Pirkei Avot was originally comprised of five chapters; the sixth was added in the Middle Ages when the custom became widely accepted to learn a chapter each week between Pesach and Shavuot. Thus, on this, the sixth week of the cycle immediately preceding Shavuot, we read these specially selected passages concerning the acquisition of Torah. On Shavuot we accept the Torah as it is transmitted to us directly from Hashem, and on the preceding Shabbat we learn how to accept the Oral Torah as it has been transmitted through the great Sages of Israel, from Moshe through the men of the Great Assembly, the authors of the Talmud, and until the present day.
The passages we read this week were selected from baraitot, or statements of Mishnaic provenance that appear in the Gemara, and were probably first collected in their present form in the Tana D’vei Eliyahu. Most of the classical commentators don’t have commentaries on this chapter, which isn’t really a chapter of Pirkei Avot. Interestingly, though, Rashi does.
Among the great and notable sayings collected for the purpose of forming a sixth chapter of Pirkei Avot is the following well-known gloss on the giving of the Torah on Shavuot: “The Torah says, ‘The tablets were of Divine handiwork; the writing upon them was Divine handwriting, engraved upon the tablets.’ (Shemot 32:16). Do not read the passage ‘engraved’ [in Hebrew, charut], but rather ‘freedom,’ [cherut], as there is no one truly free who is not engaged in the study of Torah.” (Avot 6:2).
Rav Chaim Volozhin, the celebrated disciple of the Vilna Gaon (among others), notes that the expression “engraved upon” in Hebrew should have been expressed through the syntax denoting “engraved within,” as the process of engraving causes the writing to be embedded into the surface and not, as we find in the Torah, “engraved upon,” which is exactly what engraving doesn’t do as distinct from simply writing a text. He suggests that this is likely the incongruity in the text that led the Sages to pursue this novel interpretation.
He goes on to explain that the reason a person without Torah can never be truly free is because human beings are slaves to their passions and desires. A person without Torah is ultimately in servitude to either the things to which he becomes addicted or to the people and institutions that break him to their will. Only a true student of Torah has the wisdom and the independence of spirit to break free of every other form of coercion.
In his magnum opus Nefesh HaChaim (part IV, chap. 32, note 1), Rav Chaim elaborates on this point, referencing the teachings of the Ramchal. Ramchal says in Mesilat Yesharim (chap. 5) that Hashem gave us the Torah as a medicine to cure the evil inclination. A doctor knows to combine various ingredients in precise measure, and we take our medicine with confidence in the doctor’s expertise. We don’t decide to collect ingredients on our own, or to change the formula of the medicine the doctor prescribed, because most of us don’t have the insight and the training that the doctor has to know everything that needs to be known about these substances and their effect on our body’s health. So too, it is foolish for humans to devise their own ethics and systems of values and beliefs in opposition to wickedness and lasciviousness. We are not the experts in our moral constitution that our Creator is, nor do we understand the effects of different beliefs and practices on our constitution. The only reliable cure for moral turpitude that it is fail-proof and reliable is the study of Torah.
Rav Chaim expands on this principle, tying it back to our baraita and the giving of the Torah on Shavuot. He explains that when Hashem engraves the text on the tablets, He is really engraving them upon and into the flesh of our hearts. That is to say, He affects our moral and emotional consciousness in such a way that we become inoculated against the depravity of an amoral society. “The writing was Divine handwriting,” meaning that we acknowledge the hand of Hashem in writing and transmitting the Torah to us, and we feel its imprint engraved upon the core of our being. In this way, we find ourselves liberated from every other force that seeks to work its will through us, and we become the masters of ourselves in performing the will of our Creator.
