My Personal Journey, Part 1 | Avot with the Chief

I spent years learning it, teaching it, writing about it. Then one day I stopped and realised I had never asked what Pirkei Avot actually is. What I found changed how I understand almost everything else. Many of us grew up with Pirkei Avot. Its sayings feel like something we have always known. If not now, when? Acquire yourself a friend. The world stands on three things. There is a warmth and familiarity to this book that is unlike anything else in Jewish life. And that familiarity, I have come to realise, is precisely what hid the question from me. After more than two decades as Chief Rabbi - after years of giving shiurim on this text, writing commentary, serving as general editor of an encyclopaedic work on Avot - I stopped one day and found I could not answer the simplest question about it. What is this book? Not what does it say. What is it? The Mishnah is an elaboration of Jewish law - more than sixty tractates, each one unpacking what a Jew is obligated to do. Every single tractate deals with commandments. Except Avot. Avot contains no law, no ritual, no halakhic ruling of any kind. So why is it in the Mishnah? Why did the greatest compiler in Jewish history put thi