When Ten is more than just a number

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.”

The number 10 is rich with Jewish symbolism, and one of the things it alludes to is the Ten Commandments, the quintessence of the Torah and the acceptance of which can be said to perfect the creation of humankind. The idea of linking the ten utterances of Creation with the Ten Commandments is not new: it is found in the Zohar and has influenced Torah commentators ever since—including the late Lubavitcher Rebbe, who maintained that the Ten Commandments were implicit in the ten utterances.

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.

The Voice of the Lord

Tehillim 29 is the chapter of Tehillim that we recite in shul on Shabbat morning when we return the Sefer Torah to the Aron HaKodesh. In some communities (sometimes including our own) it is sung out loud by the congregation, a hymn of triumphant praise to the God who created the world with ten utterances. Indeed, the constant repetition of the phrase kol Hashem does rather echo the opening pasukim of parashat Bereishit. 

Max Stern set this psalm to music back in 1993 with the title 'Seven Voices of the Divine' and he has shared with us a recording of it that was made in Prague in 1999. The words are sung by soprano Kristyna Valouskova, accompanied by the Talich Chamber Orchestra.

The kol Hashem is depicted here by reference to the seven qualities identified by David HaMelech (1. Upon the waters; 2. Powerful; 3. Full of majesty; 4. Breaketh cedars; 5. Heweth flames of fire; 6. Shaketh the wilderness: 7. Maketh hinds to calve).

You can listen to Max's piece here.

The Creation: a work in seven parts

The biblical story of the Creation is one of the most beautiful and best-loved parts of the Torah, reflecting the care and attention to detail with which God formatted our daily environment. Inspired by the Creation narrative and taking the text of Bereishit 1:1-31 and 2:1-3, our member Max Stern composed “Creation of the World (Bereishit)” which he scored for soprano, flute, strings and percussion.

This piece, like Creation itself, is structured in seven segments, each representing a day in the process of the world’s formation: 1 darkness-light, 2 seas-heaven, 3 land-vegetation, 4 sun-moon-stars, 5 fish-birds, 6 beasts-man
, 7 Shabbat.

Here we bring you a 1995 recording by the Ashdod Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Luis Gorelik. The soloists are Amalia Ishak (soprano) and Avihai Ornoy (flute). This is a live recording made on Kibbutz Yavneh, Israel, 1995.

You can enjoy Max’s work by clicking here.

The Great Make-Over: Noach 5785

The opening parshiyot of the Torah portray a rather dismal picture of the human race and of our world generally.  Everything noble and worthwhile seems to have spun away in a flood of vice, avarice, and murder. And this type of human behavior seems to have filtered down to the other forms of life on the planet as well.

The great flood described in this week’s parsha can therefore be seen, so to speak, as God’s make-over of the Creation. We know the feeling that comes upon us when, after working on a project for a period of time, we become convinced of the project’s failure and of the need to start over again from the beginning, discarding everything in which we had invested our energy.

But, as the parsha indicates, there is little to choose between the living world before the flood and the one that emerged in its wake. So the Lord adopts, as it were, a different tack. This is because, though God is disappointed by human behavior, He never irrevocably despairs of humans, individually or collectively. Now God will wait patiently until humans on their own, through their inner sense, seriously begin to search and find meaning and purpose in life.  This search will inexorably lead to the Creator and a moral code of behavior. Noach, as great a person as he was, was unable to transmit to his descendants the necessary sense of personal morality and that inner drive for self-improvement and righteousness which he himself possessed. Without that inner urge to search for the Creator, no outside revelation or cataclysmic event, no flood or war or Holocaust, can achieve an improved moral climate in human society.

The parsha records God’s commitment not to bring another flood upon humankind. Outside pressures and historic events, no matter how impressive and intense they may be, are not the ways to inspire and improve human behavior. A change of the human heart, a rethinking of life’s meaning and mission, a yearning for spirit and eternity—these are the proven methods for achieving a more just and noble society.

The lesson of this week’s parsha, and indeed the fundamental lesson of the Torah, is that the path to knowledge and service of God runs through one’s own inner feelings, attitudes, ideals and commitments. The task of Jewish parenting and education is to impart this basic truism of life to the next generation. And as the Torah itself testifies, this ability to do so was what set Avraham apart from Noach, and the Jewish people at their very origin from the nations of the world.

Shabat shalom, Rabbi Berel Wein