Going up, going down

One of Hillel’s more oracular pronouncements can be found in Avot 1:13, where the second of four mysterious mini-maxims reads thus:

וּדְלָא מוֹסִיף יָסֵף

One who does not increase will diminish.

Or does it mean something quite different? The word יָסֵף, which we translate as “diminish”, is derived from the Hebrew root סוֹף, which also means “comes to an end”. Indeed, the Bartenura explains, some texts of Avot have a different word completely יאסף, “he will be gathered”, a euphemism for being reunited after death with one’s family or people. This gives us a rather different meaning:

One who does not increase will come to an end.

But who is the person who increases and diminishes or comes to an end? And what is thing that shrinks or dies if it does not grow?

Since Hillel was pre-eminently a teacher of Torah and Jewish values, our commentators’ natural starting place was Torah-related. But the early commentators, while supporting the idea that this mishnah is about learning, still view it differently from one another. For Rambam, one who does not increase Torah studies will die by God’s hand. According to the commentary ascribed to Rashi, it means that one must add hours of night-time to the hours of daylight from 9 Av onwards, when the day grows noticeably shorter. The Bartenura teaches that if you don’t keep on learning, you will come to forget what you have already learned. For R’ Avraham Azulai (Ahavah beTa’anugim), people who do not keep adding to what they have been learning from their rabbi will lose their learning but their shelemut, a sort of personal completeness and integrity which the talmid-rabbi relationship can cultivate.

Later commentators offer their own variations on the learning theme. Thus Midrash Shmuel and the Etz Yosef (R’ Chanoch Zundel ben Yosef) tie the mishnah both to learning mitzvot and to their physical performance. R’ Menachem Mendel Schneerson sees it as a warning that a person’s ego and pride should not prevent him from generating chiddushim, novel Torah explanations.

Other commentators depart radically from the theme of learning Torah. Thus in the Birchat Avot, the second of his works on Avot, R’ Yosef Chaim (the Ben Ish Chai) goes kabbalistic: what must be added is God’s ado-nai name to his shem havayah or a person will not be able to gather nitzotzot kedushah (sparks of holiness).

Some modern writers taken Hillel’s words as a general and all-embracing statement of real-world existence: like it or not, we live in a world that is founded upon perpetual change and we cannot remain static. As R’ Yisroel Miller (The Wisdom of Avos) succinctly puts it:

“As many dieters discover, maintaining one’s ideal weight can be harder than trying to lose another pound”.

For R’ Abraham J. Twerski (Visions of the Fathers) Hillel teaches about spiritual growth: out of all God’s creations, only humans have the capacity for spiritual growth, adding ominously:

“The identifying characteristic of man is upward progress. If he ceases to develop himself when he is at a primitive stage or whether he is highly sophisticated and learned, it is all the same”.

Another rabbi with an interest in psychology and human growth (R’ Reuven P. Bulka, Chapters of the Sages) writes:

“The human being is involved in a never-ending becoming process. The fulfilment of today is no excuse to relax: it is an inspiration to greater fulfilment tomorrow. The missed opportunity to improve can never be retrieved, for the time which passes is not open to recall. Standing still, not increasing knowledge, is thus a regression, for it kills the present potential. In human striving there is no neutral gear. It is either forward or reverse”.

Then there is R; Marc D. Angel (The Koren Pirkei Avot) who writes:

“Learning is a life-long process. If one loses intellectual curiosity, one sinks into dullness and triteness. If one is not constantly reviewing and replenishing knowledge, one comes to forget what one has already learned”.

These last three explanations are expressed in such wide terms that clearly do not limit Hillel’s teaching to the specifically Jewish context of learning Torah or halachah. I don’t know what Hillel would have made of them, but they speak with sincerity and clarity to the needs of those of us who are living in the twenty-first century and striving to do our best at a time when Torah must increasingly resist being sidelined by other commitments, opportunities and expectations.