Avoid offence, make a fence

An Avot mishnah for Shabbat (perek 1: parashat Pinchas)

It’s back to the beginning again as we return to Perek 1 for another round of pre-Shabbat posts.

The first Mishnah in the first chapter of Avot begins by establishing how the chain of Torah tradition passed all the way down from the Giving of the Law at Sinai to its being received by the Men of the Great Assembly in the fifth century BCE. This was a tough time. Prophecy was fading away and the Jewish people had come to understand that, from now on, they were to navigate through life with the guidance of only their own understanding of the Torah. This being so, it was apparent that the Torah needed to be protected if it was to protect those to whom it was given. Our Mishnah therefore concludes with the third of three instructions from the Men of the Great Assembly:

עֲשׂוּ סְיָג לַתּוֹרָה

Make a fence around the Torah.

What sort of protection does the Torah need? Essentially, there are two main threats to its integrity. One comes from its deliberate or inadvertent misinterpretation; the other, which our mishnah addresses here, is the concern that its adherents will transgress Torah laws though their failure to perform or obey them properly. A classic example relates to observance of the rule that one must not do creative work on Shabbat, the seventh day of the week. This holy day is “fenced in” by adding to it a little bit of both the day before and the day after, to give a little leeway for those good souls who seek to work right to the very last minute and may, in doing so, slip up. This is presumably why, in its Avot page online, Chabad.org actually translates סְיָג (seyag, “fence”) as “safety fence”.

Here's an additional and perhaps surprising explanation: fence in your words so that they do not become a burden on the people who have to listen to you. This is especially the case when speaking words of Torah: one’s words should be carefully suited to match the subject matter, the occasion and the audience to whom they are addressed. This is not a modern attempt to make the Mishnah more meaningful to contemporary readers. It comes from the Me’iri (1249-1315) in his Bet HaBechirah. The Me’iri also cites a tale from the Mishlei HaArav concerning a certain wise man who was excessively long-winded. When asked why he spoke at such length he replied: “So that simple folk will understand”, to which he received the retort: “By the time the simple folk understand, the intelligent folk will be bored out of their minds”.

In reality, while a teacher of Torah (or indeed of anything else) can with relatively little effort adapt his words to a single talmid and will hurt no one else even if he repeats himself 400 times (see the story of Rav Perida, Eruvin 54b), the task becomes exponentially harder with each additional addressee. When dealing with a class full of students, each with their specific aptitudes and requirements, it is hard to establish a fence round one’s words that protects those who are quick on the uptake without imposing an insurmountable barrier for those who are less fortunate. I recall a piece of advice I received from a junior colleague early in my own teaching career: “The trick is to say everything three times without repeating yourself even once”.

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Sukkot and a methodology for teaching

For my pleasure and curiosity I’m currently reading the Analytical Didactic of Comenius, this being an English translation of the tenth chapter of Johann Amos Komensky’s Linguarum methodus novissima. This fascinating work is a 17^th century treatise on pedagogy. Much of it seems laboured and obvious to us today but, in its time, it was quite revolutionary. We take it for granted today that children benefit from learning from books with illustrations that relate to the text, but this was a radical innovation when he proposed it.

What does this all have to do with Pirkei Avot?

We do not have a Mishnaic teaching manual as such; nor have the rabbis of old sat down and compiled a lengthy treatise on teaching methods. That does not mean that the subject has been ignored. As early as the reign of King Solomon it was accepted that one had to teach a child al pi darko (“in accordance with his derech [the direction that he needs]”: Mishlei 22:6). There is of course much more. Avot contains many pieces of advice and guidance for teachers and their talmidim. Thus we learn of the importance of, for example, expressing oneself in terms that can be clearly understood on a first hearing (2:5), asking questions that are relevant and giving answers that are appropriate (5:9), not being an irascible teacher (2:6), taking care to retain one’s learning (3:9), citing one’s sources (6:6) and so on.

Comenius sets out (at para.46) the following fundamentals of teaching. He writes:

Let us teach and learn:

The few before the many;
The brief before the long;
The simple before the complex;
The general before the particular;
The nearer before the more remote;
The regular before the irregular (or the analogous before the anomalous).

With the festival of Sukkot soon to be upon us, if we open the Babylonian Talmud at the very beginning of masechet Sukkah we will find that it commences with a discussion of teaching methodology. Both the covering of a sukkah and the cross-beam at the top of the entrance to an alley are invalid if more than 20 amot high, yet in the case of a sukkah the gemara teaches “it is invalid” while in the case of the cross-beam the gemara teaches “lower it”.

Why? The text offers two plausible reasons, each of which teaches something different in its own right.  One is that the mishnah teaches “invalid” when there are many reasons why the sukkah might be validated, but “lower it” when remedies for the excessive height are so few. We can see from this that the compilers of the Talmud, without stating general theories of education, were quite au fait with the techniques of teaching “the few before the many”, “the brief before the long”, and so on.

Later in the same chapter (Sukkah 11a) we find Comenius’s principles turned on their heads, for maximum teaching effect. Thus a klal gadol, a general principle, may appear at the end of a list of examples rather than at their head: this technique has great didactic efficacy when students are pushed to find cases that fall within the klal but which are not already specified.

Taken as a whole, it seems to me that, while Comenius’s Didactic neatly summarises a number of significant principles of teaching, they can be found in one form or another in the Talmud, in mishnayot—and in particular in Pirkei Avot. 

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