Pirkei Avot, 1:4

"Yossi ben (son of) Yo'ezer of Ts'raidah and Yossi ben Yochanan of Jerusalem received [the transmission] from them. Yossi ben Yo'ezer used to say: Let your house be a meeting place for the sages, cleave to the dust of their feet, and drink thirstily their words."

With this mishna, we have now passed from transmission to reception of Torah.  The first mishna of the chapter was an instruction to the teachers; this is an instruction to the students.  This is not accidental.  The generation that learned from Moses, who were personally responsible for transmitting the law, lest it be forgotten for posterity, is now gone.  We are now left with the men who learned from the men of the Great Assembly, who are now more concerned with persuading us to receive the transmission, than with persuading those who received it to transmit it.  The emphasis of l'dor v'dor has changed from the need to transmit, to the need to receive what is transmitted.

On a literal level, the mishna addresses rules of our house; we are to welcome sages and learn from them.  But it is inescapable that the mishna also addresses our spiritual home, for it is not just in our house that we learn.  Rather, in our lives we must seek out and draw from those who are learned in Torah their habits and priorities.  The Torah, when earnestly studied over a period of time, changes the character of the student.  This changed character is contained metaphorically in "the dust of their feet" and in "their words".  It is this character, that is molded by deep study of Torah and that can be acquired from those learned in the Torah, that is to be earnestly sought out and emulated by the community of Israel at large.

Pirkei Avot 1:3

"Antignos of Socho received [the transmission] from Shimon the Righteous. He used to say: Do not be as servants who serve the Master to receive reward. Rather, be as servants who serve the Master not to receive reward. And let the fear of heaven be upon you."

The first sentence of Antigonus' teaching is easy to comprehend: We must not follow God's commands out of expectation of reward.  As we know, and as Rabbi Kushner has reminded us, good things don't always come to people who do good things.  In the words of the popular American saying, "goods deeds rarely (or never) go unpunished."  So why do good deeds?  The next sentence gives a murky answer: to be as servants who serve the Master not to receive reward.  Why would a servant serve a master with no expectation of reward?  There are two possibilities: fear of punishment for not serving, or love of the Master.  The final sentence suggests that it is both.  The key Hebrew word in the sentence, "Morah," is related to "Yara," fear, and to "Moreh," teacher.  It is not fear of a specific punishment for a specific transgression, because the text doesn't use the word "punishment," and the idea that all bad deeds are punished is as unsophisticated as the idea that all good deeds are rewarded.  Rather, it is the fear that negative consequences will come from a life of not aligning oneself with the dominant force in the universe, and at the same time the moral teacher of the universe.  We should not expect reward for serving God by following his commandments, but we should live with the belief that they come from the master and moral teacher of the universe.

Pirkei Avot, 1:2

"Shimon the Righteous was of the last survivors of the Men of the Great Assembly. He used to say, the world is based upon three things: on Torah, on service [of G-d], and on acts of kindness."

As one of the last survivors of the men of the Great Assembly, Shimon the Righteous must have felt the obligation to transmit the essence of Torah to the next generation in the most understandable fashion, so that it would continue.  The first two of the three things are not surprising: the Torah is the thing that Shimon was obligated to transmit, as one of the last survivors of the last group to whom it had been passed from Moses, who received it from God.  The Torah had to be the first thing that Shimon would say the world stood on.  It is also not surprising that service of God would be the second thing, for the service of God, through the performance of the Mitzvot, is what the Torah commands.  What is surprising is the third thing: acts of kindness.  It doesn't follow the pattern.  The logical next thing, after service of God, which is following the commandments of the Torah governing the relationship between man and God, would be following the commandments of the Torah governing the relationship between man and man.  Acts of kindness depart from the pattern of following the commandments of the Torah, in favor of a generalized human-centered observance.  Note that that third thing is not "service of man," which would parallel service of God; rather it is acts of kindness, which are defined by human feelings about what constitutes "kindness".  This is an example of an essential inclination of rabbinic Judaism, similar to the tendency of the oral tradition to favor leniency in interpretation of harsh Toraitic punishments, and dissimilar to the tendency of the Moslem tradition toward literal interpretation of harsh Koranic punishments.  It is also similar to the teaching of the Golden Rule (don't do to others what is hateful to you) and forshadows the tendency of liberal Judaism to view the essence of Judaism as tikkun olam, which is generally interpreted to mean doing good deeds for other people, both of which ignore the God-centered commandments.  Shimon the Righteous had it as one of three things upon which the world stands.  In modern liberal Judaism, the third leg has become longer than the first two.  This is not meant as an indictment of the inclination to human kindness as a direction of Jewish observance; rather, it is meant as an observation about how the tradition has developed.

Beginning a new project

With the new year, I have decided to start a project of reading consecutive verses in Pirkei Avot and giving my interpretation of them.  Although I was raised in the Reform movement, two of my children are Baal T'shuvah, and I feel post-denominational.  I am a member of Temple Judea, a Reform congregation in Palm Beach County, but my daughter and son in law are modern Orthodox, I have a son studying at Yeshiva Ohr Somayach in Jerusalem, and another son who has learned at Aish in Jerusalem, my parents were raised Conservative, and I sometimes learn with a local Orthodox rabbi.  I am intrigued by what happens when mature, newly energized modern Jews encounter Torah (in the broad sense, including the oral tradition) today in a way that is honest to themselves.  It strikes me that until recently, most non-Orthodox modern Jews have not taken Torah seriously, and most Orthodox Jews have not come to Torah from a modern perspective.  Today there is a powerful return to the tradition that offers the potential of new efforts to approach Torah from a modern perspective.  This is not new; Maimonides, Moses Mendelson and Mordecai Kaplan, among others, have brought immense knowledge of secular thought to Torah.  However I am not aware of much recent literature in which Jews raised in secular knowledge encounter Torah with serious attention.  That is the area where I would like to experiment.  I know that I will make mistakes, but that is inherent in the nature of the exercise: I am coming from a background which is more outside of Torah learning than inside it.  Others can write more authoritative interpretations; I hope to write a fresher one, insofar as it comes from an authentically modern, diaspora perspective.

It seems to me that the most promising place to start is Pirkei Avot.  I know of no more accessible text that is firmly embedded in the tradition.  Other tractates of Talmud seem to demand intense effort to understand, and often seem puzzling and unsatisfying.  By contrast, any page I turn to in Pirkei Avot seems relevant and rewarding.

So that is where I will start.  Hopefully the start will create a habit that will cause me to continue, and possibly, to continue to a siyum, a finish of a small portion of the body of what I understand as Torah.

Pirkei Avot, 1:1

"Moses received the Torah from Sinai and transmitted it Joshua. Joshua transmitted it to the Elders, the Elders to the Prophets, and the Prophets transmitted it to the Men of the Great Assembly. They [the Men of the Great Assembly] said three things: Be deliberate in judgment, raise many students, and make a protective fence for the Torah."

The first sentence gives us the pedigree of the source of the advice which is to come: it came from the men of the Great Assembly, who received the Torah from the prophets, the elders, Joshua, Moses, and ultimately, from Sinai.  Yet the next sentence oddly does not claim that the advice to come is from Sinai; rather, it is from men who received the revelation at Sinai.  It is mediated by the human mind, but not just any human mind: it is the collective mind of the last group to have received the revelation at Sinai at the same time.  After them, the understanding of the revelation at Sinai is dispersed over the greatest Rabbis of different times, and the reader must know enough to figure out who they are.

When we read the advice, it is immediately clear that this is not advice for the average person.  Although the first instruction, to be deliberate in judgment, could be advice to any serious Jew, the second and third, to raise many students and make a protective fence for the Torah, are clearly for the next group to which the revelation at Sinai is to be transmitted.  The second instruction, to raise many students, is designed to maximize the dispersion of the revelation, and the third instruction, to make a protective fence for the Torah, is designed to preserve the purity of the revelation.  The two are in opposition: the more that the revelation is dispersed, the greater is the risk that it will be adulterated; the purer the message, the more difficult it will be to disseminate.  The mediating factor is the first instruction: to be deliberate in judgment, for by being deliberate in judgment, we can balance the instruction of maximizing dispersion with the instruction of maintaining the purity of what is transmitted.

The unspoken, overarching instruction is to pass on Torah to others.  The verse instructs some of us to transmit the revelation at Sinai to other Jews.  Those of us who respond are the next link in the chain, extending from Moses to the men of the Great Assembly, and now to us, and the purpose of the chain is to disseminate Torah.