This classic work of Jewish theology is one that I’ve heard a lot about - it’s nearly impossible to be Jewish and not know something about this work, which in some places is actually part of the Shabbat liturgy. I finally decided to give it a read-through on a very long bus trip, to start off the new year.

Pirkei Avot is in fact a compendium of several different writings, compiled by different rabbis at different times in history. This heterogenous provenance is evident in the text itself. There is a section concerned with deriving a chain of authority for the Mishneh, a sort of theological geneology that is echoed in studies of the hadiths in Islam. The culmination of this section is a set of statements attributed to Rabbis Hillel and Shammai. And finally there is a section concerned with a variety of classifications, presumably in an effort to educate the reader - delineating, for example, the qualities which separate a righteous person from an unrighteous one, a saint from a boor, and so forth.

There is a great deal to admire here; Maimonides famously praised this work (which was already nearly a thousand years old in his time) for its deep insight and economy of phrase. Perhaps a perfect illustration of both of these admirable qualities is Rabbi Hillel’s famous inquisitive statement: “If I am not for myself, who is for me? And if I am for myself only, who am I? And if not now, when?” One could spend many long hours in contemplation of just this single piece of this work, and one could listen to its many, many reverberations in the history of letters and thought in the millenia since it was coined. What I appreciated, perhaps most of all, were the commentaries about the importance of study coupled with work. The rabbis of this period were intensely concerned that their Torah study should be grounded in worldly concerned, and they balanced their study with manual labor of various kinds; their writings reflect this foot-in-both-worlds sensibility, and it’s a point of view which is too rare today. It’s rather inspiring to read a work that is so dense in wisdom and thought, and more humbling still to think about all that has been written about it.

At the same time, it’s worth remembering that this work is still, after all, a product of its time. There is a deep fund of sexism that inspired these rabbis, and so it’s important to remember that as wise as they may have been, they were still blind in some ways. Moreover, Pirkei Avot is on the one hand deceptively short and pithy (which means that it can be read too quickly) and on the other hand a little plodding and prosaic (which means that it’s easy to discard it as it gros a bit dry at parts.) It’s easy to see why this work gets read in pieces - one chapter a week, in some communities - and in a communal setting.

I am glad that I read this classic work, and gladder still that I read it accompanied by some commentary. I suspect that it’s the sort of thing that I’ll need to reread or rethink, now and again.