Relationship and Boundary

The Mishna makes an interesting statement, seemingly regarding personal property and sharing with others; "What is mine is mine, and what is yours is yours, this is the average person. Some say, this is the trait of Sodom [which was destroyed, in the 19th chapter of Bereshis, "because their scream has been great, and their sin has been very severe."]. What is mine is yours, and what is yours is mine, this is an ignorant person. What is mine is yours, and what is yours is yours, this is the pious person. What is mine is mine, and what is yours is mine, this is the evil person." (Mishna - Chapters of the Fathers, 5:13)

There are several things that are immediately troubling about this Mishna. I will start with specifics, highlighting several problems, and move towards more general problems. Firstly, why is there a confusion between the trait of an average person, and the that of the most evil nation to exist in the world since the flood, one which god was forced to directly destroy. More generally, why is this even included? It seems that respecting the property of others is a generally well know principle in the Mishna, and there are entire tractates dealing with punishments for violating these rights, and other similar details. More than that, we certainly know that sharing is good. Even if we missed kindergarten, the latest bleeding edge research in game theory and economic history show us that cooperation and generosity are beneficial not only to the receiver, but to the giver and to society as a whole.

I think that, to understand the mishna, we need a bit more context; What exactly do we mean by "what is mine" and "what is yours"? It is difficult, in view of the preceding questions, to say that it deals with property, in order to inform people of the need to be nice. While Pirkei Avos is about behavior, it certainly is not written for the 8 year old, and this simple lesson regarding sharing should certainly be known already, even to them.

The first, most basic question, it seems, is what the relationship is between the "trait of Sodom" and "What's mine is mine, and what's yours is yours"? It is absolutely amazing that this is the defining trait of a society who was destroyed because of the horrible acts committed there, from the sexual perversion to the famous beds they used for hospitality, where if the person was too small, they were stretched to fit, and if they were too tall, they had limbs cut off to fit into the bed. This doesn't seem to be an example of not sharing, or even of selfishly hoarding posessions, but rather a horrible inability to be basically decent people.

To change tracks a bit, in this weeks Sidra we deal with Yosef, a person so different than his brothers that he is his own paradigm. We have only one person in all of the Torah who is called "Tzadik," and that is Yosef. Almost instictively, we would say that a Tzadik is a person who is essentially perfect. We expect the greatest fulfilment of each of the middos from them. Of course, to really understand this concept called Tzadik, instead of relying on our first reaction, it makes sense to look at it's source.

Yosef, in last week's Sidra, is sold to a household in Mitzrayim, which he end up in charge of, then in the jail, where he ends up as the dream interpreter, and in this week's Sidra, Miketz, ends up in charge of the entire country. It seems that Yosef has no problems with dealing with other people's property. In fact, when the famine begins to truly devastate Egypt, we see something very different than what we would expect from Yosef, the prototype of Tzadik; He does not give the grain which he had "gathered .. in great abundance" back, but sells it to the very citizens it was taxed from! This does not seem to be the generosity we would expect, based on the Mishna. The classic commentaries do not help; we hear that not only did he sell the grain, he made demands, and even told them to give him their flocks for the grain they needed. Eventaully, Yosef HaTzaddik owned all of Mitzrayim. This does not seem to be what we expect from the "what's mine is yours" paradigm we wanted.

It is here that I would like to attempt an answer; the Mishna has nothing to do with posessions, and everything to do with relationship. To explain, when a person sees himself as truly part of the world, not just at peace with themselves, but also with the world, and involved in Tzedek (Righteousness), the root of the Tzadik, he has a completely different way of dealing with the world. In modern social psychology, a great deal of attention is paid to so-called "personal space" and boundaries. For a person to be able to function, he needs defined personal boundaries and the ability to recognize those boundaries in others. Yosef, as a Tzadik, had the uncanny ability to expand himself to be the ruler of a nation in a sense rarely sense since; He was universally loved, a politician, in the best sense, who was able to understand a nation. He was in no way false, but he was able to relate to others to the point where, like John F Kennedy in his day, he was pursued by crowds looking just to talk to him. One medrash says that girls would climb up walls to throw their jewelery at him, in some way the first public "star" as we view them today. Other midrashim point out that he was able to address each person who came to see him in his own language, and make them feel he had a unique connection. Yosef was able, through this unique gift, to expand his personal space to include the nation, and his abilities and space turned into "what is yours" also.

While doing this, however, Yosef was able to differentiate sharply between what was not realted to him and what was. Despite being in Egypt, he married a Jewish wife (Dinah's daughter by Shechem,) and raised his children to bee leaders of B'nei Yisroel. He was very aware of what strictly was the providence of others, and left all of it as "what is yours" as well.

In Sodom, however, the personal boundaries that were erected were not only defined, but in a sense more than what is required to establish personal space, these boundaries were fixed, and completely inviolable; if a person attempted to do a Chesed, they were smeared with honey and left for the bees to kill. The mere thought that a guest wanted to enter their town was enough to decide for them that this destroyer of their perfectly static web of personal spaces should be punished as severly as possible. Even more startling than this is the way the midrashim describe other sins they comitted; in short, it was an attempt to neither give nor receive anything interpersonally. And it semms that there was nothing horribly off about what Sodom's paradigm started from, it was simply that the spaces they defined for themselves were much too rigid, and they did not allow themselves to help others. The question of whether "What's mine is mine, and what's yours is yours" is not as much simply wrong as it was that this paradigm was on that, like most, must be seen in context and applied in moderation, as we attempt to reach a level where we can integrate what it is that others want and need into our own personal missions in the world, and attempt to integrate that which matters to others while keeping ourselves within the framework of our personal goals.