Minding our own business

At Avot 4:12 Rabbi Meir offers the following advice:

הֱוֵי מְמַעֵט בְּעֵֽסֶק וַעֲסוֹק בַּתּוֹרָה, וֶהֱוֵי שְׁפַל רֽוּחַ בִּפְנֵי כָל אָדָם, וְאִם בָּטַֽלְתָּ מִן הַתּוֹרָה, יֶשׁ לָךְ בְּטֵלִים הַרְבֵּה כְּנֶגְדָּךְ, וְאִם עָמַֽלְתָּ בַּתּוֹרָה הַרְבֵּה, יֶשׁ שָׂכָר הַרְבֵּה לִתֶּן לָךְ

Minimise your business activity, but do occupy yourself with Torah. Be humble before everyone. If you neglect the Torah, there will be many excuses that you can give yourself; but if you toil greatly in Torah, there is much reward to give to you.

Doing less business and learning more Torah—the maxim opens this teaching—is a leitmotiv that runs through the Oral Torah, and particularly through Pirkei Avot: for example, Hillel (at 2:6) cautions that a person who is too heavily steeped in business activities will never be a chacham and an anonymous baraita (6:6) lists reduction of business activity as one of the 48 steps towards the acquisition of Torah. The need to work for one’s living is accepted, but one is obliged to strike a balance between work and one’s obligation to learn Torah because you can’t have one without the other (3:21). In any event, it is a blend of the two that causes sin to be forgotten (2:2).

Rabbi Shlomo P. Toperoff (Lev Avot) emphasises the specifically Oral Law aspect of this teaching, which was something that had not occurred to me before. He writes:

“The word asak used here for business is also common in modern Hebrew, but it is not found in the Bible. Originally we were an agricultural people; we came from the village, not from the city. In the Hebrew language there are ten words, all synonyms for rain, whereas we have no word which precisely expresses business or commerce. The Bible is a history of a shepherd people…. There are a number of words in the Bible which are connected with trading and merchants, but they do not specifically deal with business”

This does not mean that the Torah does not apply to traders and business transactions. As the Lev Avot explains, what it means is that the Torah addresses modes of behaviour: they must be honest and honourable. This is the case whether that behaviour is termed, “business”, “trade” or anything else.

This observation illustrates the argument powerfully made by Rabbi Aubrey Hersh in his History for the Curious podcasts on the Oral Law, that it is only through the necessary medium of the Oral Law and its rules for interpreting and applying the Written Law that the latter is enabled to remain relevant today. The Torah may not use the label ‘business’, or even recognise the concept, but the Oral Law provides the means of elucidating its principles and making them relevant to every aspect of human endeavour to develop after the giving of the law at Sinai.

Incidentally, can anyone list the ten Hebrew words for “rain”?

For comments and discussion of this post on Facebook, click here.