Avot252

18:
The 'crown' of Torah was both the first and the last of the three 'crowns' mentioned in the first clause of our mishnah. It was the first, of course, because in theory it was instituted at Sinai. However, from the point of view of modern scholarship the 'crown' of Torah was the last to arrive in Judaism.

19:
With the term 'crown of Torah' Rabbi Shim'on, the author of our mishnah, means to indicate the sages and their learning. At the very beginning of our study of tractate Avot we noted [Avot 006 #23] that a great, but silent revolution took place during the 4th century BCE. At the end of the biblical period it is still the priests who are the teachers and administrators of Judaism; by the last quarter of the 4th century, however, a rival to their hegemony appeared: the sages. For the first time in Jewish history anybody could become a teacher of God's law, regardless of who their father was. Indeed, when discussing order of precedence the Gemara [Horayot 13a] lays down:

20:
The sages held the honour of Torah learning to be the highest honour to which a Jew could aspire, greater even than priesthood or royalty. More than a century after Rabbi Shim'on ben-Yoĥai, we find the great Amora of Eretz-Israel, Rabbi Yochanan, almost repeating the idea of Rabbi Shim'on [Yoma 72b]:

But now he adds an extra thought. This extra thought is, presumably, a riposte to the fact that many who were not sages doubted that the study of Torah was an honour greater than either the priesthood with all its panoply and kingship with all its executive power:

21:
However, it was possible even for a sage to be less than a paragon of ethical virtue. Although, by the very nature of things, our sources do not provide us with many examples of rabbis who acted disgracefully there must have been some who did so. Since our sources record the words of the sages and since those sources were compiled by the sages themselves it is not surprising that the 'weeds' have been plucked from the 'grass'. However, one very famous 'weed' – at least from the point of view of the sages – has been included, as we shall see when we reach mishnah 24 of our present chapter.

To be continued.

My colleague, Marty Berman, has a query about the Rabbi Shim'on of our present mishnah:

Most contemporaries, as did you, refer to Rabbi Shim'on bar Yohai and not ben Yohai. Yet, it seems to me that the majority of Talmudic references are to ben Yohai. Is the bar an influence of the Zohar or something else?

I respond:

It is quite correct that our classical sources almost always give Rabbi Shim'on the patronymic "ben-Yoĥai", rather than using the Aramaic equivalent "bar-Yoĥai". A quick electronic survey of our sources yielded the following information:

In Tannaitic literature "ben-Yoĥai" occurs 7 times while "bar-Yoĥai" occurs only once. In Amoraic literature "ben-Yoĥai" occurs 66 times while "bar-Yoĥai" does not appear at all. In the collections of midrashim "ben-Yoĥai" occurs 122 times and "bar-Yoĥai" occurs only 3 times. This it would seem that in our classical literature the sage was referred to as "ben-Yoĥai" rather than "bar-Yoĥai".

However, if we check the literature of the Zohar we find a more even distribution: "ben-Yoĥai" is still preferred (33 times) but "bar-Yoĥai" has many occurrences (24 times).

I have no idea what to make of these statistics!