Avot135

Today's shiur is dedicated by Sol Freedman in memory of his father, Louis Freedman, Elazar bar Shlomo Yehuda, z"l, whose Yahrzeit is today.

5:
The second (or third) teaching of Rabbi Eli'ezer taught in our mishnah concerns repentance. Rather succinctly he tells us to "repent one day before you die". Clearly this means that we should repent of our sins daily, since no one knows the day of his death in advance. This is made clear when in the Gemara [Shabbat 153b] Rabbi Eli'ezer is questioned by his students about this teaching of his:

6:
Clearly this line of thought is the exact antithesis of the teaching of the Athenian philosopher Epicurus, who lived some 350 years before Rabbi Eli'ezer. Those who followed his philosophy are called Epicureans. Epicurus' disciples were enamoured with his doctrine and presented him with a garden at Athens. At the garden Epicurus began a school – almost a community of sorts – with men and women meeting as equals in discourse. After his death, Epicurus left his home and garden to be used as a headquarters for the Epicureans. They believed you were here today and gone tomorrow, so why not enjoy life while you can? "Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow, we die." For them, the hedonistic idea of seeking pleasure was the main purpose in life. They did not deny the existence of any gods, but maintained they were totally indifferent to the affairs of men who were left to find pleasure as they could. The result of this is to have no fear of God and consequently they were given over to gross sensualism. It was this indifference to any kind of religious responsibility that eventually gave rise to the use by the sages of the epithet Apikoros (Epicurean) to anyone who scoffed at or rejected the idea of man's ethical responsibility. We shall visit this term again when we reach mishnah 15 of this chapter.

7:
The last teaching of Rabbi Eli'ezer quoted in our mishnah is clearly very personal. In his commentary on our mishnah Rambam takes great pains to explain each phrase of the teaching in philosophic terms: warming oneself at the fire of the sages refers to one ethical concept, their bite being the bite of a fox indicates another moral standard, and so on. (This is his general method in explication of this tractate.) The other classical commentators have a similar attitude to this problematic teaching. Perhaps the one who comes nearest to what I think is the intent of the statement is Rabbi YomTov Lippmann Heller [Tos^efot YomTov]: he notes that sometimes the sages can do harm! He traces a descent from acute physical harm – the burning fire – to verbal condemnation (what we would call verbal abuse?) – the hiss of the serpent. (He gives as an example of the sages' malignant speech the pulsé de-nura mentioned in the Gemara [Bava Metzi'a 47a] which was, unhappily, in the news recently.

8:
Rambam has always been one of my intellectual and spiritual heroes, but to my mind, this time the great man got it wrong! As I see it one should understand the very acidic remarks of Rabbi Eli'ezer about his colleagues against the background of their treatment of him after the affair of the "Akhnai Oven". The story was recounted in detail in Avot 127 so it need not be repeated here. Clearly, Rabbi Eli'ezer nursed his hurt to the very end.

In the discussion element in Avot 133, in response to a comment I mentioned Rabbi Akiva's messianism and his enormous support – both spiritual and material – for Shim'on bar-Kokhba. I attributed this support to his general method in interpreting Torah, which was very different from the almost rational approach of Rabbi Yishma'el. I then wrote: One of the great sages of Conservative Judaism, Rabbi Avraham Yehoshu'a Heschel z"l, compiled a most interesting work which detailed the ideological battles between Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Yishma'el, his arch opponent.

Sue Mackson writes:

Please, what is the name of the book by Rabbi A J Heschel about Akiba and Bar Kochba?

I respond:

I must offer my sincerest apologies for being the cause of Sue's confusion. The book by Rabbi Heschel (in Hebrew) assembles most of the interpretative disagreements between Rabbi Akiva and Rabbi Yishma'el, orders them according to ideological topics, and elaborates on them. The book is not, essentially, about Akiva's support for bar-Kokhba. Many consider Heschel's Torah min ha-Shamayim ba'Aspaklariah shel ha-Dorot (Torah from Heaven in the light of the generations) to be his masterwork.