Avot in retrospect: a summary of last month's blogposts

Were you away last month? Just got home and missed the latest posts on Pirkei Avot, the Ethics of the Fathers? Here's a list of what you missed.

Wednesday 30 August 2023: Temper, Temper!: When we judge others who lose their temper, are we influenced by our own susceptibility to getting angry?

Monday 28 August 2023: Handle with care! Learning from tales of the Sages: In theory, we are deemed wise if we learn from everyone -- but are there limits on what we can learn from exceptional individuals?

Friday 25 August 2023: Eat your dinner, for Heaven's sake! Can self-indulgence be justified if one also has a more lofty mindset?

Wednesday 23 August 2023: Truth Lite, or the real thing? While Pirkei Avot endorses the value of truth, this is a commodity that comes in different strengths. How do we handle this?

Monday 21 August 2023: Three big no-nos -- not so bad after all: Rabbi Elazar HaKapar cautions against jealousy, lust and the desire for honour, but there is a place for them in the lives of every one of us.

Friday 18 August 2023: Recycling sins: a thought for Elul. In the month leading up to the Jewish new year and the Day of Atonement, we should ask how effectively we dispose of our bad deeds and bad habits and check that they do not resurface under another guise. 

Wednesday 16 August 2023: Misleading words: what we ask for. Again on the subject of truth, we take a look at the vocabulary of deceit.

Monday 14 August 2023: Rabbi Eliezer's good eye. Rabbi Eliezer's advice as to the good path that we should follow needs a bit of explanation. What does he mean by "a good eye"?

Friday 11 August 2023: Manna from Heaven and the power of ko'ach: We look at a puzzling baraita in the sixth perek of Avot and offer an explanation.

Wednesday 9 August 2023: When love is not enough, try fear instead: One of the talmidim of Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai is praised for the quality of his fear of sin. What's so special about this? Is it not something that everyone should have?

Sunday 6 August 2023: Was Shakespeare Jewish? And is there proof in Pirkei Avot? A provocative article on the Aish website raises the issue of the Bard's religious affiliation. We examine some of the evidence.

Wednesday 2 August 2023: Don't say "Mummy's in the toilet!" Is it safe to tell a little white lie? Sometimes it seems you're damned if you do and damned if you don't.

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Avot Today blogposts for July 2023
Avot Today blogposts for June 2023
Avot Today blogposts for May 2023
Avot Today blogposts for April 2023
Avot Today blogposts for March 2023
Avot Today blogposts for February 2023

Absolute consciousness: are we aware of it?

 The final part of Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi’s teaching at Avot 2:1 reads like this:

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

In English: “Focus on three things, and you will not come into the grip of sin. Know what is above you: a seeing eye, a listening ear, and that all your actions are inscribed in a book”.

Avot Today has often discussed different aspects of this guidance, which is open to many interpretations. The Dee Pirkei Avot Project recently used it as a springboard for the following question:

“How do you think our lives might change if we lived with absolute consciousness that our every thought, word, and action impacts the entirety of creation in a profound way?”

In other words, if the mishnah is inviting us to be continually aware of God’s supervision of our lives, because everything we do and say has an impact that God judges, what would happen if we were to do so?

I wonder whether such a thing as “absolute consciousness” even exists. God has created humankind with the ability to do more than one thing at a time. We call it multitasking, a grand label that can apply to something as trivial as chewing gum and listening to the radio while driving a car. We can perform serial tasks of this nature easily and usually succeed when we do so—but can we say that we are simultaneously absolutely conscious of all three, even if we exclude awareness of the profound impact that each of our thoughts, words and actions from the equation? And how often does the car reach its destination without us being able to recall quite how it got there?

For the sincere and practising Jew, the principle of שִׁוִּ֬יתִי יְהֹוָ֣ה לְנֶגְדִּ֣י תָמִ֑יד (“I have place God before me constantly”: Tehillim 16:8) is a sort of gold standard to which we ideally all aspire. In practice, it is impossible to maintain an absolute awareness of God’s presence at all times—and if one tries to add up the number of times a day in which one thinks of God at all on a busy day, the total can be embarrassingly small. I can scarcely imagine what it would be like to try to add to that awareness a further level of consciousness as to the impact of everything I say and do. And is the level of absolute consciousness as described in the quote above in any sense compatible with the daily task of living one's life?

Awareness of our impact on every facet of the world God created is however a useful tool both for our assessment of how we have performed over the past year and how we should strategise our plans for making the best of the year to come. Our awareness, like our knowledge, is at best imperfect and framed within the context of our own personal limitations. Even so, we must make the best what we have.

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Temper, Temper!

Here’s an interesting observation from R’ Yaakov Moshe Charlap (Mei Marom 2:52, cited by R’ Chaim Druckman, Avot leBanim) on the subject of how we judge other people. Avot Today has often cited the teaching of Yehoshua ben Perachyah at Avot 1:6, that we should judge people on a scale of favour, giving them the benefit of the doubt if it is possible to do so. R’ Charlap points out that our judgement of others can be as much a reflection of ourselves as of the person we are judging. Thus a person who is very rarely angry and only reaches that condition when sorely provoked, on seeing someone else displaying anger, is apt to conclude that this angry person must have been sorely provoked too and would not have lost his temper under normal circumstances. Presumably this works the other way too: someone who is quick-tempered, viewing someone else losing their temper, will empathise with them because his experience and perception is the same.

What does this mean in wider terms? Do we want to urge a man who is a wife-beater to judge someone else who abuses his spouse the same way because he appreciates how gratifying it may be? Surely not. Perhaps the point here is that, when looking at the conduct of another person and then excusing it or empathising with it, the onlooker should—without casting aspersions on the other person—use what he sees as a sort of behavioural barometer to measure the acceptability of this conduct. That way, before the onset of Rosh Hashanah and the great annual judgement to which we subject ourselves, we will have done a better and more honest job of assessing our own performance over the past year. That way too, we stand a better chance of putting our performance right for the year to come.

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Handle with care! Learning from tales of the Sages

The other day I found myself reading and re-reading the following passage:

How do we relate to opportunity? Let us learn from the Vilna Gaon, who appreciated the endless potential that comes with every moment of one’s stay on earth… The Gaon had a sister whom he had not seen for nearly 50 years. Travel was not easy in those days, but on one occasion she was able to make the trip to Vilna to visit her illustrious brother. He greeted her and, after a few minutes of conversation, excused himself to return to his Torah study. The Gaon’s sister was disappointed. “I don’t understand”, she told him. “It’s been so long since we’ve seen each other and I’ve travelled so far to come here. Can’t you give me another fifteen minutes of your time?”

He pointed out to her that his hair had already turned grey—a sign, he said, from the Heavenly Court that he was running out of time in this world. How could he spend the little time he had left on conversation unrelated to Torah? [R’ Yaakov Hillel, Eternal Ethics from Sinai, discussing Avot 1:14, “If not now, when?”, with citations].

On the principle of Ben Zoma at Avot 4:1 (that a person is wise who learns from everyone) we are obliged to learn something from this episode, and the Vilna Gaon is justly renowned at a phenomenal Torah scholar so we are bound to seek to learn not just from his writings but from his words and deeds. But what do we learn from the tale related here? Various possibilities present themselves and the are not all mutually exclusive. For example:

·         If one wishes to learn Torah properly, one should not allow oneself to be distracted from domestic and family considerations;

·         This episode illustrates the extent to which the Vilna Gaon’s greatness exceeds our own. Only a person of his stature should behave in this manner but those of us who are not so great should not trouble themselves to do so;

·         The learning of Torah is so great a mitzvah that it trumps the commandment of hachnasat orchim (entertaining visitors), even though hachnasat orchim is so great a mitzvah that one can turn one’s back on God, as it were, to look after them;  

·         The learning of Torah is so great a mitzvah that a person should not feel entitled to assert a claim on the time of someone who is learning Torah, even though they may be closely related;

·         One should ascertain that a person who is learning has not yet began to go grey before seeking to disturb him while he learns. 

With Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur looming fast towards us, time to set our thoughts in order is limited and diminishing fast. Regret and repentance have to compete for our attention with dinner plans, trips to the dry cleaners, shaking the dust off machzorim untouched for a year and remembering to send one’s regards to distant family and friends. Perhaps the best lesson we can take from the Gaon is this: whatever your objective, you should devote both your time and your full attention to it until it is fulfilled. Torah, being effectively infinite, can never be fully mastered, however much time is set aside for it—but if we can sweep aside distractions for the short time that remains between the moment you read these words till the New Year begins, we can at least hope to achieve something.

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Eat your dinner, for Heaven's sake!

One of the least discussed teachings in Avot today is that of Rabbi Yose HaKohen (Avot 2:17): “Let all your actions be for the sake of Heaven”.  The reason why it attracts little attention is easy to see. It is so general that it strikes us as being obvious and we take it for granted. If we believe in God and try to keep to all the do’s and don’t’s of Jewish religious observance, is not everything we do done for the sake of Heaven?

There is another way we can look at this teaching which makes it far more meaningful for us today: we can take it to mean that we should do things for the sake of Heaven even when we are doing them for other motives as well. In other words, we should add a touch of “for Heaven’s sake” to things that are not usually or necessarily thought to be so.

This idea sprung into my mind after I spotted this in R’ Chaim Friedlander’s Siftei Chaim: Middot veAvodat Hashem (1, at p 64). R’ Friedlander comments that it’s just as well that God in His kindness has implanted urges and desires in us because we can’t manage with Heavenly aspirations alone. As he graphically puts it, if we hadn’t been imbued with a real passion to eat and God had simply left us to act “for the sake of Heaven”, we would all be dead by now.

So next time you sink your teeth greedily into that burger or whatever else is your object of gastronomical desire, do make an effort to feel that you are doing it for God’s sake too. And when you get to Yom Kippur and the mega-fast that so many people fear and dread, bear in mind that you are doing that for Heaven’s sake alone.

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Truth lite, or the real thing?

The Dee Pirkei Avot Project (details here) has recently completed the first perek of Avot. For the uninitiated, the Project sends out each week a single side of A4 on which, in agreeably large print, you will find the text of a mishnah from Avot, a brief discussion or explanation of it and three questions that are more or less closely related to that mishnah. 

Sometimes the questions can be uncomfortable to answer publicly since they can force a person to make an appraisal of a facet of his or her personality that might preferably be concealed.

In Avot 1:18 Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel says: “The world stands on three things: on justice, on truth and on peace”, citing a verse from Zechariah in support of this proposition. Most people treat this teaching within the context of the administration of justice. After all, much of the first perek of Avot is devoted to that topic and the three things featured in this mishnah—justice, truth and peace—relate to either the functioning of the court system or the objective it seeks to achieve. One of the Dee Project questions goes beyond this, asking:

“When in your life do you sometimes choose to focus on some details because it’s easier than accepting the whole truth, the אֶמֶת?”

This question may not be demanded as a way of understanding Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel’s teaching since it personalises concepts which he lists in the abstract and focuses on how we react to them in the real world. However, it is demanded of us all as we approach the Days of Awe and ask ourselves whether we acknowledge two versions of truth: the genuine and absolute truth and ‘truth lite’, a convenience product that is easy to apply, wipes our conduct clean and leaves no nasty marks behind.

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Three big no-nos: not so bad after all

Here we are in the month of Elul, when all Jews who take their religion seriously prepare for the impending Days of Awe, for repentance, divine judgement and a chance to start the new year with a clean slate. Many of us undergo a sort of spiritual spring-clean, shaking the dust off our complacency, throwing out old bad habits and ideally exchanging them for brand new, good ones. This exercise comes with a caution: don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The Netivot Shalom, writing on last week’s Torah reading from Parashat Shofetim, reminds us that everything we have comes from God, and that includes our bad habits too. Since it is axiomatic that, God being good, everything that emanates from Him is good too, we must remember to check out the inherent virtue in even our character traits that are ostensibly bad.

By way of example he cites the Mishnah at Avot 4:48 at which Rabbi Elazar HaKappar says: “Jealousy, lust and glory remove a person from the world”. Yes, they do—but only if they are abused. Jealousy between scholars leads to more scholarship, and not only among Torah scholars. Lust is a precondition for the continued repopulation of the world. The Netivot Shalom gives no example of the benefits of glory, but the Hebrew word in the Mishnah, kavod, equally well translates as “honour” or “respect”, both of which are fine if you give them to others and only damaging when you seek to receive them.

So, when checking out even your worst tendencies and habits, don’t eliminate them from your behavioural make-up without first seeing which bits of them can be put to good use.

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Recycling: a thought for Elul

When I was a child, we knew nothing of recycling. Almost everything we finished with and had no further use for would go straight into the bin. Plastics, cardboard, metal cans—we disposed of them without a thought. How different is life today. We have special containers for all these unwanted items, which the local council collects and sends for recycling. I think it’s a great idea, even though a little voice inside me reminds me that recycling also has its environmental cost and I do sometimes get a little frustrated when I can’t easily tell whether a particular carton is made of paper or plastic. I do love the notion that the things I recycle might be coming straight back to me in other forms, without me even realising it.

Today marks the start of the month of Elul, when we begin ramp up our thoughts about the forthcoming Days of Awe, Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and turn our thoughts to teshuvah, repentance. Pirkei Avot has plenty to say about teshuvah: we should repent our wrongs daily rather than save them up for the Day of Atonement because we might be dead by then (Avot 2:15), by which time it’s too late (Avot 4:22); it also serves as a shield against Divine retribution (Avot 4:15).

It struck me this morning that, just as we jettison our unwanted trash, we also jettison our unbecoming behaviour, casting off our bad behaviour and throwing away the tendency to justify what we know to be wrong because we won’t admit it.

Sometimes we do actually manage to throw away our patterns of misconduct. But, it seems to me, we more often seem to recycle them. We think we have seen the last of them and we feel good when we pop them into the bin. But they come back to us again, we bring them back into our lives—and we don’t even recognise them.

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Misleading words: what we ask for

This short post follows several earlier discussions (see list below) that touched on our problem with truth. In short, the Torah (Shemot 23:7) and Avot (1:18, 5:9, 6:6) tell us that we are supposed to commit ourselves to tell the truth and to acknowledge it when we see or hear it. But there are times when we may not, or must not, do so—for example to make peace, preserve modesty or save life. Every word of untruth is deemed sheker, a falsehood, which damages our spiritual environment and corrodes our souls, even if we are obliged to speak it and are rewarded for doing so.

In this context it struck me that, every time we finish our Amidah prayer, we say the following line:

אֱלֹהַ֞י נְצֹ֣ר ׀ לְשׁוֹנִ֣י מֵרָ֗ע וּשְׂפָתַי֩ מִדַּבֵּ֨ר מִרְמָ֜ה

[Translation] “My God, guard my tongue from ra (‘evil’) and my lips from speaking mirmah (‘deception’)”.

We ask God to make sure that we say nothing bad and nothing deceptive—but we don’t ask him to protect us from saying anything untrue. This seems to me to be a strong support for the argument that, however important absolute truth may be, both in our daily lives and in terms of our spiritual welfare, real-world pragmatism demands that, while we must always respect it, we must regretfully sacrifice it for the sake of a greater good.

There is biblical support for this proposition at Bereshit 27:18-19. When Yitzchak wants to be sure that the son standing before him is Yaakov or Eisav, he asks מִי אַתָּה בְּנִי (mi atah beni?, “Who are you, my son?”). Yaakov has a problem. He could say “Eisav”, which is a downright lie, or he could say “Yaakov”, which is totally true but would result in him losing the blessing his mother so desperately wants him to receive. So he answers אָנֹכִי עֵשָׂו בְּכֹרֶךָ (anochi Eisav bechorecha). This answer is equivocal. The Torah text contains no punctuation and can be read and therefore translated in two ways. If the answer is taken as a single phrase it means “I am Eisav your firstborn”. This would be sheker. Alternatively, splitting the anochi from Eisav bechorecha, it means “It’s me! Eisav is your firstborn” which is true but misleading, mirmah, and not a total lie. The ambiguity of Yaakov’s words thus serves two functions: it enables Yaakov both to mislead his father in order to achieve a greater good and to remind himself that what he said is not the best way of expressing truth, so that he should not get into the habit of telling lies.

So we still have a problem. If we accept that sheker is so dangerous and that mirmah is less so, why do we ask in our Amidah to be protected from mirmah and not sheker?

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Recent Avot Today posts on truth and lies

‘When love is not enough, try fear instead’ (on saying that Sarah was Abraham’s sister, not his wife) here

‘Don’t say “Mummy’s in the toilet”’ (on sparing people embarrassment) here

‘When two giants meet: a modern midrash?’ (is it permissible to fabricate a tale involving real people in order to teach an important point?) here

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Older posts (on the Avot Today weblog)

‘The truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth’ (about repenting for half-truths on Yom Kippur) here

‘Learning from the lives of Torah sages’ (on potentially apocryphal tales of the great and good) here

‘Truth, justice and peace: which is the “odd man out”?’ (on sacrificing truth for peace and justice) here

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Rabbi Eliezer's good eye

At Avot 2:13, Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai sets his five leading talmidim a test:

צְאוּ וּרְאוּ אֵיזוֹ הִיא דֶּֽרֶךְ טוֹבָה שֶׁיִּדְבַּק בָּהּ הָאָדָם. רַבִּי אֱלִיעֶֽזֶר אוֹמֵר: עַֽיִן טוֹבָה

[Translation] “Go out and take a look: what is the good path that a person should stick to?” Rabbi Eliezer says: “A good eye”.

After the other four give their answers, Rabban Yochanan, at Avot 2:14, sets a further test:

צְאוּ וּרְאוּ אֵיזוֹ הִיא דֶּֽרֶךְ רָעָה שֶׁיִּתְרַחֵק מִמֶּֽנָּה הָאָדָם. רַבִּי אֱלִיעֶֽזֶר אוֹמֵר: עַֽיִן רָעָה

[Translation] “Go out and take a look: what is the bad path that a person should distance himself from?” Rabbi Eliezer says: “An evil eye”.

Again, the other four talmidim offer their answers. As it turns out, while none of the answers is “wrong”, Rabbi Eliezer’s two answers are not those preferred by his teacher. But that is not what this post is going to discuss. Instead, we will consider what is meant by “good eye” and “evil eye” in this context.

Most English versions of Avot are content to translate “good eye” and “evil eye” literally. Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks is a notable exception here, qualifying the terms as “good eye [generosity of spirit]” and “evil eye [envy” respectively.

But there is literally more to this than meets the eye. The words עַֽיִן רָעָה (“evil eye”) resurface in the fifth perek, at Avot 5:16, in an anonymous mishnah that opens like this:

אַרְבַּע מִדּוֹת בְּנוֹתְנֵי צְדָקָה: הָרוֹצֶה שֶׁיִּתֵּן וְלֹא יִתְּנוּ אֲחֵרִים, עֵינוֹ רָעָה בְּשֶׁל אֲחֵרִים. יִתְּנוּ אֲחֵרִים וְהוּא לֹא יִתֵּן, עֵינוֹ רָעָה בְּשֶׁלּוֹ. יִתֵּן וְיִתְּנוּ אֲחֵרִים, חָסִיד. לֹא יִתֵּן וְלֹא יִתְּנוּ אֲחֵרִים, רָשָׁע.

[Translation] One who wants to give but does not want others to give—is begrudging of others. One who wants that others should give but does not want to give—begrudges himself.

This translation, which is more or less identical as between ArtScroll and Chabad.org, is more meaningful than literal translations along the lines of “his eye is evil towards others” and “his eye is evil as regards himself”. Again Rabbi Lord Sacks distinguishes himself by qualifying the word “begrudge” and fleshing it out as “begrudges this merit to others” and “begrudges this merit to himself”, the merit in question being that which a person earns through making charitable donations.

Let’s return to Rabbi Eliezer’s reference to good and evil eyes. He is using the same term, “evil eye”, as is found in the anonymous mishnah about the giving of charity. But does this meaning of “evil eye” in that later mishnah fit the context? Is the counsel that a person should not begrudge the merit that another person might enjoy through performing a good deed a piece of general advice that can steer a person through the vicissitudes of daily existence?  

The Maggid of Kozhnitz makes a connection between these two mishnayot. Apart from his major work, Ahavat Yisrael, he also wrote a short commentary on Avot, Avot Yisrael, which came to light in Lemburg (Levov/Lviv) in 1866, more than half a century after his death. There, at Avot 2:13, he pins Rabbi Eliezer’s use of the term “good eye” to a verse in Proverbs that reads: “One with a good eye will be blessed, for he has given of his bread to the poor” (Mishlei 22:9). Taken literally, this citation does not immediately appear to endorse the meaning of “good eye” in Avot 5:16 but the Maggid appears to widen its application, the giving of bread to the poor being a reflection on a person’s magnanimous frame of mind. Why is the person with the “good eye” blessed? Because, being happy with his lot and rejoicing in it, he displays happiness. This happiness is a sign that he is less concerned with gashmiut, wealth and property, than he is with his role as an instrument in the execution of God’s will when giving to others.  This is the path of contentment with what one has—and this, in Rabbi Eliezer’s view, is the right attitude a person should cultivate as he or she faces each day.

Demonstrating a consistent approach, the Maggid applies the notion that “good eye” is synonymous with magnanimity at Avot 2:15—a mishnah that does not even mention the term—where the same Rabbi Eliezer teaches that one’s friend’s kavod (“honour”) should be as dear to him as his own. If one is truly magnanimous, one will not begrudge the honour and prestige to which others are entitled, a view that extends magnanimity from the field of gashmiut to that of social relations.

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Manna from Heaven and the power of ko'ach

There’s a long and puzzling Baraita at Avot 6:8 which opens like this:

רַבִּי שִׁמְעוֹן בֶּן יְהוּדָה מִשּׁוּם רַבִּי שִׁמְעוֹן בֶּן יוֹחָאִי אוֹמֵר: הַנּוֹי, וְהַכֹּֽחַ, וְהָעֹֽשֶׁר, וְהַכָּבוֹד, וְהַחָכְמָה, וְהַזִּקְנָה, וְהַשֵּׂיבָה, וְהַבָּנִים, נָאֶה לַצַּדִּיקִים וְנָאֶה לָעוֹלָם,

[Translation] Rabbi Shimon ben Yehudah used to say in the name of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai: “Beauty, strength, wealth, honor, wisdom, sageness, old age and children—these befit the righteous and befit the world”.

Of the many questions this statement raises, one is this: what specifically does strength have to do with the righteous? Since the sixth chapter of Avot deals with Torah and how to acquire it, we can reasonably suppose that the reference to the righteous in our baraita is an allusion to those who are righteous on account of their commitment to Torah. Does Torah make them strong? No, it seems. We learn that the study of Torah matashet kocho shel adam (“weakens a man’s strength”: Rabbi Chanan, at Sanhedrin 26b).

A possible explanation is that Rabbi Chanan’s statement that Torah learning weakens a person’s strength relates solely to physical strength, but that the baraita does not. The Hebrew word ַכחַ (ko’ach, literally “strength”) also connotes “power” in the sense of “having an ability” to do something. But is there any support for this answer?

One of the things that children learn in the earliest stages of their Jewish education is that, when the Children of Israel spent 40 years in the desert, they ate manna every day. This manna, which fell miraculously from Heaven, had the wonderful quality of tasting like what each person wanted it to taste like, so they never got bored with it. Few Jewish adults look beyond this cute little story to see how it is utilised by the Sages. If they did, they would find that there’s more to midrash than delicious food falling out of the sky. Here’s Yalkut Shimoni, Yitro 286, discussing the revelation of God at Mount Sinai when he gave the Jewish people the Torah (with emphases added):

Rabbi Levi said: The Holy One blessed be He appeared to them like a portrait that is visible from all angles. A thousand people may gaze at it and it gazes back at all of them. It’s the same with the Holy One, blessed be He. When He spoke, every single Israelite said: “The Word spoke to me! It’s not written ‘I am the Lord your God but I am the Lord thy God” [note: Hebrew uses different words to indicate plural or singular forms of the second person. So too does old English, where “your” means “belonging to more than one” while “thy” means “belonging to only one other”].

Rabbi Yose said: The Word spoke to each and everyone according to their personal capacity. Don’t be surprised at the manna that came down to the Israelites, each person tasting the flavour he was able to appreciate—infants in accordance with their capacities, young men in accordance with theirs and the old in accordance with theirs. If that was the case for the manna, where everyone tasted the flavour he could appreciate, how much more so does this apply to the Word [of God].

David said: קוֹל-יְהוָה בַּכֹּחַ “The voice of the Lord is in strength”: Tehillim 29:4). It doesn’t say “in his strength but just “in strength”, meaning in accordance with the capabilities of each person.

Now the Baraita at Avot 6:8 can be seen in a fresh light. The righteous, in pursuing their path in accordance with the precepts of the Torah, need כֹֽחַ in the sense of the ability to discern the many different dimensions of the Torah’s content and to identify the approach that is most appropriate or efficacious in any given situation.

A final thought. When we wish one another yashir ko’ach (or yashir kochachah), is this simply a Hebrew version of “here’s power to your elbow!”—or does it convey a subtle midrashic connotation too?

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When love is not enough, try fear instead

When Abraham and Sarah travelled to Gerar, he told the local king Abimelech that Sarah was his sister. Why did Abraham do so? Because he revealed that, if it was revealed that they were husband and wife, Abimelech would kill him in order to marry Sarah himself. When Abimelech discovered the truth, he indignantly asked Abraham why he had said such a thing. Abraham replied (Bereshit 20:11): כִּי אָמַרְתִּי רַק אֵין-יִרְאַת אֱלֹהִים, בַּמָּקוֹם הַזֶּה (“Because … there is no fear of God in this place”).

In his Hanhagot Adam Rabbi Tzvi Elimelech of Dinov, author of the Bnei Issaschar, asks why Abraham answers that there is no fear of God in that place.  Why did he not answer: “Because there is no love of God in this place?”

The question is a good one. Of all the Jewish patriarchs, Abraham is the one most closely associated not with fear but with chesed (“kindness”), a quality associated with love. Indeed, Abraham’s fear of God is an as-yet unknown quality. It is only after the test of the akeidat Yitzchak (the Binding of Isaac) that a divine utterance establishes this trait: כִּי עַתָּה יָדַעְתִּי, כִּי-יְרֵא אֱלֹהִים אַתָּה (“Now I know that you are a God-fearing man”, Bereshit 22:12). Would not Abraham be just as entitled to tell a lie to save his life on the basis that Abimelech was the king of a people who did not love God?

The truth of the matter is that fear of God, and of the deterrent effect of His punishment, is a more powerful inhibitor of bad behaviour than is love. The Torah itself recognises that we can convince ourselves that doing even objectively harmful and forbidden things to other people is right because we love them and can persuade ourselves that we are only doing what God wants us to do.  Thus in Vayikra 20:17 the word chesed (literally “kindness” but here meaning the exact opposite) is used where a man is unequivocally forbidden to commit incest with his sister. Abimelech’s domain might well have been a place where there was love of God but no sense of deterrence to accompany it. Only fear of God’s judgement will suffice.

Both fear and love receive their due in Pirkei Avot and this is hardly surprising. Both are basic human responses to relationships at many different levels. There is however one almost incidental reference to fear that I’d like to highlight here. At Avot 2:11, Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai praises one of his talmidim, Rabbi Shimon ben Netanel as being yarei chet (“fearful of sin”). This is a rather strange sort of praise. Surely we expect every rabbi worth his salt to be afraid of sin; it’s effectively an entry-level virtue for anyone who aspires to be a seriously practising Jew.

But maybe there is more to this praise. Of course we are supposed to be afraid of sinning against God, against offending Him and then being punished. But how many of us can honestly say that we are so fine-tuned to our immediate circumstances and our environment that we are afraid of other people sinning too? When he stayed in Gerar, Abraham manifested his fear of not sinning himself but of other people’s sinning—and it may be that, when Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai commended his pupil for his fear of sin, it was this extra level of sensitivity that he had in mind.

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Was Shakespeare Jewish? And is there proof in Pirkei Avot?

“Was Shakespeare a Believing Jew?” That is the title of a fascinating and provocative piece by Yehezkel Laing on the Aish website. You can read it in full here. The author, a journalist, actor and filmmaker living in Jerusalem, has gone to considerable effort to research not only the Bard’s plays but also his background—what little is known of it—in order to state his case.

Laing writes:

Shakespeare's plays draw upon over 2,000 references to the Bible. While Shakespeare could be expected to know the Bible, the world's most popular book, it is evident from his writing that he was familiar with its Hebrew version and with the Hebrew language in general. He also had knowledge of the Mishnah and the Talmud, including Pirkei Avot, Ethics of the Fathers, a Mishnaic compilation of ethical teachings and maxims [my emphases].

The Pirkei Avot evidence reads like this:

Mishnaic quotes appear in some easily identified lines, such as "What's mine is yours and what is yours is mine," in Measure for Measure (5:1) and "Sin will pluck on sin," in Richard III (4:2). While both lines are drawn from Ethics of the Fathers, their simplicity suggests that it might just have been a coincidence. But the line "Sin leads to sin" continues in in the Mishna with "the reward for a mitzvah is a mitzvah" (4:2). This too appears in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus in the praise of Marcius, a man who "rewards his deeds with doing them,"(2:2). It then becomes evident that Shakespeare has fully rendered this Mishna.

The following words of Marcius: “You cry against the noble senate, who, under the gods, keep you in awe, which else would feed on one another?” (Coriolanus, Act 1, Sc. 1) bear a close resemblance to Rabbi Chanina's words in Ethics of the Fathers “Pray for the welfare of the government – for if people did not fear it, a person would swallow his fellow alive” (3:2).

Both Rabbi Hillel and Hamlet comment in a similar manner when they see a human skull. Hamlet muses that perhaps it was the skull of a politician who thought he could "circumvent God" but is now being overruled by a lowly gravedigger. This is the same moral of "measure for measure" drawn by Rabbi Hillel when he sees a skull floating in a river. “Because you caused the heads of others to float, others caused your head to float.” (Ethics, 2:6)

Citing material from the other sources he mentions above, Yehezkel Laing references earlier literature on the Shakespeare-is-a-Jew hypothesis, including Was Shakespeare Jewish by Ghislain Muller, John Hudson’s Shakespeare’s Dark Lady and several books by David Basch. He concludes:

Was Shakespeare a Jew? The jury is still out. But if his writing is any indication, it came from deep within a Jewish soul, yearning to be free.

I know little of Shakespeare’s origins and religious inclinations—if any—but I believe that even the inclusion of Jewish ethical material in his plays and sonnets is hardly convincing evidence of his knowledge of Judaism, let alone membership of the Jewish people. As the Bartenura indicates in his commentary to Avot 1:1, many of the moral principles adduced in Avot are not exclusively Jewish. We share them with the other nations of the world. The difference between our moral code and theirs, at least as reflected in Pirkei Avot, is that other cultures have derived their moral axioms from the exercise of their reason, while ours have been gifted to us by God on Mount Sinai.

I would only add two further points. The first is that, if there was even a small suspicion on the part of anyone that William Shakespeare was Jewish, it is improbable that he would have been baptised, married and buried in local churches. And, from the perspective of halachah, there is no evidence to suggest that his mother, Mary Arden, was Jewish. If he was born a non-Jew, his subsequent conversion was unlikely in a country where Jews were banned from residing.

Secondly, there is quite an entertaining sequence of “Was Shakespeare a…?” investigations. Even apart from the thesis that Shakespeare was Jewish, a ten-minute trawl of the internet revealed theories that the Bard of Stratford-upon-Avon was (in no particular order) an antisemite, gay, bisexual, not the author of his plays or a team of authors, a woman, a Muslim (‘Sheikh Pir’), a Buddhist, a closet Jesuit, a government spy, Scottish, on the ADHD and Asperger’s spectrum, a psychopath, an international socialist, a conservative, and an alien from outer space.  My feeling is that, if one looks hard enough through his prolific writings, one can find spurious evidence that Shakespeare was anything you want him/her to be.

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Don't say "mummy's in the toilet"!

Back in the day, mobile telephony had yet to be invented. Each home that could afford it had its own phone. When the phone rang, you answered it. If it wasn't for you, you asked who the caller wanted to speak to.

As a small child, when I was taught how answer the phone, my father cautioned me: “You must never say ‘mummy’s in the toilet’; just say she’s busy”. I agreed to do as I was told but I didn’t see why I should. Everyone goes to the toilet after all, I thought, even the Queen (my grandma said so!), and when I was very young I was even praised for doing so myself. Anyway at this time I was too young to appreciate that I was being told not give an accurate and unvarnished account of the situation.

Truth is a precious and highly-valued commodity in Jewish life. Midvar sheker tirchak,says the Torah, “distance yourself from falsehood” (Shemot 23:7). Pirkei Avot underlines the point. Truth is one of the three things on which life on Earth depends (1:18); conceding the truth is one of the seven practices associated with a person who is wise, not one who is uncultivated (5:9); it is also one of the 48 bases on which Torah learning is acquired (6:6). So truth is vital—but do we not depend on falsehood too?

I recalled my father’s instruction about answering the phone when I found R' Chaim Friedlander discussing a similar topic in Siftei Chaim: Middot veAvodat Hashem. There he relates the classic aggadic story of a rabbi who relocates to a town called Kushta (Aramaic for ‘truth’), where everyone tells the truth and no-one dies before their time (Sanhedrin 97a). One day a visitor calls to see his wife, who was washing her hair. Believing that it would be immodest to mention this to the caller, he says to the caller that his wife is not there. In consequence, his two sons die.

From this tale it appears that it is imperative to tell the truth at all costs. But is this right and proper? In the first place, the rabbi’s answer was immaterial so far as the caller was concerned: the wife was unavailable, and therefore not there to receive the caller, whether she was washing her hair, saying her morning prayers or sleeping off a hangover from the previous night. Moreover, we know that it is sometimes a mitzvah not to tell the truth, for example to save life or to make peace.

How can this be explained? In cosmic terms, every item of sheker that enters the world has an impact on it. In the case of any individual lie, the impact may be small. However, the impact of many lies will be cumulative. The fact that there are countervailing priorities such as the need to save life, make peace or—as in this instance—preserve modesty does not prevent sheker from having its effect. Essentially, truth and falsehood are absolutes: something either is true, or it isn’t.

Let’s go back to the Garden of Eden. Before Adam ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good or evil, his worldview was therefore based on the binary distinction between true and false. Once he had ingested and internalised good and evil, he was now faced with qualities that were not absolute but relative: there are shades of good and evil and one is sometimes forced to choose between courses of action that have both good and bad consequences.

The teachings of Pirkei Avot do not focus on theoretical issues of this nature. In our daily lives we accept the importance of truth—but with two qualifications. First we have to recognise that truth, justice and peace are equal partners in our lives (Avot 1:18). Secondly, even where we are obliged by halachah not to tell the truth, we should still concede that the truth remains the truth even if we may not actually articulate it through our own speech (Avot 5:9).

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Avot in retrospect: a summary of last month's blogposts

If you were away or busy during July, you may have missed all or any of the posts listed below. Do please take the opportunity to enjoy them at your leisure now.

Sunday 30 July 2023: So what does it really mean to love peace? When you read the same words often enough and always hear the same explanation, it's easy to overlook the possibility that they may convey another meaning -- even with a topic as plainly obvious as Hillel's advice at Avot 1:12 to love peace. 

Wednesday 26 July 2023: Beyond understanding. Another piece of advice from Hillel is not to say anything that can't be understood if the objective is for other people to understand it (Avot 2:5). Do the mournful threnodies which we recite on Tisha b'Av breach this guidance?

Monday 24 July 2023: When two giants meet: a modern midrash? Our sages emphasise the importance of learning with enthusiasm and not letting one's mindset go stale (Avot 1:4). To illustrate this, R' Chaim Druckman records an encounter between the celebrated musician and composer Leonard Bernstein and the iconic artist Pablo Picasso. But did they ever meet, and does it matter whether this anecdote is true or not?

Friday 21 July 2023: Don't touch, don't even talk? One of the most controversial mishnayot in modern times is that of Yose ben Yochanan ish Yerushalayim, that one should not talk too much with even one's own wife, not to mention other people's. This difficult mishnah is tackled head-on in a new book, Reclaiming Dignity. 

Wednesday 19 July 2023: When it's time to raid the fridge... A baraita at Avot 6:4 urges the serious Torah student to adopt an ascetic lifestyle. But how far, and how long, need self-denial go?

Monday 17 July 2023: When Peter Rabbi met Pirkei Avot. A chance finding of two quite contrasting books on the same pile of unwanted literature opens up questions regarding the moral standards of one of Beatrix Potter's best-loved children's characters.

Friday 14 July 2023: Seeking out the hidden talent. R' Yaakov Hillel, commenting on Avot 1:13, laments the fact that people tend to follow big-name rabbis with high media profiles, while great Torah scholars are never recognised because they sit quietly learning away in out-of-the-way places. But how are we to find them when they are hidden?

Wednesday 12 July 2023: When knowing stuff is not enough. Exploring the parameters of Avot 4:1 (Who is wise? The person who learns from everyone), we ask whether emotional intelligence has a place in Pirkei Avot.

Monday 10 July 2023: Worth looking into. Here are four Avot-related snippets that may interest you. Enjoy!

Friday 7 July 2023: Peace and Pinchas -- again. We revisit the question whether Pinchas is an appropriate role model for peace seekers in light of an item in the Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle.

Wednesday 5 July 2023: Picking the right fight. Hillel (Avot 1:12) urges us to model ourselves on Aaron when pursuing peace. Why Aaron, we ask, and not Moses or Pinchas? 

Tuesday 4 July 2023: A hang-out for sages or a cause for jealousy? Yose ben Yo'ezer ish Tzeredah says (Avot 1:4) that we should open out homes to sages so that people will flock to our houses to hear and learn from them. What might happen if everyone tried to do this?

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Avot Today blogposts for June 2023
Avot Today blogposts for May 2023
Avot Today blogposts for April 2023
Avot Today blogposts for March 2023
Avot Today blogposts for February 2023
Avot Today blogposts for January 2023