God will kill him who does not read a great deal.
And even the mild-mannered Rabbi Ovadyah of Bertinoro seems to justify the harshness of the described punishment in that not learning at all is worse than the sin of the previous clause, not adding to one's learning.
11:
The version of this clause of our mishnah as given in Avot de-Rabbi Natan [12:13] is slightly different: "he who does not attend the sages is condemned to death". Since in tannaïtic times study of the oral tradition was gained by personal attendance upon one's teacher (who taught orally, of course) the two terms are more or less synonymous. Rabbi Natan illustrates this clause with an anecdote:
There was once a certain person of high degree who cultivated a saintly manner. Rabban Yoĥanan ben-Zakkai sent a student to check up on him. The student went and found him taking oil and putting it on the range and then removing it from the range and pouring it over [his] cereal. "What are you doing?" asked the student. "I am a high ranking priest," came the reply, "and I must eat my Terumah in a state of [ritual] purity." The student asked whether the range [itself] was [ritually] pure or impure. "Does the Torah say anything about a range being [ritually] impure?" retorted [the examinee]. "On the contrary, the Torah [Leviticus 11:33] speaks only of [the possibility of] an oven being [ritually] impure. The student responded, "Just as the Torah says and oven may be [ritually] impure so does it also say [Leviticus 11:35] that an oven or a range shall be broken up, they are [ritually] unclean. If this is what you have been doing you have never eaten your Terumah in [ritual] purity in your whole life!"
Interestingly enough, Rabban Yoĥanan ben-Zakkai is described in the Gemara [
Sukkah 28a] as being the least significant of all Hillel's students. (His true worth will become apparent when we reach his biography in Chapter 2.) The main purport of the anecdote is that this priest rendered his
Terumah ritually impure; this impurity would then be transferred to himself by touch. But in order to eat his
Terumah the priest had to be ritually pure. The Torah decrees death for the priest who eats his Terumah in a state of ritual impurity. Therefore, this hapless priest has incurred the death penalty, as it were, because he had not studied with the sages as he should have done. (For further information on
Terumah I suggest using the search machine provided on the BMV Home Page [use the link provided at the end of this shiur]. Just by entering the one word "Terumah" I found 519 references in the archives!)
The moral of the story seems to be that he who does not study the oral tradition of the sages is liable to transgress commands for which the Torah prescribes capital punishment.
12:
Be all this as it may, the most sensible comment from the classical commentators seems to come from Rabbi Menaĥem Me'iri in his voluminous halakhic commentary on the Talmud. Concerning our present discussion he says that this clause must be seen "as exaggeration".
To be continued.
In our study of Mishnah 12 we quoted the famous story in the Gemara of how three would-be converts were rejected by Shammai and accepted by Hillel.
Cheryl Mack writes:
I've taught the story in Shabbat as a paradigm for teachers. I think that many of us (certainly me) instinctively respond as Shammai does. We don't have time for the non-serious, scoffing student. If we truly want to succeed and bring our students "beneath the wings of the Shechinah" We must learn to be like Hillel.
I respond:
In all fairness to Shammai we should note that he had halakhah on his side. The criticism, as implied by Cheryl, is not against his reaction to their application but against his irate manner. It was Hillel's mild-mannered patience that won these converts for Judaism. All these converts made their conversion dependent on a prior stipulation and Halakhah requires us to reject any would-be convert who sets conditions to his or her conversion. Hillel's patience brought them to understand that they must waive their prior conditions.
As far as Cheryl's comment affects the teaching of Judaism in general I can only say "Amen".
