Pirke Aboth--what is it?
The first thing I need to tell you is how it's pronounced: Pir-KAY
Ah-VOHT. Pirke Aboth is an old-fashioned transliteration of the
title, used by Joseph H. Hertz in his translation--which I have normally used
for this course, largely because it's cheap and easily available. (Hertz entitled
his translation, The Sayings of the Fathers, which is a reasonable
if uncertain rendering of the Hebrew Pirke Aboth. Click
here to learn about a way you may be able to get hold of Pirke Aboth
without having to buy Hertz.)
Pirke Aboth is part of the Mishnah.
More exactly, it is one "tractate" of the Mishnah--think of the
tractates as being comparable to the "books" of the Bible--found
within the fourth of the Mishnah's six "orders." (If you'd like
to review what the "orders" are, click
here; for the "tractates," click
here.) Unique among the Mishnah's 63 tractates, Pirke Aboth is
entirely given over to Aggadah--that
is to say, non-legal (and in this case specifically ethical) teaching. Pirke
Aboth is a digest of the ethics of rabbinic Judaism and through the centuries
has been studied as such by generations of Jews. That is what makes it
so important.
The tractates of the Mishnah are divided into chapters, and
subdivided into sections which scholars call mishnayot, but which we
will just call "sections." Pirke Aboth has six chapters,
and we can cite passages in it the same way we cite passages in the Bible.
Just as we cite "Deuteronomy 4:32" (chapter 4, verse 32), and anybody
can look up that passage regardless of what edition of the Bible he or she
has, so we can cite "Pirke Aboth 1:14" (chapter 1, section
14).
(The sixth chapter of Pirke Aboth is a source distinct
from the first five, and was added on to the text at an uncertain date. But
this point is important only to specialists. The themes of chapters 1-5 are
extended through chapter 6, and for our purposes we may treat the text as
a unit.)
Pirke Aboth begins by providing a
charter for its own authority, and the authority of all rabbinic Judaism.
"Moses received the Torah on Sinai, and handed it down to Joshua; Joshua
to the elders; the elders to the prophets; and the prophets handed it down
to the Men of the Great Assembly" (1:1). The word "Torah" here
does not seem to refer to the Written Torah, the Pentateuch, but to the Pharisaic/rabbinic
"Oral Torah." (Click here
for a discussion of the concept of the "Oral Torah.")
Having made this claim for the pedigree of its teaching, Pirke
Avot goes on to trace the transmission of the Oral Torah from one generation
to the next. First we move from the obscure and probably legendary "Men
of the Great Assembly," to Hillel and his partner Shammai at the beginning
of the first century CE (1:2-15). Then we pass on from Hillel through the
line of his descendants, the rabbinic "patriarchs" of the first,
second, and third centuries (1:16-2:4). Afterward we go back to Hillel and
trace the transmission of his teaching via a different path: Rabbi Yochanan
ben Zakkai and his disciples (2:5-19).
Each of these authorities is represented by at least one ethical
saying, and often more than one. After 2:19, the "chain of transmission"
structure is abandoned, and the rest of Pirke Aboth consists of a string
of ethical sayings attributed to one or another of the second- and third-century
rabbis.
What we end up with is a book that
reads rather like the Biblical Book of Proverbs, on the one hand, and
Poor Richard's Almanac on the other. (One of my students once compared
it, very subtly and aptly, to the hypothetical gospel source "Q":
a collection of Jesus's sayings, with little or no narrative attached.) Its
subsequent history in Jewish culture is parallel to the history of Poor
Richard's Almanac in American culture. Most of us are familiar with "Early
to bed and early to rise / Makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise," even
if we don't know where it comes from. Similarly Israelis, or Jews growing
up in a Diaspora community saturated with Jewish culture, will be familiar
with Hillel's im eyn ani li mi li? ("if I am not for myself, who
will be for me?") or his im lo achshav eymatai? ("if not
now, when?" Pirke Aboth 1:14). The sayings of Pirke Aboth
have penetrated Judaism, just as Poor Richard's sayings have penetrated our
culture.
(Actually, I suspect that "If not now, when?" has
penetrated American culture as well. This morning [8/7/02] I read an editorial
in the Raleigh News & Observer discussing Congress's role in authorizing
any invasion of Iraq, and one of the subheadings in the editorial was "If
not now ... " Readers of the editorial were apparently expected to fill
in the rest of the sentence for themselves.)
So what you will be reading is a collection of rabbinic proverbs,
all of them implicitly responding to Yochanan ben Zakkai's challenge in Pirke
Aboth 2:13-14: "Go forth and see which is the good way to which a
man should cleave ... the evil way that a man should shun." They are
proverbs--but, unlike most of the proverbs we are familiar with, they are
usually not simple and straightforward. On the contrary: their authors revel
in paradox and ambiguity. They enjoy shaking us up, by contradicting what
seems to be ordinary common sense. Indeed, sometimes they even appear to contradict
themselves.
"Ben Zoma said: Who is wise? He who learns from all men. ... Who
is mighty? He who subdues his passions. ... Who is rich? He who rejoices
in his portion. ... Who is honored? He who honors everybody."[1]
(Pirke Aboth 4:1)
This is paradoxical, not in that it contradicts itself, but in that it shakes
up our natural (though often unspoken) assumptions about life. The sage ought
to be a person who has no need of instruction; strong people ought to be those
who impose their will on everybody else; honored people ought to be those
who receive honor, not those who give it. Yet once Ben Zoma has shown us the
opposite is true, it all makes sense; and we see the world in a deeper and
more humane way. That is what Pirke Aboth does.
(So does Jesus, in the Gospels. "He who finds his life will lose it,
and he who loses his life for my sake will find it" [Matthew 10:39].
This is paradoxical, puzzling--and yet, one senses intuitively, profoundly
true. It is in this taste for paradox, for provoking and evoking, that
Jesus and his teachings particularly smack of Pharisaic/rabbinic Judaism.)
"Rabbi Jacob ... used to say, Better is one
hour of repentance and good deeds in this world than the whole life of
the world to come; yet better is one hour of blissfulness of spirit in
the world to come than the whole life of this world." (Pirke Aboth
4:22)
Is Rabbi Jacob too dumb to understand that the two halves of his saying are
in mathematical contradiction? Of course not! What he is doing is evoking
a meditation on the blessed afterlife ("the world to come") compared
with our ordinary life in this world. The afterlife is certainly better by
far than our present life. Yet there are aspects of our present life--"repentance
and good deeds"--that have an incomparable preciousness of their own,
and that are bound up with our transient and flawed existence in this world.
When this life ends, they are gone forever.[2]
The best-known passage of Pirke Aboth is perhaps
the most difficult to understand, and pregnant of many different meanings:
"Hillel ... used to say: If I am not for myself, who will be for
me? And once I am for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?" (Pirke
Aboth 1:14)
Most translators, like Hertz, render the second question as: "And if
I am only for myself, what am I?" They understand Hillel to be advocating
a middle ground between absolute selflessness and absolute egoism. The problem
is that the word "only" isn't in the Hebrew text. I myself would
prefer a very different interpretation of this passage, along psychological
lines:
If I don't undertake the very difficult and painful task of discovering
who I am, and what my own needs and potentialities are--who will do that
task for me?
And once I have discovered who I am--what sort of a person do I
turn out to be?
And if I don't undertake the task of discovery now--when will I do it?
OK, my interpretation isn't perfect either. Give your own! And when you do,
and your interpretation butts heads with mine and with Hertz's, the ghost
of Hillel will smile and say, That's exactly what I intended.
The thing that I expect will most strike you when you
read Pirke Aboth is the enormous role played in it by Torah, and by
the act of studying Torah. You need to keep in mind that "Torah,"
in this context, does not mean just the Pentateuch, but the entire body of
tradition and thought that constituted the intellectual and spiritual world
of rabbinic Judaism. Still, the extraordinary value given to Torah study will
seem to most modern people the most alien (and perhaps the most alienating)
feature of Pirke Aboth.
Indeed, this feature--the act of study conceived as the supreme act of
religious devotion--is the most unique and distinctive feature of rabbinic
Judaism: self-evident to those on the inside, bizarre and nearly unintelligible
to those on the outside.
How are we to understand it?
To understand the rabbinic valuation of Torah study in a feeling way--which,
in my view, is the only way really to understand anything--I suggest you read
the first chapter of Samuel Heilman's book The Gate Behind the Wall
(Penguin Books, 1984), particularly pp. 55-68. Heilman, an American sociologist,
describes his experience in a Talmud study circle (chavruse) in Jerusalem;
and this twentieth-century experience will convey to us something of what
the ancient rabbis experienced when they studied what they called "Torah."
Day after day Heilman sat in his chavruse, studying with them the
Talmud tractate that dealt with the sacrifices in the ancient Temple. "Talking
and reading about sacrifices no longer brought to a Holy Temple no longer
standing was by no means easy for me at first. ... But for these men, all
that was no problem. They threw themselves into the text and through it back
into time ... a world of a distant past now magically made present. ... My
partners around the table were walking into the page and onto the Temple Mount
with all the assurance of old hands" (pp. 61-62).
A discussion erupts in the chavruse, about which of two textual variants
of a Talmudic passage is to be accepted. Some of the medieval authorities
read the text one way, some another. The chavruse splits along similar
lines.
"And I say," Rav Moses announced, cutting short the controversy
with a tone of judgment, "that you can read it this way and that."
The judgment, I thought, did not change anything at all. That was exactly
where we had begun--with two versions of the line. But then there was
a change; I could feel it in the room and around the circle. What had
changed? Why were the men satisfied with a judgment that returned us to
the status quo ante?
I had been using a little tape recorder in order to capture as much as
possible in each class. ... When I returned home I rewound the tape to
find the moment when the little exchange took place. ... I closed my eyes
as I listened and tried to place myself back inside the room and at the
L-shaped table.
Everything had been spoken in the present tense. What had perhaps for
others been an archaic controversy between two alternative versions of
an ancient text was for these men a fresh argument. They were not just
citing divergent texts; they were almost composing them afresh. So finally,
when the Rav arrived at the same judgment that the redactors of the text
had reached generations earlier, it was not simply an echo of that decision
out of the past. Instead it had all the freshness and novelty of the original
decision. The laughter I heard in reaction to his decision was the delight
which these men felt in being able to work out their different opinions
along the same pathways, the tried and true pathways of their antecedents.
Even their controversies did not distance them from the world of the Talmud
but rather kept them immersed in it. Only if I allowed myself to see the
old as if it were fresh and new could I too share in the delight, could
I come to care about sacrifices at the Temple. (pp. 64-65)
Echoing Pirke Aboth 1:1, Heilman speaks of "the great Jewish
chain of being that begins with Moses at Sinai and runs through Joshua, the
Elders, the Men of the Great Assembly and generations of others, finally reaching
the countless little circles of Jews who continue to review a Torah they believe
was once divinely revealed" (p. 55). To study Torah is to make oneself
part of that chain of being, and thereby to achieve union with a process which
is vastly larger than the individual and, for all practical purposes, immortal.
If, as some religious people hold, "damnation" is being condemned
to eternal loneliness and separated-ness, and "salvation" is fusion
with the divine and the transcendent, then becoming part of the Torah-process
through study is not an act that brings salvation as its reward. It is itself
salvation.
This, I think, is the introduction you need to begin reading Pirke Aboth.
You may ask: If, as I have said, the Torah-process is itself salvation, what
about those who are excluded from it? What about the unlearned? What about
women? And what about others, who can partake in the process, but who cannot
accept the religious beliefs that lie behind it?
The questions about the "excluded" point to some of the most painful
defects of rabbinic Judaism. It is beyond dispute that rabbinic Judaism has
an elitist quality, which may have rendered it far less suitable than Christianity
to win over the hearts and minds of the ancient Mediterranean world. The rabbis
themselves recognized the existence of a mass of people, whom they called
am ha-aretz (literally, "the people of the land"), and of
whom we know mainly that they were Jewish and that they resented and detested
the rabbis.[3]
As for Jewish women, in traditional Judaism they are
"unlearned" almost by definition, because they are forced to be
so. "Rabbi Eliezer says: Anyone who teaches his daughter Torah, teaches
her to be sexually promiscuous" (Mishnah, Sotah 3:4). In the Palestinian
Gemara on this passage, the same rabbi remarks: "Better that words
of Torah be burnt, than that they be transmitted to women" (Sotah
16a).[4]
(You see that I wasn't speaking carelessly when I said, commenting on the
Book of Deuteronomy, that
rabbinic Judaism discriminates even more grossly between Jewish men and Jewish
women, than does Biblical Judaism. Compare the very nasty bit of misogyny
in Pirke Aboth itself, 1:5.)
When we turn to the question of what happens to those who can (and perhaps
do) participate in the Torah-process, but who can't accept the religious beliefs
that lie behind it, we have a much more pleasant surprise waiting for us.
Rabbinic Judaism shows an extraordinary ability to come to terms with and
accept the religious disbelief that is its own shadow-side, and this ability
is one of its strongest and most attractive features. Indeed, in
this respect rabbinic Judaism has a great deal to teach religious people of
any faith.
You'll see this clearly when we turn to the Talmudic stories of Elisha ben
Abuyah, the "heretic rabbi," which as far as I am concerned are
among the most powerful and profound creations not only in rabbinic literature,
but in all world literature.
But before we turn to the "unorthodox path" of rabbinic Judaism,
let's explore the "orthodox" one ...
Reading assignment #8: Pirke Aboth (entire text).
Click here for suggestions
on how to get hold of this text.
Click here
for the study guide to this assignment.
Click here to go on to the stories
about Elisha ben Abuyah.
[1] Hertz translates the last part: "Who is worthy
of honour? He who respects his fellow-men." My translation is closer
to the original, and better brings out Ben Zoma's paradox. [Go
back to the text.]
[
2] "In
heaven there is no beer / That's why we drink it here / And when we're far from
here / Our friends will be drinking all the beer." (I heard this song on
the radio in 1970; I don't know where it is from.) Surely in heaven we are in
a state where thirst is hardly even imaginable--and how wonderful that will
be! And yet we will never again experience the taste of beer on a hot day. The
two incomparably precious experiences can hardly be weighed against each other.
This is something like what I imagine Rabbi Jacob to be saying in Pirke Aboth.
For him "repentance and good deeds" are an experience of absolute
value and pleasure, and their absence from the next world is something to be
grieved. [Go back to the text.]
[3] In my book The Faces of the Chariot: Early Jewish
Responses to Ezekiel's Vision (Tuebingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1988), I tried
to find something of the voice of the am ha-aretz in the ancient Hebrew
mystical texts called the Hekhalot. You can get some sense of my argument
by looking at the presentation I gave in 1997 at a meeting of the Society
for Biblical Literature (http://sun.iwu.edu/~religion/ejcm/97AARSBL.html).
There I don't mention the am ha-aretz by name, but I describe them
by what I believe to have been their characteristics: " ... people who
are part of rabbinic Jewish society, yet not the rabbis themselves; people
who are bound to the rabbis in a position of powerlessness and dependence;
people who represent their disadvantaged position in terms of their lacking
the Torah mastery that distinguishes the rabbinic group; and who respond to
their subordinate--better, disenfranchised--status with an intense and understandable
rage." [Go back to the text.]
[4] The Babylonian Gemara on this passage (Sotah 21a)
generously allows that women can share in "the merit of Torah,"
in that they help their sons to learn Bible and Mishnah, and wait patiently
for their husbands to return from the study-house. [Go
back to the text.]
