TEN UTTERANCES AND A WORLD OF DIFFERENCE

The mishnah that opens the fifth perek of Avot is so totally unlike those what precede it that it appears not to belong in the tractate at all. It reads like this:

בַּעֲשָׂרָה מַאֲמָרוֹת נִבְרָא הָעוֹלָם, וּמַה תַּלְמוּד לוֹמַר, וַהֲלֹא בְּמַאֲמַר אֶחָד יָכוֹל לְהִבָּרְאוֹת, אֶלָּא לְהִפָּרַע מִן הָרְשָׁעִים שֶׁמְּאַבְּדִין אֶת הָעוֹלָם שֶׁנִּבְרָא בַּעֲשָׂרָה מַאֲמָרוֹת, וְלִתֵּן שָׂכָר טוֹב לַצַּדִּיקִים שֶׁמְּקַיְּמִין אֶת הָעוֹלָם שֶׁנִּבְרָא בַּעֲשָׂרָה מַאֲמָרוֹת

The world was created with ten utterances. What does this come to teach us? Could it not have been created with a single utterance? However, this is in order to make the wicked accountable for destroying a world that was created with ten utterances, and to reward the righteous for sustaining a world that was created with ten utterances.

Commentaries on Avot generally assume that our teaching at Avot 5:1 addresses the Torah’s account of the creation of the universe. The ten utterances are therefore made up of nine acts of divine creativity that begin with an utterance, “And the Lord said…”  They then add the first word in the Torah, “Bereshit” (“In the beginning”) and classify that too as an utterance. This gives them a full complement of ten utterances to which the mishnah refers (see Rambam, Machzor Vitry, the Commentary ascribed to Rashi, the Bartenura and the Tiferet Yisrael). Proof that “Bereshit” is an utterance is inferred from Tehillim 33:6, “By the word of the Lord were the Heavens made”.

It is however possible to explain the ten utterances in a completely different way. There is a verse in Yeshayah that reads as follows:

וָאָשִׂם דְּבָרַי בְּפִיךָ, וּבְצֵל יָדִי כִּסִּיתִיךָ; לִנְטֹעַ שָׁמַיִם וְלִיסֹד אָרֶץ, וְלֵאמֹר לְצִיּוֹן עַמִּי-אָתָּה

“And I have put My words into your mouth, and have covered you in the shadow of My hand, so that I may plant the Heavens, and lay the foundations of the Earth, and say unto Zion: You are My people.”

The Hebrew word for “My words” in this verse is דברי (divarai). If you insert a space between the letter י (the yud) of דברי and the rest of the word, you change the meaning. This is because the yud represents the numerical value 10. You now have דבר י (devar yud, “a matter of 10”). Revisiting our verse, we can now learn it as:

“And I have put a “matter of 10” into your mouth, and have covered you in the shadow of My hand, so that I may plant the Heavens, and lay the foundations of the Earth, and say unto Zion: You are My people.”

The number 10 is rich with Jewish symbolism, and one of the things it alludes to is the Ten Commandments, the quintessence of the Torah and the acceptance of which can be said to complete the creation of man. Linkage of the ten utterances of Creation with the Ten Commandments is not new: it is found in the Zohar and has influenced Torah commentators ever since. Thus Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, Pirkei Avot im Sha’arei Avot, explains that it was unnecessary to mention the Ten Commandments among the lists of 10 in Avot because they were implicitly within the ten utterances.

Going back to our mishnah and reading it in the context of this verse from Yeshayah, we can now maintain that it does indeed refer to creation—but not creation of the universe. Instead, we can read it as referring to the olam katan, the “small world” which is man (see the Maharal, Derech Chaim, on Avot 1:2).

If our olam here is the olam katan of man, it is not just a nod to any man. Here we have an individual who is initially incomplete but is created in his final form through the “matter of 10,” the Ten Commandments that God uttered on Mount Sinai. With the ultimate perfection of man comes the conclusion of the Creation which began with the Heavens and the Earth – mentioned both in our verse from Yeshayah and also in the very first verse of the Torah itself.

In light of this reading of our mishnah, when a person destroys another human being, someone who has been “created” through acceptance of the Ten Commandments, his punishment is in proportion to his having broken the link between his victim and all ten of them. Conversely, someone who saves another is taken to have affirmed all ten and his reward is commensurately great.

So far as I am aware, there is no support among commentators on Avot—traditional or otherwise—for the explanation that I have offered. I can only say in its defence that it can run in parallel with the usual explanations because it does not contradict them and that it does at least focus on human behaviour in the world of social and interpersonal relations, which is what Avot is all about.

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The Tablets of Stone and the invention of literacy

This week's Torah reading deals with the episode of the Golden Calf and Moses' breaking of the two tablets of stone on which were carved the Ten Commandments. This event is not discussed at all in Pirkei Avot, but there is a reference to the tablets of stone and their literary content.

While Avot is famously described as a mishnaic tractate that deals with ethics and moral chastisement, some of its content seems quite remote from that objective. One of the many teachings in the earlier part of the fifth chapter that ostensibly has nothing to do with the perfection (or at least the improvement) of human behaviour is Avot 5:8, which opens with a list of ten things that are said to have been created at twilight on the Sixth Day of Creation, just before the onset of the world's first Sabbath. This list of ten reads as follows:

The mouth of the earth [that swallowed Korach]; the mouth of [Miriam's] well; the mouth of [Balaam's] donkey; the rainbow; the manna; [Moses'] staff; the shamir [worm]; writing script, the manner of writing and the tablets [of the Ten Commandments]. 

Most commentaries on Avot are content to discuss them as they are, but do not look beyond them for any profound moral message. R. Travis Herford (Ethics of the Talmud) acknowledges this when he writes:

"It is not impossible that beneath this list of unique creations ... there is concealed some attempt at the solution of a philosophical problem; but I am unable to define what it was".

Leaving aside the question left open by Reverend Herford, it is pertinent here to consider the tablets and what they contain.

The final three eve-of-Sabbath creations of the ten listed in this mishnah are concerned with the writing and recording of God’s word, and that of man. The precise meaning of the mishnah is however unclear and there is some scope for flexibility in understanding it since the consonants of the Hebrew word for “the manner of writing” ( מִּכתְבָּ , michtav) can also be read as mechatev, meaning “stylus” or “writing implement" (both the commentary ascribed to Rashi and the Machzor Vitry take the word to be mechatev though most modern editions of Avot have michtav).  Ultimately, though, these three items are still all about literacy, and the universal benefits of literacy are so far beyond challenge that to record them here would be otiose. Their inclusion here may have been particularly dear to Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi (who redacted the Mishnah) and those like-minded scholars who reached the conclusion that the time had come to organize the Oral Law and set it down in written format as the six Orders of the Mishnah that we have today. 

While we take it for granted today that the entire Torah shebe’al peh (the Oral Torah tradition) is available in convenient printed and online versions, we should remember that it was at one time a punishable offence to commit the Oral Torah to writing (see Temurah 14b, per Rabbi Abba bar Chiyya in the name of Rabbi Yochanan; also discussion at Gittin 60b).

The significance of putting things into writing is manifold. This gift of God underlines the impermanence of human memory and the value of creating a transmissible record of things that should never be forgotten. In the Torah, God not only provides an authentic text of the Ten Commandments but ensures that Moses makes a verbatim copy of it, not a paraphrase. He also commands the Children of Israel to inscribe the words of the Torah on large stones covered with plaster before crossing the River Jordan and entering Israel, this being a statement to the seventy nations of the World of what it was that the Jewish people stood for (see Devarim 27:1-8 and Rashi there). Writing is thus shown to be both God’s way of making a statement and our own. If you say something and are serious about it, putting it in writing even today is the usual manner of acknowledging that this is so.