[Jeremy Phillips writes] I was asked to prepare a devar Torah for se'udah shelishit yesterday in the event that there was some time to fill after the sponsors spoke. As it turned out, there was no spare time -- but it seemed a shame to let the devar Torah go to waste so I have posted it here:
At Avot 4:20, Rabbi Matya ben Charash opens his teaching with the following short piece of advice:
הֱוֵי מַקְדִּים בִּשְׁלוֹם כָּל אָדָם (“Be first to greet everyone else”).
This is a really problematic mishnah and I’ll
explain why.
Almost all of the middot in Pirkei Avot can be done by
everyone without any problem, because no-one’s good middot interfere
with anyone else’s. For example, we can all judge other people favourably. We
can all open our houses to the poor. We can all say a little and do a lot, and
so on. If I do it, you can do it too. In fact, the more the merrier.
But this is not so with being the first to greet someone
else. This mishnah is what in game theory we call a zero-sum game. If I greet
someone first, they can’t greet me first. My greeting trumps theirs, as it
were. If I win, they lose. But if I’m busy checking my smartphone and I don’t
see them creep up on me and say hello, it’s they who win and I who lose.
Anyway, one of the first things I discovered about them was
that, if I greeted them with the words “Good Shabbes”, they would infallibly
reply “Good Shabbes, good Shabbes”. I was really puzzled by this behaviour. Since
Hillel at Avot 2:6 teaches that someone who is timid will never make a good
student, I took what to me seemed the incomparably bold step of asking a crusty
old yekke why, when I greeted him with the words “Good Shabbes”, he and his
friends would always answer me twice. He pointed to the words of R; Matya ben
Charash in this mishnah. I had won by greeting him first with the words
“Shabbat shalom”. His kenas, his punishment as it were, was to acknowledge his
failing by greeting me twice.
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There is of course far more to this mishnah than meets the
eye, and our commentators have had a field day with it. Some commentaries
suggest that the thrust of this teaching lies in its tail—that you have to
greet everybody, whoever they are. In other words, the duty to greet applies to
all people and should therefore apply even to a non-Jew (commentary ascribed to
Rashi), an idolator (Bartenura) or an enemy (R’ Shmuel di Ozeda, Midrash
Shmuel). Rabbenu Yonah adds his mysterious pennyworth to the debate when he
says that these words are mussar—but he inconveniently does not spell
out what that mussar is, unlike R’ Shmuel di Ozeda. He agrees that this
is a mussar teaching, and pointedly observes that it’s not enough to deign to
return someone else’s greeting if that person should greet him first: you have
to be first to pounce.
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According to Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau (Yachel Yisrael) Rabbi
Matya is actually reminding us that greeting another human being should not be
a mere mechanical act or conventional social reflex. As he, when a Jew greets
another person, the word used is שָׁלוֹם
(shalom, peace”). To offer another person peace is to confer a blessing. By
being first to greet others we express our peaceful intent—with one major
caveat. There is no magic power in the word shalom: as important as it
is for us to choose the right words when we greet others, it is equally
important for us to greet them with a friendly disposition (Shammai at Avot
1:15). Growling “shalom” while you scowl at them is unlikely to produce
the requisite effect. So I suggest we all practise our best smiles whenever we greet each other.
