Avos 4:6

בס׳ד

אבות ד:ו

Rabbi Yose says: Whoever honors the Torah is himself honored among the people; But whoever desecrates the Torah is himself desecrated among the people.

רַבִּי יוֹסֵי אוֹמֵר, כָּל הַמְכַבֵּד אֶת הַתּוֹרָה, גּוּפוֹ מְכֻבָּד עַל הַבְּרִיּוֹת. וְכָל הַמְחַלֵּל אֶת הַתּוֹרָה,גּוּפוֹ מְחֻלָּל עַל הַבְּרִיּוֹת:

        The Roman persecutions of the Sages, which lead to the deaths of Rabbi Aqiva and the other great teachers of the Vineyard of Yavneh, created a huge crisis in Rabbinic teaching.  Who, after 12 years of disruption, could reconstruct the fragile oral traditions learned by heart?  Rabbi Yose ben Rabbi Halafta was one of the key figures who transmitted the Aqivan tradition into the future.  One of the main teachers of Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi, he must be regarded - along with Rabbi Aqiva and Rabbi himself - as one of the “founders” of the Mishnah.

        There is among the meforshim a wide range of opinion about what Rabbi Yose means by “honoring” or “desecrating” the Torah. Rashi gives a surprisingly simple example: the mere act of putting a book of Torah in an honorable spot, rather than a filthy place or on a chair, bespeaks a larger sense of honor for the words, ideas, and values that speak to us from the domain of holiness, and for their Source - the Blessed Holy One.  A person moving through the world with even that elementary sense of honor for the objects that contain our knowledge of Torah will also possess a physical and spiritual bearing that others will respond to.  Correspondingly, a person who treats holy books contemptuously reveals a larger lack of honor for the One whose Torah is contained in the physical object of the book.  A person with such a spiritual coarseness will elicit from others the same sort of contempt he or she exudes.

        There is an odd stylistic aspect of this mishnah which should be explored, even though it is lost in most translations, including mine.  A literal translation might read: “Whoever honors Torah, his body is honored more greatly than the creatures (al habrios); but whoever desecrates Torah, his body is desecrated more greatly than the creatures.”  The word gufo certainly can mean “himself,” as it is usually translated.  But it could also have been omitted from this saying entirely without changing anything.  Why, then, does Rabbi Yose express himself in such a way as to call attention to the body?

        It seems to me there is an important implication here.  Namely, the way we treat the physical manifestation of a spiritual reality - the Torah - will have an impact on the very physical form that clothes our own spiritual being.  The body is not fundamentally separate from the soul - it is a material manifestation of spiritual, psychological, and moral processes.  As such, the body - its external features, how it is borne - serve as a kind of code that communicates many apparently “private” aspects of a person.  Our physical bearing hints at the degree to which our soul is itself transformed by Torah through the honor we give it in our own lives.  In this sense our bodies are windows opening up the character of our souls.  Anyone who has ever met a truly great Sage will know this is so.  And likewise the opposite.

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