Avot273

29:
After what must be one of the longest biographies in this series we now turn our attention to the teaching that is attributed to Elisha ben-Avuyah in our present mishnah. Compared with many of those that have preceded the teaching in our present mishnah must seem quite bland. Indeed, it is very simple.

30:
While our mishnah does use the Hebrew word for paper we must bear in mind that the metaphor implies parchment as well as paper (papyrus) as the medium for writing. In either case, what had previously been written on the paper could be erased but the process was laborious and, more often than not, not quite perfect: the ghostly remnants of what had previously been written on the paper could still be seen (with difficulty) below the present contents.

31:
This is the springboard for the metaphor. Teaching a child is like writing on new paper for the first time; but when one teaches an adult there is a lot of previous 'baggage' getting in the way most of the time: the messages previously written on the 'tablets' of the memory are still 'there'. The conclusion we are expected to draw is, of course, that it is best to learn Torah while young, because that is really never forgotten, never completely erased: it is what the sages called in Aramaic girsa de-yankuta – what one learned in childhood.

In Avot 267 we told of Elisha's attempts to enter the Pardes, the 'orchard' of Jewish mysticism. Jacob Chinitz writes:

A very fine interpretation of the Pardes story and Elisha ben Avuya. I would go in a slightly different direction. For me,the word flesh does not refer to the students of Torah, but to the pleasures of the flesh. When I was a teenager in Yeshiva Torah Vodaath, we had a Mashgiach Ruchani by the name of Feivel Mendelovitch. He declined the title Rav, worked as a laundryman and other trades for a time, in order to avoid taking a salary for working for Torah. I shall never forget one of his arguments against Science and in favor of Religion. He said: You think Albert Einstein is an objective observer of the cosmos. No. He is bribed by his desire to live his life in his own way, without being bothered by the laws of the Torah. If I remember Milton Steinberg's book, As a Driven Leaf, correctly, there was an implication there that Elisha ben Avuya, after his heresy was proclaimed, lived his sexual life rather loosely. When a secularist lives a moral life, and does not profit materially from his heresies, his case against religion is stronger. He can, in fact, accuse the religious of not being objective, but bribed by the promises of rewards in Heaven. Each of us has to examine his own intellectual development and be honest about the objectivity of his loss of faith. Was it the result of a cold intellectual process? Or was it influenced by the attractions of a free life? In Israel, the word for secular used to be Chofshi, Free. Now it is Chiloni, not sacred. Chazal were conscious of this phenomenon when they identified faith and Torah with freedom. Ein Lekha Ben Chorin Ela Me Sheosek Batorah [No one is truly free unless he occupies himself with Torah].

I respond:

As I wrote in a later shiur, I suspect that that accounts of Elisha's alleged promiscuity were stories told later in order to add some 'colour' to what may have been seen as 'an otherwise bald and uninteresting narrative'. The same applies to what Elisha did or did not see in Heaven. I believe that the word used to describe a non-religious person, Ĥofshi, was intended to be parallel to the English word 'liberal'.

Not only Jacob Chinitz, but Jim Feldman had mentioned the novel "As A Driven Leaf" as well. I then commented that I do not think that there is any reason to prefer Rabbi Milton Steinberg as a source to the Talmuds and the Midrashim. Cheryl Birkner Mack writes:

I re-read the novel as part of a book club last year. One of the participants brought a page with all the sources (midrash, Talmud…) It seemed to me that Rabbi Steinberg was fairly faithful to the early sources. I'm sure when Rabbi Roth gets to the book he can confirm (or deny) this.