Pirke Avot

Impact

In the Jewish world, the popularity and impact of a work can be measured by the amount of commentary generated, the number of new editions and reprints released, and the number of translations made into other languages. Judged from the number of commentaries on Pirke Avot, it became an influential document as soon as it was composed. The earliest commentary is Avot d’rabbi Natan (late third century CE), which, like Pirke Avot, is included in the Talmud, the main rabbinic work (sixth century CE). After that, many famous Jewish authorities wrote commentaries on it, most notably Moses Maimonides in the twelfth century. To this day, ever-new commentaries on Pirke Avot are being written. (See, for example, Pirke Avot: A Modern Commentary on Jewish Ethics, a very readable translation and commentary by Leonard Kravitz and Kerry Olitzky.) Avot has been reprinted more often than any other rabbinic text. It is the only rabbinic text that is included in its entirety in the Jewish prayer books, traditional and contemporary. For this reason, even Jews who are not so scholarly are familiar with the work.

Because of its generally appealing content of brief wise sayings, popular Hebrew songs take as their lyrics lines from Pirke Avot (for example, Avot 1:2). Pirke Avot is translated in many languages for non-Jewish and Jewish audiences. A 1996 Chinese translation is just one example of its cross-cultural impact. A recent interfaith commentary (noted in Ronald W. Pies’s book The Ethics of the Sages) featuring Christian, Confucian, Hindu, and Muslim parallels is yet another.