Pirkei Avot, Part 4 — The Three Pillars of Shimon HaTzaddik

This is an occasion to greet you all. I am continuing my reflection on Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers) through the words of Shimon HaTzaddik, who opens Pirkei Avot with the following statement: upon three pillars the world rests — “on the Torah, on the service, and on acts of kindness” (Avot 1:2), al haTorah, ve’al ha’avodah, ve’al gemilut chasadim. It sounds like a cooking recipe; well, it is a recipe — a recipe of the spirit. But why this sudden determination to found the world, at all costs, on these three pillars? We have three Patriarchs, Avraham, Yitzchak and Yaakov, and through them we have already learned that the practice of kindness was the hallmark of Avraham: openness to the other. Divine service, devotion to the extreme, was the hallmark of Yitzchak, since he agreed to be laid upon the altar — and for the sake of all humanity. And the Torah is that of Yaakov; truth belongs to Yaakov. And that is the principle of the three pillars on which the world is said to rest.

It is also expressed differently by Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel at the end of the first chapter of Avot: al sheloshah devarim ha’olam kayam — “by three things the world endures.” But there he says: al hadin ve’al ha’emet ve’al hashalom (Avot 1:18) — by justice, by truth and by the pursuit of peace. It is clothed differently; these are the same principles, give or take a few nuances. But there is one thing we must retain: the Hebrew language speaks of the decline of the generations — yeridat ha-dorot — with a verb of descent […]. As we move forward through history, there is in fact no improvement in the human condition in its spiritual dimension.

Of course, science has solved many problems; it has indeed opened new horizons for man. It has certainly raised man to various levels of life, of his own dignity. But we cannot say that man today is much more moral than he used to be, or much more spiritual than he used to be. Those who searched, who were in quest of spirituality — to this day they stand out, through their exemplary conduct, through their learning, through the point of reference they were for their society and beyond: the masters of thought, universal and specifically Jewish. I say “universal,” forgive me, because the principle of spirituality, at its root, comes from Judaism; it has spread somewhat, on different levels. And this we know: the colors of the rainbow come, or emanate, from a white light which through refraction produces seven colors — seven, paradoxically. And if one manages to recombine them scientifically, one can indeed obtain the color white again.

It was Kandinsky who said that black and white are the same colors, except that black is color at rest, and white is the various colors in motion. In other words, all the colors fused together at rest give black; all the colors in motion make white predominate — you can see it on a spinning disc: when you turn it quickly, white takes over. Well, the same holds on the level of thought; so it is with thought. Differences of thought are like these different colors — and not only at the level of humanity, but at the level of a people, at the level of a family — and we must learn to live with them. G-d Himself promised never again to bring a flood upon the world, in the image of the rainbow: that is, to accept that one may indeed approach, from the same light, different shades of color, different shades of perception.

And this is important: the image of the rainbow is given before the Torah is handed to the people. It is a commitment of the Creator toward His humanity, because everything He creates, He creates with the mark “good,” tov. This tov runs through the whole of creation and culminates, in man, in the signature tov me’od — “very good.” But take care: our sages said that if one reaches the excellence of “very good,” it means death. And therefore, once the creation of man has been completed […], “very good” opens the horizon of Shabbat — that is, of a re-creation of being. We are in a movement of perpetual re-creation, know this; and there are three stages in creation. We are not speaking of emanation, Atzilut, which is intuition in the strict sense; but what does fall within our reach is conception — Yetzirah — and its passage into the world of reality, Asiyah; and Beriah, creation out of nothingness, is situated in this possibility of bringing oneself back to life.

And the first movement of resurrection is teshuvah. Teshuvah: the return to another way of thinking, another conception of life. And this one indeed arises out of the nothingness we have discovered around us. When our accounts come to nothing but lies and failures all around us, then we set out in search of ourselves. And in the search for oneself there are three paths. Torah is the first search; the second is prayer. Through Torah we stand face to face with ourselves; we realize our own person. Through prayer we go beyond reason: prayer belongs to the heart, while Torah belongs to thought, to reason. And gemilut chasadim (acts of kindness) is our relationship with our fellow. And that one we cannot do without. We all need the other.

A life can only be lived by two. And our sages say that among the ten things created on the eve of Shabbat there is “tongs made with tongs” (Avot 5:6): a ring set into another ring. To do that you generally need two pincers; you have to put both hands to work — two pairs of tongs — to slide the first ring into the second. Well, this was done in a time that is neither that of creation nor that of Shabbat: bein hashemashot, at twilight. And what does that mean? That in truth, life with the other — and the other par excellence is the husband or the wife — this setting of one within the other was conceived in a time that is not the time of creation, of which it is said, “and there was evening and there was morning” — a well-defined time; nor is it the time of Shabbat, because that is the time of the infinite: on Shabbat there is neither evening nor morning, the seventh day is the time of eternity. And between the time of finitude and that of the infinite, there stands the couple. It is the interlocking of two beings moved by one spirit, by one prayer — for it is written, “For this let every hasid pray to You at a time of finding” (Tehillim 32:6): a devout person must pray in order to find. And what will he find? His soulmate, his partner.

And that is why “you shall love your fellow as yourself” (Vayikra 19:18) refers first of all to your partner in life — whether husband or wife. The last witness of the Great Assembly: of this Great Assembly we have not heard much; we do not have many names. And Shimon HaTzaddik was a kohen gadol who led the Jewish community in the Land of Israel for forty years, and it is told of him that during his lifetime many wonders surrounded his person. It was he who received Alexander of Macedon when he came to the Land of Israel to conquer it, intending to destroy the Temple: he went out dressed in the vestments of the High Priest to meet him, and the aggadah relates that he — I mean Alexander of Macedon — stepped down from his chariot to greet the High Priest, who was Shimon HaTzaddik.

And after Shimon HaTzaddik, of course, the Talmud tells us that all the miracles that had occurred in Shimon HaTzaddik’s time were no longer renewed. But how is Shimon HaTzaddik defined? He is defined as being mishe’yarei Knesset HaGedolah (Avot 1:2) — “of the remnant of the Great Assembly.” And here we shall have to take another direction to understand this mishnah, because many people believe that the Torah itself does not pass through this movement of re-creation and re-conception across the generations. That is not true. The essence of the Torah — and I told you this last week — has remained whole, well preserved; but its various dimensions have not been explored to the full, and in each generation the wheel turns again.

When the Talmud describes life in the era of Babylonia, or the life of the people of Israel in the Land of Israel, these are situations that seem outdated today. But in reality the structures are the same; it is the architecture that differs. And this is what is distinctive about the chacham, the sage: why do we say chacham adif mi-navi (Bava Batra 12a), that the sage is far more important than the prophet? Because he is the one who charts the road for his generation according to the problems he must confront. Indeed, if what has been handed down about Shimon HaTzaddik, this kohen gadol, is that he was the last witness of the Great Assembly, it is to tell us that from Shimon HaTzaddik onward, another chapter of the history of the Jewish people will unfold.

And this chapter of Jewish history passes from the Persian sphere, from Persian culture, to Greek culture. And the chachamim must contend with this movement of Greek philosophy, which seeks to disown the past and rethink everything through reason, without taking into account each person’s emotions, the inner perception of each thing, or a person’s obligations toward his fellow. So, given these successive upheavals — and it must be said that when such upheavals take place, there are internecine struggles within the Jewish people. There are different currents, for instance in the interpretation of the Torah: the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Zealots. There are also great schools vying for precedence in halachah (Jewish law).

We know this very well from Hillel and Shammai, who are most of the time at opposite ends from one another, and we must decide what the rule of conduct ought to be — but above all never underestimate or reject the other’s view, regarding it as extreme or excessive, without having truly examined it from several angles. That is the reason why the Mishnah, when it reports the opinions of the sages, gives an idea — a ruling and its opposite. And if there are five opinions, it will analyze them all and sift them, to see whether they stand up to the logic of the Torah as a whole. And our sages did not refrain from saying elu va’elu divrei Elokim chayim (Eruvin 13b) — “these and these are the words of the living G-d” — even though some forbid and others permit, some declare profane and others declare sacred: these and these, both are the words of the living G-d. It depends on the circumstances and situations in which a person finds himself, and it is perspective that dictates these positions.

These positions — the sages, the sages of every generation, have had to take upon themselves the task of setting the priorities. As you know, when the Temple was destroyed, there were people who vowed never again to drink wine, never again to sing, never again to eat meat; many communities sank into despair. We know this ourselves, we who only a few years ago lived among and alongside those who escaped death, who escaped the concentration camps; everyone was asking whether we were truly the people chosen by G-d, where G-d had been, and so on. These are questions that keep coming back. The sages sought to breathe new life into these people, who had been disappointed — deeply disappointed — by their own history; to bring about a resurrection.

Well then, they asked themselves what could once again reconstitute the Jewish people and give it back its cause. And you know, what Shimon HaTzaddik goes through, standing at the crossroads between Persian and Greek culture, is what Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai would later live through at the crossroads between the Hellenistic world and the Roman world. The project is always — the project is always — to seize the Jewish heritage and reject the Jew, reject its bearer, forget him. In truth, in truth, all of humanity kneels before the Jewish genius; only it first began by crucifying its bearer. In short, even Pharaoh, in the world in which he lived, would gladly have absorbed the Jewish womb through the Jewish women, the Jewish daughters, but rejected the father, keeping only the mother. Well, this phenomenon runs through our entire history. And therefore, when Shimon HaTzaddik says which are the three pillars that can save the people, he says: Torah, service. Service — what is it? Self-devotion. It is said that through Torah one is the prince. In prayer we are no longer the prince; we are the eved, the servant. Yet the servant has one privilege over the prince, over the minister: the minister himself must request an audience with the king; he cannot simply come, he cannot open the palace door at any moment he likes. But the servant, who stands at the door — he is under orders to go in and out, because he is in the king’s service.

Well, we must hold both of these prerogatives — that is, to be both sar (prince) and eved (servant): a dignity of being, but always the humility of serving; and it is through them that one can approach the third element, gemilut chasadim, the practice of kindness, openness to one’s fellow. But note that Shimon HaTzaddik — a High Priest — might perhaps have been expected to give priority to prayer, or to sacrifice, or to the Temple ritual. No — we said that the kohanim do not figure in the transmission of the Law; but it is indeed on them that this will rests, the will to form the chain of transmission and to be able to rebuild oneself after every trial, because what […] does, what […] says […]