Friday, 21 June 2024

it's a steal!

An Avot mishnah for Shabbat: Perek 2 (parashat Beha'alotecha)

Continuing our series of erev Shabbat posts on the perek of the week, we return to Perek 2.

At Avot 2:8 Hillel cautions against various examples of excess. One of them reads like this:

מַרְבֶּה עֲבָדִים מַרְבֶּה גָזֵל

The one who increases [his] manservants increases theft.

This reads a little awkwardly for the modern Torah student because the vast majority of people today do not retain manservants: butlers, valets, footmen and the like are the domain of costume dramas. Since manservants are no longer a familiar part of daily life in Western society, if we want to see something of the servant’s bond of loyalty and sense of commitment to his master we have to refer to costume dramas like Downton Abbey or to literary works such as P. G. Wodehouse’s series of Jeeves books and Kazuo Ishiguro’s prize-winning novel The Remains of the Day.  

Faced with the problem of the lack of contemporary relevance, some commentators omit any discussion of this teaching (e.g. R’ Dan Roth, Relevance: Pirkei Avos for the 21st Century; R’ Yisroel Miller, The Wisdom of Avos). Strangely, other authors have gone retrograde, opting for “male slaves” (David N. Barocas’ translation of Me’am Lo’ez; Chanoch Levi’s translation of Ru’ach Chaim; Joseph G. Rosenstein, Reflections on Pirkei Avot); David Haddad’s French translation (Les Actions des Pères) does the same with “esclaves”. While no translations have jettisoned “manservants” for something more familiar like “employee” or “domestic employee”— the mishnah is often explained as applying to this modern concept.

If we take “manservant” literally in its classical English context, what do we see? A “gentleman’s gentleman,” a man who serves but is never servile, and whose wit and resources are entirely devoted to the needs of his master. Belonging at the bottom of the hierarchy of society, such a servant might be expected to earn the lowest of wages, a factor that might motivate him to supplement his meagre income through theft of his master’s property. In the case of any theft, the master with only one servant in his employ would have little difficulty in identifying the likely culprit. However, with a multitude of servants, not only would it be harder to point the accusatory finger at any individual suspect; it would also be much more difficult to supervise the duties and activities of all the servants, so opportunities for theft would themselves increase.

But if we transfer the context of this mishnah from the domestic sphere to the corporate world, we can see how very practical it is. Statistically speaking, some 75% of employees steal from their employers and around one-third of business bankruptcies have been triggered by the consequences of employee theft [Figures taken from https://www.embroker.com/blog/employee-theft-statistics/].

Finally there’s a neat twist to this mishnah in the explanation of R’ Shmuel de Ucida (Midrash Shmuel): whose thefts are we talking about? When a person has a larger staff than he can afford, it’s not the staff who work for him but he himself who does the thievery in order to pay for his bloated and overmanned establishment. This explanation works just as well in the commercial world as in the domestic one, as Gila Ross (Living Beautifully) observes.

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