The Root of Ten (5:1)

During the hot, lazy weeks of summer when our spiritual guard is down, we review the moral treatise par excellence, Ethics of our Fathers. This week’s fifth chapter begins by detailing various aspects of Creation that follow the singular pattern of ten. Examples include how the universe was created by ten Divine Utterances, that the early formative years of the world’s development contained ten generations from Adam to Noach, that the father of our people, Abraham, only appeared after another ten generations had passed and how that same Abraham was tested exactly ten times. But the number ten, our Sages wish to remind us, is not limited to just these instances. Ten is also the tally of plagues in Egypt, the miracles He performed for the Jews at the splitting of the sea and the amount of rebellious uprisings by the wandering Israelites in the desert.
If only these occurrences had significance to the number ten, it would have been recognized as more than an impressive coincidence. Obviously, we would be clamoring that the veiled Hand of G-d was mysteriously at work. But the Mishnah it seems doesn’t want to leave anything off the list, and so it adds; the ten miraculous signs in the Holy Temple in Jerusalem and the ten objects which were created at twilight of the first Shabbat eve.
Although the Rabbis who researched this surely did their homework, it looks like they didn’t cover all the bases. After all was said and done, in their comprehensive list they somehow overlooked the most important ten of all, the Ten Commandments. Now why do you think that would happen? Could it be simple oversight? Hardly! So let’s approach this from another angle.
Imagine you were compiling a list of items that occupy space, would you include space itself? Or in the list of entities that encompass ten elements, i.e., ten generations, plagues, miracles, etc., would you add the number ten itself to the list (since it too contains ten smaller items; like the numbers 1,2,3….)?
No thing is the source of its own significance. If certain objects are considered special in that they are comprised of tens, then the number ten must similarly be important because of something greater than itself.
The Torah is the soul and essence of creation. This explains why any event or item that is of an all inclusive, all embracing nature is ten-fold, for it reflects the ten dimensional core of Torah. That is why the Mishna does not list the Ten Commandments, as they are the root, source, and cause that brought about all the other tens recorded. Thus the list of ‘tens’ presented by the Ethics of our Fathers is one whose uniqueness lies in that they all express one aspect of the totality of the Torah (which is represented by its own TEN).