Erev Matot
July 25, 2008
Pirkei Avot Chapter 4, Mishna 24
Shmuel HaKatan, Samuel the Little said: ‘When your enemy falls do not rejoice, and when he stumbles let not your heart be glad; for Adonai may see it and find it evil and He will turn away His wrath from him [your enemy] [toward you].’
After experiencing the aftermath of the prisoner exchange in Israel last week, I knew I needed to teach this Mishna from Pirkei Avot.
Two Israeli soldiers who had been killed by Hezbollah when they were kidnapped two years ago were exchanged for several men (including Samir Kuntar) who had heartlessly killing innocent Israelis and spent many years in Israelis prisons. One of the many disturbing things about this exchange is that none of the men sent back to Lebanon had repented for what they did.
When I talked about this prisoner exchange last Friday night, I said I was sure Samir Kuntar would be back planning an attack on Israel within 10 days. I overestimated the amount of time it would take him. On Wednesday MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute, quoted Kuntar as saying that he was eager to kill more Israelis and would do so as soon as he could.
Last week I also said that as hard as it is not to wish him a long, slow and extremely painful death, I was choosing to pray for the healing of his heart and soul instead.
This Mishna helps us understand why that is so important.
This saying attributed to Samuel the Little is actually two verses from chapter 23 in Proverbs [verses 17, 18]. But since it’s attributed to him, it must have often been on his lips.
Even though this Mishna is teaching us not to wish harm on our enemies, it goes beyond that. Of the many people we have in our lives, some are very close to us and some we see only frequently. Each person has a place along a continuum from most beloved to least. I suspect there is no one in any of our personal lives who would be in the category of Samir Kuntar who is very easy to despise and fear.
But the Mishna is teaching us how dangerous it is for us to wish ill to anyone. It takes into account the overt kinds of hatred and those that are more subtle. Among the more subtle ones is hatred we express through the competition we sometimes feel even with people we are very close to. When we are competitive with each other, we are setting up a zero sum game. One of us will win and one of us will lose, even if the winning and losing happens only inside our own heads. This Mishna teaches us not to feel even subtle pleasure when our friends or our enemies stumble and not to gloat when we are more successful than they are.
Most of us do not want to admit that we sometimes feel competitive with other people. Most of us do not want to admit that we sometimes keep a mental check list of who has a bigger home and makes more money than we do? Whom we think is more intelligent, who has a more prestigious job than we do?
When I was in rabbinic school, I was face to face with almost constant competition. Most of the time I was taken out of the general game because of how different I was from the rest of the students in the school. I was so much older and had started my learning so much later than almost all of them.
But still I was not immune to feeling inferior to my classmates who were able to learn and retain the material much more easily than I was. Nor was I immune, on the rare occasion that I did better than one of them, to internally gloat at their expense.
It was a constant mediation on my part to keep my attention on my own progress and compete against the last grade I received instead of against the students who would almost always do better than I would.
Competing against myself was much healthier for me. When I pushed myself to do better than I had done in the past, I had a good chance of winning the competition. But when I began comparing myself to those who knew more than I did, I was doomed to feel badly about myself.
There is a story about Samuel the Little that tells us that he was the kind of person who protected others from the disregard that comes from competition. Rabban Gamliel, the head of the Sanhedrin, the rabbinic court, called for 7 sages to serve with him to decide whether or not to add a second month of Adar to the year and create a Leap Year. When 8 men showed up, Rabban Gamliel (who was known to embarrass people in public), rather than being relieved that more than enough came to help him, demanded to know who the 8th person was. Immediately Samuel the Little spoke up and said it was him. He said he had come not to participate in the decision but to learn how to make the necessary calculations to determine the leap year.
Of course, the extra man was not Samuel the Little, but he spoke up to deflect the criticism from the extra person.
This is exactly what Samuel the Little is teaching with this Mishna. When he had the chance to watch someone be humiliated and maybe even feel some kind of perverse pleasure, he made sure that didn’t happen.
As much as we are rightfully horrified that Samir Kuntar, or anyone for that matter could hate us as a people enough to kill us with such pleasure, such eagerness, we cannot become a person who lives with hatred in our own hearts. As we see with Samir Kuntar, hatred has made him a hate filled and violent person. And while none of us would ever go to that extent, the competition we feel toward those in our lives creates a separation between us and them and makes it harder for us to respect them and feel close to them. We are told in Leviticus: Do not hate your brother in your heart. When we do not revere other people, we are killing a part of our own goodness and our own openheartedness. When we do revere them, we are also feeling that reverence for ourselves.
May it be our intention as we go through our lives to help people when they are about to stumble and to be a net of protection for them when they do. When we are generous with them, they will in turn be generous with us.