SQUEEZING THE IN-BETWEEN TIME

Much of Pirkei Avot deals, directly or by inference, with the need to establish a good lifestyle balance between four key ingredients of a meaningful Jewish life:  learning Torah, performing mitzvot and good deeds, earning one’s keep and attending to one’s basic needs. While each of these four elements is vital, their relationship to one another is not constant. It is obvious that there must be times when one or other is in the ascendant.

In terms of being the priority element by default, Torah does well enough. It has its own dedicated perek, the sixth—and we learn that there is a direct proportionality between Torah and life itself (Hillel at 2:8). However, Torah does not have everything its own way. Thus it is not Torah but good deeds that are the main thing (Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel at 1:17); Torah is most efficacious only when blended with an occupation and, when undiluted, causes sin (Rabban Gamliel at 2:2). But if one forsakes Torah learning, the burdens of government and a worldly occupation are thrown upon him (Rabbi Nechunyah ben Hakanah, 3:6). Food, drink and sleep are essential, but only in small quantities if a person wishes to maximize his pleasure in learning Torah (6:4. There are many more examples.

Of particular note is Rabbi Meir’s call to minimize one’s business activities in order to engage more substantially in learning Torah at 4:12:

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

Minimize your business activity and engage in Torah. Be humble before every person. If you neglect the Torah, there will be many excuses for you; if you toil much in Torah, there is much reward to give to you.

The first and third segments of this mishnah point clearly to the relationship of Torah to other activities, and there are many commentators who explain this mishnah in a somewhat artificial manner by weaving humility into the balance of Torah learning versus the arguably lesser priorities.

As a personal observation, I’d like to comment on something that affects the balance of Torah study, good deeds, parnasah and personal wellbeing, and that is time.

It’s easy to imagine an ideal day in which, at any given time, a person is doing one of the four things. Here we have a sort of zero-sum game in which there is no moment in which one is not locked into one of the four. Do more of one and you do less of the others, but A + B + C + D always comes out to the same one, complete day. In practice I don’t think this is the case.

Our contemporary lifestyles should warn us to be sensitive to the many challenges we face if we do not wish to watch potentially productive time to fall through the cracks in our day.

One such challenge is posed by choice in a materialist society. Which shirt to wear; which items to select on a menu; which car to buy; which method to fund the purchase of a house or apartment; which school or group to send one’s children—these are just some of the choices that not only demand the consumption of time but, in at least some cases, invade the time spent in pursuit of one’s Torah learning or day job. Some choices are more important than others, but the time consumed by them is not necessarily proportional to their overall importance (picking the right wallpaper or fabric pattern, for example).

Even apart from choice, our good use of time is always subject to bitul, the cancellation of the moment because we do nothing with it. Standing at bus stops and railway platforms, wating for one’s turn at the barber or in the dentist’s reception room, watching advertisements while awaiting the beginning of a program one wishes to view: these are unproductive uses of time and, because of their frequency and inevitability, it is easy to acquiesce and write this time off as lost.

A challenge of a different kind is posed by our own reactions when faced with a decision-making process. Anyone who has worked in the financial sector or in business deadline, usually one that is inherently arbitrary and not imposed by the employees who seek to meet it, so often means skipping meals, working nights, missing regular shiurim and so on. But there is little or no reciprocity here. It is most unusual to hear of anyone who has consciously missed a deadline in order to attend a shiur, or who has taken time off work in order to finish learning a masechta. To the outside observer it might look as though work has gained ascendancy over Torah, though I am sure that we would all be quick to assert that this is not so.

So, to return to Rabbi Meir, we can say with him: “Minimize your business activity and engage in Torah”, while recognizing that there may be real and serious limits as to how this might be done and also accepting that, with the best will in the world, the time saved by minimizing business activity is unlikely to translate precisely into time gained for Torah learning.

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CONSCIOUS OF YOUR IMAGE?

 How self-conscious are you? Are you concerned about your image? Well, you should be, at least according to Rabbi Akiva. At Avot 3:18 he opens a three-part mishnah by telling us:

חָבִיב אָדָם שֶׁנִּבְרָא בְּצֶֽלֶם, חִבָּה יְתֵרָה נוֹדַֽעַת לוֹ שֶׁנִּבְרָא בְּצֶֽלֶם, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר: כִּי בְּצֶֽלֶם אֱלֹהִים עָשָׂה אֶת הָאָדָם

Beloved is man, for he was created in the image [of God]; with extra love it was made known to him that he was created in the image, as it says, "For in the image of God He made man" (Bereishit 9:6).

Commentators do not generally struggle with the idea of being loved by God, since it is a primal conceit that we are loved. For most of us, the first emotion to which we are exposed following our birth is the warmth of a mother’s love—powerful, unconditional and in most cases irrevocable.

Being created in God’s image is quite another matter. From the moment we recognize that God has no visible or tangible form, we are forced to accept that “God’s image” is a metaphor of some kind. Having accepted that, we soon learn that there is no single metaphor that can encapsulate all the qualities and attributes of an infinite and unbounded deity. This acceptance gives us the opportunity to choose the metaphor that fits the moment. Just as God is kind and merciful, so too do we mortals have the capacity to be kind and merciful. Just as God is slow to anger and willing to forgive, so too is this ability embedded somewhere within us.

When choosing our metaphors, we are careful to point to good and noble qualities alone. Thus in the realm of middot we accept that God has an awesome power to project His anger and to punish others—but these are not for lessons that our Sages draw for us. The Torah too makes it plain that vengeance is an attribute that is specifically reserved for Him and barred to us.

In a short but fascinating essay on this mishnah in Foundations of Faith (a companion to Pirkei Avot based on the thoughts and writings of Rabbi Norman Lamm), Rabbi Mark Dratch reviews an argument between the rationalists (R’ Saadya Gaon and Rambam) and the ethicists (led by the Ramchal). For the former, the image of God is expressed by man’s ability to reason. The Ramchal rejects this on the ground that a person can exercise reason and then fail to act upon it. Rather, what makes man like God is the ability to act in accordance with his perception of the distinction between good and evil.

The key feature of this ability to act, it is argued, lies not so much in what one does as in what one refrains from doing: it is effectively the ability to say “no”. Developing this point, Rabbi Aaron Levine points to part of a verse in Kohelet (Ecclesiastes 3:19) that appears daily in our morning blessings:

וּמוֹתַר הָאָדָם מִן-הַבְּהֵמָה אָיִן …

…and man’s pre-eminence over the beast is naught….

Rabbi Levine gives these words a positive spin. They don’t mean that man has zero pre-eminence over the animal. Rather, they teach us that we are pre-eminent. Our superiority is based on our ability to say אָיִן (ayin, “no”). Ramming home this point, Rabbi Dratch writes:

“An animal has no choice—no freedom—and therefore must say ‘yes’ to his drives, to the world in which he lives. But a human being can say ‘no’ to that which is unseemly and beneath his dignity. And when he says ‘no’ to all that is ungodly, he is being Godly. He is showing that he was created in the image of God”.

This is only one of a large number of explanations of Rabbi Akiva’s words, but it has a special attraction:

“It was Rabbi Akiva, the man who was able to stand up to the wrath and the might of the whole Roman Empire and say ‘no’ to tyranny and despotism, who taught us ‘Beloved is man that he was created in the image of God”.

Now that’s a point to ponder when, in our Mussaf service on Yom Kippur, we reach the midrash of the Ten Martyrs, of whom Rabbi Akiva was the most prominent.

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