We are on verse sixteen of chapter two, in Joseph Hertz’ss’es translation:
R. Joshua said, The evil eye, the evil inclination and hatred of his fellow-creatures drive a man out of the world.
It’s a bit confusing to use this translation. Perhaps I’ll include Jacob Neusner’s for comparison:
R. Joshua says, “(1)Envy, (2)desire of bad things, and (3) hatred for people push a person out of the world.”
Where Rabbi Hertz is interested in representing the way that the original Hebrew repeats the word evil (ra), Mr. Neusner is willing to leave off the repetition to avoid troubling idioms. The idioms, interestingly, run in both directions, as the English idiom evil eye means, essentially, a curse from one person to another, and the Hebrew one means envy. I don’t know. I like repetition as a writing device, so I am reluctant to give it up.
The end, though, where the translation is essentially the same, is where I have more problem. What does it mean to drive, or to push, a person out of the world? That is an idiom we don’t have in English. R. Travers Herford claims that it “only means exclusion from human fellowship. It does not refer to death, , and still less does it imply exclusion from the world to come…” I can’t quite work with that. I mean, I don’t see how taking the idiom to refer to death makes the verse very useful or persuasive. And I am willing to accept that if Joshua (ben Hananiah) had meant that these three things would exclude a person from the world-to-come, then he had a perfectly good idiom for saying so, and he didn’t use it, so he didn’t mean it. He could have said ha-olam ha-ba, the world to come—and he could have said ha-olam ha-zeh, this world—but he didn’t, he just said ha-olam, the world.
And what makes me really wonder about it is that there is, among some of the Rabbis, a sense that it is better to be a little apart from the world. That overmuch concern with things of this world is detrimental to real virtue, but that we should concern ourselves with the Divine instead. Whatever we take it to mean, it’s clear that Joshua uses a metaphor that implies that driving a person out of the world is a Bad Thing.
Thinking about this made me look back at what we know about Joshua. In verse eleven, we learn that Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai’s feeling for him is “Happy is the one who gave birth to him” (I’ve switched to Mr. Neusner here for modern English clarity); he is the only one of the five disciples who is described in relation to another person. In verses thirteen and fourteen, Joshua’s description of the correct (incorrect) path is a good (bad) friend. He isn’t the only one who chooses to describe it in terms of human relationships, but it is interesting that he does. And now, according to Mr. Herford, the saying associated with his name is about human fellowship.
This seems important to me, because I don’t like to think of the sayings as simply making a list of bad or good things. Yes, envy and lust and misanthropy are Bad Things, but R. Joshua has chosen those bad things, and described them not just as bad but as driving a man from the world. So why those things? And why not say that they make a man a fool, or that they put make a man sin against himself (a phrase that will come up several times) or that they come between man and the Divine, or whatever? That may lead me to accept, at least provisionally, Mr. Herford’s idea about the phrase. But then the trick is to apply it.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.