Avot 4:11
Rabbi Eliezer ben Jacob said: He who performs one commandment acquires for himself one advocate, and he who commits one transgression acquires for himself one accuser. Repentance and good deeds are a shield against punishment.
The words used by Rabbi Eliezer ben Jacob for “advocate” and “accuser” in this mishna have their origins in the Greek language. Hundreds of Greek words are found throughout the Mishna and Talmud. The rabbis, living in a Greco-Roman world, were familiar with the system of Roman courts. In Greek, a paraklete means a supporter, and in the legal documents it means defense advocate. Accuser is kategoros in Greek, which was the word used for prosecutor in ancient Athens and later in Rome.
The rabbis were not fond of the lawyers of their day. As Rabbi Dr. Richard Hidary notes in his Rabbis and Classic Rhetoric, familiar with the adversarial system of lawyers in Roman courts, the rabbis did not think that justice and fairness were achieved through the use of lawyers in human courts. Hence, we have already seen in Avot 1:8, “Do not play the part of an advocate.” It was up to the judges, as we saw in Avot 4:7, to first promote compromise and if not, make sure to judge fairly. If that is the case, why are there lawyers in the heavenly court, as intimated by this mishna and other midrashim?
Rabbi Dr. Hidary suggests that the reason lawyers are present in the heavenly courts is precisely because they have the capacity to persuade G-d away from strict justice. Lawyers are dissuaded in human courts by the rabbis because they leave open the possibility that justice wouldn’t be served. Lawyers focus on rhetoric, arguments, and persuasion, not truth. Rabbi Hidary writes:
I propose that the rabbis envisioned the heavenly court in terms of Roman courts, not in spite of the corruption of the latter but precisely because of it. They feared that a heavenly court that followed strict justice and judged human actions according to the truth would issue impossibly harsh, even if justifiable, verdicts.
If left to our own merit, the rabbis presumed that divine justice would demand punishment. Through Midrash, the rabbis proposed that different advocates, including the Patriarchs, utilized many tricks and strategies classically employed by Roman lawyers to try to convince G-d not to punish the Jewish people.
In an interesting parallel, Philo of Alexandria, the first-century Jewish philosopher, writes that there are three parakletes that can advocate on the Jews’ behalf: G-d’s mercy, the prayers of the Patriarchs, and the improvement of the repentant. When one brings a sacrifice, he brings “with him an irreproachable mediator (parakleton), namely, that conviction of the soul which has delivered him from incurable calamity, curing him of the disease which would cause death, and wholly changing and bringing him to good health.”
This sheds light on the end of the Mishna that “[r]epentance and good deeds are a shield against punishment.” Repentance and good deeds advocate on our behalf, attempting to outweigh and overshadow any of the accusers.
Some commentaries move the focus of this mishna from the realm of heaven to the inner world of the individual. One way of reading the Mishna is intrapersonal, with a focus on the self. As we have seen in other mishnayot in the fourth chapter of Avot, our actions create habits. Good actions spiral into more good actions, and the opposite for bad. If we think about the prosecutor and defense attorney as reflecting the inner voice of conscience or temptation, the more we support the advice of one, the more empowered it becomes, for good or for bad.
Focusing on the interpersonal realm, Dr. Binyamin Ziv likens the first half of the mishna to the idea of emotional contagion. Emotions can spread from one person to the next and even within larger groups. People can feed off of each other’s positive energy. Alternatively, the negative emotions of one person can change the dynamic of an entire room of people. Murray Bowen, creator of Family Systems Therapy, reflects on how a family is a single, emotional, interdependent unit. Anxiety from one person in the family creates an emotional domino effect impacting the emotions of all involved. Additionally, following Albert Bandura’s social cognitive theory, which emphasizes the importance of role-modeling, our actions create reverberations in the world through others’ witnessing and then modeling them. Consequently, before acting, we should be mindful of the potential reverberations our decisions have for ourselves and those in our sphere of influence.
