… When the wicked perish there are shouts of joy [Proverbs 11:10]
Shemu'el ha-Katan says [Proverbs 24:17-18] : "If your enemy falls do not exult … lest God see it and be displeased, and avert His wrath from him." [Avot 4:19]
Rabban Shim'on ben-Gamli'el used to say: The world stands on three things: on law, on truth and on peace; as is said, "Judge in your gates truth and the justice of peace".
EXPLANATIONS (continued):
23:
We can now turn our attention to the sole teaching of this great sage that has been preserved for us in Tractate Avot, which is the subject of our present mishnah.
24:
What a huge philosophical distance we have traversed between the beginning of Chapter One and its end! The second mishnah of this chapter [see Avot 013] contained a teaching attributed to Simon the Righteous: "The world stands on three things: on the Torah, on the ritual, and on acts of kindness." Simon sees the ideal Jewish society as resting on three great pillars: on the study and interpretation of Torah, on the minutiae of the sacrificial cultus of the Bet Mikdash and on kindly relationships between people. Such were the hopes and aspirations of one of the greatest of Israel's sons living towards the end of the 2nd century BCE.
25:
When we reach the teaching of Rabban Shim'on ben-Gamli'el at the end of the chapter some 350 years have passed. Three and one half centuries separate the two Shim'ons. But what a philosophical chasm separates them! I do not mean to imply that Rabban Shim'on ben-Gamli'el would negate the teaching of Simon the Righteous; I am certain that he approved. What I mean is that a vast philosophical divide separates the hopes and aspirations of both men for the social and national well-being of their people. By the time we reach Rabban Shim'on ben-Gamli'el the earlier Simon's hopes for the supremacy of the Unwritten Torah, the oral tradition, had long been achieved, and the Sadducean opposition had collapsed nearly a century previously. The Bet Mikdash, whose ritual was so important to Simon the Righteous, had not been in existence for about a century when his presidency eventually came to an end. And perhaps the latter Shim'on could but sigh at the assertion of the earlier Simon that acts of kindness must be an everyday occurrence: in Avot 076 I noted that the generation of the later Shim'on had to contend with such issues [Ketubot 49a] as whether parents were halakhically required to feed and care for their children, so dire was the abject poverty into which the people had been plunged in the wake of the catastrophic revolt of bar-Kokhba.
26:
Rabban Shim'on ben-Gamli'el also sees the world of the Jewish people as resting on three pillars, but they are vastly different pillars than those raised by Simon the Righteous. Rabban Shim'on ben-Gamli'el says: "The world stands on three things: on law, on truth and on peace."
27:
In his commentary on our present mishnah Rambam immediately identifies the exact implications of the pillar of law to which Rabban Shim'on refers:
"Law" refers to the administration of the state in righteousness.
For Rabban Shim'on ben-Gamli'el the ideal Jewish society must be based on righteous laws which everyone must obey. When one part of society deems that it is freed from the yoke of the law because it is the recipient of a greater truth the whole of that society is in grave danger. The law must be the same law for everybody and no one has the privilege of deciding which laws they will obey and which laws they will ignore.
28:
Rabban Shim'on also sees 'Truth', or 'Integrity' as being an absolute necessity in the running of the affairs of the state. But 'truth' is often hard to establish, and perhaps one can only strive for 'integrity'. Perhaps only with God can be pure truth. The Gemara [Shabbat 55a] records that
Rabbi Ĥanina says that the seal of the Holy One, blessed be He, is Truth.
29:
We have already expatiated on the blessings of peace [see Avot 056 and the subsequent shiurim] so I will not repeat myself here. I summarized those shiurim in Avot 059 as follows:
The requirement to pursue peace and justice is so elementary that it need be stated only once. On the other hand, the blessings that peace brings are mentioned quite literally dozens of times. In the Torah [Leviticus 26:6] God promises that the reward for Israel's 'good behaviour' will be plentiful harvests, wealth and so forth. And then He adds "And I will give peace in the land". On this Rashi adds an immortal comment (drawn from the Sifra): without peace there is nothing!
30:
The "proof text" that some codices append to the teaching of Rabban Shim'on ben-Gamli'el in our present mishnah is from Zechariah 8:16. We can not be certain that Rabban Shim'on ben-Gamli'el intended this verse to be a part of his teaching in this mishnah, but he certainly would have approved of the quotation itself:
These are the things you are to do: Speak the truth to one another, judge in your gates truth and the justice of peace, do not contrive evil against one another, and do not love perjury; because all those are things that I hate — says God. [Zechariah 8:16-17]
31:
We have now reached the end of the first chapter of Tractate Avot, and it has taken us more than eighty shiurim to cover this one chapter! In our next shiur, God willing, we shall continue with Chapter Two.
PLEASE NOTE:
Even though I am officially on vacation I hope to send out as many shiurim in this series as possible. Please forgive me if here and there I should fail in my good ntentions .
.