The fifth chapter of Pirkei Avot, the mishnaic tractate that deals with mussar and middot, curiously opens with a mishnah that tells how the world was created with ten statements. But maybe there's a hidden message for us. Jeremy Phillips speculates.
The mishnah at Avot 5:1 links the divine notion creation of the world to the very human idea of being accountable for what we do, for good or ill:
The world was created with ten utterances. What does this come to teach us? It could have been created with a single utterance. However, this is in order to make the wicked accountable for destroying a world that was created with ten utterances, and to reward the righteous for sustaining a world that was created with ten utterances.
Many commentaries on this mishnah, including the Rambam, the Bartenura and the Machzor Vitry, recite that, in the Torah’s account of the Creation, nine acts of divine creativity are preceded by the utterance “And the Lord said…” Added to this is the first word in the Torah, “Bereshit” (“In the beginning”), which also constitutes an utterance, making up the full complement of ten.
Here’s a fresh explanation, one that does not have the
support of tradition but which does offer some further meaning to this Mishnah.
There is a verse in Yeshayah 51:16 that reads as follows:
And I have put My words into your
mouth and have covered you in the shadow of My hand, so that I may plant the
Heavens, and lay the foundations of the Earth, and say unto Zion: “You are My
people.”
The Hebrew word for “My words” in this verse is דברי (divarai). If you insert a space between the
letter י (the yud)
of דברי and the rest of the word, you change the meaning. This
is because the yud represents the numerical value 10. You now have דבר י (devar yud, “a matter of 10”). Revisiting our
verse, we can now learn it as:
And I have put a “matter of 10”
into your mouth and have covered you in the shadow of My hand, so that I may
plant the Heavens, and lay the foundations of the Earth, and say unto Zion:
“You are My people.”
Armed with this verse, we can return to our mishnah and postulate
that, when its anonymous author is alluding to the creation of the world, he adopts the Maharsl’s concept of the olam
katan, the “small world” which is every human, in other words every one of
us.
In this context the mishnah appears to envision an individual who is initially incomplete but is created in his final form through the “matter of 10,” the Ten Commandments that God uttered on Mount Sinai. With the ultimate perfection of man comes the conclusion of the Creation which began with the Heavens and the Earth—mentioned here in our verse from Yeshayah and also in the very first verse of the Torah itself. When a person destroys another human being, who has been “created” through acceptance of the Ten Commandments, his punishment is in proportion to his having broken the link between his victim and all ten of them. Conversely, someone who saves another is taken to have affirmed all ten and his reward is commensurate with this.
