Shammai says: Make your Torah fixed; say little and do much; and receive everybody with a smile on your face.
5:
Having re-examined the personality of the sage, Shammai, we can now concentrate on the teachings which he has left to posterity enshrined in our present mishnah.
6:
Make your Torah fixed. The classical commentators (Rambam and Rabbi Ovadya of Bertinoro) take the Hebrew term which I have rendered 'fixed' as 'main': 'make Torah your main occupation'. The idea is that among all your daily occupations make certain that you spend the most time studying Torah. In his magnum opus, Mishneh Torah, Rambam [Talmud Torah 1:12] gives an example:
If one is a professional and devotes three hours of the day to his work and nine hours to Torah…
Bearing in mind that elsewhere in the same work [
Polite Behaviour 4:4] Rambam says that one should spend eight hours out of the twenty-four in sleep, nine hours is a great proportion of the day. Indeed three hours of work, nine hours of study and eight hours of sleep leave only four hours each day for all one's other activities, including eating, hygiene and so on. On his own personal admission Rambam himself was not able to adhere to such a régime. In a letter he wrote to a friend he describes how he comes home from work – tending the sick in the royal residence in Cairo – in the late afternoon so tired that he has to tend the patients waiting in his clinic while reclining on a couch, "and I only have time for Torah study on Shabbat".
7:
Certainly, this is a very idealistic understanding of Shammai's teaching. It is just possible that Shammai's students and followers, coming as they did from the more moneyed rural sector, were able to follow such a daily régime – but I doubt it! Rabbi Natan [13:2] gives a different understanding of Shammai's meaning, an understanding which seems more reasonable. He understands the Hebrew term keva as meaning 'fixed' (not 'main'), and he interprets Shammai's teaching with the reality of oral Torah in the background.
8:
We must recall that in order to preserve a clear distinction between God's Torah and the Torah of the sages the latter had decreed that only the former could be written down and that the teachings of the sages must be passed on orally (which is why it is known as the Oral Torah). This basic rule was observed until Rabbi Yehudah, one of Hillel's descendents, abolished the ruling when he published the Mishnah at the start of the third century CE. In Shammai's time the abolition of this rule was still three hundred years in the future.
9:
Rabbi Natan therefore understands Shammai as giving the advice that when in the Bet Midrash you hear some sage say something worth remembering you must make a conscious effort to commit it to memory, to make it a part of the enormous amount of material that you are carrying around all the time in your head. 'Make your Torah learning fixed in your memory'.
To be continued.
I do not usually bring comments sent me by people who do not fully identify themselves, but one that was sent me by someone called Arieh, has given me so much pleasure that I present it to you as well. In Avot 064 I added a personal – and very tentative – alternative explanation of Hillel's dictum 'if I am not for myself who will be for me?' You may recall that I suggested that Hillel might possibly be using the word 'I' as a synonym for 'God'. Arieh writes:
Your comment in today's shiur #6 about 'ani', is brought by HaRav Baruch Epstein in 'Baruch Shomar" on Perkei Avot (If my memory serves me correctly).
I did not know this, since I do not possess Rabbi Epstein's Barukh She'Amar; so I am very honoured that unwittingly I suggested something that has also been suggested by someone far, far greater in Torah learning than I can ever aspire to be. (Rabbi Barukh Epstein lived from 1860 until 1942, when he was murdered by the Nazis aged 82.)
A different approach to the same issue is suggested by Naomi Graetz:
The two statements below, taken out of context, sound very much like Descartes, Cognito….
'If I am here everything is here and if I am not here who is here?"
If "Ani" [God] is here everything is here; and if "Ani" [God] is not here nobody is.
I respond:
I think that Naomi is referring to the famous dictum of the French philosopher René Descartes [1596-1650]: Cogito ergo sum – "I think, therefore I am".
More of your comments next time.
