This evening, at Shaya’s “Men’s Learning Night”, we were in Pirke Avos, 4:17, where it says that there are 3 crowns: Torah, Kahuna, and Malchus. And that the crown of a good name is the best of them all. We discussed what a crown might refer to. It was decided (amongst us) that a crown must refer to a particular public image that is regarded highly. So a person who has a “crown of Torah” might be a well-known Torah scholar, etc.
It then came up that having such a crown would denote that the person has a great deal of honor. It was brought up that honor could be a negative trait, as it says in a different place in Pirke Avos “Jealousy, lust, and the pursuit of honor remove a person from the world.” It was then suggested that honor could also have a good place and was proven by the following:
In Parshas Balak, when Bilaam HaRasha set out to curse the Jewish people, the Gemara tells us that he felt capable of doing this because he knew the moment of the day when Hashem has a particular wrath such that a curse would be a effective. Bilaam had assumed that he would wait for this particular moment, then say his curse to the Jewish people, and it would work! But, to Bilaam’s dismay Hashem did not have this moment of wrath at this particular moment of the day that Bilaam went to curse, so rather the curse was a blessing.
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