Back to work --- but do you love it?

The extended Jewish holiday period that characterises the month of Tishrei is now over. For some people -- those with jobs and who are not self-employed -- this is a bit of a relief. For the religiously observant, a succession of days off have to be sought, work arrangements must be amended, colleagues persuaded to provide cover, and so on. This leads me to ponder on an incidental work-related issue: are we supposed to love our work?

Pirkei Avot seems to suggest so. In Avot 1:10 Shemaya teaches:

"love work, hate mastery over others, and avoid intimacy with the government".

This is a broad statement, which invites us to ask questions. For example:

What sort of work should a person love?

In this mishnah the Hebrew word מלאכה (melachah) is used. It literally means “work”—and that is also the word used in the Torah to describe a large range of activities that are forbidden on the Sabbath, a holy day of rest. However, the word has overtones. While other words also mean “work,” melachah shares the same four-letter root as the word malach, an angel or emissary of God. The mishnah can therefore be suggesting that the sort of work a person should love is that through which he serves as an agent of God, in effect doing His work. This overtone is consciously deployed in a later mishnah (Avot 2:20, per Rabbi Tarfon).

Not all translators and commentators regard melachah as carrying such exalted implications. One takes the Tanna to be urging people to love “handicraft,” which conjures up slightly comical images of the Sages weaving baskets, sewing garments and crocheting kippot while they sit and learn in their houses of study. It is hard to conceive of any reason why Shemayah would wish to urge people to take up any handicraft, particularly in an era in which everything was made by hand and the skills relating to the production of clothes, shoes and household artefacts would have been far more widespread than they are today—unless he implanted into his advice some deeply encoded meaning which has since been lost.

Why should anyone love work?

A simple yet practical explanation is that work keeps a person occupied: it is a good idea to work even if you can afford not to, since work staves off boredom (per Bartenura, citing Ketubot 5:5). This explanation accepts that not everyone is cut out to spend their days learning Torah (or indeed anything else), since a person who can learn Torah and has the time in which to do so need never feel bored. However, this does not explain why a person should actually love work, rather than simply do it—and doing a job that one does not enjoy can be as effective a means of avoiding boredom as doing work that one really loves.

There is another aspect of involvement in one’s efforts to secure a living: the degree of self-respect that an individual is able to generate when he or she takes pride in their work, knowing that it has been done to the best of one's ability. This in turn can generate a kiddush Hashem (“sanctification of God’s name”) when clients or customers associate the conscientious execution of employment duties with the fact that the person performing them is a practising Jew. From the sheer brevity of Shemayah’s words we cannot deduce whether this aspect too was within his contemplation, though he certainly does not preclude this possibility.

Whose work should one love?

It is only a short distance from the Torah’s narrative of the Creation to the first mention of Man being placed in the Garden of Eden “to work it and to guard it.” From this we see that some form of useful human activity was written into God’s plan for the World. In the Torah this comes even before man’s obligation to toil on the soil (which was spelled out in consequence of the Fall of Man—as both a punishment and an absolute necessity for survival).

Shemaya does not specify whether the work which is to be loved is one's own, or whether it is that of others. Each of these positions can be justified—one’s own work, because it helps cause sin to be forgotten (Avot 2:2, per Rabban Gamliel ben Rebbi) and the work of others, because one recognizes with gratitude that one is ever dependent on the efforts of others.

As an aside, we should also recognize that loving one’s own work and doing it to the best of one’s ability has an impact on one’s ability to appreciate the quality of other people’s work—or at least to give recognition to the effort and dedication that has gone into it. An example of this effect in the Torah world is where only a person who regularly prepares teaching material is well equipped to see how much trouble a colleague has taken over the same activity; the same applies in the world of secular work where, for example, the preparation of food or the performance of music depend on experience, skill and practice that may be apparent only to the most discerning and knowledgeable diner or audience member.