Pirkei Avot, Part One: An Introduction to the Tractate

Good evening, everyone. Tonight we begin the series — the series of lectures on Pirkei Avot. But before moving on to the first mishnah, which has already been presented, and then the second and the third, I would like to offer a short introduction. It is worthwhile, because generally speaking there is no mussar (moral instruction) in the Torah. We find it only in the book of Devarim, which is the book of Moshe, Moshe’s spiritual testament, and which the Holy One, blessed be He, ratified as pure Torah, just as much as the other books. But the term mussar is somewhat foreign to the thought of the Torah. It is difficult to moralize. The Torah is not a catechism that one teaches. For each person, the lived experience of morality is personal. The Rambam asks whether it is possible to teach morality in schools. That still exists today, perhaps, in Belgium — but in secular schools, in secular education. In any case, that class no longer exists, for various reasons, because indeed not everyone can embrace the same morality. And yet in Bava Kamma we find a saying of our Sages: “Hai man de-ba’ei lemehevei chasida — one who wishes to be pious,” one who wishes to be a hasid, “lekayem milei de-nezikin — let him fulfill the matters of damages”: he need simply apply the laws concerning damages. The second, Rava, says no: “milei de-Avot — the matters of the Fathers”: one must apply the principles of the Fathers. Mussar is indeed a science that has been handed down from the Fathers of old, and we ought to try to preserve it.

One must apply all the laws relating to […] of existence. So there are three opinions. The first — […] — is morality. — Excuse me, Mr. Benizri, there is a problem: someone has left their microphone on, and it is rather disruptive. Everyone should switch to mute. Click at the bottom left and set it to mute — and please do not turn the microphone back on. There are three opinions. The first is the one that situates morality in the relationship between a person and his fellow. That is milei de-nezikin. In reality, we are confronted in society with the other, and everything depends on what one does to the other, for the other too is […]. It is of this that we are told, “lo tishtachaveh le-el acher” — do not bow down to another deity: you already have Someone else, so remain faithful to that One. And inasmuch as each person carries within himself a divine breath, as I said last time, then the other with whom I communicate is also a bearer of the image of G-d, and in this respect there is no difference between a Jew and a non-Jew.

Let us not forget Rabbi Akiva’s definition of the Torah: “Ve-ahavta le-re’acha kamocha,” you shall love your fellow as yourself — which is very difficult. “Zeh klal gadol ba-Torah,” this is a great principle of the Torah: it is the very foundation of the Torah. But be careful: when Hillel takes it up in his own name… The love one bears one’s fellow — and indeed, this is no different — there are three loves in the Torah. The first: you shall love the Eternal your G-d. The second: you shall love the stranger. The third: [you shall love your fellow]. Now, for the love of G-d and for the love of the stranger, the text says et, and et means “with”: it is a possible love. Whereas for one’s fellow, it does not say et but le-, because there it is difficult to be “with.”

He is not — he is utterly different from me, he is a projection of being, and consequently I must address him as though through a screen. This is not the case with “ve-ahavta et Hashem Elokecha,” you shall love the Eternal your G-d: it is G-d who dwells within you. And you love [the stranger], for “you were strangers in the land of Egypt” — you knew him in the land of Egypt, because you were a stranger. The stranger dwells within you. Your fellow does not dwell within you. Know this: he is different. And this is interesting in the way the Rambam renders it in his introduction to the Shemonah Perakim, where he also mentions Pirkei Avot — for the Rambam wrote, he introduced the book of Pirkei Avot with a series of meditations, counsels and reflections on human conduct, on how to remedy its frustrations and its ills.

And he justifies this. He says: what I am about to explain is first and foremost founded on the midrashim of our Sages, on their sayings — that is his first source. But he has a second source. The second source, he says, is the philosophers, the thinkers, even of other religions. We know very well that he developed ideas, or rendered ideas, similar to those of Aristotle. He sometimes even quoted Arab philosophers. And for that reason he did not want Pirkei Avot to be, so to speak, a possession acquired by the Jewish people alone — even though this people is a sampling of all the other cultures — but held that everyone can carry within himself the principle of morality. And if we say that everyone can carry within himself the principle of morality, could morality then be secular? It is possible, if one regards it in that way. Except that, as you well know, for Dostoevsky, if G-d does not exist, everything is permitted; there is no morality.

Because morality would then be entirely personal. Indeed, everyone could have his own morality. But on the other hand, Maimonides speaks of the hasid, of being a hasid. You know the difference between a tzaddik and a hasid. The tzaddik was Noach. Noach is a tzaddik. The righteous man walks with G-d, he holds His hand. Step by step: he is not to stay behind, nor to go ahead of G-d — that is the tzaddik. And we know what became of this: Noach was not chosen as the father of the Jewish tradition. For us, the first blessing, which indeed seals our homage to the Eternal, is Magen Avraham — You are the Shield of Avraham; with you the blessing is sealed. Why? Because Avraham was the man of hesed, the one who shared goodness and generosity of heart with everyone.

The tzaddik is the man of reason. The hasid walks before G-d; he is G-d’s herald. He may sometimes stumble, but he is the herald of a revealed word. And it is in this sense that hasidut is like the ultimate degree before the holy spirit. Before attaining the holy breath, ruach ha-kodesh, one first passes through hasidut. Whoever lacks this quality of sharing with others cannot claim access to the secret of the Absolute. Now, we do not understand everything. Many things in life escape us. Throughout our lives we walk in search of the unknown. And each time we remove a doubt, we are reassured, we are at peace with ourselves, and we rejoice in that state of things.

So Maimonides says that, from a pedagogical point of view, he does not even wish to cite the sources of his reflections and meditations — whether he takes them from the Midrash or from other philosophers — quite simply so that no one will pass judgment, and so that no one will exclude, will dismiss this or that idea. For there are elements of revelation that every human being holds. Whatever he may be, one must look, in a sense, at what his lived experience is, how one can learn something from it and integrate it into what we have studied. That is what we have done, and that is what the Jewish people has done throughout its history.

And it is thanks to the insights of other peoples that we have been able, little by little, to develop the currents of our Torah, of our thought. And we continue to do so. Let us not forget that we share, that we are family, that we are bound together with Esav and Yishmael, and that we cannot answer hatred with hatred, or exclusion with exclusion. That is the principle of the Fathers, and that is why the Rambam justifies the place of the tractate of Avot — the tractate of principles, the chapter of the Fathers — at the end of Nezikin, that is, of the order of damages. But as for Nezikin, we began by saying: whoever wishes to be a hasid must first take care not to harm others.

As Hillel said: “De-alach sani le-chavrach la ta’avid — what is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow.” That is how he rendered “you shall love your fellow as yourself.” But can morality be separated from the source of revelation, that is, from the Torah? Can morality be, in quotation marks, non-religious? Must it not remain attached by its umbilical cord to the Torah, to revelation? In the introduction to the Shemonah Perakim, the Rambam, in treating the tractate of Avot, says that morality has a universal side and belongs to every human being. Then the Rambam, in his introduction to the Mishnah, justifies the fact that Masechet Avot was placed as the penultimate tractate of the great order of Nezikin, of damages. For you know that there are six great orders in the Mishnah, in the Oral Law, summed up by the mnemonic Zeman Nakat: Zera’im, concerning agriculture and blessings; Mo’ed, concerning the festivals and the Shabbatot; Nezikin, damages; Nashim, the chapter of the feminine; and then Kodashim and Taharot.

Kodashim is the order of the sacrifices and of the Mishkan, and Taharot is the laws of purity and impurity. So at the end of Nezikin stands the tractate of Avot. Why? Quite simply because, says the Rambam — and I render it in my own way — we are confronted with the other. We are confronted with the other, we are in competition with him, we are in a race. I would not say that the other is defined as an enemy, but as a rival, and because of him I go through various crises on several levels. But through these crises I must manage to find a balance, to find points of reference. So after the three tractates dealing with the damages one may cause one’s fellow, and with the situations of fall and decline in which one may find oneself, comes Sanhedrin. The Sanhedrin is the legislative body composed of seventy-one members — the elect, the scholars of the Torah — who deal, through their courts, with all the problems of the individual and of the whole. And of course this tractate of Sanhedrin is followed by the law verifying the credibility of witnesses, and even by the knowledge of the tractate Avodah Zarah. That tractate is found in Nezikin. You will say to me: a tractate on idolatry within Nezikin — what is it doing there? But in reality, do you know what can be treated as idolatry? What is idolatry? It is everything that is foreign to my sources, everything that poisons my existence. And everything that poisons my existence — well, I must know it, I must be acquainted with it, in order to keep away from it. Sometimes people want to close all the books, and Rabbi Meir was reproached for having carried, hidden in his bosom like a wallet, many books of general culture and general philosophy. Yet the judge must be aware of avodah zarah, of the practices and cults of other nations and other cultures, in order to know how to guard against them, how to be wary of them. And finally, after this, comes the tractate of Avot. The tractate of Avot is faithfulness to the principles of the Fathers, which is indeed the opposite side of avodah zarah. And of course we are not — we are not angels. As […] says, we are angels at moments. It is very rare, it is intermittent, but we manage to live this angelic state at moments. But we have our faults, our stumblings, and it happens to us. And one must recover oneself — that is what man is: he learns through his mistakes. Let us not forget that the sin of Adam was programmed into the history of humanity. We begin history only with the sin of Adam; without the sin of Adam, there would have been no history.

That is how it is, and that is why the end of this order of Nezikin is Horayot, which deals with the errors the judge may make, the errors the kohen may make, and how one comes back from them. So here the Rambam has a position altogether different from the one he set out in the Shemonah Perakim, saying that Masechet Avot is reserved for one who has already absorbed the teachings of the Torah. He is a scholar, but he may be lacking in morality, and the Torah calls him to order. It tells him: take care, you who judge others — know that if some ordinary person commits an error, he harms only himself. But you, if you have reached a level of learning and you commit an error, know that you harm others as well, because everyone listens to you, everyone watches you and everyone judges you. So Masechet Avot comes to crown the judge, the shofet, and for that reason Masechet Avot is reserved for an elite more than for the common run of mortals. In fact, many commentators have tried to find a sort of modus vivendi between the Rambam’s first position and his second. But in reality the Rambam is divided. There is indeed a morality that is difficult to teach, difficult to transmit; everyone can have his own morality, everyone can teach it; it may have a secular side — but it must lead to ruach ha-kodesh.

It must lead to the recognition of something transcendent. Whereas in the introduction to the Mishnah he says: take care, it must not be detached from the whole of the Torah; it is the continuation of the whole of the Torah. And that is why it is said, “derech eretz kadmah la-Torah” — right conduct preceded the Torah. If one wants a bond between parents and children, between children and parents, this transmission must be established — the faithfulness of this transmission through lived experience, the lived experience of the Torah, which is indeed not given to everyone, because no one can claim to practice the Torah in its entirety. After all, there are laws concerning the land, but not everyone owns land.

There are laws concerning the kohanim, but not everyone is a kohen. Consequently, the Torah as a whole — there is, if you like, a structure common to the whole community, but it is the community as a whole that practices the Torah in its totality. And that is why, as the Rav used to tell you, Torat Yisrael, Eretz Yisrael, Am Yisrael — the Torah of Israel, the people of Israel and the Land of Israel, the land on which the Torah’s commandments are fulfilled. There is no Torah like that of Eretz Yisrael, the Torah one lives in Eretz Yisrael, because even the seasons, even the times, the mo’adim (festivals), follow the seasons of Eretz Yisrael and not those of Australia. So this Pirkei Avot, this tractate of the Fathers, should be situated within the chain of generations, from Moshe down to our own day — and it is not finished.

That is why the Oral Law preceded the Written Law. The Written Law is fixed — […] people went so far as to count the number of its letters — but the Oral Law is always on the move. We are always in the process of developing aspects of the Torah. So here the Rambam says that Pirkei Avot stand within the stream of transmission from generation to generation. The Tannaim are but one link in this chain of transmission, and we continue it. And the aim is always to turn the heart of the fathers to that of the children, and the heart of the children to the fathers. This is something the Rambam does not say in his introduction to the Shemonah Perakim, because he would like, in a sense, what constitutes our heritage, our treasure, to be jealously guarded by the elite of the nation — but without thereby condemning us, you understand, to exclude other peoples, to exclude the other, or to refuse the light that the other also holds, just as we do, though to a different degree.

And that is the introduction I wanted to give to Avot, because what we are going to study appears, on the surface, disjointed. But at bottom everything is attached to a single source and embraces many domains. Here the first mishnah has been presented to you, “Moshe kibel Torah mi-Sinai” — Moshe received the Torah from Sinai. But generally we are accustomed to introduce the reading of Pirkei Avot with “Kol Yisrael yesh lahem chelek la-olam ha-ba, she-ne’emar: ve-amech kulam tzaddikim, le-olam yirshu aretz, netzer mata’ai ma’aseh yadai le-hitpa’er” — all Israel has a share in the World to Come, as it is said: “and your people are all righteous; they shall inherit the land forever, the branch of My planting, the work of My hands, in which to take glory.” I will have the opportunity to deal with this aspect in the next lecture. We are on the eve of Yom HaZikaron (Israel’s Memorial Day), and I would not want to prolong the lecture unduly; I want to leave room for questions, in case some point has remained unclear or has not been understood.

And the floor is yours. — Good evening, Mr. Benizri, this is Éric Skibowski. I do have a few questions. A few years ago you reminded me that you remembered me as a rebellious student, so I shall try to keep to that way of seeing things. — No surprise there, Éric! — You quoted Dostoevsky, saying that if G-d does not exist, everything is permitted, there is no morality. I find that hard to accept, since states function and they are not especially religious. There is nevertheless a state morality, [without] there being any religion. — Yes, but it is a morality of interest. That is the problem. Morality between states remains governed by interests, and if in the end you do not cooperate with me, relations are broken off. So I am not […] — because morality goes out toward the other; it knows neither kin’ah, jealousy, nor the pursuit of recognition at any price. One goes on loving one’s fellow even when one is, in some way, excluded by him. — Then you are opening, precisely, the second reflection I had. You speak of the stranger in our midst. As soon as we place religion, with the morality of religion, within the state, a moral problem does indeed arise — and we see this very clearly in Israel: there is a very great problem with accepting the other, the stranger, and unfortunately some religious parties already take this stance of rejecting the stranger who is in our midst. So there is a very serious problem in the relationship between religion and the state? — Yes. We are still on a moving train.

We have not reached our station, and I do not know whether we will reach it. Because the problem you raise also exists even within the religious world. There are currents that reject one another. So there is no point in transposing it only onto the hiloni (secular) world and the dati (religious) world. I told you the other time — or I believe I did not quote it; I alluded to it without quoting it — that the Baal Shem Tov addressed the Holy One, blessed be He, saying to Him: I beg You, save Your people. But if You do not wish to save them, if You judge that they do not deserve it, then I beseech You, save the other nations — because with the deliverance You bring to the other nations, we ourselves will come to know our own liberation.

So we are bound to others. With Yishmael we belong to two different wombs; with Esav we are in the same womb, we issue from the same womb. But take note: it is concerning Yishmael that it was said, “ki shama Elokim el kol ha-na’ar,” for G-d has heard the voice of the lad — the Eternal heard the voice of this youth who was weeping. Consequently, even the rejection of Yishmael is unacceptable. Now, that is what we believe. How we translate it into reality seems far off to us — we are far from it — and it is true that the reach of the Torah’s thought remains somewhat on the margins of what we are. But I am only teaching the thought of our Sages.

And this thought of our Sages is universalist, and that is precisely what is at stake. For — you know — in the alef-bet there is the letter alef and the letter bet. The letter bet is the letter of duality. The Torah begins with this letter of duality, Bereshit, and bet is bayit, the house. Each person shuts himself up in his house, each cloisters himself at home, and each wants to create his own heaven and his own earth. He forgets that the bayit must remain open; it is not closed. The only letter that is closed, and that in Judaism is the sign of messianism — which is why Mashiach begins with a mem — is the letter of universality: the circle is closed.

When parents recognize themselves in their children, and children in their parents, in their sources, then unity is regained. So we go from duality to unity, from duality to unity: this is how we move forward in life, and this is how we resolve many problems. But to reach the moment of “Hashem echad u-shemo echad” — the Eternal is One and His Name is One — when the essence is no longer covered by the garment… for the garment is an artifice of the essence, is it not? Man, at the origin, when he was created, was not created with a garment. And the garment is, if you like, the mask of the essence, or the screen set before this light, before this primordial light. We ought to be able to rid ourselves of it.

Yet even today, you see, we are very much conditioned by the garment. And garment is beged — beged, from the verb bagad, to betray. It is an element of betrayal of our being, of what we are, an element of hypocrisy. The levush, the clothing, should espouse man’s middot, man’s attributes. Now, the one garment of the kohen that was thirty-two cubits long and wound around his chest, at the level of his heart of course, was the avnet, the belt. […] It is a play on words, but it is to say that this belt, which he imposes on himself so as not, in a sense, to give free rein to every temptation, to all his inclinations, to everything he would like to accomplish in life, but without measure, without bearing, without restraint — that is the garment.

And this garment […] — the word is iver, blind — it has blinded, it has hidden this light. The garment has hidden being. We are the bearers of these garments. Any other question? — If no one else has one, I still have one, Mr. Bourdis-Ressigny, if you will give me the floor. You say that the Written Law is fixed. Is that logical in a world in constant evolution? — Yes, but the Oral Law is not. The Oral Law preceded the Written Law. And the Oral Law is the one we received from our fathers. Avraham had no written law; Yitzchak did not either, nor did Yaakov. The Written Law was given to a people; it was not given to the elect. The elect had no need of a written law.

Do you know the root of the word Torah? What is the root of Torah? The root of Torah is harah — harah, to conceive. Of a woman carrying a child, one says that she is harah. Well, the Torah is the reflexive form of the verb harah, because the Torah is in perpetual gestation. But the essence is there: it is the seed that needs to grow, to take shape, and to give birth to further aspects. It is fixed only for a people that would be tempted, each time, to mold it to its own way of reading, to freeze it at its own way of interpreting. […] Yes? — Thank you very much. — There we are, I will leave you now. This was a moment of pleasure and of joy, and until next week: we will begin “Moshe kibel Torah.”

— Thank you very much, Mr. Benizri. Thank you very much, Mr. Benizri. Thank you so much — kol ha-kavod, Mr. Benizri. Just to remind you that we will meet on Sunday at 8 p.m. Israel time, 7 p.m. European time. Thank you very much. — Thank you for organizing this. Thank you very much. Goodbye. — Goodbye. Goodbye, sir. Goodbye… Thank you, Mr. Benizri. I thank you. Thank you, Mr. Benizri. Goodbye. — It is… We are fortunate to live in a marvelous era, marvelous. It is true. […] One must be able to realize it, unfortunately. […] Thank you, goodbye. — Goodbye. Thank you. Goodbye, everyone. Goodbye… I did not know you were here. Hi, Manu. Are you well? Thank you, Manu. Thank you — this is marvelous.

Thank you, truly. Until Sunday. Until Sunday. Very good, in any case. Thank you, Manu. Thank you so much. […] Goodbye, Chantal. Goodbye, Chantal.