The Everyday Vision
Pirke Aboth: The Tractate “Fathers,” from the Mishnah.
by R. Travers Herford.
New York, Jewish Institute of Religion, 3rd revised edition, 1945. 176 pp. $2.00.
Sayings of the Fathers or Pirke Aboth.
by Very Rev. Dr. Joseph H. Hertz, and Moses Schonfeld.
New York, Behrman, 1945. 128 pp. $1.25.
The Law which Moses received on Sinai was both the Written and the Unwritten. The Unwritten was handed down by word of mouth through Joshua, the Elders, the Prophets, to the men of the Great Synagogue; from the last survivor of these it was handed in unbroken succession for nearly five hundred years to a rabbi or a group of rabbis in each generation until about 200 C.E., when the Unwritten Law was codified in the Mishnah of the Patriarch Judah.
One of the tractates of the Mishnah is Pirke Aboth, a collection of a few hundred brief ethical sayings, mostly of these rabbis. They set forth no specific rules of law; they are too miscellaneous and fragmentary to constitute a system of ethics. They have nevertheless an important legal and ethical function in the code: their chronological arrangement reminded the reader that their authors were links in the chain of the transmission of the Law and a warrant of its authenticity; and in themselves these sayings are a diverse praise of the Law and the beauty of its study, a quiet assurance that it is the only way of life.
In his introduction to his new edition of Aboth, Dr. Herford explains that the study of Torah as conceived by the rabbis was much more than the study of Scripture “as mere literature”; it is the study of the divine revelation, of God’s thoughts; “it might be called,” the Christian rehabilitator of the Pharisees says, “the Pharisaic form of the Beatific Vision.” This conception of the Law, of which Aboth is so deeply conscious and of which “non-Jewish readers seldom have the least comprehension,” explains, we are told, “the undying hold which Aboth has had on Jewish minds . . . in all ages since it first appeared.” (It was very early embodied in its entirety in the Prayer Book.) Dr. Herford is insistent on the peculiarly Jewish character of Aboth; if his commentary fails, the failure will not be due to a want of sympathy but “to the fact that the present writer is not himself a Jew, and may perhaps be deaf to melodies which sing divinely in a Jewish ear.” The Fathers whom Dr. Herford so deeply loves might not have been charitable to this warmly sympathetic effort of a non-Jew to understand their view of the Law, but they decisively refute any suggestion that whatever may have escaped him would have come naturally to a Jew. “Dispose thyself to learn Torah,” Rabbi José says, “for it is not an inheritance.”
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The study of the Torah, like all the worthwhile occupations, is an unnatural one, and Aboth is full of warnings against the distractions of nature—the company of women, the talk of children, even breaking off one’s study while walking to exclaim, “How beautiful is this tree.” The rabbis have an urgent commitment to a hopeless task: “The work is not upon thee to finish, nor art thou free to desist from it”; and a certainty of its inexhaustible worth: “Turn it and turn it for all is in it and look in it and grow grey and old in it, and turn not away from it, for there is no better rule for thee than it.” The modern uncommitted reader does not take easily to such intensity of faith; he has been bullied into half-heartedly accepting it in the artist and the revolutionary, but in the religious, who discovered the sense of dedication, he is likely to find it strange and unforgivable.
Such a reader will probably be least attracted by that strain of high exaltation in the Pharisees which both the present commentators so admire. To Rabbi Hertz “they were among the noblest men that ever lived,” and he always extracts the noblest meaning from their words, even at times from a proverb which, as Dr. Herford more astutely notes, is so terse that it may mean anything. Dr. Herford is a very subtle and discriminating admirer; by pitching much of his praise low, his highest praise rings true; he knows just which maxims will sound “pharisaical” to the uninitiated reader, and these he ingeniously explains away as untypical or as a historical necessity of their times or as having a special truth of their own. A remarkably sensitive and flexible interpreter of religious thought, even he on occasion strikes what appears to be an attitude of official high-mindedness. Of Akiba’s splendid metaphor of divine justice, “All is given in pledge, and the net is spread over all the living; the shop is open and the shopman gives credit, and the account-book is open and the hand writes, and every one who would borrow let him come and borrow; and the collectors go round continually every day and exact payment from a man whether with or without his knowledge . . .” he says, “The solemn force of the thought is not helped by the terms of the comparison with a tradesman or moneylender keeping his books and collecting his debts.”
The difficulties that face a commentator on Aboth are best illustrated, not by his occasional failures, but by his successes in finding unsuspected meanings, as in Dr. Herford’s comment on the effect of using the same words in the two following sayings:
4. With ten trials Abraham our father was tried, and he bore them all, to make known how great was the love of Abraham our father.
7. With ten trials did our fathers try the Holy One, blessed be He, in the wilderness . . .
Our commentator says: “The meaning in each case is the same—put to the test; but whereas it is part of the divine discipline that man is put to the test by what is laid upon him to endure, it is human insolence which tries the patience of God, and dares to put even him to the test. There is a certain daring simplicity, which perhaps only a Jew can fully appreciate, in thus linking together the trials which God and Israel brought on each other.”
Whether a Jew could fully appreciate it without the intervention of the brilliant Christian editor is by no means clear: the compiler of Aboth has merely used the same words in setting down two incidents; it is the editor who has linked them together and pointed out that an uneasy marriage has been made in Heaven.
I do not mean that Dr. Herford has pushed his text too far, but that here he has followed it with a degree of imaginativeness that he cannot afford to use frequently. A commentator on Aboth, no matter how much he may perceive them, must forego the luxury of many ironies. It is the nature of a collection of proverbs to scatter contradictory meanings and suggest incongruous associations profusely, ironically, irresponsibly. But a commentary is expected to make a logical, symmetrical whole, and if the commentator is to achieve this unity he must keep his material strictly in hand.
At times the mere arrangement of sayings—“a studied disorder,” as Dr. Herford puts it—seems calculated to emphasize the disunity of the Fathers. Thus the saying of Rabbi Ishmael who managed to survive Bar Kochba’s war, “Be submissive to the ruler, patient under oppression; and receive every one with cheerfulness,” is followed immediately by “Laughter and levity accustom a man to immorality,” a saying of Akiba who was put to death by the Romans during the course of that war.
The Fathers seem so little to fear inconsistency that Aboth even records along with their wisdom a bitter attack on it and lavish praise of the attacker. We are told of Eliezer ben Horkenos, that if all the Wise of Israel were in one scale and he in the second scale, he would weigh them all down; and that he said, “Warm thyself at the fire of the Wise, and beware of their glowing coal lest thou be scorched. For their bite is the bite of a fox, and their sting the sting of a scorpion, and their hiss the hiss of a serpent, and all their words like coals of fire.” Dr. Herford offers as the clue to this bitter judgment the fact that Eliezer had been excommunicated. It may be an accident, but the compiler, as if to guard against any such personal explanation, has included in the same verse two sayings of Eliezer’s which show him as a man whom we would expect to be a careful and responsible judge: “Let the honor of thine associate be dear to thee as thine own; and be not quick to anger.”
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Aboth speaks to the ignorant and uncommitted reader far differently than it does to its learned editors. (That it would not speak to him at all but for their lively translations and commentaries is beside my present point.) Much that they find exalted and splendid he finds dry and narrow. He will never be so sure as they that there is more than worldly wisdom in the command to keep far from the evil neighbor and consort not with the wicked—it is his own practice; and while he may envy its certainty he will doubt the soundness of the claim (except for those who are already committed to it) that the apparently trivial parts of the Law, the rules relating to the sacrifices of birds and the purification of women, are more important than any secular science. On the other hand, where the editors find only a narrow meaning, a further invitation to study the Torah at all times, he will find a great truth about all of life, as in “He who wakes in the night, and he who walks alone by the way, and he who makes his heart empty for idle thoughts, lo he is guilty against himself.” Aboth will tell him in net result much more about the world he lives in than it does about the Torah; and what he learns from it will not be learned by sticking to the point but by straying from it with the freest play of the mind.
To insist on this freedom of association in the face of the restraints that scholars impose on themselves may seem presumptuous in the ignorant reader, but it is actually his right, for it is the only method that he has. A moral saying will remind the scholar of its author, his times, the circumstances in which it was said, the qualifications that should be placed on it; a unity will be achieved by cutting off everything alien to it. But in the case of a reader free of such impediments, one moral saying can remind him only of another and bring about their interplay and confusion, and a diversity of unrelated ignorance will grow together—a proper course for proverbial wisdom. As Rabbi Hertz finely says, “The wisdom of the sages in every people finds its way to the masses, by means only of the proverb, saying, or parable.” Which really means that in the end the wisdom of the Fathers is in large part what their ignorant children in their everyday life make of it.
