Since as long as I can remember, I have been deeply interested in Jewish culture and its people. As a Catholic kid reading the Bible, it was hard not to take the Old Testament literally, seeing it as establishing the Jews as “God’s chosen people.” Later, as a teenager, I learned about the history of antisemitism in general and the Shoah in particular. Jewish history, legends, stories, and lore became a fascination for me, with José Patterson’s Angels, Prophets, Rabbis and Kings from the Legends of the Jewish People as a good starting point and Nicholas de Lange’s Atlas of the Jewish World as an even better one. I also read Yiddish literature, mostly Isaac Bashevis Singer, mentally transporting myself to the now-vanished world of the Eastern European shtetl. In my young adult years, it was no longer religion but the community’s high regard for learning and intelligence that continued to endear the Jewish people to my nerdy, bookish heart.
At that time, I also read selections from the Talmud and the Zohar, though not extensively: both are gargantuan works, and the opportunity cost of Torah study for an irreligious gentile is probably too high. However, Harold Bloom included one tractate of the Mishnah, Pirkei Avot, in his famous list of canonical works. Although I disagree with many of Bloom’s ideas, I am fairly confident that anything he canonized is worth the reading time. Given that Avot is relatively short and that I had a digital copy available (a scanned version of the 1921 Hebrew, Yiddish, and English edition, translated into Yiddish by Yehoash and into English by B. Halper), I decided to give it a try.
The book is a collection of ethical sayings by rabbis, as its title suggests ("Chapters of the Fathers," "Sayings of the Fathers," or "Ethics of the Fathers"). The sages quoted range across a span of roughly four centuries, from 200 BC (Simon the Just) to 200 AD (Judah haNasi). In between, familiar names from rabbinic literature appear, such as Hillel, Shammai, Akiba, Gamaliel, and Yohanan ben Zakkai.
Unlike other tractates focused on legal rulings, Pirkei Avot is devoted entirely to questions of character, virtue, leadership, and the pursuit of a meaningful life. Its short, memorable aphorisms encourage humility, patience, respect for others, and devotion to study and good deeds.
As with most works of Wisdom literature, many sayings sound persuasive individually but can seem contradictory when compared two by two. I imagine this is the stuff that makes yeshivah study so lively, with students throwing different quotations and interpretations at each other. The ethics proposed, while deeply religious, are ones any Westerner can recognize and sympathize with, and in many ways they remind me of the Gospels. Some sayings feel dated ("Do not gossip with women, especially if they are not your wife"), while others remain more universal ("True love is like that of David for Jonathan, not mere lust for the body").
One aspect I found particularly interesting was the strong belief in an Afterlife of reward and punishment, plus future resurrection, that pervades the text. Most of the Old Testament, which remains the only Jewish religious work I have fully read, holds a "this-worldly" view where God rewards and punishes in this life. The shift toward belief in a postmortem judgment is a fascinating development I would like to read more about. I imagine it began after the Babylonian captivity, but it is largely absent from the Tanakh. The four centuries covered by Pirkei Avot are probably the period in which these ideas became mainstream, given that in the Gospels we still see infighting between Sadducees and Pharisees over this very issue.
All in all, the work was moderately interesting. The translation has a "ye olde English," King James Bible style. The ethical content is fairly conventional, but I would not hold that against it too much. Rather, it underscores how deeply our Western tradition has built itself upon these same ideas and beliefs.
אֵיזֶהוּ חָכָם? הַלּוֹמֵד מִכָּל אָדָם
"Who is wise? One who learns from every person."
Pirkei Avot 4:1
