I don’t like any of the translations of this verse, so I’m going to attempt my very own, drawing from all the ones I’ve been using and my own incredibly meager knowledge of Hebrew grammar.
He used to say: There is no boor who fears sin, and no pious man of the world; there is no shy student, and no angry teacher; there is no wise man who puts everything into business. And where there are no men, try to be a man.
I’m not terribly happy with that one, either, but I think it gets the sense and some of the rhythm and emphasis. My translations all treat is as, f’r’ex, A boor cannot be sin-fearing, which puts the negative in a different place, and (to my mind) assumes the existence of the boor rather than the existence of fear of sin. That is, logically, looking at the unions of statements and whatnot, while both statements could be disproved by a boor who fears sin, if there are no boors, the second statement is entirely null but the first statement is true, while if there are boors (who, of course, fails to fear sin), the two statements still apply. Why does this matter? Because if the emphasis is on the presence of boors who do not fear sin, the last part of the verse is detached and irrelevant. If the emphasis is on the absence of sin-fearing boors, then the last part of the verse picks up the theme of absence and carries it to a higher plane.
Why do I care so much? Well, and this ties in to a theme I have been neglecting to blather about regularly, but one I have touched on now and then: people change. The character traits of piety, anger, diffidence, wisdom and sin-fearing are not permanent nohow, which means that you have a way out.
Are you a worldly man? Or woman, of course; Hebrew is even worse than English for the patriarchal tyranny of gender. But are you worldly? Then you are no chasid, used here not as we think of Hasidic Jews with payess and fringes on the outside, but as is g’milut chasidim. But where there is no man, then you should try to be a man, that is, you should engage in acts of loving-kindness and piety. And then, you see, following the logic, you are no longer an am ha-aretz, a man of the world.
Are you too angry to teach? There is no angry teacher; try to act like a teacher, control your temper, and become the thing that is absent. In doing so, the contradiction resolves itself; you master your anger and become a teacher. You overcome your shyness and are able to learn; you overcome your focus on work and gain wisdom.
There are no boors. That is, there are boors, of course, but those boors are not somehow doomed to a life of boorishness. They have choices and pathways and responsibility. They can begin to understand sin, and fear it. And, of course, you, Gentle Reader, who are no boor now, may yet lose your fear of sin, through arrogance or obsession or even absent-mindedness, and begin to act like a boor yourself. It’s not a permanent distinction. It may be that some of us are sheep and some goats, and if a Shepard were to divide us up it could be done perfectly, but unlike actual sheep and goats, if it were done next week, the result would be different.
Absences are constantly being created and filled; we are becoming angry and then teaching again, drowning in work and resurfacing into wisdom, burying ourselves in the world and then resurrecting ourselves in piety. We are all men, there are no men, we strive to be men. We fail, we succeed, we strive again.
I’m going to go into the examples in separate notes, because I think y’all would have interesting things to say about them, but the beauty of the verse as a whole is, I think, in the way Hillel plays with absence and contradiction. The commentary I have, which is very good on the examples, seems to miss that altogether.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.