The students of Rabban Yochanan ben Zakkai had three different sayings that they would repeat. Rabbi Eliezer says that the honor of your friend should be as dear to you as your own. You have to show respect to your friend, just like you want respect shown to you. You have to stand up if anyone speaks badly about your friend, just like you would stand up for yourself. Connected to that is that you're not allowed to be easily angered because of that. A person, by nature, gets angry. Angry people don't have the ability to treat their friends with respect because they lose it. They get angry, and then they don't think with their sechel (intellect). Therefore, a person has to preserve the honor of others by controlling himself and making sure he doesn't lose his temper. That's number one.
Number two: one day before you pass away. What he's really saying here is that we don't know when we pass away. We have no idea when that time will be. Therefore, we should always do Teshuvah one day before that. If we don't know when that is, we have to do Teshuvah every single day. We should do some sort of introspection every single day, thinking about our actions and thinking about how we could repent and come back to Hashem. We shouldn't leave it for once a year on Yom Kippur or for a person to think later on in life, “I'll do it.” You never know when that day will be, and therefore a person should constantly be introspecting and thinking about his actions.
Number three: a person should warm himself by the fire of the chachamim, of the sages. But beware; be very careful of the coal that's glowing, and make sure you don't get burned. What he's saying here is that a person should be very careful around some of the chachamim. He wants to be influenced by them. He wants to pick up on their positive middot (character traits), just like with a fire or coal. You could only gain from it, from the warmth, if you're close to it. When you're close to it, you could get heated and you could take care of yourself. It's the same thing with a chacham. Get close to them. Have a relationship with them. Feel their inspiration only when you have proximity to them. It's not someone you check in with once in a blue moon. It's somebody you're around pretty often. But at the same time, you have to be careful not to get too close to them. If you're too friendly and you start to joke with them and treat them with disrespect, then you're going to be burned. You're going to be burned. If you get too close to that coal, it's going to become a problem and you're going to get hurt.
The bite of a chacham is like the bite of a fox. A fox has slanted teeth, and when it bites, it doesn't only cause damage to the flesh, but it also causes a great amount of pain. Their sting is the sting of a scorpion. A scorpion stings with tremendous venom, even more than a snake, so it causes a lot of damage. Their hiss is the hiss of a snake. This type of snake, a serpent, doesn't have the ability to be calmed down with a charm or by somebody playing music in front of it. It won't calm down. It's the same thing with a Talmid Chacham (Torah scholar). If you mess with them, if you treat them with disrespect, they could strike back and cause damage. They're dealing with kavod ha-Torah. A Talmid Chacham represents the Torah. So they're not really standing up for themselves, but they're standing up for an attack against the Torah. They could punish a person in three different ways. They could bring direct punishment, like we said, with the bite of the fox. It's frontal. It's direct damage that the Talmid Chacham is causing to a person. It could be indirect, like the scorpion, whose tail indirectly causes damage. And then, like the scorpion with its mouth, like the hiss of a serpent, it could cause damage to a person through speech. A person has to be very careful with the kavod (honor) of a Talmid Chacham.
The kol divrehem ke-gachalei esh, and all of their words are like fiery coals. A person who thinks that he could reason with a Talmid Chacham, that he could go toe-to-toe in a halacha (Jewish law) question, is facing someone who spent years studying Torah and has a very in-depth understanding, using da'at Torah, using his logic and the svarot (reasonings) that have been cultivated through many years of Torah study. That person is like a fire. Torah study refined his logic and sharpened his mind way more than the mind of a person who hasn't had the ability to learn Torah. So a person should be very careful with their honor.