Avot220

Today's shiur is dedicated by Edie and Sol Freedman
in memory of Sol's father, Elazar Bar Shlomo Yehuda z"l
whose Yahrzeit was on 22nd Av;
and in memory of Edie's mother, Sima bat Ozer z"l,
whose Yahrzeit falls today, 7th Elul.

1:
What we said in our exposition of the previous mishnah concerning the status of ben-Zoma applies also to his 'twin', ben-Azzai. Rabbi Shim'on ben-Azzai was a tanna in the generation of Rabbis Akiva and Yishma'el: the beginning of the 2nd century CE. He studied under Rabbi Yehoshu'a ben-Chananyah and expresses regret that he never studied under either Akiva or Yishma'el (which suggests that he was a younger contemporary of theirs). He was a brilliant scholar; as we saw in a recent discussion [Avot 218] he never married, which is probably why he is usually denied his title of 'rabbi'.

2:
We cannot be certain that the text of the first clause of our mishnah is exactly in the words of ben-Azzai. No less a commentator than Rabbi YomTov Lippmann Heller [1579-1654] in his commentary, Tosefot YomTov, suggests that the original (preserved in some codices) wording was quite simply:

He suggests, most plausibly, that the additional phrase 'a serious one' is a mistaken interpolation caused by a similar phrase in the first mishnah of chapter 2 [Avot 082].

However, since so many texts offer the ’emended' version we have retained it here. In Chapter 2 mishnah 1 Rabbi assumed that people would be drawn towards faithful observance of the more serious mitzvot while having few compunctions about 'forgetting' the more simple miztvot:

Ben-Azzai takes the opposite view: most people will readily observe the 'easy' mitzvot but may fall shy of observing the more 'difficult' ones. So his message is that we should observe the more 'difficult' or 'serious' commandments with the same alacrity that we evince towards the 'easy' ones.

Of course, if we accept the text as suggested by Rabbi Heller then Ben-Azzai and Rabbi are in agreement: be diligent in your observance of an 'easy' mitzvah as you would be in your observance of a 'serious' one.

3:
Of course, it is inevitable that people will ask for a definition of 'easy' and 'serious' in this context. I do not believe that there is any one answer, especially given the great individualism seen in Jewish observance today. I suspect that each person will have to classify the miztvot for themselves: what is 'easy' for one Jew may well be 'difficult' in the eyes of another.

4:
Ben-Azzai's reasoning is developed in the next clause. Why should one run towards the observance of an 'easy' mitzvah with diligence and alacrity? Because "one mitzvah drags another in its wake." If we accustom ourselves to observe with diligence those mitzvot that seem to us to be easy we will accustom ourselves to observance; and 'one thing leads to another' and we shall find ourselves observing more and more of the mitzvot. It seems to me that ben-Azzai's approach is a most appropriate one for modern Jews just beginning their adventure into Jewish observance. (This approach will only work if we give equal consideration to the other side of ben-Azzai's equation:

To be continued.

I offer your comments and queries in the order that they arrive in my inbox. This means that sometimes they appear to be out of order, as it were. The following comment comes from Reuven Artzi and relates yet again to the issue we discussed quite some time ago: Mishnah Shabbat 2:6 states:

Reuven writes:

For three sins women die? The very statement is unacceptable, if only from the purely statistical point of view. According to this thesis secular women should have disappeared from the world. In the religious sector they emphasise this mishnah to young girls approaching Bat-Mitzvah so as to introduce fear at a young age. Appalling. You commented in a response to a similar question that a woman 'might' die. Has not the time arrived to state quite categorically that not everything that was said by the sages on this or that occasion is necessarily the will of the Creator? At least according to Conservative understanding.

I respond:

So, let me state quite categorically: not everything that was said by the sages on this or that occasion is necessarily the will of the Creator! That is the accepted view of Conservative Judaism.

However, our primary task here is to understand and elucidate what they did say, regardless of whether we might agree or do not agree with it. In the particular case in point: what the sages were saying was something like this:

These three miztvot are very important and women should make every effort to observe them. Who knows? – when a woman dies in childbirth it might be because of her negligence regarding one or more of these sins.

This topic is now closed.

The next shiur in this series will be on Thursday, 7th September, God willing.