We come to chapter 1 of Maseches Avos, mishnah 5. The partner of Yose ben Yoezer in this mishnah is Yose ben Yochanan of Jerusalem, the av beis din of that period. The historical background we have about these figures is relatively meager: we know that they lived during the persecutions of the Greek-Syrians, the Seleucid decrees and the story of Chanukah, but we have almost no personal information about them or about their direct impact on the Jewish people and its history.
Two decrees that the two of them enacted (Maseches Shabbos 14b):
The tumah of the lands of the nations - they decreed tumah upon the land outside of Israel. This decree came in several stages, but the reason given for it, simply put, is the concern for unmarked graves in other places. The obvious question is why specifically now, and the answer is a matter of conjecture: it may be that as a result of the decrees a desire arose among Jews to leave Eretz Yisrael, and this decree served as a deterrent.
The tumah of glass vessels - they declared glass vessels to be vessels that are susceptible to tumah. From the Torah there are only seven materials that are susceptible to tumah, and glass is not among them, and they added it to the list. Here too the explanation is conjectural: this was a period of social and economic hardship because of the decrees, and all the glass manufacturers were located to the north, in present-day Lebanon, on the coast north of Israel. It may be, then, that this was a kind of negative economic incentive, intended to help local industry in Israel.
Whatever the reason may be, according to these lines of study it emerges that this was a period in which the Sages were occupied with social and economic questions in addition to other matters.
Our mishnah as well contains three statements that hint at concerns revolving around the social and economic distress of the era of Yose ben Yochanan. Let us first read all three as they are written:
"Yehi beischa pasuach lirvachah" - let your house be open wide.
"Veyihyu aniyim bnei beisecha" - and let the poor be members of your household.
"Ve'al tarbeh sichah im ha'ishah" - and do not engage in excessive conversation with a woman.
The mishnah attaches further statements to these three fundamental points. All three of them, as the classic Rishonim explain them, are not what they would appear to be on a simple reading. Let us go through them one by one.
"Yehi beischa pasuach lirvachah" - let your house be open wide:
Seemingly the mishnah could have said only "pasuach" - open. What does the word "lirvachah" add? There are two basic approaches to this:
The approach of the majority (the Rash and the Rambam) - the picture is that of Avraham Avinu and his tent, open on all four sides, so that passersby could enter. So too here: the subject is travelers, wayfarers coming from outside the city. When they arrive in the city they need not search for a way to get in; rather, they see the door standing wide open and they enter. The word "lirvachah" teaches that the door should be literally open, so that they have easy and immediate access.
The approach of Rabbeinu Yonah (in his first explanation) - "lirvachah" is from the root revach, relief and rescue, meaning ease. A person's house should be an open place that provides relief to others in whatever they need: whether a place to stay, whether financial support in the form of a loan or charity, and even comforting words, emotional support and good advice. The house is a place where people find help, and it stands at their disposal.
The great difference between the approaches: according to the second approach this applies not only to the poor person, the needy person and the traveler (who is poor and needy temporarily, being far from home), but to every person. His house is open to whoever wishes to come, and each one finds there what he needs. Here too the image of Avraham Avinu stands before our eyes, but with a different understanding of the word "lirvachah".
"Veyihyu aniyim bnei beisecha" - and let the poor be members of your household:
The main approach among the Rishonim (the Bartenura and others) - this is speaking about the servants who run the household. Do not acquire non-Jewish slaves and do not hire non-Jewish labor; rather, take on Jewish labor and provide employment for Jewish workers. Instead of foreign workers in your home, give the work to local Jews and they will be like members of your household. In the time of the Mishnah people did in fact own slaves, whereas a Jewish servant is not acquired under ordinary circumstances - this is not the place to go into the details, but the bottom line is that Jews were not slaves under ordinary circumstances. It emerges that the household staff, the residents if you will, would be Jews, and in this way you provide economic support to the local Jewish population that was struggling. And why would you give your money somewhere else?
The approach of Rabbeinu Yonah (in his second explanation) - people in need should feel comfortable in your home.
Both approaches are forms of tzedakah. According to the first approach, you are providing employment for Jewish workers by having them serve in your home, and as the Rambam lists the various levels of tzedakah, this is the highest level. For the drawback of tzedakah is that the recipients are embarrassed and humiliated by needing support, whereas when you provide a person with work and he earns his living, there is no shame in it at all and he can hold his head high with pride.
According to the second approach, people are in need of things, and you must make them feel welcome in your home as though they belong there. Just as you smile at your son when he walks past you, so too when guests come to you for Shabbos, and perhaps they are people in need to one degree or another - they feel comfortable, they receive that same smile and they feel like part of the household. This blunts the sharpness of the difficult situation of being dependent on others.
"V'al tarbeh sichah im ha'ishah":
This is the part that sits least comfortably with the contemporary reader's ear. Even before discussing the words themselves, two precise points in the wording:
"Tarbeh" - excessive amount. It does not say do not speak with your wife, but rather do not do so to excess.
"Sichah" - chatter. This refers to speech that is not constructive and is not done for any particular purpose, but is merely idle conversation.
The instruction here is therefore: do not engage in excessive idle conversation with your wife.
To understand this, we need to grasp the starting point of the Mishnah and of Chazal: their conception of marriage is not the way many people view it today. Marriage is comparable to a business partnership. It is not a business in itself, but the point is that a person has a mission in this world that he cannot fulfill alone. He needs a partner, and therefore he marries, and together they build a home and raise a family - something a person cannot do on his own. That is the essence of marriage and that is what it exists for, and not merely so that a person will not be lonely and will have companionship.
By way of analogy: if I were writing a book of advice for the business section, I would strongly recommend that someone who has a genuine business partnership avoid excessive idle chatter with his partner. Why? First, because you have more important things to do. Second, idle chatter can generate disagreements over matters that are not important to the business and distract from the goal. And third, it can cause the other side to lose trust and respect for you: do you have nothing better to do than sit and chat about sports and the weather? We came here to build a business - go and do something to advance the goal.
This is exactly the point Chazal are driving at, mapped back onto marriage, but with one additional element: when the partner is of the opposite gender, another layer is added to the prohibition against excessive conversation, since it can lead to things worse than a lack of productivity or a wasted opportunity - it can lead to sin.
This is stated explicitly in the continuation of the Mishnah: "B'ishto ameru" - the author of the Mishnah, Yosi ben Yochanan, says: this is what I received from my teachers, and when they said "do not engage in excessive conversation with the woman" - they were speaking about a man's own wife. The word "ishah" in Hebrew is ambiguous: it can refer to a woman in general, or to a wife. And here, by force of the definite article in the word "ha'ishah," it refers specifically to a wife. And afterward: "Kal vachomer b'eshes chaveiro" - how much more so should a person not engage in idle chatter with his friend's wife, for obvious reasons.
Here the words of Yosi ben Yochanan come to an end. The rest of the Mishnah is in the nature of an editorial note from the editor of the Mishnah, Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi, Rabbeinu HaKadosh: "Mikan ameru: kol zman she'adam marbeh sichah im ha'ishah - gorem ra'ah l'atzmo, u'vatel midivrei Torah, v'sofo yoresh Gehinnom". "Mikan ameru" - from the words of the Mishnah up to this point, the Sages of later generations derived three things. Let us now read all three of them into the words themselves.
"Gorem ra'ah le'atzmo" - he brings harm upon himself:
Idle chatter can raise between husband and wife issues and disputes that have no substance to them. Picture a husband and wife starting to argue about politics, about whom they will vote for. It is a great shame, and there is nothing vital in it for their mission of building a home and a family and raising children. The subject is not relevant, yet it can become a source of quarreling.
More serious than that, and to my mind this is an important point: there is a measure of disrespect toward the relationship in it. A person has relationships of many kinds, but the bond between a man and his wife is sacred. It is meant to support the most central values of a person's mission in the world: to build a home and a family, to raise children, to develop himself and to develop the relationship itself. And when it is turned into an arena for idle chatter, the holiness and honor befitting that institution are damaged. At the same time, Chazal and the commentators stress that there is certainly a time and a place for a man and his wife to talk and even to chat, and there is nothing wrong with that. Only excess is the problem - excessive conversation, idle and purposeless chatter.
It can diminish the husband's honor in his wife's eyes. As was said above in the business context: do you have nothing better to do than sit and talk about yesterday's sports games? Is that what your life amounts to? There are more important things - whether earning a living, whether spending time with the children, whether learning Torah. Go and do something of value, and stop wasting time chattering about trivialities.
"U'vatel midivrei Torah" - he neglects the study of Torah:
The simple reason is that as long as a person is chatting for his own enjoyment, he is not learning Torah, and that is bad news. But there is another layer here: when a man and his wife are carrying on side conversations of any kind, even when he sits down to learn he continues to turn them over in his mind - what he should have said, what she said, what she meant and what will happen when he comes home this evening. It turns out that he is distracted from his learning even when he is sitting alone and trying to learn.
"Vesofo yoresh gehinnom" - in the end he inherits Gehinnom:
Many have understood here that levity and frivolity lead to immorality, that is, they bring a person to sin in matters of sexual morality. In the context of a husband and his wife, this is limited to the situation in which the wife is a niddah and forbidden to him, and this is a type of safeguard among the safeguards - for there is a range of preventive measures designed to prevent closeness between them during the time of the prohibition. And of course, there is the second matter, the kal vachomer regarding another man's wife: it is clear that a person has no business chattering with other men's wives, since this leads to immodesty.
In summary: In this Mishnah we learned the three statements of Yosi ben Yochanan of Jerusalem, against the background of a period of social and economic distress that was reflected as well in their decrees concerning the tumah of the lands of the nations and glass vessels. "Yehi beischa pasuach lirvachah" - both as opening the door to travelers and as a home that provides relief and ease to anyone in need. "Veyihyu aniyim bnei beisecha" - both as providing employment to Jewish workers, which is the highest level of charity, and as instilling a sense of belonging among those in need. "Ve'al tarbeh sichah im ha'ishah" - the prohibition of excessive idle conversation, stemming from the understanding of marriage as a partnership with a mission, and its three consequences: he brings harm upon himself, he neglects the study of Torah, and in the end he inherits Gehinnom.