{"id":11656,"date":"2008-11-22T11:20:24","date_gmt":"2008-11-22T16:20:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2008\/11\/22\/11656.html"},"modified":"2018-06-11T09:57:12","modified_gmt":"2018-06-11T14:57:12","slug":"pirke-avot-verse-four-the-firs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2008\/11\/22\/pirke-avot-verse-four-the-firs\/","title":{"rendered":"Pirke Avot, verse four: The First Yose"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This is the fourth week we’ve met to talk about Pirke Avot<\/i>, and we’ve had a lot of interesting discussion so far about the sayings themselves, the authority of the sages (individually and collectively), and the nature of Scripture. I’ve been really enjoying it. This week we move on from the generations in which the tradition is said to be held by a single sage to the first of five generations in which there are a pair of sages listed. It is surmised that in these generations there was a division in duties between the parliamentary Speaker and the Chief Justice, and that the two Rabbis named held those two posts. The analogy is not intended to be exact, by the way, but there you are, analogies seldom are. Our first pair are both called Yose (pronounced yo<\/i> as in adrian say<\/i> as in anything); this is a diminutive form of Joseph and is spelled in a variety of ways in English, from José to Yossei. Today I’ll use the Jacob Neusner translation of the verse, just for kicks:
\n

Yose ben Yoezer of Zeredah and Yose ben Yohanan of Jerusalem received [the Torah] from them. Yose ben Yoezer says<\/strong>:
Let your house be a gathering place for sages.
And wallow in the dust of their feet,
And drink in their words with gusto.<\/blockquote><\/blockquote>
\n

I haven’t been pointing out (I think) that for the most part, the tradition is not handed down from father to son, but from teacher to student. In our first four verses, this is the second time that we have mentioned the relationship between teacher and student, and we have yet to talk about parents and children. In part, that is because the sayings are compiled for an audience of rabbis, that is, of teachers and judges. On the other hand, there is a lot of advice about personal lives, so a comment about filial or fraternal relationships would not seem out of place. Instead, we repeatedly focus on teachers and students. I think that focus is very important for the Avot<\/i>. For all that there is a tradition of genetic Judaism, where the discovery of a maternal grandmother you have never met having been born to Jewish parents makes you suddenly a Jew, the tradition also has this emphasis on passing the tradition not from father to son but from teacher to student. That goes back to the Judges and Kings, of course: Eli doesn’t pass his authority to his sons but to Samuel; Samuel passes his authority not to his sons but to Saul; Saul passes his authority not to his son but to David. And whoever Yoezer was, it’s his son Yose that gets the tradition, and not from him but from Antigonos. And Yose himself (according to Chapter 8 of Bava Batra<\/a>), had a son with bad habits, who not only does not appear in the line of succession in our text, but is struck out of Yose’s will. On the other hand, he bought a fish with a pearl in it, so there you are.
\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In which Your Humble Blogger also has a son with bad habits. Maybe someday he will buy a fish with a pearl in it! Probably not, though.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[207],"tags":[212],"class_list":["post-11656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scripture","tag-pirkeavot"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11656"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11656\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18592,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11656\/revisions\/18592"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}