The mishnah before us is mishnah 15 in the third chapter of Maseches Avos (in some editions of the Mishnayos: mishnah 11), and the author of the statement is Rabbi Elazar HaModai - Rabbi Elazar from the city of Modiin, the city from which the Hasmonean revolt went out under the leadership of Matisyahu and his sons.
The periods should not be confused: Rabbi Elazar HaModai lived at the time of the Bar Kochba revolt, some three hundred years after the days of the Hasmoneans. He is known as a relative of Shimon bar Kochba. At a later stage a claim was brought before Bar Kochba that his cousin, Rabbi Elazar, was acting as a traitor and collaborating with the Romans, and in the end Bar Kochba killed his cousin - an act that was a significant turning point in the loss of rabbinic support for him. All this, however, has no direct bearing on the content of our mishnah.
The text of the mishnah:
"HaMechallel es haKodashim, vehamevazeh es hamoados, vehamalbin penei chaveiro barabim, vehameifer beriso shel Avraham Avinu alav hashalom, vehamegaleh panim baTorah shelo kahalachah - af al pi sheyesh beyado Torah uma'asim tovim, ein lo chelek le'olam haba".
"HaMechallel es haKodashim" - one who desecrates the sacred things belonging to the Beis HaMikdash.
"Vehamevazeh es hamoados" - one who treats the festivals and holidays with contempt.
"Vehamalbin penei chaveiro barabim" - one who shames his fellow in public.
"Vehameifer beriso shel Avraham Avinu" - one who nullifies the covenant of circumcision.
"Vehamegaleh panim baTorah shelo kahalachah" - one who interprets the Torah not in accordance with halachah.
The conclusion of the mishnah is especially severe: even if such a person has Torah and good deeds to his credit, he has no share in the World to Come. This sharp statement calls for explanation, and it seems even to contradict the mishnah that opens Perek Chelek in Sanhedrin: "All of Israel have a share in the World to Come." If that is the rule, why should these people not receive their share like everyone else?
A parable of a person who denies the existence of the Creator:
Picture a person who is considered the pleasantest and finest of people. He deals properly with everyone, is always ready to help, and his hands are full of kindness toward others. The only thing is that this person does not believe in God. The Rambam, on that mishnah in Perek Chelek, explains that such a person has no share in the World to Come, because he does not believe in Hashem.
At first glance this seems unfair: a good man, who does good to everyone - how can there be no place for him in Gan Eden? The answer is that every good deed is indeed deserving of reward, but this person maintains no relationship at all with the Holy One, blessed be He, since he denied His existence throughout his life. And the very essence of the World to Come is the experience of the relationship a person developed with the Holy One, blessed be He. Where there is no relationship, there is no point of connection and no common ground, and he would be there like a fish out of water. This is not a punishment, but the necessary consequence of lacking the basic tools and capacities to cope with that existence.
A similar idea underlies our mishnah. We live in a world of action and are occupied all day with material things: we have a body, and we deal exclusively with physical matters. We never see, touch, smell or taste anything that is not physical, yet we are aware of the existence of such things, at least in our mind's eye. Those spiritual elements that exist behind the scenes, behind the curtain of the physical world, are our entrance ticket and our connection to the World to Come.
Defining kedushah:
That phenomenon of connection to what lies beyond is called kedushah - that is the definition of the word. We say of the Holy One, blessed be He, "asher kideshanu bemitzvosav": the Holy One, blessed be He, determines that here below, in keeping kosher, in taking the lulav, in making Kiddush on Friday night or in giving tzedakah, the act itself is connected to the spiritual world and builds a person's relationship. It cannot be seen with the eyes, but the connection is direct and real. Indeed, the word mitzvah has two explanations: mitzvah from the root tzivui, a command and an order, and mitzvah from the word tzavsa - togetherness, connection and relationship.
The same is true of anything that possesses holiness: it means that it has a special connection upward. Therefore, a person who completely rejects the concept of holiness and behaves as though it does not exist is very much like a person who lives as though there is no Holy One, blessed be He. The soul currently resides in a body of flesh and blood; when a person dies, the body returns to the earth and decomposes like any animal, but the soul continues onward because it is connected. A holy soul, connected to Heaven, has a share in the World to Come and continues on there (and this is not the place to discuss the resurrection of the dead, which is a separate topic).
Therefore, a person who denies holiness, ignores it and is sealed off from it as though it does not exist, will find it very difficult, and in fact will be unable, to merit a share in the World to Come: the very awareness that there is a World to Come, that actions here below have an effect above, and that a person has the power to connect himself there, simply does not exist for him, and he has severed the connection with his own hands.
There are things a person can relate to as mere physical matter. But if he is a materialist who maintains that there is nothing in the physical world beyond its physical components, he has cut the connection, and he has no place there and no way to relate to it. A person's identity is a product of his choices; and when he never makes a single choice based on the awareness that there is holiness behind the scenes connecting things to what is above, he has no connection. And when he dies, the Torah and good deeds he holds have no way to be revealed, since he lacks any relationship to the concept of holiness and connection to what lies beyond.
Five places where holiness resides:
The five examples in the Mishnah are five categories of places in which holiness is present, even though on the surface they appear to be nothing more than physical objects. A person who ignores them, and beyond that actively denies them and undermines them, cuts himself off from the holiness contained within them, and consequently he will have no place and no connection.
"HaMechallel es haKodashim" - one who desecrates sacred items:
Sacred items come in two types: sanctity of the altar - something brought as an offering, such as a lamb designated for a shelamim offering; and sanctity of Temple upkeep (bedek habayis) - a person consecrates an object, a shirt for example, and says, "I wish to give this shirt to Hashem," and it passes into the hands of the Temple treasurer. Its sanctity is of a lesser degree, but it is sanctity nonetheless.
One who desecrates sacred items relates to something sanctified as though it were not sanctified. The Bartenura explains the first case: even though the lamb has already been consecrated as an offering, he makes it tamei or renders it nosar and pigul - that is, he deliberately disqualifies it and treats it as though there were nothing special about it. A korban comes from the word karev, to draw near; the thing itself connects a person to Hashem, yet he sees before him nothing but a goat and feels no holiness in it, whether he rendered it tamei, pigul and nosar, or whether he misappropriated it. The same applies to bedek habayis: the shirt, once its owner consecrated it, belongs, as it were, to Hashem, and a special holiness has been invested in it. One who ignores this and wears it as an ordinary shirt is actively severing that connection of holiness, and that has consequences.
"VehaMevazeh es haMo'ados" - one who degrades the festivals:
This refers in particular to Chol HaMoed - the intermediate days of Sukkos and Pesach, on which there is no prohibition of labor in the general sense, and yet there is a prohibition of labor. Everyone knows that labor is forbidden on the first day of Pesach or Sukkos and on the final days; but even on a Tuesday in the middle of Pesach week labor is forbidden, unless it is for the needs of the festival. The Rishonim disagree as to whether this prohibition is from the Torah or rabbinic, and let us assume it is rabbinic.
The point is that there is holiness in time here. On the festivals themselves - Pesach, Sukkos, Shavuos, Shemini Atzeres, and certainly Shabbos - this is self-evident; but even on Chol HaMoed, which has an aspect of the ordinary about it and looks like a regular Tuesday in the middle of the week, holiness exists. The Bartenura lists two ways of degrading them: performing labor that is not permitted, or even failing to eat and drink in the manner customary on Yom Tov. On Yom Tov one is careful to have at least one festive meal, and Rabbi Rabinovitch was particular that it is fitting to have a meal of meat and wine on each of the seven days of Sukkos. One who relates to these days as an ordinary Tuesday conducts himself as though they contain no holiness, and thereby severs one of the most essential connections between a person and Hashem - not only the holiness of the Temple and the offerings, but the holiness of time as well.
"VehaMalbin p'nei chaveiro b'rabbim" - one who shames his fellow in public:
Literally, one who whitens his fellow's face means exactly that - he drains the color from his fellow's face. When a person is embarrassed, at first his face reddens and flushes from sheer humiliation; and once he realizes that there is nothing he can do about it, the blood drains from his face and it turns white. Chazal said terrifying things about this, that humiliating another person is comparable to killing him, and in certain respects is even worse. Some Rishonim took this literally and ruled that this is a Torah prohibition governed by the principle of yeihareig v'al ya'avor - better that a person die, like Tamar, than humiliate his fellow; others held that it is not meant literally.
Why should humiliation be worse in certain respects? Death is of course the gravest thing of all, but a person dies only once; whereas when someone truly humiliates his fellow, that fellow relives that moment again and again, and that is a death that keeps repeating itself. There is even a parallel here to death itself: the hardest part of Gehinnom, when a person confronts the consequences of his actions, is the experience of shame - seeing the enormous gap between what could have been and what actually was. That is the very definition of shame: when people see a person as he really is, while they had expected far more of him.
This does not mean that one who whitens his fellow's face is literally a murderer, even though the blood is spilled from his face as a kind of miniature slaughtering; after all, someone who cuts his fellow's face with a knife and blood is spilled but the victim does not die is not a murderer. The draining of the blood is a sign of the enormous emotional distress the person is undergoing. But in the context of our Mishnah, the main point is that we relate to a human being as a tzelem Elokim - a person is the greatest reservoir of holiness that exists in this world. One who degrades, humiliates and belittles his fellow is rejecting the very idea that holiness exists in his fellow, for every human being is a tzelem Elokim.
Here is a story heard recently: Rabbi Avishai David related that in 1972 he came to Ponevezh to receive a berachah from Rav Yerucham, the mashgiach. He stood there, and the mashgiach had him sit down. Rabbi David, then a young man in his twenties, wondered why he had to sit. The mashgiach answered him: "How can I sit here and give you a berachah while the tzelem Elokim is standing? You must sit so that you will be on the same level as I am." He saw a tzelem Elokim in every person - even in a young man who came before him. And just as in the other cases, so too here: one who whitens his fellow's face severs that connection and loses his ability to have a proper link to the World to Come.
"V'hameifer briso shel Avraham Avinu alav hashalom" - and one who nullifies the covenant of Avraham Avinu, peace be upon him:
This refers to breaking or annulling the bris milah. Some explain that it means someone who was not circumcised as a child and chooses not to be circumcised as an adult, which constitutes a degradation of the covenant. Others explain - and this is easier to understand - that it refers to a practice widespread in the Hellenistic period, in the second century BCE, when people would engage in sports in the nude; and anyone who was circumcised was immediately identified as a Jew and excluded from society. They therefore underwent a medical procedure called "moshech es orlaso" - pulling the skin downward in order to cover the area, a widespread practice, whose purpose was to remove the sign that they were circumcised as Jews.
The point here is that a person's power of procreation is itself holiness and is invested with holiness, and it connects a person to what lies beyond. And just as one can see merely a goat, or merely a shirt, or just an ordinary Tuesday, or just a person standing across from you - so too a person can view his own body as nothing more than a biological creature: cows also give birth to offspring, so what is the difference between him and them? But an enormous power of holiness exists in the context of marriage, and one who denies this is denying the very place where holiness dwells, and he loses his ability to have a proper link to the World to Come.
"V'hamegaleh panim baTorah shelo k'halachah" - and one who reveals facets in the Torah not in accordance with halachah:
This refers to schools of thought that were widespread during the Second Temple period, especially in the city of Alexandria and its surroundings, which was the largest Jewish community outside of Jerusalem, and which housed great academies numbering hundreds of thousands of people. They related to the Torah as an allegorical work open to metaphorical interpretation, and in one stroke the laws of kashrus became, for example, a lesson in self-discipline and health and the like.
The Bartenura brings an example: the prohibition of passing one's offspring through fire to Molech, one of the 613 mitzvos, whose subject is idolatry, was understood by them as a metaphor teaching that one should not marry off one's children to gentiles. They take the plain meaning of the Torah, reinterpret it allegorically, and that metaphorical interpretation does not accord with the mesorah or with halachah - it is being invented as they go along.
This is the fifth place, the most inspiring and most intense, in which holiness is revealed in the world: the holy book, the Torah itself. One who looks at the Torah and does not see in it something saturated with Divine holiness, to which the rules of the mesorah apply, but rather sees it as one book among books - here you have the Iliad, the Odyssey and the Septuagint, and you may reinterpret as you please. Philo, the most important of the classical Jewish philosophers, whom no Torah-observant Jew has even heard of or knows anything about, argues that Plato is found in the Chumash, and that the Chumash preceded Plato and was wiser than he, only that Platonic philosophy is embedded within it and that is how it should be read. This does not accord with the mesorah; the Torah thereby becomes something it is not - not a reservoir of holiness but a toy in the hands of the interpreter. And as in the other cases, one who takes something in which holiness has been invested and sees it only on its external level strips it of its holiness, and consequently it no longer serves as a conduit through which he can establish for himself a connection to the World to Come.
The Mishnah concludes: "Af al pi sheyesh b'yado Torah uma'asim tovim" - even if this person has learned much Torah and performed many good deeds, since he actively nullifies and denies the holiness that exists in sacred objects, in sacred times, in his fellow Jew, in himself and in his own power of procreation, and in the Torah - "ein lo chelek la'olam haba" - he has no share in the World to Come, for he has lost his connection to the World to Come, Rachmana litzlan.
An important closing note: As the Bartenura himself writes - "nothing stands in the way of teshuvah." Even if a person is guilty of these things, he has the ability to return to Hashem with sincere teshuvah from the depths of his heart, and through that these matters are completely rectified, and he will certainly have a share in the World to Come.