Moses Received the Torah from Sinai
The Teaching
Moses received the Torah from Sinai, and handed it down to Joshua, and Joshua to the elders, and the elders to the prophets, and the prophets delivered it to the men of the Great Synagogue. They said three things, "Be deliberate in judgment; raise up many disciples; and make a fence about the Torah."
— Pirkei Avot 1:1, trans. Joseph I. Gorfinkle, 1913
Remember the days of old, Consider the years of many generations; Ask thy father, and he will declare unto thee, Thine elders, and they will tell thee.
— Deuteronomy 32:7, JPS 1917
And thou shalt teach them diligently unto thy children, and shalt talk of them when thou sittest in thy house, and when thou walkest by the way, and when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.
— Deuteronomy 6:7, JPS 1917
Commentary
A tradition opens its book of ethics not with a principle but with a receipt. Five links in a single sentence — Moses, Joshua, the elders, the prophets, the Men of the Great Assembly — and only after all five has anyone said anything. The chain is stated before the content, because in this tradition the chain is part of the content. Avot 1:1 is not an aphorism either; it is the opening of a genealogy that runs the length of the chapter, naming teacher and student down the generations.
Notice what the three sayings do. The middle one, raise up many disciples, is itself a transmission instruction. The chain does not merely describe handing-down. It commands it.
And notice the preposition. The Hebrew is mi-Sinai — from Sinai, not at Sinai. Gorfinkle's 1913 rendering keeps it; the more widely circulated modern translation does not. A large classical commentary literature turns on that word, and its point is the one this teaching is here for: even the first link in the chain is described as a recipient. Moses did not originate what he handed on.
The domestic machinery is in the Shema, and its verb is sharper than the usual English. V'shinantam comes from a root meaning to whet or sharpen; the King James margin glosses it that way. The instruction is not instruct your children in any classroom sense. It is sharpen these words into them, by repetition, in the four ordinary settings of a day — sitting, walking, lying down, rising up. Transmission is located in ambient domestic life rather than in ceremony, which is why it survives the loss of a temple, a language, or a country.
A note on a phrase that does not belong here. This teaching should not be filed under l'dor v'dor. The exact phrase does occur in Tanakh, but in every verified occurrence it is a temporal formula meaning for all generations, describing God's eternal reign — not the handing of a tradition to one's children. Its fame comes from the liturgy, not from scripture, and Psalm 145:4, usually cited as its source, reads dor l'dor, a different construction. The phrase is real. Its provenance is the prayerbook.