Still finishing verse sixteen. Here’s 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.
And here Jacob Neusner’s:
R. Joshua says, “(1)Envy, (2)desire of bad things, and (3) hatred for people push a person out of the world.”
I’m going to quote from the commentary of Joseph ben Judah ibn Aknin, a contemporary of Maimonedes. Interesting guy. Possibly an acquaintance of Maimonedes, although that is disputed. In fact, there seems to be a lot of dispute about his history. Some people say he was born in Barcelona and moved to Fez, where he kept his Judaism secret whilst writing the commentaries. Norman Roth, however, claims that this is all balderdash, the result of confusing him with Joseph ben Judah ibn Shimon. At any rate, keeping in mind his various possible histories, here is his commentary on misanthropy:
When a man withdraws from human beings, hates them, and does not want to associate with them, men begin to hate him, seek to do him evil, and plot to kill him. They will not help him in his need, and so he is left completely on his own to do things he has to do—then he can do these only with the greatest difficulty and pain. Now, this is something we know from psychology, that the association of men with each other and support of each other is an absolute good, for everybody helps his fellow. Withdrawal from human society is an absolute evil, unless of course the people of one’s time are utterly depraved and turn completely from the good way to the evil way and abandon the Lord. In such times a man must of course separate from his contemporaries so that he will not learn their ways and perish with them. (quoted from Judah Goldin)
Joshua ben Judah ibn Aknin is on about the practical matter; the truth is that it is Unhealthy to be Unpleasant, and that will drive you out of the world. I am liking the whole thing right up until we get to the point where the you have to judge whether the people of your time are utterly depraved. Because, you see, misanthropy is an absolute evil, unless you hate people because they are bad. This is where the whole thing falls to the ground. Which is too bad, because I’m afraid one of my greatest temptations is to misanthropy. Not that I dislike people, when I meet them, just that people in the mass seem to provoke in me the worst and most patronizing sort of contempt.
I do know that this is wrong. I struggle with it anyway. Generally, when I’m writing, or when I’m advocating some public policy or other, my better self holds sway. But the urge to just throw up my hands and say Morons! Morons! Morons! is still there.
Which is why I feel some satisfaction in connecting misanthropy to envy and lust—I don’t know that it had ever occurred to me that those were not obviously a triple of connected sins. But they are, and it is largely because they each involve replacing the people (and things) with the idea of people and things. They involve pushing the world away, to deal with the world in your head.
It’s much easier, honestly, to deal with the world in my head. And even with all the warnings of the sages, in fact it’s not at all difficult to combine physical comfort and material success with frequent departures from the actual world to the world in one’s head. But it’s wrong.
People exist. It’s not my option to avoid them, or to set up those distances between them, simply because they fail to live up to my (imaginary) expectations. Well, and it is my option, but it’s not the right thing to do. The correct thing to do is to deal with people as they are, as they actually exist, rather than comparing them to an ideal, or consigning them to a stereotype.
This is the day the Divine made.
You can sleep through it if you want to. You can stay indoors if you want to. But if you want to go out into it, if you want to participate in the Creation of the Divine, if you want to be the Creation of the Divine, then you should keep in mind, with Joshua, that the evil eye, the evil impulse, and misanthropy will push you out of that Creation. They call all be overcome.
And then overcome again tomorrow, because that, too, will be the day the Divine made, so you get another chance.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.