We’re discussing Pirke Avot; I started with some general ideas about the discussion before we began, and now in order to facilitate some sort of coherent discussion that can be joined in and followed, I’ve broken the first verse into four notes. Here’s the verse:
Moses received the Law on Sinai and delivered it to Joshua; and Joshua to the Elders; and the Elders to the prophets; and the prophets to the Great Assembly. They said three things: Be not hasty in judgment; Bring up many disciples; and, Make a hedge for the Torah.
I broke out the first sentence, and then had a separate thread for hasty and disciples, and then this note about the hedge to finish it off. At least I hope this will finish it off. And I hope this isn’t confusing. YHB is making it up as we go along, you know.
Make a hedge for the Torah or a fence around the Torah, or a safeguard for the Torah. I mean, the language is hedge, in the sense of protective hedge, but the word was used to mean fence (as in fact hedges are used as fences), and then some translators want to indicate that it’s used as a metaphor, because, you know, it is. Anyway this whole hedge business is problematic for YHB, both in itself and in terms of how it played out historically.
Rabbi Natan (an early medieval commentator) gives an example of this hedge in the rules of niddah; men and women are not permitted to have sex while the woman is menstruating, so a hedge is put in place that not only is the sex act not permitted, but embracing, kissing and sleeping under the covers together are also forbidden, and the custom then forbids any contact whatsoever, including, say, the contact of hands when passing a plate across the table or whatnot. Now, there are lots of other issues involved in that, but it seems to me that there it’s very easy to lose sight of the actual law if the hedge is too thick. You know? Take as another example the Ashkenazic custom that considers fowl fleishig for purposes of kashut, despite the fact that chickens don’t give milk. Why aren’t chickens parve? Because you get them at the butchers, where you get meat. Because they are like meat, because they look like meat sometimes, because if you sent your servant to get some meat for dinner, and he came back with fowl, you would be happy.
But here’s the thing. You can look at this injunction two ways: as an individual applying it for yourself, or as a member of the Great Assembly applying it in rulings for everybody. I’m happy to make a hedge around the law for myself (although since I am scarcely observant, it doesn’t so much apply), and if you want to treat your gardenburgers as fleishig for the purposes of the hedge, I respect that. More than that, I see it as a valuable lesson, or tool I suppose; if I am tempted to gamble, then I shouldn’t go to a casino. I don’t want to go right up to the edge of what is permissible and try to stop there. For myself, a hedge is a good thing in all the areas that I need a hedge, but silly and useless in the others.
On the other hand, as a general matter, custom (minchag) is considered binding. Or at least it has considerable weight; it doesn’t outweigh everything else, but it does outweigh mere common sense. If chicken is meat, then chicken is meat. If margarine is parve, then margarine is parve. And who am I to say that margarine is a lot more like butter than chicken is like goat. Or at least, when I do make that decision, I should make it deliberately, not in haste.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
Shit, I’d be happy just to have the servant. He comes back with falafel, do I complain? I don’t.
I have opinions about the meat of the issue, but I find discussing them personally distasteful, and this sentence shall serve as a hedge about them, and I’ll leave it at that.
peace
Matt
1. I’d like to see some attention paid to pruning the hedge. The verse calls for one single hedge and not an impenetrable forest, yet each Orthodox generation acts as if it has an obligation to add to the hedge.
2. The hedge is generally applied to the negative commandments, such as what not to eat. How should the hedge apply to the positive commandments, or the balancing commandments? Does loving our parents turn into loving everyone near us? Does violating a fast to save a life turn into violating a fast to avoid dizziness?
Hm. I’m all about the love, and I don’t see it as a hedge against… what? Forgetting to love my parents? I can’t forget that, they’re freakin’ hilarious!
I see it as loving my brothers and sisters, whom all of you are, as the children of goddess, and all that. On the other hand, given my goofy philosophy, I have to love the virus that’s making me all sniffly (for it is no less a child of goddess than I am), and screw that guy, says I. I’m no Jainist.
So, what I do, see, is love folks that don’t deserve my scorn. If something is scorn-worthy, I scorn it and move on. But I have to say, if even my parents were worthy of scorn, I probably wouldn’t love them, so I’m naughty in the eyes of… anybody who thinks one should love parents unconditionally just due to the fact that they’re parental. Any asshole can have a kid, and they frequently do.
Fortunately, my folks are a hoot, boy howdy!
peace
Matt
To my reading eye, there’s an interesting resonance between “bring up many disciples” and “make a hedge for the Torah” — especially with the introduction, in the last thread (see, here I’m already breaking protocol) of the sense of “bring up” as “raise up,” which does evoke children but also evokes armies. Does one bring up many disciples partially in order to make a living hedge for the Torah?
For that matter, does one bring up many disciples in order that each may be individually deliberate in judgment whilst collectively getting somewhere already, and does a multiplication of disciples discourage hasty judgment?
Three, three, three, does a hedge around the Torah give the followers of the Law the safety of time and space to be deliberate about their judgment? Does being slow to judge require a hedge of caution?
Be not hasty to judge the hedges of your disciples, for they are your hedges.
peace
Matt
Huh. So, okay, i want to definitely agree with Michael’s point 1. But how do you prune the hedge?
There’s a certain type of conservatism which says, “Okay, so here are the things we do because we’ve done them for generations. And we don’t know exactly why we do these things, but we do know that (a) we do them, and (b) humanity has more-or-less survived up to this point. It’s probably the case that some of the things we do are unnecessary to the survival of humanity, but we don’t know which ones, and a lifetime is pretty short for figuring that out. So let’s default to sticking with what we’ve got.”
In other words, if we don’t know what the original rule was, and all we’ve got to go on is the hedge, maybe we’re better off leaving well enough alone.
Now, that’s not entirely satisfactory, because progress is good too, and things get cruft-laden in ways that may not actually make sense any more. But, without enough available information, the main alternative is to say, “Huh, i don’t know what this piece does. Let’s just throw it out.” As anyone who has ever edited software knows, this… only sometimes works.
Back when it was possible to be an elder of That Science Fiction Club and i was trying to become one, i spent a bit of thought on how to encode information about why we did things the way we did them. The theory was that, if the next generation wanted to scrap some rule we’d made, that was all fine and well, but, if they clearly didn’t know why we’d done something the way we had, that got under my nose. And, as it happens, i did a terrible job of encoding that information, such that i wound up in way too many conversations that ended with, “Wait, y’all were sitting around the dinner table claiming i’d advocated what, now!?”
In principle, of course, Jewish law has the rule right in there among the hedges, and anyone can go and learn it, so it should be easily possible to clean things up occasionally. But no one remembers anything correctly for more than ten minutes, so i doubt it. Anyone want to provide some cheerful anecdotes of this sort of thing being done successfully?
Sure. Peanuts and garlic during Passover. Those were verboten when I was growing up, and became ok.
Dude. Progress is a fairy tale. It’s like seeing evolution as a movement from “lower” to “higher.”
peace
Matt
I think—but am not sure—that the rules for niddah are now restricted to the actual rules, rather than complete physical separation for twelve days a cycle. At least among Conservatives. And the medieval accrual of niddah hedges that prevented a menstruating woman from touching a prayerbook (for instance), were pruned over the centuries. And I should point out that I am pretty sure that the rules for men and ejaculation (a man who has ejaculated and has not undergone ritual immersion is not permitted to do certain things) are not followed at all among Conservatives (a man who has ejaculated and has not undergone ritual immersion is not permitted to read the Sh’ma and certain other activities).
I also want to mention Dan P’s image of students as a living hedge around the Torah, which I like. And, in fact, writing down the Oral Law could be seen a hedge, or at least a safeguard, in case the student-hedge fails to blossom.
Thanks,
-V.