Personal space, personal time

 Below are the notes from the talk given by Jeremy Phillips between Minchah and Maariv on Tuesday 1 September.

In modern secular society we often hear people speaking of the invasive way that other people behave. For example, we don’t like people standing too close to us when we are talking to them. What constitutes an acceptable space varies from culture to culture and also depends on where you are at the time. You can see this in shul every Shabbat morning, when people don’t like to have other people brushing up against them when they are davening their Shemon’Esrei, but they have no inhibitions about pushing up against others during kiddush when they are jostling to get closer to the cholent or hot kugel.

What applies to space also applies to time. There are times when we want people to be close and we want to feel their love or support, and other times when we want those same people to just disappear for a bit, or simply to be quiet and not say anything. A sensitive, empathetic person knows when to come close and when to stand back; when to open his mouth and when to shut it.

When you are dealing with people, getting your timing right is important. So is knowing what’s in good taste and what isn’t. Rabbi Mordechai Ginsbury, who spoke at Beit Knesset Hanassi recently, explains this in his book. Someone might be in the depths of despair having lost a loved one or a business partner; you don’t go up to him and try to cheer him up by saying “What are you so worried about? This might look like a tragedy but can’t you see what a golden opportunity it gives you for the future? You can really cash in on it if you play your cards right”. We just don’t say that sort of thing so an avel, for example, even if it’s totally true. It’s totally in bad taste.

Pirkei Avot has something to say about this. At Avot 4:23 Rabbi Shimon ben Elazar says

אַל תְּרַצֶּה אֶת חֲבֵרְךָ בִּשְׁעַת כַּעְסוֹ, וְאַל

תְּנַחֲמֵֽהוּ בְּשָׁעָה שֶׁמֵּתוֹ מֻטָּל לְפָנָיו, וְאַל תִּשְׁאַל לוֹ בִּשְׁעַת נִדְרוֹ, וְאַל

תִּשְׁתַּדֵּל לִרְאוֹתוֹ בִּשְׁעַת קַלְקָלָתוֹ

What we have here are four classes of action that are not prohibited in the Torah, but which you still shouldn’t do. Let’s run through them in English translation.

“Don’t appease your friend in his time of anger; don’t console him at the time when his dead is laid out before him; don’t question him when he’s taking a vow; and don’t try to see him at the time of his degradation.”

Why doesn’t the Torah prohibit them, one might ask? One answer is that sometimes these things are the right thing to do, not the wrong one.  If you know the person and the circumstances, and you have the right degree of empathy and common sense, you will certainly do them. Rabbi Ya’akov Shlomo Landman, in his Mussar Avot, cites an instance when Rabbi Shlomo Zalman Auerbach visited a woman whose husband had just been murdered on the very same day she gave birth to a son, in order to give her strength and support. But this sort of intervention in another’s grief can easily go wrong, which is why this mishnah is framed as four negative guidelines. Basically, if you don’t know whether you should intervene, the rule of thumb is the rule of “better not”.

Many questions can be asked on this mishnah. For example: are the four guidelines listed by Rabbi Shimon ben Elazar an exhaustive list of things we should take care not to do, or are they just examples of a wider rule that we can express as “Take care not to trespass on other people’s feelings and personal space”? or “Be patient and careful before you interfere with other people’s feelings”?

I like to think that they are simply samples of the sort of situation that most commonly arises in normal human relationships. For example, people do get angry and lose their tempers to the point at which they quite lose control of themselves. Think of the spectacle of seeing a school teacher, having being wound up in class by a pupil who is brighter than he is, totally exploding and then saying or doing the most extraordinary things. Likewise, all of us have probably gone through the process of losing one or more loved relative and have known the devastating and immobilising power of grief. As for oaths and vows, we may not take them in the Torah sense these days but we take important decisions that have an impact on the lives of others as well as ourselves. And as for those moments of shame and degradation—we pray that they will never happen to us but know that we should not want to show our face at such a time.

However, these four things surely don’t constitute a complete list of situations in which people invade each other’s time, space and feelings—and really hurt them. For example, a clumsy attempt to comfort and console a bereaved person even after the burial of a loved one can be just as painful as one that is made while the avel is still preoccupied with the burial arrangements. A good example is the person who turns up at a shiva for someone who had been ill and bedbound for years and comes up with classic lines like “It must be a relief for you, now you don’t have the responsibility of looking after the niftar day and night”. The same applies to people who remind others of their former humiliation or degradation even years after the event. Into this category go people who remind gerim of what they used to get up to before they converted to Judaism, and the same applies to ba’alei teshuvah.

Anger

A time for anger

The Noda BeYehuda takes a close look at the words of the mishnah. It doesn’t say “don’t appease your friend when he is angry.” It actually says “don’t appease your friend in his time of anger.” This is significant, because it sends out a note of caution. If you think about it, there’s no need to warn people not to try to calm someone down when they’re in a rage. You can get your head bitten off—or worse! What we learn here is that we should be alert to those times when it would be quite normal for someone to be angry—but they don’t appear to be. Perhaps they are so totally in control of themselves that they have conquered their anger or, more likely, they are smouldering like a volcano waiting to erupt. If they are like that, just leave them alone. Wait until the time for exploding in fury has passed and then calm them down. This is definitely a subtle approach to our mishnah, but I wonder if it’s of any practical value. Calming a person down when the time he ought to have been angry has passed is like waiting till the rainstorm that never came is no longer coming and only then putting up your umbrella.

At whom is the anger aimed?

The mishnah doesn’t say who the angry person you shouldn’t try to placate is angry with. Does it matter? That depends who you are. Both the commentary ascribed to Rashi and R’ Yitzchak Magriso in the Me’am Lo’ez say yes, we are talking here about a guy who is trying to calm down someone who is angry with him. If you are the person that caused the anger in the first place, any premature attempt to restore peace might go unnoticed in the red mist of rage or, if noticed, may make things even worse. The Sforno disagrees: this mishnah assumes that the person who is in a rage is angry with someone else—his mother-in-law, perhaps—or maybe he is angry because somebody else got maftir. We know this because if it’s you who has upset the angry person and it’s your fault—let’s say you drove into the back of his brand new car—you have a duty to apologize, to seek forgiveness and to put things right. So this mishnah must apply in a different scenario, for example where someone else rammed his brand new car. Since there’s no halachic imperative to smooth his ruffled feathers, you need a mishnah in Avot to fill the gap.

Why is the angry man angry?

This question is really important. You can do more harm by pacifying him than by letting him rant and rage. Rabbi Avraham Azulai makes this point in his Ahavah BeTa’anugim and it’s such an obvious point that it’s surprising that many commentators have not taken it up themselves. So why is the person angry? Listen to him. If he is angry because he hasn’t got a sword, don’t let him have one. Giving him a sword may shut him up, and even make him happy, but do you know what he is planning to do with it?  We sometimes encounter a rather sad variant of this on Purim, when someone who is very drunk gets angry because he has been refused yet another drink. Giving it to him may silence his shouting and assuage his anger on at least a temporary basis. But, against that, there is the question of what damage he might do to himself and others if he is given his way.

Disgrace and degradation

Anyone who remembers being a small child, or who has ever taken a child to any public place, will know how firmly anything that is strikingly unusual will attract and rivet the child’s attention. It can be anything, because the world is full of fascinating sights. Anyone who is unusually tall, short, thin, fat, covered in tattoos or who doesn’t have the standard number of arms and legs becomes the centre of a child’s attention. They won’t stop staring and you have to pull them away. That’s why, from an early age, our kids receive the familiar parental mantra of “It’s rude to stare”. This doesn’t usually make much of a difference, because children soon learn to do what we grown-ups do, and exchange a full-frontal stare for a series of stealthy, sideways glances when we try to pretend we’re not really looking. But for most of us, we don’t appreciate how important this is until we are the people who are being stared at.

Rabbi Shimon ben Elazar does not say that one should never look, or see, when somebody else is in a state of degradation. These reactions are difficult to avoid in any society that is populated by humans who possess normal human curiosity, feelings and reflexes. Nor does he teach that one should go to great lengths to avoid such sights. What he does say is that one should not try to see; it is wrong to make the effort, to go out of one’s way to see what it looks like when a person is degraded and humiliated.

The principle that we should take care to spare the feelings of others in their moment of shame is not something that was suddenly invented by Rabbi Shimon ben Elazar: it is fundamental to the Written Torah itself. Thus we learn how two of Noah’s sons took pains not to look on his nakedness when he lay drunk in his tent, walking backwards towards him when they covered him up, while the third son – who did not – was cursed.

If the Torah has already taught this principle, why should our Tanna feel any compunction to repeat it? I can offer a possible answer, that he is conveying a more subtle message than “don’t look!” What he is actually saying is “don’t just look!” In other words, don’t just stand and stare, like a curious spectator. No! Act upon what you see, do something about it; try to relieve the distress or at least offer moral support and comfort. This idea focuses on how we understand the word lir’ot in our mishnah, which has a parallel in Tehillim, in a verse that has been incorporated into Birkat HaMazon: na’ar ha’iti, gam zokanti, velo ra’iti Tzadik ne’ezav vezaro mevakesh lachem (“I was young once and now I’m old, and I’ve not seen a righteous man abandoned and his children begging for bread”.   This verse has upset many people, especially among those who, having survived the horrors and starvation of the Second World War, either refuse to say it at all or won’t say it out loud. But Rabbi Yehudah HaChasid says it doesn’t mean what they think it does at all. What it means is really “I’ve not seen a righteous man abandoned and his children begging for bread and then stood by without doing anything about it.” Whatever one feels about the validity of this interpretation, which has been enthusiastically endorsed by Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks a.h,, it cannot be denied that offering some form of help or assistance is a bigger, better gesture towards self-improvement than merely staring or indeed averting one’s gaze.

The case against paparazzi

Twenty-first century Western culture is fed on a constant diet of news. With constantly-updated coverage of events across the world, the traditional mass media and the social media provide their own accounts of political, military, economic, environmental and other developments on a scale unparalleled in history. Because of its ever-changing nature, news is popular with the public – never more so than when it is about people whose names and faces are familiar to them. Once a person has featured in the media to a sufficient extent, he or she obtains the status of a “celebrity,” effectively a person who is well known on account of being well known.

Once a person is well known, media intrusion into his or her private life is a frequent and often much resented occurrence. This intrusion is often inflicted by paparazzi, opportunistic photographers who seize the moment at which a celebrity may be taken unawares and then sell their photographs to those who distribute the images across the media in an attempt to attract or retain the attention of their public. Photographs of celebrities at times when they are behaving inappropriately, whether in public or in private, or at times of stress or grief, are likely to fetch the highest prices; despite the enactment of secular laws to prevent the invasion of personal privacy and the unlawful commercial exploitation of another’s image, this practice continues largely unabated. Often it causes much distress to the celebrity victim, as well as to his or her family and friends.

This Mishnah has a message for these paparazzi: don’t do it! The embarrassment and humiliation of another human being can inflict untold pain and damage – and the pain of other people knowing can be far worse than the suffering which is so apparently newsworthy in the first place. The facts that the general public regards the suffering of others as a form of entertainment, and that the public exposure of private pain generates lucrative profit, are not justifications. Rather, they underline the sad truth that what these people are doing is a reflection of their own lack of sensitivity towards fellow human beings.

Our mishnah teaches us to cultivate that sensitivity if we can, and to show that everyone should show sensitivity when dealing with the grieving, the afflicted, the angry and the vulnerable—and even with the honorary officers of Beit Knesset Hanassi! 

Follow the Lady

Here's the text of a Minchah-Maariv mini-shiur given by Jeremy Phillips on Tuesday 18 August 2026, during Rabbi Kenigsberg's summer vacation. 

In last week's shiur I introduced you to a roaming Rav, Rabbi Yose ben Kisma, and we discussed whether he should stay home at Kisari and learn there, or leave for a much more remunerative position where his prospects for personal advancement in Torah were less certain. This evening we look at another rabbi who faced a travel decision.  But, in our mishnah today—Avot 4:18—the incentive to move was not the prospect of gold and silver: it was likely the lure of a lady.

The mishnah reads like this:

רַבִּי נְהוֹרָאִי אוֹמֵר: הֱוֵי גוֹלֶה לִמְקוֹם תּוֹרָה, וְאַל תֹּאמַר שֶׁהִיא תָבוֹא אַחֲרֶֽיךָ, שֶׁחֲבֵרֶֽיךָ יְקַיְּמֽוּהָ בְיָדֶֽךָ, וְאֶל בִּינָתְךָ אַל תִּשָּׁעֵ

Rabbi Nehora'i used to say: Exile yourself to a place of Torah; do not say that it will come after you, because it is your colleagues (your chaverim) will fix it into you—and do not rely on your own understanding.

This is a mishnah that leaves out a crucial piece of information, something for which we have to look to the Gemara. Who was Rabbi Nehorai, and why does it matter to us?

The basic message of the mishnah needs no great explanation. It is axiomatic that, if you are going to learn Torah, you don’t need books, smart phones or a good internet connection—you need human resources: at least one Rav, a teacher, and at least one chaver, someone with whom you can learn. If you are where they are not, or they are where you are not, you aren’t going to learn much Torah. What’s more, if you have already learned some Torah, you need to keep it fresh by going over it, revising it and discussing it with others. Otherwise, with the best will in the world, you will find yourself eventually getting muddled, getting it wrong—or forgetting it completely. So, if we know what this mishnah teaches, why does it matter who its author is?

As the Gemara indicates, the later Tannaim were in agreement that Nehorai was not Rabbi Nehorai’s real name, and were speculating as to who he really was. One suggestion was that he was really Rabbi Nehemiah. Why, because Rabbi Nehemiah was one of the five prime talmidim of Rabbi Avika and, in the fourth perek of Avot where we find our mishnah, it just so happens that the previous four mishnayot were taught in the names of each of the other four. The second suggestion is that Rabbi Nehorai is Rabbi Meir, because the name Nehorai in Aramaic means “the one who illuminates”, which is also the meaning of “Meir”.  A third suggestion—and this to me seems the most plausible—is that Rabbi Nehorai is actually Rabbi Elazar ben Arach. Why? Because of a piece of aggadah that attaches to Rabbi Elazar ben Arach, alluded to near the end of Gemara Shabbat and fleshed out by midrashim in Kohelet Rabbah and Yalkut Shimoni.

The story goes like this. Al regel achat, we are taught that Rabbi Elazar ben Arach was one of the five top talmidim of Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai, who described him as a ma’ayan hamitgaber—an unceasingly-flowing spring, full of original ideas. He was, according to Abba Shaul at Avot 2:12, the most brilliant of them all. There we learn that, if all the talmidei chachamim—including Rabbi Eliezer HaGadol—were placed in one pan of the scales, with Rabbi Elazar ben Arach put in the other, he would outweigh them all. But curiously, given the man’s scintillating brilliance, we appear to learn very little from him. Why might this be the case?

After Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai died, his celebrated talmidim went off in their own directions and Rabbi Elazar ben Arach followed his wife to Diomsit—a holiday resort that was famous (perhaps ‘notorious’ would be a better word) for its warm springs, sensuous mud and luxurious living. This was manifestly not a place for Torah scholarship. As the Gemara at Shabbat 147b puts it, “Rabbi Chiya ben Abba said in the name of Rabbi Yochanan that one should never immerse oneself in the mud of Diomsit, since it stimulates the body and loosens the bowels”.

Alas, for the good rabbi, he settled down in Diomsit but neither his chaverim nor his talmidim followed him there. Diomsit was not a makom Torah and, while they never lost their respect and affection for Rabbi Elazar, they had better places to learn, presumably with fewer attractions and fewer pleasures of the flesh.

So what happened to Rabbi Elazar? He quite forgot his Torah. Rabbi Chelbo picks up the story from there: When eventually he did return, he got up to lein and suffered the indignity that many of us have experienced: he thought he could do it but then he tried to do it and got it wrong. He tried to read Hachodesh hazeh lachem (“This month shall be for you”) but he misidentified one letter in each word and what came out was haharesh hayah libbam (which sort of means “Their hearts were silent”).  But the scholars prayed for him and, mirabile dictu, his learning returned. At this point the Gemara then quotes our mishnah in full. If Rabbi Elazar ben Arach is indeed the Rabbi Nehorai of our mishnah, this makes sense because he would be teaching us on the basis of his own personal experience.

So that’s the story. But is this all that the mishnah has to offer? No! So let’s look into it more deeply. In the first place, can it really be true that the Tanna is telling Torah scholars to go into exile in order to learn Torah? No, says Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau in his monumental Yachel Israel. There’s no positive mitzvah to go into exile and no-one is supposed to leave Israel anyway. But, citing Rabbi Akiva’s 24-year absence from home, he suggests that if you really want to seek out Torah and learn it properly, and can’t do that where you are, you have to cultivate the mindset of someone who is prepared to shift themselves and go off to where Torah can be found.  

Several other commentators agree that the place of exile is only really a state of mind rather than a physical location at all. In other words, it’s the metaphorical ‘place’ one arrives at if you travel back in time,  along the spiritual path of your forefathers who accepted upon themselves the yoke of learning Torah and of keeping its commandments. Thus, explains the Mahari’a (Rabbi Yehudah Assad), only once you have arrived at that notional point are you then fully entitled to engage in investigating the deepest meanings of the Torah, subject only to the proviso that you should not rely solely on your own intellective activity but should measure it against the path of Torah and mitzvot along which you travel.

So far as Rabbi Shmuel di Uceda is concerned, going into exile is not just a state of mind. It’s part of a psychological drama to which the talmid chacham subjects himself. This is how it goes. Just imagine that you have accidentally killed someone. There’s blood on your hands. You’ve got to flee. Drop everything and run, or the go’el hadam will come after you and kill you if he can. This is a matter of life and death—and the life or death we’re talking about are yours! You don’t waste time packing and looking for your favourite possessions. You don’t even think of gathering up your essentials. You just run, run, run till you get to the city of refuge. Now that’s what exile to a place of Torah means. Run to a makom Torah. Forget your worldly possessions, jettison your toys—just run to the place where you can learn Torah. Yes, it will be uncomfortable, yes it will be inconvenient. But you are alive. Alive to the prospect of learning Torah, and that’s what matters. And you will have incidentally ticked another Avot box: as we learn at Avot 6:4,

פַּת בְּמֶֽלַח תֹּאכֵל, וּמַֽיִם בִּמְשׂוּרָה תִּשְׁתֶּה, וְעַל הָאָֽרֶץ תִּישָׁן, וְחַיֵּי צַֽעַר תִּחְיֶה, וּבַתּוֹרָה אַתָּה עָמֵל, אִם אַתָּה עֽוֹשֶׂה כֵּן, אַשְׁרֶֽיךָ וְטוֹב לָךְ, אַשְׁרֶֽיךָ בָּעוֹלָם הַזֶּה, וְטוֹב לָךְ לָעוֹלָם הַבָּא

Not every commentator takes so dramatic a view of our mishnah. Taking a more measured approach, neither the Meiri nor the Bartenura are in such a hurry. The first thing you should do, they agree, is to look around and see if you are already in a place where you can learn Torah. The reason for exiling yourself is to enable you to get the benefit of Torah scholars and chavrutot in your vicinity. If you already have them, then don’t go anywhere. This is good news for anyone who lives in Lakewood, Gateshead, Bnei Brak or any other established Makom Torah.

A curious view of going into exile is espoused by Rabbi Yisrael Lifschitz in his Tiferet Yisrael. What he learns is that a young man learning Torah should exile himself from his home and get away from his parents. Why? Because living at home is bad for you. He gives three reasons: (i) parents reinforce or at least validate the childish habits of their offspring; (ii) they continue to treat their children as children, spoiling them and thus impeding their growth and independence; (iii) children living at home don’t cultivate the art of self-reliance. No other rabbi comes close to saying anything like this.

Another rabbi who made domestic relations the basis of his commentary on this mishnah is Rabbi Eliezer Papo. Some 200 years ago this rabbi was the Rav of Silistra, Bulgaria, ministering to a small and largely peasant community whose great pleasures in life, as recorded in is best-known book, the Pele Yo’etz, were chatting outside shul when they should be davening inside it, smoking tobacco, singing non-Jewish songs, drinking so much coffee late at night that they couldn’t get up in time for shul the next morning, and beating their wives.

This colourful and imaginative rabbi addresses a facet of this mishnah that we have so far left unexplored. It teaches וְאַל תֹּאמַר שֶׁהִיא תָבוֹא אַחֲרֶֽיך, “don’t say that it [meaning the Torah] will come after you”. We might ask why it doesn’t. The Pele Yo’etz explains by referring to a passage from Mishlei that we recite every Friday night: Eishet Chayil Mi Yimtza (“A woman of valour, who can find her?”). Some people take this passage as an allegory that refers to Shabbat, or to the mother of Shlomo HaMelech or to the Torah. Others sing it to their wives.

So, the Pele Yo’etz asks, when you sing Eishet Chayil have you ever wondered what the difference is between the holy Torah and your wife?  He answers thus. In the first place, he says, when husband and wife have an argument and the husband storms off in anger, the wife will eventually go after him in order to make peace with him; the Torah, however, is different. The Yerushalmi to Berachot says “If you leave me for one day, I’ll leave you for two.” Secondly, a wife has only one husband at a time and may have no-one else to whom to turn if her husband leaves her, while the Torah is always followed by a multitude of admirers and enthusiastic suitors. Thirdly, it is the husband whose role is to support his wife and provide for her needs while, in contrast, as we learn in Mishlei itself, it is the Torah that provides for those who are wedded to it. Finally, the wife is presumed to be less knowledgeable and less intelligent than her husband, while it is the Torah that imparts her knowledge and wisdom to those who pursue her.

This comparison reflects the social and economic reality of the Ottoman-ruled Balkans in the early 19th century and may appear inappropriate, if not offensive, to those who read it two centuries later. However, the punchline is as powerful now as it was then: don’t treat the Torah as though it was dependent on you, for the truth is quite the reverse. The Torah owes you nothing and has no need for you at all. If you do not continue to study its content and you fail to practice its principles, you can hardly expect it to cling faithfully to you – particularly if you run off in pursuit of other activities and pleasures, in places like Diomsit where the light of Torah rarely, if ever, shines.

There is a touch of irony in the Pele Yo’etz’s explanation here since this Mishnah reflects an element of role reversal: if the Rabbi Nehorai of our mishnah is indeed Rabbi Elazar ben Arach, it was his wife who decided to live in Diomsit, and he who followed after her.

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As a footnote to this shiur, one might ask why, if it’s so deleterious to a talmid chacham’s Torah learning and spiritual health, would he ever consider going to places that are Torah-free zones like Diomsit at all. This question clearly troubled the Maharal, since he discusses it in his Derech Chaim.  The Maharal’s approach to this question reflects a degree of sensitivity to the human condition. He points out that, for people in general, the attraction of leaving a spiritual citadel in pursuit of a more earthly paradise needs no deep explanation. We know it in our own lives. After all, we like to think of ourselves as being committed to Torah; we learn; we keep the mitzvot and so on—but how many of us seek to spend our vacations and share quality time with our families in seaside resorts with comfy hotels in preference to trooping off to Lakewood, Gateshead or Bnei Brak. The Maharal understood this. Humans, being gashmi (inherently physical rather than spiritual beings), are drawn by their natural desires to that which is also gashmi. When a person who is gashmi encounters that which is gashmi, the spiritual dimension of Torah—which is the complete antithesis of man’s earthly instincts and desires—can easily be not just ignored but forgotten. This unfortunate consequence is best avoided by relocating in a stronghold of Torah, a place where the power of the ruchni is strong enough to overcome the powerful appeal of the gashmi.

As a further footnote, it’s worth considering the final words of Rabbi Nehorai’s advice in this mishnah: וְאֶל בִּינָתְךָ אַל תִּשָּׁעֵ (“don’t rely on your own understanding”). These words come straight out of a verse from Mishlei (at 3.5), but they are not treated  as a proof pasuk: rather, our Tanna has simply incorporated the last part of the verse into his own mishnaic advice.  The full verse actually suggests the exact opposite of what he’s teaching: you don’t need to rely on rabbis or chaverim at all. The full verse reads

 בְּטַח אֶל-יְהוָה, בְּכָל-לִבֶּךָ וְאֶל-בִּינָתְךָ אַל-תִּשָּׁעֵן

(“Trust in God with all your heart, and don’t rely on your own understanding”). In case you are wondering, the view that all understanding comes from God and his hashgachah over any individual is reflected in the Mikra’ot Godolot, in the commentaries of the Metzudat David, the Ralbag and the Malbim—none of whom make any reference to our mishnah and the need to enhance one’s understanding by engaging with any other mortals.

On the Derech

Here's the text of a Minchah-Maariv mini-shiur given by Jeremy Phillips on Tuesday 11 August 2026, during Rabbi Kenigsberg's summer vacation. 

Let’s look at a teaching from Avot that, in very different ways, relates to the value of Torah and not why, or how, but where you should learn it. It’s a baraita at Avot 6:9 that goes like this (omitting the proof pasukim):

אָמַר רַבִּי יוֹסֵי בֶּן קִסְמָא: פַּֽעַם אֶחָת הָיִֽיתִי מְהַלֵּךְ בַּדֶּֽרֶךְ, וּפָגַע בִּי אָדָם אֶחָד, וְנָתַן לִי שָׁלוֹם, וְהֶחֱזַֽרְתִּי לוֹ שָׁלוֹם, אָמַר לִי: רַבִּי, מֵאֵיזֶה מָקוֹם אָֽתָּה, אָמַֽרְתִּי לוֹ: מֵעִיר גְּדוֹלָה שֶׁל חֲכָמִים וְשֶׁל סוֹפְרִים אָֽנִי. אָמַר לִי: רַבִּי, רְצוֹנְךָ שֶׁתָּדוּר עִמָּֽנוּ בִּמְקוֹמֵֽנוּ, וַאֲנִי אֶתֵּן לָךְ אֶֽלֶף אֲלָפִי דִּנְרֵי זָהָב וַאֲבָנִים טוֹבוֹת וּמַרְגָּלִיּוֹת. אָמַֽרְתִּי לוֹ: אִם אַתָּה נוֹתֵן לִי כָּל כֶּֽסֶף וְזָהָב וַאֲבָנִים טוֹבוֹת וּמַרְגָּלִיּוֹת שֶׁבָּעוֹלָם, אֵינִי דָר אֶלָּא בִּמְקוֹם תּוֹרָה

Rabbi Yossei ben Kisma said: Once I was traveling and I encountered a man. He greeted me and I returned his greetings. He said to me: "Rabbi, where are you from?" I said to him: "From a great city of sages and scholars, am I." He said to me: "Rabbi, would you like to live with us in our place? I will give you a million dinars of silver, gold, precious stones and pearls." I said to him: "If you were to give me all the silver, gold, precious stones and pearls in the world, I would not live anywhere but in a place of Torah.

Incidentally, it’s not clear whether this baraita should be here in Avot at all.  Some editions of Avot leave it out—and, while it’s also found in Kallah Rabbati, it’s not in Eliyahu Zuta.

Be that as it may, on the surface this looks like a straightforward message. A rich man meets talmid chacham, asks him to come to his town as the rabbi and offers a large inducement. The talmid chacham says no. The moral of the story? Torah is worth more than any money can buy. The first of the proof pasukim cited in support of this baraita validates this understanding. As we sing on Simchat Torah, טוֹב לִי תוֹרַת פִּֽיךָ, מֵאַלְפֵי זָהָב וָכָֽסֶף

But things are never as easy as they seem.

First, let’s look at the man himself. Who was Rabbi Yose ben Kisma?. We only know a little about him, but what we know is quite significant. He lived in Kisari, now Caesarea. Was this a “great city of sages and scholars?” That’s a tricky one. It may well have been originally a great city of sages and scholars—but it was not at the time Rabbi Yose was there. He lived there in the middle of the 2^nd century, when what was formerly a city with an active Jewish population had become a prosperous Roman market town. It was not to become an עִיר גְּדוֹלָה שֶׁל חֲכָמִים וְשֶׁל סוֹפְרִים until more than a century later, under the influence of Rabbi Abbahu and the third generation of Amoraim. Anyway, when Rabbi Yose died, some time after the Bar Kochba revolt, Kisari was a veritable citadel of Roman culture. Rabbi Yose was himself on good terms with the Romans. Indeed, a Gemara in Avoda Zara tells how the local Roman administrators attended his funeral as a sign of respect.

So where was Rabbi Yose going on his journey? If Kisari was a great city of scholars and sages, he wouldn’t need to be going anywhere. According to Rabbi Shmuel di Uceda, author of the Midrash Shmuel, this was indeed the case, as the opening words of the narrative suggest. Says the Midrash Shmuel, don’t think the words pa’am achat mean “once upon a time”; they mean this: “Look at me! I only left the Beit Midrash once and suddenly I was beset by all these temptations – gold, silver, kavod”. This leaves an interesting question, though. If Rabbi Yose hardly ever left the Beit Midrash and the Roman governors probably never had any reason to enter it, how did they become such good friends that the Romans turned up at his funeral?

But let’s leave Rabbi Yose aside and take a look at the man who encounters him on his journey and tries to buy him. Who is this man? Do we even need to know? No, we don’t, if all we are supposed to learn from this baraita is that we shouldn’t sell out and make our Torah subordinate to our material wealth. But the Maharal of Prague disagrees. In his Derech Chaim, the Maharal regards it is highly significant that we don’t know who this man is because, paradoxically, the fact that we don’t know who he is means that we do know who he is. Who turns up in many stories when no-one recognizes him? Why, of course, it’s Eliyahu haNavi! Several times in aggadic passages in the Gemara, Eliyahu turns up incognito. This man who encounters Rabbi Yose must therefore be Eliyahu. Since Eliyahu is an emissary of Hashem, it follows that Rabbi Yose is being tested by God himself, the implication being that even if the gold and silver that you are offered is a reward, as it were, for services rendered in this world, you should have the strength of character to refuse it.

In case the Maharal is wrong about this, and the mysterious man is not Eliyahu haNavi, there’s someone else he might be, someone else who alsoturns up incognito offering great things. And that’s the Satan. This hypothesis is also quite plausible since the level of the bribe to take the position of town rabbi is so great and no other terms of engagement are specified. This suggests that the magnitude of the wealth on offer should be sufficient to blind Rabbi Yose to all other considerations.

So, we’ve dealt with the basic story and we’ve said a bit about Rabbi Yose and the stranger he encounters. Now let’s look at the moment they meet.

Strangely, the first person to speak is the stranger, who greets the rabbi. Isn’t this wrong? It’s axiomatic that a learned rabbi who knows his Pirkei Avot should implement the teaching of Rabbi Masya ben Chorosh in perek 4 and be the first to greet others—and the Gemara teaches that Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai was first to greet everyone—even the non-Jews he met in the shuk—so why doesn’t Rabbi Yose do the same? Now here the Maharal’s explanation comes in handy. Whether the stranger is Eliyahu haNavi or the Satan, he would simply have appeared before the rabbi’s eyes without giving the latter a chance to see him coming! And even if this is wrong, we may conjecture that Rabbi Yose—even on his journey—was so engrossed in his Torah learning that he wasn’t looking around to admire the scenery (which might incur a spiritual death penalty if he stopped learning long enough to admire the scenery: per Rabbi Yaakov in Avot perek 3), and he wouldn’t have seen anyone coming at all.

Another mystery is why the stranger opens the dialogue by asking Rabbi Yose straight away where he comes from. It’s much more normal to say something like “who are you? What’s your name? even “Where are you heading?” I’ll come back to this later.

But perhaps the biggest mystery in this baraita, at least for the many rabbis who have commented on it, is the size of the booty offered to Rabbi Yose to go with the stranger and take the job. Put at its simplest level—and this is good news for Rabbi Kenigsberg—there is no halachic limit to the amount a rabbi can earn or own. The Gemara in Kiddushin cites the case of Rabbi Elazar ben Charsom, whose name was a byword for unimaginable affluence and he was praised for being able to learn Torah despite the responsibility he bore for his massive wealth. While Rabbi Tzadok in the fourth perek of Avot, citing Hillel, insists that one must not use one’s Torah as a spade to dig with, there’s no problem with anyone showering their favourite rabbi with gold, silver, share stock in AI start-ups or even tickets to fly El Al. But while the good news for Rabbi Kenigsberg is that the sky is the limit for what he can earn, there’s some bad news too. Nobody in the real world pays rabbis that much. And if you ask rabbis if they are same’ach b’chelkom, contented with their lot, they may ask you what you mean by “lot”. In short, their lot is not usually a happily affluent one.

This factor has coloured commentaries on our Baraita. Rabbi Yisrael Lipschitz, for example, the Tiferet Yisrael, says that the million gold dinars, gold, pearls and precious gems were never intended to be taken literally. No, he says, they are simply an invitation to Rabbi Yose to name his price, presumably on the normal rabbinical scale of his time. Rabbi Shmuel di Uceda takes a different line. When the stranger offers to give Rabbi Yose the million dinars and so on, what he really means to do is to comfort Rabbi Yose by saying “don’t worry. You won’t have to go collecting door-to-door to collect your pay. I’ll do that for you”. I suspect that this was not intended as a serious explanation of our baraita. Rather, it was a cry from the heart from Rabbi Shmuel di Uceda, who lived in Safed at the time when Sultan Murad III deported the city’s 1,500 richest Jewish citizens to Cyprus and left the poor man having to go knocking on doors to collect his own pay.

Now, if Rabbi Yose had accepted the offer and become rabbi in the stranger’s town, what would his job have looked like? The key word here is bimkomeinu; “in our place”. This word is double-edged. It can either mean “right here in our town” or it can mean “in place of us”. This double meaning was almost certainly unknown to Rabbi Yose in his day and age, where the concept of the “middle of the road”, nominally orthodox Jewish community had yet to develop. But we do know, particularly in some English-speaking parts of the diaspora, that there are places where people would really like to say: “We want a rabbi to be frum” in our place”, meaning “in place of us”. He can do all the religious stuff—we are happy to leave that to him, so long as he lets us get on with our lives and do our own thing”. In this sense a rabbi can earn a large salary and enjoy a comfortable lifestyle, though he may find that he is the only member of his community to keep Shabbat, observe the laws of kashrut outside as well as inside the home, or to do any Torah learning.

Incidentally, the tendency of all commentators is to side with Rabbi Yose and praise him for his principled approach in refusing any amount of money and treasure for the sake of Torah. Not one commentator that I know of has a kind word for the stranger who tries to buy Rabbi Yose’s knowledge and scholarship though. I think this is really sad. Here’s a man who, it is assumed, comes from a place that is not a makom Torah—and just look how much he is prepared to part with in order to get a Rav! How many of us would pay so much under similar conditions. The outrageously large sum offered to Rabbi Yose for his Torah presence is as much a praise for the value of the Torah as is his rejection of it.

Now to close with a few random points.

First, is the position of this baraita within the sixth perek significant? Some mefarshim make a great play of learning each mishnah or Baraita from what the one that came before it says. The Baraita that comes before ours, learned by Rabbi Shimon ben Yehudah in the name of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, sings the praises of both wealth and honour as being things that are no’eh latzadikim, things that befit the righteous and which, therefore, are things that holy rabbis are entitled to enjoy. Our teaching says yes, wealth and honour are indeed befitting for a tzaddik—but you shouldn’t compromise your Torah learning in order to get them.

Secondly, we have no idea whether the events recorded in this baraita ever happened. From the strange circumstances of the encounter and the many questions that arise from the dialogue, it may be that this whole thing is an invention of Rabbi Yose, a teaching device that conveys a powerful message: that our Torah is a treasure beyond worth.

In this context, we may be reading here a parable for the workings of the human mind.  Let’s read it like this: when Rabbi Yose says הָיִֽיתִי מְהַלֵּךְ בַּדֶּֽרֶךְ, he isn’t on a physical journey at all: he is telling us that he was on the derech, the derech yasharah, the straight and narrow. The adam who meets him is his own yetzer yara, who was poga, who encounters him unexpectedly (we daven on a daily basis for this sort of meeting not to happen when we ask to be spared a pega ra). Rabbi Yose and his yetzer hara don’t need to exchange names since they already know each other pretty well. The yetzer hara then challenges Rabbi Yose to look at where he is in life and to ask him: “don’t you think you could do better for yourself than to be a big rabbi in this relative Torah desert?” Rabbi Yose realizes that he could do much better in material terms, but he also recognizes that he has a good routine for learning Torah where he is, and that he doesn’t need to exchange the routine he knows for the uncertainties of a move to another place—particularly if it involves the disruptions involved in becoming the local celebrity Rav somewhere else. That would be like using the Torah as a spade to dig with.

Finally, here’s the question that troubles many laymen. Why didn’t Rabbi Yose just take the money and use it to set up a well-funded Beit Midrash from where he could be marbitz Torah and create a new generation of talmidei chachamim? I leave the answer to you.