Be wary of the government: they only show you friendship for their own purposes. They appear to be friendly when it suits them but they do not stand by you when you are down.
1:
Our present mishnah is not attributed to an particular sage; since it follows on immediately from the previous mishnah which belongs to Rabban Gamli'el the son of Rabbi Yehudah the President of the Sanhedrin it is reasonable to assume that he is the author of our present mishnah as well. However, it is not clear why this sage should be the only one (apart from Hillel, the founder of the dynasty) to be quoted more than once: even the great Rabbi himself was only accorded one mishnah! However, since all existent codices omit any attribution and since all attribute the next mishnah to the same sage it seems reasonable to assume that mishnahs 2,3 and 4 are all to be attributed to Rabban Gamli'el – the last of the dynasty of Hillel to be included in Tractate Avot. We shall say more about this when we reach mishnah 5.
2:
We saw, when we studied Chapter 1 of this tractate that 300 years before Rabban Gamli'el another sage had warned of the unreliability of 'the government': "Shemayah says: Love work, hate authority and do not attach yourself to the government." [Avot 1:10] But there, as we explained at the time, Shemayah was recommending that we hate 'being in authority'. In our present mishnah Rabban Gamli'el is making a general statement about what we would now call politicians.
3:
His teaching is so clear and straightforward that it needs almost no commentary. It is a classic description of what the hunger for power and prestige does to people. Incredible as it may seem, Rabban Gamli'el almost seems to be describing a modern democratic election campaign: when they need your vote the candidates promise a heaven on earth; but nine times out of ten these are promises that are written on water. We recall that his father was the personal friend of at least one Roman emperor. Is it possible that in these words Rabban Gamli'el is bewailing the fact that his father's 'friends' have not accorded him the same honours? It may be the case, but this is pure speculation.
In Avot 093 I wrote:
If Rabbi Yehudah the President of the Sanhedrin was the redactor of the Mishnah … how can it be that a saying attributed to his son is included after the saying attributed to Rabbi himself? Surely, the text of the Mishnah must have been finalized before Rabbi published it! … The simple truth must be that … it was not Rabbi who finalized the redaction of the Mishnah, but the work continued for a few years after his death. How much of the Mishnah (as a whole, all six orders) was added or edited after Rabbi's death cannot be known.
Benjamin Fleischer writes:
Doesn't the end of Sotah include events that must have happened after Rabbi's death? Also, I am always struck by how the Mishnah quotes Rabbi Yehudah haNasi as Rabbi. It would have made more sense for me if he were the stamma, not identified by his nickname. By the way, do you follow Shaul Lieberman's theory that the mishnah was finished orally with Rabbi but was written down the same time the Gemara was? That would make more of a case for how parts were added or modified.
I respond:
What Benjamin is referring to is the last clause of the mishnah quoted in Sotah 112: "When Rabbi died humility and fear of sin ceased." I agree with Benjamin that this most certainly might be preseumed to indicate that part of that mishnah, at the very least, must post-date Rabbi's death. But – and this is a very big but – see my first comment on that mishnah! Benjamin's second observation, while cogent, is even less convincing because in ancient times authors were often in the habit of referring to themselves in the 3rd person. However, I must admit that he has raised a very interesting point. Benjamin's reference to a stamma utilizes the Aramaic word which can serve as "editor" or "redactor". However, the term – as far as I am aware – is used only in connection with the editing of the Gemara. The very nature of the Mishnah would, I would think, preclude the possibility of an anonymous editor including his own comments.
The term used in the Babylonian Gemara to reference a mishnah is Matniteyn, which, In Aramaic means "our Mishnah". It has been suggested that there was more than one redaction of the Mishnah and that in Babylon the Amora&#umli;m wanted to emphasize that they were using "our version of the Mishnah". I think this is very unlikely, if, for no other reason, the differences between the text of the Mishnah as recorded in the Babylonian Gemara and the text as recorded in the Gemara of Eretz-Israel are truly minimal and inconsequential. The redaction of the Babylonian Gemara, to which Benjamin refers, was not undertaken until two and a half centuries after Rabbi's death: that seems to me to be an awful long time before the Mishnah was actually set down in writing. All Jewish tradition points to Rabbi as he who took that momentous step. I can only repeat my own surmise that it was Rabbi who undertook the creation of the Mishnah, but that the work continued for a short while after his death, concurrent with the work on the Tosefta.
