This lecture opens the third chapter of Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers) and dwells entirely on its first mishnah, that of Akavia ben Mahalalel: reflect on three things and you will not come to sin — know where you come from, where you are going, and before whom you are destined to give an account. The question it raises is not moral in the usual sense: it concerns the time and the space of a life, what makes a person occupy a place that belongs to him alone, and why the same mishnah splits in two and reformulates itself in far harsher terms. The lecture answers by distinguishing between those it addresses: the first formulation speaks to the righteous and to the average person, the second to the one tradition calls the rasha.
Rav Raphaël Benizri begins with the author of the mishnah, a tanna who stood firm against the Sages of his time on four points of law rather than yield to the majority, and whose stance led to his being set apart. His words have become the ones addressed to a person who departs this world, first in the Ashkenazi communities and today in the Sephardi communities as well.
The discussion follows the three members of the sentence one after another — the origin, the destination, the account to be rendered — drawing on Ibn Ezra’s reading of time, on the four names of man, and on the etymology of the word for the Creator. The audience’s questions then turn to what the word mishnah means, to who Akavia ben Mahalalel was, and to the difference between Mishnah and Gemara.
What this lecture teaches
Akavia ben Mahalalel preferred to be thought a fool rather than betray his truth. He was a tanna of the second century who asserted himself through clear-cut opposition, even to the Sages of his time, so convinced was he of his conclusions on four points. The Sages, who nevertheless acknowledged his erudition, proposed that he fall in line with the majority, and he held his ground: he would rather, he said, be taken for a fool in the eyes of men than fail the truth of his Creator. His stance was censured — to the point of excommunication, according to some; others say that the Sages merely placed a stone on his coffin at his death. That stone, incidentally, explains a custom we have kept. To lay a stone on a grave is to implore divine mercy for the departed one we are visiting, and that was precisely its meaning here: despite his having been set apart, forgiveness for his sins was being asked. As for his words, they were consecrated as the final message delivered to a person who leaves this world, first in the Ashkenazi communities and now in the Sephardi communities as well.
“Reflect” means observe and go deeper, and the word contains understanding. The verb used carries within it the root of sekhel (intellect): the point is not to remember three things but to become aware of them. And what we are to avoid, aveirah, is a way of stepping outside one’s own limits: there is no need to go looking for challenges in life. The word must also be distinguished from deviation, which is a false interpretation or a failure of duty, and still more from rebellion: it comes from the verb “to pass over,” even though I am an Ivri and my task is precisely to establish the crossing.
An object changes according to the angle from which it is seen, and so does spiritual perception. Depending on whether one stands to the left, to the right, in front or to the side, the shadows and the lights that convey the reality of the object will differ. So it is with us: we do not practice in the same way, each according to his level. And provided there is honesty, faithfulness to one’s own faith, and consistency with oneself, a person’s act has a value equivalent to that of the righteous — who merely enjoys certain privileges the other does not have. We therefore have no business judging the spiritual worth of the act performed by one or the other.
The mishnah splits in two because it addresses a community, and a community is not cut from a single cloth. A true community is made up of the righteous, the average and the resha’im, whose initials form the word that designates it. And the rasha is not the unbeliever, who bears another name: he is the one who is learned, a philosopher, who would like to place the emphasis on the thought behind the act rather than on the act itself. It is insofar as this detaches him from his real commitment that he is regarded as such.
We need him, as the incense needed its impure ingredient. The Sages taught that when the rasha is not among the ten of the congregation, prayer is not at its optimal level. The incense of the Temple, which established the bond between this world and the world above and expressed the favor of divine service, included an element that was impure at its base, and it was this element that intensified its fragrance. He is therefore not to be excluded or cast out; rather, we must see how he can be integrated and contained — just as we seek to contain the evil inclination, which is in reality a traveling companion and becomes evil only once it has been cut off from the good inclination, since divine service is carried out with both.
Through a single point one can draw infinitely many lines, and yet one must mark out one’s direction. All directions are good, but if we care about unity, we must choose one. This is what the Sages mean when they say that the wise man has his eyes in his head: he always bears in mind that there is a point of departure and a point of arrival, and that we move within a segment of life, each in his own way, since the chances are not equal for everyone.
Ibn Ezra closes the three gates of time, and the Torah opens a fourth. The past no longer exists, and there is no use fixating on what was; the present is the blink of an eye, fleeting, and we have little hold on it; the future is uncertain, and nothing guarantees we will be here tomorrow to carry out our plans. But there is a time that the Torah asks us to count for ourselves, and this is what we do during the Omer: a time counted outside of time, bound to the Exodus from Egypt, to the liberation of the self and to revelation. The Torah is that very freedom, since it calls us to rise above the current in which our destiny has placed us.
“Know where you come from” means: consider that nothing was done before you. You arrive in your century, in your generation; you could have been here a hundred or two hundred years ago, and you would have had another life, other burdens, other missions. As long as I had not been created, I was not needed: it is now that I have been called to be and to fulfill my mission. Everything that preceded me, insofar as it must be taken into account, is so as a fragment of the infinite onto which my life is grafted.
The word “know” is not a matter of information; it is the knowledge that lies within love. Its first occurrence in the text is where Adam knew Chavah: love is in knowledge and knowledge is in love. One must therefore cultivate the love that gave you life — and this is not the animal desire that lies at the origin of life. In man, it is not desire that begets the child; it is the will to have a child that gives it body and gives it that love.
What I do, I do first of all for the generation to come. Life has two faces: this world is destined to be torn away and the World to Come to take its place, and whatever I sacrifice is for my children, who are a part of it. The verse that says to heed the discipline of one’s father uses a word derived from the verb “to put to the test”: it is the father who is sorely tested in educating his child, an education that comes not through the sum of knowledge he imparts but through the example he inspires. And the Torah of the mother, which one must not forsake, consists of the attachments that belong to the affective realm and to a will for renewal. Indeed, the first mitzvah given is the power to govern one’s own time. That time is not a flowing, abstract time, independent of me and wearing me down: it is set to the rhythm of the renewal of each moment. That is why the question always asked is what one has brought forth that is new today, what new teaching one contributes to the time in which one lives. This is the past of the mishnah: the time that gave you birth and called you into being.
“Where are you going” designates space, and space is what time is not. Time we share with everyone; space is the one I occupy and which is mine. Unless I am dislodged from it, no one can deprive me of the place I occupy: the place I build is entirely personal — it is my achievement and my work. This question, then, is the question of the present. We do not always know why we are here, and if we knew, things would be simpler; we cannot know, because we do not know how we will develop — and also because we could, in the end, have resigned and refused life.
It is against your will that you live, and to renounce life is a desertion. You can decide to live no longer, but that is reprehensible, because it is a rejection of your mission, an act of weakness, an admission that one is unable to face difficulties. If I have failed, it is as though I had never existed. This is also why tradition speaks of “good kindnesses”: one might think the qualifier superfluous, but administering poison to relieve a soul in distress is not called kindness, even when it is a matter of a being that is running out of breath. There remains the future, before which we are always rendering an account — and one will notice that judgment there comes before the reckoning, contrary to what one would expect. One would think that one must first calculate, weigh the good deeds against the bad, and only then decide. But the judgment you know yourself: deep down, you know what you would deserve if you broke the rule or took a dishonest path. The reckoning, by contrast, is what reaches your family and social circle, and that you do not know. That is where the gravest part is at stake: we believe we have escaped punishment, and we do not realize that it sometimes reaches our children and our grandchildren.
The second, harsher formulation is addressed to the rasha. The first version concerns the righteous and the average person — the one in pursuit of righteousness, and the one who holds to an average, unremarkable morality but discharges his obligations as best he can. For the other, Akavia takes up his text again and says that he comes from a putrid drop. It is a way of acknowledging that one may be overwhelmed by this animal side, which dwells in man and is indispensable to all growth, including moral growth — but also of recalling that this side is destined to decompose, whereas the neshamah (soul) knows no such state. To reduce a being to his biological life is indeed a lower level.
The text does not name G-d as the one before whom we give an account. It says the King of the kings of kings, the one who transcends all material life and asserts Himself through a threefold holiness. It is this holiness that wrenches the earth from its raw reality and wraps it in the heavenly, or that sows the spiritual within the material. That is where each person’s moral action lies — a person who at no moment loses his identity: though he has sinned, he remains Israel, because this holiness is eternal, a fragment of the divine within us, and it lies beyond death. Each of us belongs to a letter of the alphabet, or to a portion of a letter, and what unites all these varieties into one is precisely this shared holiness.
The three questions come from the encounter between Esav and Yaakov. The Sages derive Akavia’s words from the question Esav addressed to Yaakov when these two worlds met: where do you come from, where are you going, and whose are these? Kohelet, for his part, says the same thing differently when he tells us to remember our Creator in the days of our youth. And we must remember that the four stages of life — Enosh, Gever, Ish, Adam — can pursue us into old age: one can be a Gever at seventy and accept no submission, be an Enosh and see only the economic side of things and the pleasure to be drawn from life, or remain in the middle of a moral life telling oneself that one does no harm to anyone — a withdrawal into oneself which is an expression of pride, and which is also reprehensible.
The ideal term is Adam, and it is realized only through the companion. It is realized through the meeting of masculine and feminine, of man and his re’a — and that companion is at once the wife, the other, the stranger, and G-d. The word shares its etymology with the word for evil, because the companion can become my enemy if I do not lend myself properly to his company, and thus become my hell, as someone once put it. Finally, the word for the Creator sounds like the word for the well — the spring, the source of renewal — and like the word for the pit: these are the three parameters that Akavia’s words embrace.
Repeating a hundred and one times is not repeating a hundred times. The word mishnah means teaching, and it derives from the verb “to repeat” — for when one repeats a text, one does not repeat it in the same way. The Sages taught that one who has studied his text a hundred times is not like one who has gone over it a hundred and one times, and that between the two lies the difference between one who serves G-d and one who does not: to stop at a hundred is to judge that one no longer needs to return to it, and to fail to enter the infinity of thought. The root also points to the tooth, which grinds food and likewise grinds our study, sharpening it. The Torah is the embryo that contains everything within it; the Mishnah awakens its potential and gives it an accomplished body.
The Gemara is what keeps thought from coming to a halt. Akavia ben Mahalalel was a tanna of the first or second century, in the time of the Second Temple, so learned that he was offered the presidency of the court — a post he refused rather than align himself with the view of those who opposed him. His teaching belongs to a tractate whose first chapter records individual transmitters, the second pairs, the third teachings in three dimensions and the fourth in four. The Mishnah is the study carried forward until its redaction by Rabbi, in Hebrew, as the complement to the interpretation of the Written Law; the Gemara, in Aramaic, also means study, but with the connotation of completion. The debate it opens is not closed to this day, and that is what makes our thought a thought on the move.
Full transcript of the lecture
Good evening, friends. We are resuming our study of the third chapter, mishnah 1: Akavia ben Mahalalel says. We said that he was a tanna of the second century who asserted himself by taking a clear-cut position of opposition, even in the face of the chakhamim (Sages) of his time, so convinced was he of the conclusions of his thinking on four points — to the point that the Sages, who recognized his erudition, proposed that he fall in line with the majority. He held his ground; he refused, and he said: I would rather be a shoteh (a fool) in the eyes of the beriyot (people) — rather pass for a madman in the eyes of creatures — than fail the truth of my Creator. This position was somewhat censured by the Sages, since they placed him under a ban and more or less excluded him from the community; but some say they did not go that far, and that they simply, at his death, placed a stone on top of his coffin to signify that, despite everything, they were asking forgiveness for his sins. This also explains our custom of always placing a stone on a grave, as a way of imploring divine mercy for the dear departed whom we are visiting in the cemetery. And his words have since been consecrated as the final message delivered to a person who leaves this world, above all in the Ashkenazi communities; but today this is also accepted and practiced in the Sephardi communities.
And what he says is: “Reflect on three things and you will not come into the hands of transgression: know where you come from, where you are going, and before whom you are destined to give an account.” In reality, what we translate as “reflect” means “observe.” Observe, go deeper — in the word histakel there is the word sekhel, intellect. Become aware of three things, and you will not come into the hands of aveirah (transgression); you will not in fact stand on the path of aveirah. And we explained that aveirah is a way of going beyond our own limits, the limits of the human being himself. There is no need to go looking for challenges in life. We said that, just as an object is rendered differently depending on the angle from which one views it — whether one looks at it from the left, from the right, head-on or from the side — the shadows and the lights that convey its reality will differ.
So it is with our spiritual perception of things. Spiritual perception is not the same for everyone. And this is why, even when we practice the mitzvot, we do not all practice them in the same way. Each one, according to his level and according to the way he practices — provided there is a certain honesty, a certain faithfulness to his own emunah, his own faith, provided he is consistent with himself — his act has a value quite equivalent to that of the tzaddik (the righteous), even if the tzaddik may sometimes enjoy certain privileges the other does not have. Consequently, we have no business judging the spiritual worth of an act performed and practiced by one or the other, insofar as it is the natural expression of each person according to his capacities. How, then, can this spiritual honesty of a person be verified? So he tells us: if you do not want to fall into the hands of aveirah, of this overreaching, this challenge a person sets himself — whether in strict orthodoxy or within the minimal bounds of practice — know where you come from, where you are going, and before whom you are destined to give an account. In reality, the words of Akavia ben Mahalalel could have been reduced to this, could have rested content with saying it this way; but he says it in another way as well: “Where do you come from? From a drop that has reached a state of putrefaction. Where are you going? To a place of dust and worms. And before whom are you destined to give an account and a reckoning? Before the King of the kings of kings, the Holy One, blessed be He.”
But Akavia ben Mahalalel chose to state his words in two stages, because he considers that they are addressed to a tzibbur. Tzibbur, as you know, is a community, and a community is not cut from a single cloth. A true community is made up of tzaddikim — which corresponds to the letter tzadi — of beinonim, average people, which corresponds to the letter bet in tzibbur, and of resha’im, abbreviated by the letter resh. And rasha is not the unbeliever, as it is usually translated, because the unbeliever is the kofer. The rasha is the one who is a chakham, a learned man; he is the philosopher, the one who would in fact like to place the emphasis on the thought behind the act rather than on the act itself.
Now, insofar as this detaches him from his real commitment, he is regarded as a rasha. But take note: we need him. That is why our Sages said that when the rasha does not appear among the ten people of the kahal (congregation), prayer is not at its optimal level. For in the ketoret, the incense offered on the altar — the golden altar — and we know that the ketoret is, in its true sense, kesher, a bond: it is what establishes the connection between this world below and the world above; and it is re’ach, fragrance, the scent of being, expressing the favor of this divine service that installs the spiritual on earth and raises the earthly to the level of the spiritual.
Well, this ketoret contained an element that was tamei, impure at its base, yet it was the very one that gave, that intensified, the fragrance of the ketoret. So the rasha is not to be excluded, not to be cast out. On the contrary, we must see how we can integrate him, how we can contain him, just as we seek to contain the yetzer hara. The yetzer hara — what is translated as the evil inclination — is in reality our traveling companion; it is the re’a, a companion. It becomes the yetzer hara only when it has been disconnected from the yetzer hatov, when it is not governed or framed by the good inclination, by good intention — the notion of mastery expressed in bishnei yetzarekha, “with both your inclinations” — because divine service passes through these two inclinations. So the notion of aveirah applies when the instrument of sin consists in taking things — the elements given by the Torah — out of their own limits. We are not speaking here of avon, of deviation, which is a false interpretation or a failure of duty, of moral obligation, and still less of the sin that is an act of rebellion. No: aveirah, from the verb la’avor, to pass over — whereas I am an Ivri, and I must establish the crossing, the ford, from one bank to the other, must I not? That is what I must do in my life, and yet I remain in uncertainty. Now, we said that through a single point we can draw infinitely many lines. And all directions are good. But if we care about unity, we must indeed mark out our direction. And our Sages went further, saying: “The wise man has his eyes in his head” — that is, the wise man always bears in mind that there is a point of departure and a point of arrival; we move between them, within a segment of life, each in his own way — again, because the chances are not equal for everyone — each in his own way. The essential thing is to live in a time that is neither that of the past, nor of a present that slips away from us, nor of an uncertain future. I always recall these words of Ibn Ezra concerning time: ha-avar ayin — the past no longer exists; there is no point in always fixating on what was. The present, ke-heref ayin, is the blink of an eye; it is fleeting, it slips away from us, and we have only the slightest hold on it. And the future — the future is uncertain: we can make plans for the future, but who says we will be here tomorrow to carry them out? On the other hand, there is a time that the Torah has asked us to count for ourselves. That is what we do, for example, during the period of the Omer. We count a time outside of time. This time is bound to the Exodus from Egypt, to the liberation of our being and to the revelation of the Torah. Now, the Torah, we are told, is the freedom of being, because it calls us to rise above the current in which our mazal, our destiny, has placed us; and it calls us indeed to bring that current back into its proper course, or, if it is already there, to give it an enhancement, an added value. All life is relative: it remains a rough draft of something else that is yet to come, which will perfect all the drafts that came before.
That is how life is. The drafts of our great-grandparents, our grandparents, our parents, and so on — each, at his own level, is in the process of giving it a better form, a better understanding. Each is building further stories upon these foundations. So what Akavia ben Mahalalel says is simply this: da me-ayin bata — know that you come from ayin, from nothingness. You come from nothingness: that means, consider that nothing was done before you. In reality, you arrive in your century, in your generation; but you could have been here a hundred years ago, two hundred years ago — you would have had another life, other burdens, other missions. But no. Ad she-lo notzarti eini kedai — “before I was formed, I was not worthy”; eini kedai, that is, I was not needed. I could indeed have been here two hundred years ago […] — but it is now that I have been called to be and to fulfill my mission.
That is how one must regard it; and consequently, everything that preceded me, if it is to be taken into account, is like a fragment of the ayin — of the Absolute, of the Infinite. And onto this infinite my life is grafted. But take note: the da, “know,” is not simply information. The first “knowing” is ve-ha-adam yada et Chavah ishto, “and Adam knew Chavah his wife”: knowledge lies within love, and love lies within knowledge. Consequently, you must truly cultivate the love that gave you life — for we are not speaking of the animal desire that lies at the origin of life. For man it is something else: it is not desire that begets the child; it is the will to have a child that gives it body and gives it that love.
And that is how you must truly see your calling to life — knowing that in this life, which you must lead with a double face, there is olam ha-zeh, this world, and there is olam ha-ba, the World to Come. This world is destined to be torn away, and the World to Come to take its place, since, in the end, what I do in my life, what I sacrifice, is first and foremost for the generation to come; and this generation to come is my children — my children, who are a part of it. That is why it is said in Mishlei (Proverbs): shema beni musar avikha ve-al tittosh torat immekha, “Hear, my son, the discipline of your father, and do not forsake the teaching of your mother” (Proverbs 1:8). “The discipline of your father”: musar comes from the verb yasar, to put to the test. To put to the test — it is the father who is sorely tested in the education of his child, an education that comes not through the sum of knowledge he imparts to him, but through the example he inspires in him.
“And do not forsake the Torah of your mother.” Now, the Torah of your mother is all those mitzvot, all those attachments that belong to the affective realm and to a will for renewal, for returning to the source — because it is in this time of renewal that we envisage our life, not in a time that flows on, abstract, independent of myself, that wears me down and ages me. No: the first mitzvah the Torah gave me is the power to govern my own time. And my own time is set to the rhythm of the renewal of each moment. That is why the question always asked is mah chiddashta ha-yom? — “What new thing have you brought forth today?” What new teaching are you contributing today, in this time in which you live? So this is what must be considered: this is the time that gave you birth, that called you into being. That is the past.
Le-an atah holekh — toward what place are you headed? Time and space: time, we said, is what we share with everyone; space is what I occupy and what is mine. Unless I am dislodged from my space — then you may occupy it in your turn. But if I am there, no one can deprive me of the place I occupy. The place I occupy, the place I build, is entirely personal; it is private. Time is not private — though within that time each person shares it differently — whereas the bayit, the space in which I live, is mine: it is my achievement, it is my work. So an, “where,” is space. Indeed, when one asks someone le-an atah holekh, where are you headed — that is the present. Le-an atah holekh is the present. We do not always know why we are here; if we knew, things would be simpler. We cannot know, because we do not know how we will develop — and we could, in the end, have resigned and refused life.
Yet we are told: no. “It is against your will that you live”; you did not decide to live. You can indeed decide to live no longer. But this is reprehensible. Why? Because it is a rejection of your mission; it is an act of weakness; it is a desertion. You are not able to face the difficulties of life, you give up, and so you no longer fulfill your role. If I have truly failed, then it is as though I had never existed. And we know very well the difference with chesed, kindness — “good kindnesses”: can there be kindnesses that are bad? Chasadim tovim — why do I need to say chasadim tovim, kindnesses that are good? Because administering a poison to relieve a soul in distress is not called chesed tov, a good kindness; it is called chesed ra, a bad kindness. It is a way of depriving life of its last breath, even when it is a being that is running out of breath. Very well. So that is the future: lifnei mi atah atid liten din ve-cheshbon, before whom you are destined to give judgment and reckoning — we are always in the process of giving an account.
There is no need to… The Sages say that one who commits an act, a bad act, is made to pay mi-da’ato, with his knowledge — consciously — because we are always comparing ourselves with someone. We always know what we would deserve if we broke the rule, if we decided in the end to take a dishonest path, and so on. We know what awaits us. That is mi-da’ato, “with his knowledge.” She-lo mi-da’ato, “without his knowledge,” is when we think we have escaped the penalty that is due to us, the sanction, the punishment; but “without his knowledge,” we do not realize that it sometimes reaches — Heaven forbid — our children and our grandchildren. That, indeed, is why it says here din ve-cheshbon, judgment and reckoning, whereas in principle it should have said cheshbon ve-din, reckoning and judgment. One first makes the tally, one calculates: what are your good deeds, what are your bad ones — and then one decides. No: the din, the judgment, you know yourself; deep within you, you know it. The cheshbon, the reckoning, is when it reaches your family circle, your social circle — and that one, in reality, you do not know. So this part — me-ayin bata, u-le’an atah holekh — concerns the tzaddik and the beinoni: the tzaddik, the just man, the man in pursuit of justice; and the man who, despite everything, keeps to an average morality, unremarkable in itself, yet tries to discharge his obligations as best he can. But for the rasha — for the rasha, Akavia ben Mahalalel takes up his text again and says: me-ayin bata? mi-tippah seruchah — “from a putrid drop,” a putrefied seed. That is to say: one can take into account the fact that you are overwhelmed by your evil inclination, by this animal instinct that also dwells in man and is indispensable to all human growth, even moral growth. But know that this animal side […] which dwells in man is destined to decompose. There is, however, one thing that does not decompose at all: the neshamah, the soul of man. The soul knows no such state of putrefaction. So the me-ayin bata of this version is of a lower level: it is when one reduces everything to physical life, to the biological life of the being […].
The mi, “who,” refers to man. It is true that on the level of middot, of what we are, we are always weighing our attributes — ve-nachnu mah, “and what are we?” — but it is precisely by weighing our attributes that we truly affirm our mi, our personality. So this affirmation of the personality is called to give an account — before whom? We were not told “before Hashem,” we were not told “before G-d,” but lifnei Melekh malkhei ha-melakhim, before the King of the kings of kings — that is, the one who transcends all material life and asserts Himself through holiness, through a threefold holiness. It is this holiness that wrenches the earth from its base reality and wraps it in the heavenly, in the spiritual — or that installs, plants, sows the spiritual within the material.
It is the one who truly succeeds in bringing about this union in the name of holiness — and that is where the true moral action of every Jew lies, a Jew who at no moment loses his identity. Why? Af al pi she-chata, Yisrael hu — “even though he has sinned, he is still Israel.” Why does he remain Israel? For the simple reason that this holiness of Israel is eternal. It cannot be destroyed, because it is the fragment of the divine within us, and this fragment lies beyond death. Now, as you know very well — I believe I have said it — we all belong to letters of the alphabet. Each one of us is a letter of the alphabet, or a portion of a letter of the alphabet.
Some belong to the zayin, some to the chet, some to the tet, some to […]; nonetheless, what makes the richness of the entire Jewish people, and what unites these varieties into a single one […], is above all this kedushah, this holiness — the holiness of kadosh ani, “I am holy,” the supreme attribute that G-d ascribes to Himself: I am holy. And this kedushah I seek to share with you: ve-atem tihyu li mamlekhet kohanim ve-goy kadosh — “and you shall be for Me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.” Now our Sages say that these words of Akavia ben Mahalalel derive from Esav’s question to Yaakov, when that encounter between Esav and Yaakov took place.
I leave you to guess a little at these worlds — these two worlds that meet — when he says to him: where are you from, where are you going, and to whom must you render account — who are these with you, to whom are you answerable? Kohelet puts it another way: u-zekhor et bor’ekha bi-mei bechurotekha, “Remember your Creator in the days of your youth.” And we have already said that there are four stages of development in our life, through which we pass: Enosh, Gever, Ish, until we reach Adam. And these are states of being that can pursue us into old age. One can be a Gever at the age of seventy and accept no submission to any other order.
We can be an Enosh and see only the economic side of life and the pleasure one can draw from it, even at the age of seventy; or one can just as well remain in the middle ground of a moral life: I do no harm to anyone. That is a withdrawal into oneself — but a withdrawal into oneself that is, all things considered, an expression of pride, of a will to assert oneself individually over against others, and it too is reprehensible. Now, the ideal term, as we said, is Adam, which is realized through the ideal meeting of the masculine and the feminine, of man and his re’a, his companion. And the re’a — this companion — is at once the wife, the other, the stranger, and G-d. For re’a shares its etymology with ra, evil, because the companion can become my enemy if I do not lend myself to his company as I should; then he becomes ra, evil itself — he becomes my hell, as someone once defined it: other people are my hell. And at every level, it is the other who is truly my traveling companion.
That is how our Sages understand it. So our Sages explain that bore, Creator, has the same sound and connotation as be’er: the be’er is the ma’ayan, the well, the spring, the source of renewal; and bor is the pit. So when you consider these three parameters — the bor on one side, the be’er on the other, and the Bore at the origin of all things — you have this saying of Akavia ben Mahalalel, which embraces these three parameters: da me-ayin bata, u-le’an atah holekh, ve-lifnei mi atah atid liten din ve-cheshbon. That is what I had to say on this mishnah of Akavia ben Mahalalel. If there are any questions before we move on to another mishnah, tell me right away.
Are there any questions? Has anything in the development of my text troubled you? — “I have a question, Mr. Benizri.” — Yes. — “What is the exact translation of Mishnah?” — The exact translation of Mishnah is “teaching.” But the etymology of Mishnah comes from the verb shanah, to repeat — because when one repeats a text, one does not repeat it in the same way. The Sages already said: eino domeh shoneh pirko me’ah pe’amim le-shoneh pirko me’ah ve-echad — one who studies, who repeats his lesson a hundred times, is not like one who has gone over it a hundred and one times. They were so insistent on this principle that they said: this is what distinguishes…
…what distinguishes someone who serves G-d from someone who does not serve Him. The one who has repeated his text — who has studied it, analyzed it — a hundred times and then stopped, because he stopped at the hundredth time and judges that he no longer needs to take it up again: that one does not serve G-d; he does not enter into this infinity of thought. Whereas the one who is not content with a hundred times and continues beyond — a hundred and one times — he is the true servant of G-d. And the root of shanah comes from the word shen. Shen is the tooth. The tooth is what grinds food, what grinds everything we put into our mouths; and it is likewise what grinds our study, our reading — it is what sharpens it more and more,
and what gives our Torah the dimension of Mishnah. Because the Torah, if you like, is the embryo that has everything within it. The Mishnah is what awakens the whole potential of this embryo and gives it a body far more — let us say — accomplished. Very well. So… Yes? — “I wasn’t able to listen from the beginning. Who is Akavia ben Mahalalel?” — He is a tanna of the Mishnah who lived in the first or second century — it is not very precise — in the time of the Bayit Sheni, the Second Temple. He was a great scholar, even offered the post of Av Beit Din, president of the court of the Sanhedrin in his day; but he refused, because he did not want to align himself with the view of those who opposed his halakhah on four points — this is not the moment to list them. As for Akavia ben Mahalalel, those who have interpreted his name said it means one who wishes to place himself within the seyag, the protective fence, of Mahalalel — of the one who carries within him the praise of G-d. And that is what he taught. He is in fact known — known, that is, on the lips of our contemporaries — only through this teaching of the tractate Avot, in the third chapter. For you know that in the first chapter of Avot we find the people who transmitted the teaching, or who cared for the transmission of that teaching, even in a solitary, independent way. In the second chapter we have rather pairs. In the third chapter we are going to see this teaching in three dimensions, which will be echoed in the fourth chapter, where there will be a teaching in four dimensions. We will have the opportunity to see it. There you are. — “One last question: what is the difference between Mishnah and Gemara?” — The Mishnah is the study carried out by the rabbis until its complete redaction by Rabbi, in lashon ha-kodesh, the holy tongue; and this Mishnah is the complement to the interpretation of the Written Law. But this Mishnah gave rise to debates that opened on many fronts, and which have not ended to this day. For Gemara also means teaching — but Mishnah is in Hebrew, and Gemara is in Aramaic. Gemara also carries the sense of study, but with the connotation of gamar, of completion, of perfection. That is the Gemara. So there is the open debate on this oral interpretation, which makes our thought always a dynamic thought, a thought on the move, one that does not settle things definitively — except, for the time being, in matters of halakhah, of the conduct to be adopted on the spot — because each day brings its share of questions and of answers to be given. This holds for everything. And that is the Gemara, which debates all these problems.
— “Okay, thank you very much.” — Another question?
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