The third worm

An Avot mishnah for Shabbat (Parashat Chukkat)

Continuing our series of erev Shabbat posts on the perek of the week, we return to Perek 5.

There are three worms in Pirkei Avot. Two—the rimah (at 3:1 and 4:4) and the tole’ah (3:1—are what one might call conventional worms. But the third, which we meet in this week’s perek is anything but ordinary: it is the miraculous shamir. At Avot 5:8 we learn of 10 things that, the Tannaim agreed, were created at the very end of the sixth Day of Creation, just before all creative work ceased for Shabbat. They are:

פִּי הָאָֽרֶץ, פִּי הַבְּאֵר, פִּי הָאָתוֹן, הַקֶּֽשֶׁת, וְהַמָּן, וְהַמַּטֶּה, וְהַשָּׁמִיר, הַכְּתָב, וְהַמִּכְתָּב, וְהַלֻּחוֹת

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; writing, the inscription and the tablets [of the Ten Commandments].

The shamir, which may possibly not have been a worm, was a tiny creature that, in our tradition, was vested by God with the power to cut the huge stones that were used in the construction of Solomon’s Temple.  For two millennia the notion that a tiny worm might cut into solid rock was regarded by many as a laughable fantasy, but the discovery in 2019 of the bivalve shipworm lithoredo abatanica changed all that. This small, unprepossessing creature burrows into limestone and excretes it, creating an as-yet unsolved puzzle as to how it derives its nutrients.

The corpus of the Mishnah deals with law and (in the case of Avot) best principles of behaviour and conduct.  It is not a treatise on natural history. So what is this shamir doing in Avot? What can we learn from it today?

For the father-and-son team of Rabbis Baruch and Amos Shulem (Avot Uvanim) the creation of the shamir resonates an earlier mishnah (Avot 2:13). There Rabbi Shimon ben Netanel recommends that we take steps to foresee possible problems ahead. When God created humans he gave Adam and Eve free will. Had they opted to obey His instruction not to eat the fruit of the tree of knowledge, the human race would have lived happily ever in a sin-free world. The Temple, with its mechanism for atonement, would not have been needed and creation of the shamir would not have been called for. From this we learn that even God, in creating the world and everything in it, took the precaution of engaging in an act of creation that was purely conditional. We too should guard against events and misfortunes that may not ultimately occur.

The Ben Ish Chai (Birkat Avot) offers another answer. The ‘stone’ the shamir burrows into is the yetzer hara, the inclination to take an evil course of action.  But no matter how hard the stone is, the shamir represents the potential of even flesh-and-blood creatures such as ourselves to break it into pieces. This is learned by a kal vechomer: if even a small, weak worm can achieve this effect, how much more should we, bigger and possessed of greater strength and will-power, be able to do the same.

Though he does not mention it here, the Ben Ish Chai has support in the Gemara for use of the word ‘stone’ to refer to the yetzer hara: at Sukkah 52a, citing a verse from Ezekiel, ‘stone’ is deemed to be one of seven metaphors by which the yetzer hara is identified in Tanach. The vulnerability of stone to a slow but unremitting attack from a substance less strong than itself is also acknowledged by Rabbi Akiva’s resolution that, if the constant drip of water can wear away a rock, so too, through persistent study, might the words of Torah eventually penetrate even his then-unlearned mind (Avot deRabbi Natan 6:2, citing Job 14:19).

But there is more to the success of the shamir, and by implication to our own success, than this story suggests. Our achievements are not just credited to ourselves. There is a further ingredient—a vital ingredient without which there can be no success. As R’ Mordechai Dov Halberstam (Knesset Yisrael) comments, our efforts depend on the will of God too. We recognise this on Chanukah, when we give thanks for the victory of the Hasmoneans over the Greeks, the triumph of the weak over the strong.

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It's only worms

The menagerie that is Pirkei Avot features no fewer than three different species of worm -- the rimah, the tole'ah and the shamir. One does not appear in Tanach at all. That is the shamir, which gets a name-check at Avot 5:8. This worm, whose natural habitat is the Talmud and midrash, is traditionally taken to have been employed in the construction of the First Temple, where the use of metal cutting tools was prohibited because of their affinity with weapons of war. Until recently the existence of this little rock-splitting worm was regarded as being far-fetched, the shamir being the stuff of myth and legend. However, discovery in the Philippines of the shipworm lithoredo abatanica has changed all that. Here is a tiny creature that actually burrows into stone and digests it, excreting it in the form of sand. Strictly speaking, while lithoredo (right) may look like a worm, it is actually a bivalve of the genus teredinidae. These species bore into wood and stone but not, it seems, into us.

Of more immediate concern to humans are the rimah (Avot 2:8, 3:1, 4:4) and the tole'ah (Avot 3:1). These are more conventional worms that dine upon corpses. The precise difference between them is unclear. It may be that the rimah burrows into the body from outside, while the tole'ah burrows out of the body from within (see Rabbi Yitzchak Zoller, cited in the compendium Mishnat Avot). The general function of the references to worms is essentially to remind us to be humble: however important we are (or, more usually, think we are) in our lifetimes, we all end up on the à la carte menu of miserable little creatures that are synonymous with lowliness and with being of little worth. 

It has been argued that worms play an additional role in Avot, this being to threaten that they will make a meal of the wicked, causing great pain in the process. There is a considerable body of rabbinic discussion on whether the dead feel anything after they have died, on the sharpness of worms’ teeth and on their ability to inflict pain (see e.g. Berachot 18b, Shabbat 13b and the discussion in Baruch She’amar al HaSiddur at Avot 2:7). Suffice it to say that, while these discussions are fascinating, they are something of a distraction. This is because there are no worms that possess teeth--a fact that would quite likely have been known to the sages of the Mishnah, who were no mean anatomists.

The reason why I felt it appropriate to mention this point now is that there have recently been a number of articles and news items concerning worms' teeth (see e.g. "Worm’s teeth conceal odd mineral material", here; "Bloodworms Make Their Teeth From Metal And Now We Know How", here; "Scientists discover how bloodworms make unique copper teeth", here). These headlines are misleading and do not disprove the rule that worms have no teeth. The bloodworm glycera (left), which is carnivorous, feeds by extending a large proboscis that bears four hollow jaws--and it is these jaws, mistakenly called "teeth", which contain copper. 

While the bite of the bloodworm is painful even to a human, because it injects venom when it clamps its jaws upon its victim, we humans can take comfort from the fact that they, in turn, are eaten by other worms.

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.”