Pirke Avot chapter two, verse six

Today, a short one. Sorry, I know I’ve been skimping. Stuff to do. We’re still going through Hillel sayings, this one in Jacob Neusner’s translation:

Also: he saw a skull floating on the water and said to it, “Because you drowned others, they drowned you, and in the end those who drowned you will be drowned.”

Maimonedes said “This is something borne out by experience at all times and in all places: whoever does evil and introduces violence and corruption, is himself the victim of the harms caused by those very evils he introduced; for he himself has taught an occupation which can only bring harm to him and to others.”

Rabbi David the Prince, his grandson, said (on the authority of the ancients) that this was not Hillel at all, but Moses who said this, and about Pharoah. Furthermore, his contemporary Menachem ben Solomon ha-Meiri said that this verse “is to teach us to believe that misfortunes are a punishment, they are not accidental events.”

I think there’s a wide gulf between those perceptions of the world. I side with the Rambam, that violence begets violence as part of the natural tendency of events, rather than as some directed or miraculous judgment. It’s not that the two are entirely exclusive; one could see the hand of the Divine in that natural tendency of events, or the impersonal pressure of history in the Pharaoh under the Red Sea. But as reactions to the verse, they seem to me to reveal different outlooks on life. Mine is with Maimonedes.

Did Hillel recognize the skull? How did he know that the corpse was that of a murderer? Rashi says that it was decapitated (he saw a skull, not a body) and that he deduced the rest. Not terribly persuasive, to me. I keep in mind that Hillel was a teacher, and that the verse has him speaking to the skull. Was he teaching the skull? No, that would be silly, of course. Who was he teaching? I imagine him crossing a bridge, or sitting by the river, with a disciple or two with him, deep in conversation about—what? Theodicy? Scripture? Saul? The Romans? Anyway, a student points and shouts. A skull! In the water! And Hillel takes a memorable moment to remind his students of the consequences of violence. A skull in the water, even in those days, can’t have been a common occurrence; the students would remember it, and in remembering it, remember the lesson. And they did, enough for it to have become one of his recorded sayings. It’s one of those Hillel verses that is incredibly compact in Hebrew, because Hebrew is built like that. What he says to the skull is al di’atayf’t ateefuch v’sof m’tayfayich yitufun; the root (aleph tet phay, if I’ve got it right) is in four different combinations denoting object, subject and time. If he really did come up with it on the instant of seeing the skull, it’s pretty impressive. Of course they might have been discussing grammar, and he decided to use drown as an example.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.