One of the most trying mishnayot in Avot is the teaching by Rabbi Yonatan at Avot 4:11:
כָּל
הַמְקַיֵּם אֶת הַתּוֹרָה מֵעֹֽנִי, סוֹפוֹ לְקַיְּמָהּ מֵעֹֽשֶׁר, וְכָל
הַמְבַטֵּל אֶת הַתּוֹרָה מֵעֹֽשֶׁר, סוֹפוֹ לְבַטְּלָהּ מֵעֹֽנִי
Whoever fulfils the Torah in poverty will ultimately fulfil it in wealth;
and whoever neglects the Torah in wealth will ultimately neglect it in poverty.
What can this mean? It
surely cannot have been intended as a literal statement that the poor will
become wealthy if they keep the Torah while the rich will become poor if they
don’t. After all, from pretty much the day that mishnah was first taught until
this very moment our literature has recorded instances of people committing
themselves to the Torah with total dedication but dying as poor as shul mice.
We also know of others who have basked in the sunshine of a life of unabashed
and undiminished affluence, over which the study of Torah and compliance with
its precepts have cast no shadow. Indeed, in the world today we can see with
our own eyes that there are those who commit to Torah and remain poor while
others ignore it and remain rich. So is this Tanna telling us a lie?
A cynical way to read
this lesson might be as a judgmental one. If we see someone dedicating himself
to Torah and remaining poor, we might infer that he wasn’t really committed to
Torah at all, that his life was a sham, an outward display of piety; if things
were otherwise, he would surely be rich!
Conversely, if we see a rich man who, despite his non-Torah lifestyle
remains rich, we might castigate ourselves for judging him falsely; by
retaining his wealth he is marked as someone who secretly pursues the Torah and
hides his righteousness under a veil of affluence. But it there is no reason to suspect that
Rabbi Yonatan should have a message such as this in mind, and our traditional
commentators do not take his words in this way.
Rabbi Abraham J. Twerski
(Visions of the Fathers) suggests that Rabbi Yonatan is making a plain
factual statement rather than describing a normative one: a person who is poor
but lives a Torah life will not be deflected from it if his material condition
improves, while the rich man who ignores the Torah is likely to continue to
ignore it when his assets dwindle. If this explanation is valid, it is
something of an outlier since it is more a statement of probability than a
proposition relating to how we should behave—which is what most of the tractate
of Avot addresses. Another outlier is the assertion of Rabbi Yisrael Meir Lau (Yachel
Yisrael) that we are being told here that both wealth and poverty pose
challenges. If this is the message of the Tanna, we may ask why Rabbi Yonatan
chose to express it in such an unclear manner.
It is easier to explain
this mishnah as being based on metaphor. Thus, one might say, “wealth” is
shorthand for one’s reward in the world to come. Naturally the poor man who
adheres to the Torah can expect a massive dividend in Heaven, while the rich
man who neglects it cannot. But this idea is so well chronicled in the Oral Law
that we might wonder why Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi, while compiling Avot, should
have felt it necessary to add yet another teaching in support of it right here,
in the middle of the fourth perek of this tractate. Another metaphor reads
“wealth” as the quality of living one’s life in a meaningful and Torah-true manner.
Keep the Torah when your life is meaningless and it will improve; abandon the
Torah when life is sweet and beautiful and your sweet living will soon be lost
(Gila Ross, Living Beautifully). Similarly, for the Sefat Emet,
“wealth” and “poverty” symbolise the quantity of satisfaction that one can
extract from rejoicing in one’s portion, while for Rabbi Chaim Volozhiner (Ruach
Chaim) they relate to the spiritual elevation that can be enjoyed by governing
one’s yetzer hara, the evil inclination.
A highly original spin on
this mishnah comes from Rabbi Mordechai Shapira, the Saba Kadisha of Neshchiz
(brought in the Chasidic anthology MiMa’ayanot Netzach). He takes this
teaching as an open invitation to pray to God to give wealth to Jew. Why not?
After all, if the Jew is a poor servant of God, the mishnah promises him
money—and if he is wealthy already, more money won’t change his status and
drive him off the derech, but he will be bound to lose it if he doesn’t
trouble to serve His maker.
On a purely practical level, both Rabbi Yitzchak Volozhiner
(Milei de’Avot and Rabbi Ya’akov Emden (Lechem Shamayim) have
noted that some mitzvot cost a lot of money while others cost little or nothing.
Building on this, it can be suggested that a poor man who commits himself to
Torah observance should focus only on those commandments that are within his price
range and make do with them in the hope that he will in time be rewarded with
the opportunity to perform more costly mitzvot; this fits in nicely with the
idea that the reward for a mitzvah is a mitzvah (Ben Azzai at Avot 4:2).
Likewise, a rich man should splash out on expensive mitzvot while he can, since
if he doesn’t he will be left with only the mitzvot that a pauper can perform.
Adding all of this up, we can see a surprisingly wide range
of interpretations of Rabbi Yonatan’s words. Is this a good thing, since it fosters
analysis, discussion and deep consideration of important elements of Jewish
life? Or should the Tanna have been reminded of the importance of not saying
something that can’t be understood immediately if you intend that it should be
understood in the end?
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