Torah learning and the Garden of Eden

Avot 3:9 is a difficult Mishnah in which Rabbi Ya’akov teaches that a person who is learning while on a journey, but who stops to admire a beautiful tree or field, risks spiritual suicide.

It is possible to link this mishnah to the earliest narrative of human life in the Bible—the story of Adam, Eve and a tree that had monumental significance for the future of humanity. In short, on the Sixth Day of Creation Adam is told not to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge; this instruction is passed on to Eve; Eve sees the tree and declares it to be “a delight to the eyes.” After the forbidden fruit is consumed, Adam’s punishment is that he is condemned to feed himself forever more through the sweat of his brow, God telling him: “you shall eat the plants [literally ‘grass’ or ‘herb’] of the field.”

There is a long, strong tradition that, if Adam and Eve had fulfilled that one instruction which God had given them, entering the World’s first-ever Shabbat with an unblemished record, mankind would have achieved perfection there and then, and there would have been no need for God to give the Torah as a means of serving Him since they would not need to exercise their free will in order to choose good over evil.

Putting this all together, one might speculate that the teaching in this mishnah is this: here is a hypothetical scholar, committed to a life of Torah learning. He is on a journey, but this is not a physical journey: it is a metaphorical one, his journey through life. This journey is long and hard since the pursuit of Torah is an onerous task that can never be completed. Our scholar could well be feeling frustrated or dejected by what he feels is a lack of progress, or bored by the necessary revision that fixes his studies firmly in his mind.

Closing his mind to his Torah studies, our scholar pauses to contemplate two scenarios in which he is free from this unending commitment. In the first scenario he imagines what his life would have been like if Adam and Eve had never eaten from that beautiful but forbidden tree, when life would have been ideal in all respects and he could contemplate the majesty of God without the need for any effort; in the second he wonders if tilling the fields and toiling in the soil might not be a preferable alternative to Torah learning, since at the end of the day the farmer can at least sit back, admire the sight of the crops that result from his hard work and look forward to eating the fruit of his labour.

Each of these scenarios has an appeal that he may not experience in his own journey. This is because, for the true Torah scholar, every achievement is met not by a feeling of complacency or accomplishment but by a greater realisation of how much more there is to achieve. Might it just be that this hypothetical scholar of ours is precisely the person to whom Rabbi Ya’akov says in this mishnah:

“Stick to your journey! Deviate and you put your very soul at stake.”

This might seem like a somewhat harsh warning to administer to a wavering Torah scholar whose thoughts may be drawn towards pleasures that do not appear to be included in the bundle of benefits available to him, but in the next chapter of Avot Rabbi Ya’akov redresses this by describing the unimaginably blissful state that awaits him in the World to Come.