Pirkei Avot, Part 3 — The Chain of Transmission

Kant said that there is no philosophy one can learn; one can only learn to philosophize. In truth, if we have no foundation, no reference point for thought in the absolute, everyone could have his own morality; everyone could remain within the subjectivity of his own thinking. Socrates, who supposedly took over from the prophets, said: “All I know is that I know nothing.” In so doing he cut himself off completely from the past. We, with Pirkei Avot — the name itself means that we have a tradition, we have fathers, we have foundations, and that we cannot sever our knowledge from revelation itself, from the act that presided over the creation of the world. For if we believe that this world has a purpose, it must also have a beginning; and a beginning presupposes a future. For our Sages, morality and Torah are inseparable — and yet morality is not the Torah: it is what lies beyond the Torah. For when the Torah says, in the name of the Eternal, “You shall keep My commandments and My statutes,” it adds: “You shall do what is right and good.” What is this good, and what is this right? The Ramban says: just as He commanded you laws that you must fulfill because they constitute your own patrimony, your own inheritance, your source of life —

so too you must keep laws that He did not tell you, that He did not dictate to you, but that you could understand by yourself. The Torah could not transmit all these laws; it left room for discovery by man, for revelation through man. That is the realm of morality, and that is why it is said: “Hear, my son, the instruction of your father” — that is the Torah; that is the Holy One, blessed be He, who dictated it — “and do not forsake the teaching of your mother”: that is the Assembly of Israel, which has a share of revelation in the Torah. And it is in this way that one’s Torah becomes entirely personal.

In short, the Torah is not an inheritance: “Prepare yourself to study Torah, for it is not an inheritance for you.” And yet the first verse we teach a child is “The Torah that Moshe commanded us,” which we translate as “is the inheritance of the congregation of Yaakov.” But that is a poor translation. It is the patrimony of the whole congregation of Yaakov, and every member of Yaakov, every member of the people of Israel, has a share in this heritage — the verse speaks of discovering this heritage. So the Ramban, when he explains what morality is, says that it is in fact something more than the Torah. And we observe that there are people who have studied the Torah, and even studied it in depth, yet in their conduct, unfortunately, the Torah has not passed through them, has not permeated them.

They did not seek to go beyond what it had transmitted to them. Now, says the Ramhal, the love of Torah should be compared to the love of a son for his father. If one is content to wait until the father finally expresses this or that wish so as to respond to it, one has not given this love its full dimension. But a true son, attentive to his father, has no need for his father to speak or to ask for anything: he goes ahead of his father’s wishes. That is the moral dimension; that is how the moral stature of any child is judged. And that is why our Sages introduced the chapter of morality, Avot, with the transmission running from Moshe down to the Great Assembly.

“Moshe received the Torah from Sinai and transmitted it to Yehoshua; Yehoshua to the Elders; the Elders to the Prophets; and the Prophets transmitted it to the Men of the Great Assembly.” We notice that the kohanim (priests) are not mentioned. Why? For the simple reason that the kohanim benefit from a hereditary line: from father to son, they are kohanim. Even an am ha-aretz, an unlearned man, is a kohen. It is a status that the law has conferred on him, but he cannot be the reference point of the Torah. And that is why the kohen — of whom it is said, “For the lips of the kohen shall guard knowledge” (Malachi 2:7), and who has charge of the ritual of the law, of knowledge of the law — nevertheless does not figure among those named in the transmission of the Torah.

We have: “Moshe received the Torah from Sinai and transmitted it to Yehoshua.” Of course, this mishnah ought to have been the opening of Tractate Berachot, the first mishnah of the first tractate of the Talmud. But no: our Sages insisted on placing it only in Tractate Avot, quite simply because it is here that the significant share of revelation belonging to each and every person, in the way he apprehends the Torah, is assessed. That is how it becomes his own Torah, for the Torah is not perceived in the same way by all, nor was it given in the same way to all. Our Sages said that the power of G-d’s word was that it answered to every level.

The sages, the elders, heard it at a higher level; there were other levels. There was the level of the young, the level of women, the level of ordinary people. And so it will be in times to come: “For the earth shall be full of the knowledge of G-d as the waters cover the sea.” The waters cover the sea — one would think it a flat surface, with the same depth everywhere. But no: there are, of course, hills and mountains on the floor of the seas, and each has its own level. Just as there are different ages for understanding a text, there are different levels in the perception of the soul, and everything depends on the way the soul receives. Kibbel: “Moshe received the Torah from Sinai” — we say that Moshe received the Torah from Sinai — “and transmitted it to Yehoshua.”

There are two verbs here, kibbel and masar. Kibbel, to receive: one receives only what one is able to receive. And since one receives only what one is able to receive, the text does not say that Moshe received the Torah from G-d. He received it — here it is translated “at Sinai” — he received it from Sinai. Sinai was the privileged place of the transmission of the Torah, the meeting place between the divine and the human. There are ten descents of G-d in Scripture, and one of these descents, in which G-d places Himself at the level of the human, is His manifestation on Mount Sinai. Why? Because the very principle of the Torah, as we have already said, espouses the physical laws — that is, it espouses the reality of this world.

It is not designed to transport us into higher spheres and tear us away from this world. On the contrary, the laws that are given bind us all the more to the governance of this world in its own reality. Moshe received only that; he could not receive more. The Torah, in its cosmic dimension, is immensely vast — beyond the reach of any living being, whether here on earth or in the celestial sphere. That we cannot truly apprehend; what Moshe received were laws that allow man to take charge of himself here below and to secure for creation its purpose. We come back to the idea of reshit and acharit, the beginning and the final purpose; we said that there were several final purposes. The transmission of the law, on the other hand, can be made whole: from Moshe to Yehoshua, from Yehoshua to the Elders, from the Elders to the Prophets. You will notice that the Prophets come in fourth position, before the Great Assembly, which comes in fifth. And of course there were links between them all — between Yehoshua, the Elders, the Prophets and the Men of the Great Assembly — but the text does not cite them. It is true that in Avot de-Rabbi Natan, for example, there are the shoftim, the judges; here they do not appear — we shall have to explain that later. But let us first dwell on this notion of transmission, which our Sages drew from the verse “The words of the wise are like goads.”

The words of our Sages are ka-dorvonot, like goads — like stimulants. But our Sages did not render it as stimulants. They rendered it as a ball that girls toss to one another in play. Why girls? As we said earlier: “Do not forsake the teaching of your mother.” Morality has a more feminine basis, or essence; it is more refined — that is understandable. Now the passing of a ball is whole: one does not let it drop; one must catch it and pass it from hand to hand. And that is how Yehoshua transmitted. But why Yehoshua? You know what was said about Yehoshua — what did he do? He arranged the benches, he spread mats on the floor for the Elders, he served Moshe; he was wholly devoted to him.

And yet it was taught that Moshe’s face is like the sun, and Yehoshua’s like the moon, which receives its light from the sun. And our Sages cry out: “Alas for that shame! Alas for that disgrace!” Whose shame and disgrace? Yehoshua’s? The Rashbam says no: the shame and the disgrace are not Yehoshua’s; they are the Elders’. Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin illustrated this with the parable of a rich man who arrived in a village whose population was poor, and proposed that they join him in a business venture […]. Only one of them said to himself, “I’ll stake everything,” whereas the others were full of doubts. As it happened, that man came back six months later with a great deal of money.

His fellow villagers could not look him straight in the eye. They were embarrassed: “Alas for that shame, alas for that disgrace.” So they were embarrassed — why? They were not embarrassed before the rich man. The rich man had enjoyed a divine gift: Heaven had helped him, favored him and given him his chance. But the others — from the moment they had been offered the chance to join him, they could indeed have taken the risk of investing what they had with him. They did not; they missed the opportunity. So they were embarrassed not before the rich man, but before the poor man, their brother, who had dared to walk with that rich man and had gained equal wealth. And so it was said: Yehoshua did not have the good fortune of Moshe, who became, in a sense, the intimate of G-d.

He became the intimate of G-d, of course, because he had certain assets — we know them, and we will not go over them today — but it is a fact that Moshe had reached a point of, let us say, reduction of his material needs, and that is why he alone could ascend Mount Sinai and receive the Torah. He probably had innate aptitudes from birth. Those, Yehoshua did not have. But Yehoshua attached himself to his master. He recognized him, he followed him, he was his servant. And because he was his servant, he tried to put into practice what his master said through his stammer — for, as you know, Moshe stammered. And why did he stammer?

Because his thought was so elevated that he could not express it in words and transmit it to the Elders. Only Yehoshua, who lived in intimacy with him, could truly understand what his master was thinking and how he would carry out his teaching and transmit it to the Elders […] for the learning of the Torah of Moshe; and so the Torah of Moshe is transmitted to the zekenim, the Elders. Zekenim, zaken: by definition, the zaken is one who has acquired wisdom. Acquired it how? There is a way of acquiring wisdom through observing this world, through the trials of life, through all one’s lived experience within society; and little by little, through these experiences, one manages to detach oneself from the body of experience and reach the idea.

That is the zaken; that is the wisdom of the zaken — precisely because they were able to bring this back to their own experience. They had the capacity to understand what Yehoshua transmitted to them. And they, in turn, could educate prophets. What is a prophet? The prophet is the opposite of the Elders. The prophet is one who builds on the lived experience of the Elders in order to project it onto the purpose, onto what is to come, onto the end, and at that moment to fix the project of the future. That is why the prophets appear only at the fourth level: because after the prophets it becomes possible to transmit the law to the Men of the Great Assembly, who will bring it to completion. You know that these Men of the Great Assembly began with Ezra, who, returning from the Babylonian exile to the Land of Israel, gathered around him the last prophets and the Elders.

Some say that this Great Assembly numbered eighty-five people, others a hundred and twenty, and it was they who gave the Torah the present structure we know — for Ezra was the first of the soferim (scribes); they are the ones who established the final structure of the Torah and of prayer. So much so that it is said that Ezra could indeed have received the Torah, but Moshe preceded him. So we have here, in sum, an explanation of the fact that Moshe received the Torah at Sinai, or from Sinai: no one can claim the Holy One, blessed be He, for himself and say, “I am the sole recipient of G-d’s revelation.” The Torah could have been revealed to Ezra as much as to Moshe.

Sinai was only the meeting point of the divine and the human, and that is why we say: “Had He brought us before Mount Sinai and not given us the Torah, it would have sufficed us.” Had He brought us near Mount Sinai without giving us the Torah, it would have sufficed us — but without giving us the Torah, in what way would it have sufficed? No: the elevation of being that we attained at the foot of Mount Sinai was sufficient in itself for us to go on, in our turn, to discover the Torah. Only it would have taken us a very long time: we would have had to pass through the stage of Yehoshua, of the Elders, of the Prophets, of the Great Assembly, until reaching us.

What the revelation at Mount Sinai did was to burn through many stages for us. And in sum, if our Sages placed this mishnah as the introduction to Pirkei Avot, it is because Pirkei Avot is a source of personal meditation for man — but through the Torah — and each person discovers an aspect that had been ignored until then. Moreover, further on we will again find the verb kibbel: “Antigonos of Socho received from Shimon the Righteous” — they received. Now we know that kabbalah, the act of receiving, is less than mesirah, transmission: transmission bears on the whole, on the totality, whereas reception is partial. Indeed, there was a loss of spirituality throughout these generations, and particularly during the Babylonian exile — so much so that Ezra had to commit people, from then on, to function according to three principles; and you may be surprised to hear me say that one of these three principles is bound up with the Torah itself.

“Be deliberate in judgment, raise up many disciples, and make a fence around the Torah” — a limit, a barrier. We are not told what each one said — what Yehoshua said, what the Prophets said. But for the Great Assembly it matters that we be told: yes, this Torah had to be rediscovered, and for that these three basic principles were essential. Hevu metunim ba-din is translated “be deliberate in judgment,” and it is generally understood as addressed to judges, to teachers; ve-ha’amidu talmidim harbeh and the principle bound up with the Torah, likewise, to rabbis. Yet if we have started from the abstract idea as Moshe received it at Sinai, in its purity, and have tried, as best we could, through a movement of adherence, to give it a first reality and to think of transmitting it to people capable, through their lived experience, of translating it into ideas and of glimpsing the project of the future as the prophets did — then we can count ourselves among the Men of the Great Assembly.

Provided, however, that we do not exclude, that we do not compare. It is true that analogy is one of the thirteen paths for understanding the Torah — but in law, not between people, not when we judge persons. Indeed, within hevu metunim ba-din our Sages include the rule that one must not compare one person’s case with another’s. It may be the same case, but we must not rely on that in order to decide, because every case, every person, is different from the next. Every perception is different — and this therefore concerns the relationship between a man and his fellow. […] There is a difference between two ways of reading ve-ha’amidu talmidim harbeh.

In common Hebrew, ve-ha’amidu talmidim harbeh means “raise up many disciples.” Some have deduced from it: raise up only disciples who are worth the effort […] — practice elitism in the training of disciples. That is somewhat what Rabban Gamliel did, and our Sages lost no time in deposing him for a while, because before Rabban Gamliel the school was open to everyone. For he had decreed that a student whose inside does not reflect his outside, or whose outside does not reflect his inside, may not enter the beit midrash, the house of study. So when they deposed him, they abolished this restriction of Rabban Gamliel, and he himself could not sleep when he saw that the house of study, the schools, were full of students.

He said: “Heaven forbid — have I deprived all these students of Torah?” And he was told in a dream that the measure he had taken at the opportune moment had been worthwhile. Why? Because they were witnessing the birth of separatist movements within the Jewish people. This was already the birth of the different currents — the Sadducees, the Pharisees, the Zealots — and Rabban Gamliel was deeply worried about what would become of these teachings of Torah if they were exploited and distorted by other people. That is why he said that the students must at all costs be worthy of this teaching. This, however, is a directive that was not upheld, and it was said that the Torah may indeed bring about the return of many people and lead them to right conduct on the path they should follow.

But I would like to come back here to an idea we have already mentioned, that of Rabbi Chanina, who said: “I have learned much from my teachers, more from my companions, and from my students more than from all of them.” So if you truly want to fulfill yourselves, try to raise up many disciples. Do not keep the teaching to yourselves, and do not keep your thought as though it were a kind of private property. Rub it against other minds; that is how you will form yourselves and fulfill yourselves. Of course the Torah did not come to make man’s life impossible; on the contrary, it came to enrich man’s life. And so, in truth, seek the ways to open the Torah further to the pleasure of life, to the joy of life. But a fence around the Torah: in the relationship between man and G-d there must be a limit, a barrier; one must not […].

“Would that they had forsaken Me and kept My Torah” — for if, in the end, they invest themselves in the study of Torah as they should, imposing on themselves the limits that go with the Torah, they will rediscover Me. So in sum, what our Sages did — the Anshei Knesset HaGedolah, the Men of the Great Assembly — was to say to future generations: take care; you will discover your own share in the Torah by yourselves, but take with you these three basic principles: hevu metunim ba-din, between a man and his fellow; ve-ha’amidu talmidim harbeh, for yourselves, for your own fulfillment; and va’asu seyag la-Torah, a fence around the Torah, between you and the Holy One, blessed be He.

So we have said, concerning Pirkei Avot: “Whoever wishes to be a chassid” — whoever wishes to fulfill himself as a chassid, a hero of G-d — must keep the laws that govern the relations between a man and his fellow; between a man and himself, milei de-Avot, the words of the Fathers; or else milei di-berachot, the matters of blessings. In reality, all three are needed together; they converge, they join one another — and that is what we will discover later through the study of the text. There — I believe I have finished for this first [mishnah]; there are still other lessons to draw from it, but I must give you the floor. I have answered your question. — Rav Benizri, it’s Diana. Hello.

Hello. True to my good habit, I arrived a little late, so I apologize. — Yes. — I just have a question that I put to the group, and I would like to hear your view on it: this antinomy — in my view, a contradiction — between raising up many disciples and, at the same time, building a fence around the Torah. I understand the principles in light of the last sentence, but at the same time I find them a little contradictory. Within the question there is also a question that is more political — you know me a little; at least I hope you haven’t completely forgotten me — about study behind closed doors, as in the yeshivot and so on. So I can’t manage to reconcile these three principles: an openness to the other, or to the student, or the richness that study brings — and at the same time, raising up many disciples also means the people, not only those who study. You spoke of Rabbi Akiva.

I ask myself all these questions because there are obviously always many explanations for every sentence of the Torah, of Pirkei Avot and the rest, and I would like to have your opinion on this — unless it has already been answered earlier, in which case, forgive me. — What I teach through the text is first of all what it tells us, what was done; I am not here to judge. […] You know, I remember once, in a class, I went along with a student’s line of reasoning in order to lead him into an impasse, and he said to me: “Mr. Benizri, you are a demagogue.” Well, I took note. But in reality I was only conveying the spirit of the law, which people tend to judge within narrow confines.

And that, in sum, is an evasion, a flight. The text here, ve-ha’amidu talmidim harbeh, compels you to go beyond yourself, because if you study Torah only for yourself, it will be of no use to you. You will have distorted it. The Torah was given to a people. It is said that there were six hundred thousand souls at Sinai, and that each soul took hold of a letter. Now you know that if a single letter is missing in the writing of a Torah scroll, the Sefer Torah is invalid. Consequently, one must seek that letter among the different components of our people. And as for the fence around the Torah: the barrier to set around the Torah is not to try to assimilate it to other cultures, other wisdoms, other sciences. It is different — fundamentally different. And that is a second idea of va’asu seyag la-Torah. I have translated morashah for you as “patrimony”: the word appears twice in the Torah. “The Torah that Moshe commanded us, a morashah” — that is the Torah — and the Land of Israel: the same word serves for the Land of Israel and for the Torah. That is what led Rav Kook to say: the Torah, the Land of Israel and the people of Israel are a single unity. There you are, Diana.

Thank you. — Briefly, another question. — Well, I will have the pleasure of seeing you again next week. — Thank you so much. — Thank you very much. […] — Are you still there? — Yes. — Can you hear me? — Of course I can hear you. — May I ask my question, Rav? You guessed it, Mr. Benizri. It’s a little question that makes me laugh; I don’t know why I’m asking it. It seems that Brussels sprouts are forbidden to eat. It isn’t easy to get rid of those little bugs. So I wonder whether that is really the case for eating Brussels sprouts.

A somewhat more serious question. I heard something from a friend at the synagogue. He gave a class in which he said that in the past, on the basis of a gezerah shavah or a kal va-chomer (an a fortiori argument), one could establish a halachah, whereas now it is no longer possible. — That is a question you should have asked your teacher. — You are my teacher. — No, but I am not a doctor. Because today… You see, this is a situation where someone said something. The Torah is brought up to date — to the flavor of the day. Careful: when I say “the flavor of the day,” I do not mean an adaptation, but another way of seeing things, and the Sages who bend over the Torah for the problems of our time… Because, as I have told you, every era has its own structure of life and thought, you know, and so does every region of the world. And that is the genius of the Elders and the Prophets: finding the right words for the formula, seeing what the people are suffering from, what new problems stand in its way — and, on the basis of halachah and, to take up your own terms, of analogies, comparisons and a fortiori reasoning — there are thirteen modes of reading the Torah, like the thirteen attributes of G-d.

Rachum ve-chanun, merciful and gracious: these thirteen attributes of mercy, of justice, of truth join together with the thirteen modes of interpreting the Torah in order to resolve, to face, the new problems that arise in your generation — and some of them are urgent. That is what makes our Torah, day after day, take on a new appearance: chiddushim, new garments. But you know — I believe I have told you this before — two lines that cross: the narrower the angle of the past, the narrower the angle of the future; if the angle of the past is much wider, the vision of the future is wider too. So let us reason in this way: let us try to open the lens of the Torah so that we can have a far more generous view of the future.

Thank you for these wonderful words, Mr. Benizri. — Yes. — Thank you so much; it’s truly magnificent. — All well? Then I’ll leave you. — Thank you very much. Shavua tov to you. — Shavua tov, and see you next week. — Shavua tov, Mr. Benizri. Thank you. — Shavua tov, Mr. Benizri. — Thank you. — Shavua tov. — Thank you, Mr. Benizri. — Shavua tov, Mr. Benizri. — Mr. Benkowski. — Thank you. — Samuel. Good evening. — Shavua tov, Mr. Benizri. — Shavua tov, everyone. — Thank you. — Thank you for so much wisdom and generosity. — Shavua tov, Mr. Benizri. Speaking as a former student of the Maimonide school, it moved me deeply to see you again after so many years. I don’t even dare say the number, because it is very high indeed, but it is a pleasure to hear you, and I hope to hear you again next week.

My name is Danielle Finkel — you knew me as Dany Finkel. I live in Israel, and what is quite moving is that at this gathering tonight there are several of us, classmates who found one another again not so long ago, and suddenly to find ourselves listening to your class brings back so many memories; it is very moving. — The feeling is mutual. Thank you very much. […] — Go ahead. — From Jerusalem. — Erev tov, erev tov, good evening. — We’re from Réunion. — Luc, how are you, Luc? — Very, very well.

How is Bricelle? — Very well. And you, are you well? — Very well. — How is Bricelle? — Fine, fine, Samuel. Listen, I have to leave you, because I need to close the session and then put the video up on YouTube. Be-hatzlachah, and all the best. — Thank you, Luc. — Thank you, everyone. Goodbye. — It’s a pleasure to see you too.