We come now to the fifth mishnah in the second chapter of Avos. In many editions of Pirkei Avos this is still part of mishnah four, but the sheer number of topics it contains justifies studying it on its own. What is more, there is a structural turning point here in the mishnayos: until now we have moved from Moshe Rabbeinu, with whom the chain of transmission opened at the start of the first chapter, down to Rabban Gamliel the son of Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi, one of the last of the Tannaim.
From here on we retrace our steps and climb back up to Hillel, who could be called the father of the Tannaim. Until now we have followed his family line through his direct descendants, who were the Nesi'im; from here on we will follow his students, his spiritual descendants. Instead of his son or grandson, we move to Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai, the founder of the vineyard in Yavneh and the leader after the destruction of the Beis HaMikdash. And in order to get there, we have to return to Hillel.
Hillel as the Symbol of Humility:
The Gemara describes Hillel in several places as a kind of symbol of humility. Moshe Rabbeinu, of course, was the humblest of all men and the greatest of all generations, but it seems that Hillel was exceptionally humble in his own right. Our mishnah expresses Hillel's mastery of this trait and the way he saw it being applied in a person's relationship with the world around him. The thread that ties together all the different points Hillel raises here is the theme of humility and submission.
What Humility Means According to the Torah:
Of all the character traits a person might examine, humility is the most important in the Torah's order of priorities. Moshe Rabbeinu is called the humblest of all men, and his humility was the cause of his greatness rather than the result of it: he was chosen to be Moshe Rabbeinu because he was so humble. When we think of humility, we tend to picture a shy, quiet person standing in the corner, doing nothing and drawing no attention. That is not correct.
After all, Moshe Rabbeinu himself confronted Pharaoh face to face, the king of the most powerful nation in the world, and held nothing back from him. This was no weak personality, and yet he was the humblest of all men. The definition, then, is a person who understands exactly who he is and who he is not - he holds no mistaken impression of his own strengths or weaknesses. Moshe Rabbeinu understood his strengths and gave expression to them, understood his shortcomings and did not try to hide them or feel insecure about them, but admitted them, lived with them and accepted them as they were.
The same is true of Hillel, the great humble one. Hillel was the one who could say "If I am here, everything is here," as we learned earlier, because he understood full well how important he was to the Jewish people and did not shy away from it. From here we turn to see various expressions of the question of how a person should be humble in his relationship with the world around him.
"Al tifrosh min hatzibbur" - do not separate yourself from the community:
The first example is Hillel's instruction not to separate oneself from the community. First we have to admit that withdrawing is human nature: everyone at some point feels that sense of "stop the world, I want to get off." Mark Twain is credited with the line, "The more people I meet, the more I like my dog." Everyone has his own ideas, and there are people who hold foolish ideas and behave in foolish ways, and it is frustrating. The urge arises to say: I would rather go off on my own, live on top of a mountain and do my own thing, than deal with all these frustrating and difficult people.
Although this is human nature, it runs contrary to the Torah's worldview. According to the Torah, a person must see his identity as part of the community: he is one of the Jewish people collectively, and that is where his significance lies. We mentioned earlier the words of the Rambam, that one who separates himself from the ways of the community, even if he has no specific sins to his name, has no share in the World to Come. The Torah was not given to an individual - not to Avraham, Yitzchak or Yaakov - but to an entire nation, and a person is part of a nation and must not separate himself from it.
Beyond that, there is an element of arrogance in such withdrawal. Most people, most of the time, need the support of the community: we all needed it as children, and we will all need it again, God willing, in our old age. To say something like "Right now I do not need the community, so I will go off on my own" is the height of arrogance. If at the moment a person does not need them and they need him, that is his good fortune, and precisely for that reason he must help and serve as a support for those people who need him. Distancing himself from them is a terrible crime.
Two fundamental stories in Tanach illustrate this:
Moshe Rabbeinu at the war with Amalek: Moshe did not take part in the fighting itself and was not a soldier, but he was with the nation the entire time, holding his hands up: as long as his hands were raised they were successful, and when they were not, they were not successful. He was with them in spirit the whole time, directing his heart and their hearts to the Holy One, blessed be He, in heaven.
Naomi and Elimelech in Megillas Rus: This is the negative version. They lived in difficult times of famine in Eretz Yisrael, and they were wealthy. Instead of supporting the community, and out of fear that charity would deplete their assets, they got up and left for Moav, which was a sort of antithesis to the values of the Torah, leaving the Jews in Yehudah to fend for themselves. Already by the third verse of the Megillah they are all dead - Elimelech and his sons Machlon and Kilyon - for having abandoned the community.
From here we learn that a person must share in the joy of the community and in its suffering, out of genuine empathy.
The halachic implication:
These ideas carry real halachic consequences. The Shulchan Aruch rules in the laws of fast days (Orach Chaim siman 574:5): "Kol haporesh min hatzibur eino ro'eh b'nechamah, v'chol hamitzta'er imahem zocheh v'ro'eh b'nechamasan". One who separates himself from the community will not see its consolation, while one who shares in its suffering and identifies with it will merit to see its consolation.
The Mishnah Berurah explains that the concept of sharing in the community's distress applies in a situation where a person has some way of helping the community: like Moshe Rabbeinu, who raised his hands and helped the nation through prayer. One can fast with the community and do teshuvah, one can give charity and provide financial support - this is the obligation that rests upon him.
It is worth noting the words of the Magen Avraham, cited here in the Sha'ar HaTziyun: if the community is in distress or in danger and a person has no realistic way of helping it, he is not permitted to remain when his life is at risk, and doing so is forbidden. In other words, there is an obligation to help, but one who cannot bring any real benefit may not endanger his life. This is the answer to the question of when a person should leave a war zone or flee from persecution - he is not entitled to stay and join in the community's suffering while risking his life, and this decision is not his to make. The stories from the Holocaust era are of course well known, such as the story of Janusz Korczak. In an actual case, God forbid, one should seek guidance from a halachic authority and not decide alone; but the halachic principle is that a person must be with the community, unless it involves risking his life and he cannot genuinely be of help to them.
"V'al ta'amin b'atzmecha ad yom mosecha" - "And do not trust in yourself until the day of your death":
The second thing Hillel says is that a person should not be overly confident in himself. Self confidence is essential, and a person does not succeed in life unless he has self confidence and an awareness of who he is and what he brings with him; but he must not deceive himself into thinking that he is something he is not. Excessive self confidence is destructive, because life is a struggle. The Jewish outlook is that a person has a built in yetzer hara, that drive toward self destruction which makes choice possible, and the greatest risk to his spiritual success is complacency. Complacency is the death knell of spiritual growth.
There is a familiar analogy that life is like standing on an escalator going down: whoever is not climbing up is going down. I do not know its precise source, if not from this very Mishnah, but it is certainly true. The Holy One, blessed be He, created the world with gravity, and things are pulled downward; there is such a thing as entropy, and the world tends toward disorder. Unless a person makes an effort to fight this, things deteriorate.
Accordingly, the commentators explain that this instruction of "do not trust in yourself" applies on several levels:
In matters of sin: With regard to overcoming the yetzer hara, a person should not be too confident that it will not happen to him merely because he has not stumbled until now.
In matters of faith: One should not spend time with heretics and deniers thinking that they will not influence him because he has withstood it until now.
In matters of character: Even if a person has trained himself until now to be refined, if he does not exert himself to continue maintaining that refinement, his character will deteriorate, the filter will drop, and his behavior will not be as elevated as it could be.
The famous example the Bartenura cites here is the Gemara in Berachos (29a), that Yochanan served as Kohen Gadol for eighty years and in the end went astray and became a Sadducee. The reference is to Yochanan Hyrcanus, the Hasmonean king and High Priest, who was a complex figure: at first he did great things on behalf of the Jewish people, and in the end he fell very far.
"V'al tadin es chavercha ad shetagia limkomo" - "And do not judge your fellow until you reach his place":
One should not judge a friend until one stands in his place. This idea flows directly from the previous part of the Mishnah, and its essence is: be kind, because everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle. We are all on the same downward escalator, everyone has a yetzer hara, and life is not easy. That particular formulation is a quotation from the nineteenth century, from Ian Maclaren, but it seems that had Hillel spoken English, he would have said exactly the same thing.
When it comes to judging others, there is a wonderful insight from Stephen Covey in his book "The Seven Habits": "We judge ourselves by our intentions and others by their actions." There is great truth in that. Hillary Clinton took it to an even more extreme version, which unfortunately is also accurate: we judge ourselves by our best intentions and others by their worst deeds. Although this is human nature, it is neither correct nor good, and Hillel is teaching us to fight it and to move in the opposite direction.
The formulation needs precision: it is important not to be judgmental, but that does not mean a person may not be discerning. It does not mean he should have no value system of his own, that he should not know how to distinguish between good and evil, or that he should not hold firm opinions; that is proper and correct. But to be judgmental, which is what Hillel is speaking against, means to condemn another person, to feel superior to him and to write him off. That is why a person must act with kindness, because everyone is fighting a hard battle.
When you look at a person, in all likelihood he is doing the best he can. It may well be that his best is not very good, meaning that the toolbox in his hands is not sufficient to allow him to overcome the challenges he faces. But every one of us, too, was at some stage of life younger, holding a far more limited toolbox, and struggling to get through life. Afterward, hopefully, he learned more skills and acquired more tools and became more capable, and thank God for that. But the fact that he has been blessed does not indicate that the other person has already arrived at that same place.
The model that illuminates this part of the Mishnah is any parent who has raised a teenager. Adolescents will inevitably do things the parent does not agree with, things that are foolish and self-destructive, and it is maddening. And yet, knowing that what they are doing is unwise, harmful to them and perhaps entirely wrong does not stop the parent from loving them, caring for them and supporting them. That is precisely the point: no one is saying you may not call a person's action a bad idea, unwise and wrong; what is being said is that when it comes to evaluating the person himself, you must understand that he is dealing with something that is hard for him, and there is no position of arrogance, pride or superiority that grants anyone permission to judge, condemn and dismiss another human being.
Many point out that Hillel's instruction not to judge a person until you reach his place is an instruction that cannot be fulfilled, since a person will never stand in his fellow's place exactly. Every person's life story is unique, and the struggles he faces began the day he was born: the tools he was given, the mind he was given, the parents he was given, the education he received, the school he attended, and the way his friends treated him in childhood. We will never know what is going on there in the background, and therefore we can never judge. The Holy One, blessed be He, can judge a person, but we, human beings, are never in a position that allows us to judge.
Twenty years ago a conversation took place between two chavrusas, one of whom was a smoker. He was told again and again how foolish it was and how destructive, and was given a hundred and one reasons why he should stop smoking immediately. His response, which was one hundred percent correct, was: "You don't know. You were never a smoker. You don't understand." And indeed, someone who has never smoked does not understand what it means to be a smoker. Although it is entirely true that smoking is a terrible idea, harmful and destructive, a person who smokes knows that it is not at all easy to give it up.
And one must add: the Mishnah does not say that permission to judge is granted to someone who smoked himself and quit. On the contrary, it seems that the Mishnah is directed primarily at the person who used to smoke and stopped, because he is precisely the one who thinks: "I know what it is like to be a smoker and to quit, and therefore I am telling you that you are behaving foolishly." But when a person smokes, and the same is true when he has a learning disability or any other struggle, the matter is not one dimensional. The whole situation is multifactorial, and many things are going on in the background. Having succeeded in quitting proves nothing: perhaps the stress levels were different, perhaps the brain chemistry was different, perhaps the social circles were different. Someone who managed to stop is not wiser about his friend's challenge merely because he is familiar with one dimension of it, the smoking itself, and so it is in every area.
The classic model for this is the Gemara in Sanhedrin (102b). The Mishnah there lists three kings who have no share in the World to Come: Yeravam, Achav and Menashe. Rav Ashi, one of the last of the Amoraim and one of the editors of the Gemara, said to his students: "Tomorrow we will begin our study of our colleagues," meaning those kings. That night Menashe came to him in a dream, asked him questions in halachah, and Rav Ashi did not know the answers. Once Rav Ashi understood that Menashe was a serious talmid chacham, he asked him: "If you are such a great talmid chacham, how could you have done all the terrible things you did?" - after all, Menashe embedded idolatry so deeply in Israel that we could not extricate ourselves from it. Menashe answered him: "Had you been there, you would have lifted the hem of your garment in order to run faster after idolatry." In other words: you do not know what things were like; in our time and in our place the challenges and the force of the yetzer were completely different, and you have no standing to judge me. So it is with all of us and with all the places we find ourselves in. Therefore: be discerning and have a value system, but do not be judgmental, for one must not disqualify, denounce or feel superior to others.
"V'al tomar davar she'i efshar lishmoa shesofo l'hishama" - "And do not say something that cannot be understood, for in the end it will be understood":
The version as we read it is explained according to the second interpretation in the Bartenura, whose source is Rabbeinu Yonah, and it deals with revealing secrets: do not say something that is forbidden to say and is not fit to be heard, for in the end it will get out and be heard.
Here too, in my humble opinion, the Mishnah is guided by the theme of humility. The point is that a person has no right to place his own wants above other people and to put himself before his fellow - this is the very foundation of humility, not to think that you are more important than other people. To place the desire to share information about another person, in order to gain attention, in order to feel important and in order to look like someone who knows what is going on, above the obligation to guard the confidentiality and privacy of others - that is terrible. Similarly, a person should not think that he knows better than his fellow what needs to stay private and what does not. One must respect other people's boundaries and not arrogantly walk into areas that are not his. If a person has set a boundary, one should not assume that another's right to tell the information overrides his own right to privacy. One must not treat other people's private information as social currency that is ours to spend. Humility means knowing who you are and who you are not: information that is not yours you have no right to share, and the mere fact that it was entrusted to you does not make you its owner, and do not place your own needs before those of others.
Another version - advice for educators:
There is a different approach based on a slightly different version, in which instead of a shin there is a vav: "V'al tomar davar she'i efshar lishmoa v'sofo l'hishama" - where "lishmoa" here means to understand: something that cannot be understood, but in the end will be understood. This is the first interpretation in the Bartenura, and it is advice given to teachers and educators: when you teach, be completely clear. Do not teach with the attitude that the students are responsible for digging into your words, and that if they mull them over long enough and deeply enough they will grasp what you meant and reach the depth of the matter. That is sheer arrogance. It is the teacher's responsibility to meet the students on their level and to enlighten their eyes, not to demand that they rise to his level and hope for the best. For if he hopes for the best, the students may not be motivated, interested or able to understand what he meant, they will misunderstand, draw mistaken conclusions and may even think that the halachah itself is mistaken. A teacher should not be so haughty as to think that the responsibility rests on the student to exert himself and meet him; he must make things perfectly clear and set them out arranged on a table, just as the Shulchan Aruch is called by that name, a set table, so that they will understand exactly what he means. One must be clear and understand that the teacher is there for the student, and not the student for the teacher.
"V'al tomar lichsheh'epaneh eshneh, shema lo tipaneh":
A person should not say: when I have free time, then I will learn - for perhaps he will never be free. On the simple level, Hillel is saying here that life is complicated. Every one of us knows that new problems crop up every day and new challenges arise: social problems, political problems, health problems and parnassah problems. There are always challenges to deal with. Someone who expects to solve everything and only afterward to sit quietly and calmly and occupy himself with Torah - that may never happen.
This is really Hillel's version of Shammai's point: one must make Torah learning the fixed part of life, the big rocks, and arrange everything else around it, instead of waiting for things to be the way they are supposed to be. It is arrogance to think that a person will have control over life and that things will work out exactly right. Things may never be exactly right, because life is complicated. This is true on two levels:
In the big picture: a person should not say, "I will make a lot of money, retire young, and at fifty I will learn full time." He should not fool himself, for that may never happen: perhaps when he reaches fifty he will not be healthy or will not have the head for it, and perhaps it will not work out at all in terms of his business.
In the small picture: a person has five minutes here and ten minutes there of free time. He should not say, "I am not going to sit down now to cram something in; I will wait until I have a proper hour or two to think in, I will have a proper seder and then I will learn. In the meantime I will pass the time on my phone and waste it." That is a great loss.
One should look at those small moments of waiting in the bank, waiting in line and waiting to pick up a child from school - those are the moments to be used. They are little gifts, and every little gift of five minutes allows a person to review something, to reflect on a matter, to gather his thoughts, to make a cheshbon hanefesh or to take a Mishnayos out of his pocket. The wise person keeps his sefer with him wherever he goes, and when five minutes of waiting come his way, he uses them to learn and moves forward. One must not throw that opportunity out the window.
There is a well known story told in the name of Rabbi Moshe Feinstein. A short time after he made a siyum on Shas, about two weeks later, he made another siyum on Shas. They asked him: does one finish Shas in two weeks? He answered: no, but I had a special seder, that every time I was waiting for something - at a wedding, at the post office or anywhere else - I would take out my Shas and move forward in it during those small free moments of waiting. And now I am making a siyum, and this is a special siyum for me, because I recovered for myself so much of my life's time that would have been lost. I managed to finish Shas in those moments when I supposedly had nothing else to do. That is no small accomplishment, and with Hashem's help may we merit it as well.
This is the point Hillel is teaching: a person should not be so arrogant as to think that life will work out exactly as he wishes. One must accept life as it is, take each moment as it comes, put the important things first, give priority to learning and personal growth, and arrange the problems and challenges of life around them. One must not wait for things to be perfect and for the sailing to be smooth in order to begin doing what really matters - to learn, to grow and to focus on talmud Torah.