Pirke Avot, verse nine

This will be a quick note on Simeon ben Shatach, both because YHB is behind, and because I don’t seem much need for the three-part note and detailed analysis. Here’s the Hertz:

Simeon, the son of Shatach, said, Be very searching in the examination of witnesses, and be heedful of thy words, lest through them they learn to falsify.

Simeon ben Shatach had a son who was executed for a crime he did not commit, convicted on the false evidence of witnesses. Or so Hertz tells us. At any rate, he is concerned here with the accusers, where his buddy Jehudah ben Tobai is concerned with the accused. They both show caution, but Simeon ben Shatach expands that tremendously. It is, of course, very good advice, if not obviously widely applicable. We could take from it the idea that you shouldn’t believe everything you hear, and that it’s very easy to encourage people to tell you what you want to hear and leave it at that, and those are certainly habits to avoid. But even if you take to heart the advice to be heedful of your words, how exactly do you go about it? How can you tell if your witnesses (or colleagues or employees or political advisors) are learning to falsify from your words?

Another story about Simeon: In the tractate Sanhedrin, the rabbis are discussing the warnings to witnesses, that they should not witness according to a supposition, or to hearsay, or to what somebody else saw, but only to what they actually saw. Simeon ben Shatach told of how he saw one man chase another into a ruined building. Following the two, he saw the pursuer with a sword in his hand, the sword still dripping with blood. The other was still in his death throes. Simeon was faced with a dilemma: first of all, he was the only witness, and in a capital case, you needed two witnesses. Second and more important, he hadn’t actually witnessed the murder. Fortunately, a snake came and bit the guilty man and he died, so it never went to trial.

Then the rabbis argue for a while about whether a snakebite is properly reserved for people who commit crimes for which the legal punishment is burning, rather than execution by the sword, for which the appropriate miraculous punishment would be to be murdered himself, or to be drafted into the Roman army and then killed in battle. They conclude that the murderer must have committed some other, graver, sin in his past, and the snake was just catching up with him now.

But the point of the story is how difficult it is to be a witness to a crime, and the awful responsibility of it. Simeon ben Shatach is represented in this book by his angle on the problem from the point of view of the judge, but is elsewhere given the point of view of the witness, and of the father of the falsely accused; I think the text is supposed to be read in that context, which is why the whole adventure of reading Avot without the full study of the Tanach and Talmud really should have a rabbi helping, and not just YHB and Google.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.