishnah must be taken to say something that the cited proof verse does not say, otherwise the Tanna in Avot would only be teaching as Oral Torah something that was already known from the Written Torah, which would be contrary to standard Tannaitic practice. We can conclude from this that, since a mishnah will not repeat a teaching that is clearly stated in Tanach, the proof verse can never 100% support the proposition contained in the mishnah.

I was looking at some of these supporting verses the other day in my Mikraot Gedolot Tanach, which contains the valuable commentaries of Radak, Ralbag, the Metzudot and Malbim, among others. It occurred to me that, in elucidating the verses I was checking out, none of these scholars made any references to the mishnayot of Avot or to those who had commented on them. This set me wondering: is this merely the hand of coincidence at work -- or is there any principle whereby those who explain the meaning of verses in Tanach do not look to Avot as a means of explaining or discussing them?