Moses received Torah from Sinai and passed it on to Joshua; Joshua to the elders, the elders to the prophets and the prophets passed it on to the Members of the Great Assembly. They said three things: Be moderate in judgement, Create many students, and Make a fence around the Torah.
1:
We must preface a few introductory comments concerning Tractate Avot as a whole before we begin our study of the first mishnah in the tractate.
2:
Tractate Avot is different from all the other tractates of the Mishnah in several respects: it is one of the shortest of the tractates, parts of it are arranged chronologically rather than thematically, and it is the only tractate to be incorporated in toto into our liturgy. Popularly known as Pirkei Avot, Ethics of the Fathers or Chapters of the Fathers, it is printed in all siddurim [prayer-books] after the service for Shabbat afternoon [Minĥah] because it became the custom to read consecutively one chapter of the tractate after the service on each Shabbat between Pesaĥ and Shavu'ot. This custom is quite old and dates back some 1500 years, to the time of the Ge'onim – the heads of the major academies [yeshivot] both in Babylon (Iraq) and on the eastern Mediterranean coastline. Tractate Avot only has five chapters but there are always six sabbaths during the period between Pesaĥ and Shavu'ot. Therefore a sixth chapter, a baraita, was added: this addition too dates back to Ge'onic times.
3:
But tractate Avot is most distinguished from all the other tractates of the Mishnah in that it has little or no halakhic material in it. It is an anthology of maxims, ethical pronouncements and philosophic observations made by the greatest of the sages during the five hundred years that led up to the editing of the Mishnah at the very beginning of the third century CE. (Actually, parts of Avot may even slightly post-date the editing of the Mishnah, as we shall see in due course.) I say 'little or no halakhic material' because it depends on how you choose to define halakhah. If we look upon the 'earnest recommendations' of the sages as halakhah then we will find many instances of halakhah in this tractate: statements of the nature of 'do this', 'do not do that', 'imitate this' and 'do not imitate that' and so forth. However, almost all scholars are content to look upon our tractate as being composed entirely of aggadah, as opposed to halakhah.
4:
Participants who are new to this kind of study may find it useful to take a look at the Introduction to the Mishnah in our web archives. There they will find described terms such as 'baraita', 'halakhah', 'aggadah', Gemara and Tosefta. Other terms will be described and defined in these shiurim where necessary, possibly even as a result of your questions and not just my own initiative.
5:
The fact that tractate Avot is not halakhic in nature means also that it has no Gemara – neither in the Babylonian Talmud nor in the Talmud of Eretz-Israel. But an amplification of Avot has indeed come down to us: the work known as "Avot de-Rabbi Natan" ("Rabbi Natan's Avot") is related to our tractate in much the same way as most of the tractates of the Tosefta are related to the various companion tractates of the Mishnah. (The definitive edition of Avot de-Rabbi Natan was created and published in 1887 by Solomon Schechter, who was in many senses the founder of Conservative Judaism in the new world; but, of course, that work was published in Europe before he arrived in the United States.)
6:
The 'Avot' of the title of the tractate are the leaders of the pharisaic movement. There are several instances in Tannaïtic literature of the outstanding religious leaders of the early generations being called Avot ha-Olam, Fathers of the World (meaning, Fathers of our world – the world of the sages). The term is used, for instance, in the Mishnah (Eduyyot 1:4, paralleled in the Tosefta) and the Talmud of Eretz-Israel (Shekalim 12a, Chagigah 10b, Sanhedrin 49b etc). The term is used very freely by the later authorities from the Rishonim onwards.
7:
Tractate Avot seems to have grown in sections and it is generally recognized by scholars that the first section is one of the oldest sections, and may even have been originally compiled some decades before the destruction of the Bet Mikdash in the year 70 CE. This first section consists of a chronological overview of the religious leadership of the pharisaic movement in its first centuries. Each religious leader is identified and three maxims associated with him are presented. (No female religious leaders are mentioned at all in this tractate.)
8:
This first part of the tractate seems originally to have consisted of a section that started with the first mishnah of chapter one and went through to mishnah 14 of chapter two. However, it also seems that a large group of mishnayot in this section are a later interpolation: I refer to a group that starts at 1:16 and continues through to 2:4. This group breaks the chronological format of the section in order to identify the leaders of the House of Hillel who served as President of the Sanhedrin. We shall expatiate on this when we reach 1:16. The section as it now stands carries the pharisaic leadership through to the generation after the Mishnah was published. In 2:2 Rabban Gamli'el the son of Rabbi Yehudah the President of the Sanhedrin is identified and statements attributed to him are presented. This would suggest that the long interpolation just mentioned was inserted into the original text of the Mishnah in the next generation, during the second quarter of the 3rd century CE – possibly by Rabban Gamli'el III himself.
To be continued.
