Life with the lions

One of the shortest and most memorable mishnayot in the fifth perek is Yehudah ben Teyma’s one at Avot 5:23:

הֱוֵי עַז כַּנָּמֵר, וְקַל כַּנֶּֽשֶׁר, רָץ כַּצְּבִי, וְגִבּוֹר כָּאֲרִי, לַעֲשׂוֹת רְצוֹן אָבִֽיךָ שֶׁבַּשָּׁמָֽיִם

Be bold as a leopard, light as an eagle, swift as a deer and strong as a lion to do the will of your Father in Heaven.

We can all get the gist of this teaching, even without the assistance of learned scholars and commentators: when doing God’s will, we should do our best and measure our performance against those who excel, in whichever field of activity we seek to do His will.

Some commentaries go further. They discuss, for example, the choice of these four creatures and the quality of their assigned attributes. Some look at other verses from Tanach and the Gemara that enrich this mishnah by developing its animal-based theme.

But can one go too far when offering an explanation of that which, superficially at least, we can understand without one?  Arguably, yes.

On our mishnah Rabbi Shlomo P. Toperoff (Lev Avot) writes:

“The lion possesses a number of features which make it conspicuous. The head and neck are covered with a thick, long and shaggy mane, considered by some as a crown. His great strength, thunderous roar and majestic appearance inspire his enemies with dread. The lion will devour when he is hungry but he is not naturally cruel. He will aid weaker animals and procure food for them, and is known to spare human beings. He will not chase his prey, but will wait patiently and time his attack”.

Taken at face value, this paragraph is frankly bizarre. Lions do not procure food for other animals. Nor do they aid weaker ones. When they hunt, they hunt in families and most certainly do chase their prey (her prey, not his—since the hunt is led by the female of the species. Lions in aggadic literature and in Greek mythology spare humans (think of Daniel in the lions’ den, and of Androcles), but in the real world they kill an average of five humans a week, making them the third most prolific human-killers after hippopotamuses and elephants. I could go on.

I very much doubt that the author of this paragraph intended it to be read literally. My feeling is that what he meant was that the lion is a symbol of nobility, a metaphor for all that is good in human behavioral norms. If you do the things which are ascribed here to this symbolic beast, one might say that you are a lion among mortals, a person who leads by example and by good conduct.

It would have been good, if that is what Rabbi Toperoff meant, if he had spelled it out too.

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The Topper Rov: a missing page in Jewish history

No, there is no Topper Rov. This title was however an affectionate appellation and a play on words based on phonetic similarity with the surname Toperoff.

Rabbis come and rabbis go. Some make a name that resounds through the ages, while others are little noticed and soon forgotten. I doubt that many readers of this post will have heard of Rabbi Shlomo Pesach Toperoff, but I hope that they will not object if I write a few words about him.

R’ Toperoff was a pulpit rabbi in North East England. While Gateshead is famously known as a leading contemporary powerhouse of Torah scholarship, numerous other communities existed during the past century. These included Sunderland, where R’ Toperoff served as the minister of the Ryhope Road shul from 1934 to 1951, and Newcastle upon Tyne, where he held various positions before he made Aliyah in 1973.  A son-in-law of the saintly scholar Rabbi Tzvi Ferber (author of Higionei Avot), he wrote in his retirement an English-language commentary on Avot which he entitled Lev Avot: A comprehensive commentary on the Ethics of the Fathers.

In the Foreword to Lev Avot, the then Chief Rabbi Sir Immanuel Jakobovits welcomed it with the comment that “The literary output of Anglo-Jewish Rabbis is none too prolific” [this book was published in 1984, six years before Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks was to rectify this situation virtually single-handed with the first of his remarkably popular series of books and writings].  

The style of the book may strike the modern reader as being often somewhat stilted, formal and non-colloquial, as if to echo the solemnity of the Soncino Chumash and the Authorised Prayer Book that were popular in the United Kingdom in the pre-ArtScroll era. Given its slightly archaic flavour, I was surprised to discover that it was reprinted in the United States as late as 1997 under the same title but with the word Lev omitted. I do not know whether anyone apart from me has ever read it; nor have I ever seen any mention made of it in either popular or scholarly writings. If any reader has information to the contrary, I am eager to receive it.

Lev Avot is a strange book. Explaining each mishnah and baraita, R’ Toperoff draws on sources as varied as the Babylonian Talmud, the works of the Me’iri, the Rashba, Rabbenu Yonah, Rav Kook and occasionally Graetz, as well as numerous authors unknown to me, who are referenced solely by their surnames (Lev Avot lacks both footnotes and a bibliography). In each instance the commentary is rounded off with text described as ‘Hasidic Lore’. This feature is quite perplexing, since it is often difficult or even impossible to relate the relevant Chasidic tale to the mishnah or baraita in question. My feeling is that the book would have read better and been far more useful to its readership if the ‘Hasidic Lore’ component was either enlarged and made more relevant to Avot or simply omitted.

The commentary section is interesting as an historical perspective on Jewish life in post-War Britain. The author deprecates the downward trend in public morality and the decline in quality of Jewish education in the absence of Jewish schools. He also offers some highly personal and occasionally original insights into the mishnayot and baraitot of Avot which I hope to mention in future posts.

By the way, when I found my copy of Lev Avot in a small store dedicated to the sale of second-hand and unwanted books and articles to raise money for the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, it was in perfect condition—but for the fact that someone had brutally ripped out from it a leaf upon which were printed pages 27 and 28. I should love to know what this gentle and mildly-spoken rabbi might have written that would have attracted the ire of the book’s original owner. Once again, if any reader can enlighten me, I shall be most grateful.

***** ***** ***** ***** ***** *****

Above: R' Toperoff (middle row, third from the left) is easily identifiable by his clerical collar.

Whether anyone has ever read Lev Avot or not, R’ Toperoff deserves an honourable mention for something he did not write for publication but which was avidly consumed by those who laid their hands on it. From 1942 to 1946 he took it upon himself to write a monthly news-and-views bulletin that was sent to every one of the young Jewish men and women from Sunderland who were called up for military service. The entire sequence of bulletins has since been published as a 300-page book, Sunderland Jewry at War. The bulletins contain a good deal of material generated by third parties too: extracts from letters from those on active service, quizzes and even reports on local football teams and sporting events. Together they constitute a remarkable and moving compendium of information about Jewish life during World War 2: they are at the same time poignant, tragic, funny, courageous and immensely moving.

Like rabbis, commentaries on Pirkei Avot come and go. Some are remembered, others sink without trace. But if R’ Toperoff is to be remembered for only one thing in his life, it should be for this.

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