"If not now, when...?": a mishnah expands

Last year the most frequently-cited teaching from Avot on the English-language social media was that of Hillel the Elder:

אִם אֵין אֲנִי לִי, מִי לִי, וּכְשֶׁאֲנִי לְעַצְמִי, מָה אֲנִי, וְאִם לֹא עַכְשָׁו, אֵימָתָי

“If I am not for myself, who is for me? And if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?” (Avot 1:14)

This teaching has always been well known in Jewish circles, and not only on account of its enigmatic nature and catchy words. Put to music, it has been joyously sung by chasidim and many composers and musicians, including such luminaries as Mordechai Ben David, Isaac Bitton, Benny Friedman and Shloime Gertner have given it their own personal treatment.

But this mishnah is known well beyond the concentric circles of Jewish culture.  It is known among non-Jews too, on account of the international success of a book, If Not Now, When (original Italian title Se Non Ora, Quando?) the prize-winning novel by Primo Levi. A studio album of the same name, released by Incubus in 2011 and loosely based on two of Hillel’s mishnayot from Avot, sold over 600,000 copies.

The mishnah has clearly spread in terms of public familiarity. It has also broadened the scope of its applicability.

The idea that Hillel is addressing himself as an individual is hard to deny. Of the 14 words in his three-part dictum, 5 of them are “I”, “me” or “myself”.  Both the Bartenura and the commentary ascribed to Rashi initially explain the mishnah in personal terms, almost as though Hillel is talking only about himself, but then allude to its wider application to humankind as a whole, a position endorsed by Rambam, Rabbenu Yonah and all subsequent commentators.

Can we take Hillel’s teaching further and apply it to corporate entities and even state actors?  I have been unable to find any commentary that answers this question but in principle it is hard to object to doing so. Individuals must balance their self-interest with the complementary or even conflicting interests of others; they must also act in good time—as many people who have made a late payment of tax have discovered. So too must local and national governments, businesses, schools, sports clubs and other collective bodies do likewise.

Writing in yesterday’s Jerusalem Post Eliot Penn does just that. His article,” Israel must take its security into its own hands”, opens as follows:

Hillel the Elder, the first-century sage, offered three insights for living as cited in the ancient book of rabbinic wisdom, Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers). The first two come as a pair: “If I am not for myself, who shall be for me? But if I am only for myself, what am I?”

Hillel’s first two maxims are often understood as directives to the individual to take personal responsibility for their life, balanced with concern for others. These astute ideas apply beyond individual living to fit the State of Israel quite well.

So far as I know, Eliot Penn is neither a scholar nor a sage, but I can think of no good reason why Hillel’s teaching should not apply to corporate entities as well as to individual ones. After all, the actions of collective and corporate bodies are all initiated by individuals. If Hillel’s teaching is addressed to each of them, surely it is fitting to address it to them as a whole.

If any reader knows of any commentary—traditional or otherwise—that has discussed this, can he or she please let me know?

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Eliot Penn’s article can be read in full here: https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-782438

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Rabbi Akiva, free will and God's foresight again: a mishnah for the month of Ellul

Our previous post looked at one of Rabbi Akiva's somewhat enigmatic teachings, one that has been given all sorts of interpretations over the generations because no-one knows what he had in mind when he taught it. Because it is so vague, its flexibility allows it to be applied to situations and scenarios that lie entirely outside the traditional scope of Avot. For example, the table below relates Rabbi Akiva’s words to the period between the beginning of the Hebrew month of Elul (a period traditionally marked by introspection and self-improvement) and Yom Kippur.

Time	Avot 3:19	Relevance
Chodesh Elul	Everything is foreseen but free will is given	Man must examine his past deeds and future plans honestly, since God knows them too. Does he have the willpower to break bad habits or to take new and better commitments upon himself?
Rosh Hashanah	The world is judged for good	We reappoint God as King and accept Him as our judge, praying that He will fasten on to our good points and forgive those that are not.
Yom Kippur	Everything depends on the rov hama’aseh	God weighs us in the balance. If the preponderance of our deeds and intentions are good, we trust that we will be acquitted

Readers are invited to try their hand and find their own scenarios in which the great rabbi's words can shed some quite unexpected light.

Rabbi Akiva, free will and God's foresight

Avot 3:19 is one of the most enigmatic of Rabbi Akiva's teachings. In short, he says: "Everything is foreseen, and freedom of choice is granted. The world is judged with goodness, and everything is according with the majority of the deed". 

The flexibility of Rabbi Akiva’s dictum offers great opportunities to vest his words with meaning. The table below shows how this mishnah in its entirety can be contrasted with an earlier mishnah (Avot 1:18) taught by his younger near-contemporary, Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel: ""he world is kept going by three things: truth, justice and peace".

Avot 3:19 (Rabbi Akiva)	Avot 1:18 (Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel)	Significance of contrasting content
Subject: the world, as viewed by man, which is full of doubt and uncertainty	Subject: the world, as viewed by God, which stands on three fixed pillars	God sees and knows all, while man’s knowledge is limited in time, space and depth of intellectual capacity
Everything is foreseen but free will is given	Truth	God, who knows all truths, makes man responsible for his actions by giving him free will
The world is judged for good	Justice	God, knowing all, is entirely just. Lacking such knowledge, man must give others the benefit of the doubt
Everything depends on the rov hama’aseh (literally "the majority of the deed")	Peace	God makes perfect peace in Heaven and on Earth; man-made peace is a compromise, depending on what the majority are prepared to accept

 On this reading, we see that Rabbi Akiva teaches how complex and baffling is the real world in which we live: we daily face unresolvable problems. We have to accept that, while nothing happens in the world unless God wills it, we have free will—or at least the illusion that it exists. We are required to be just, but our judgements are clouded by ignorance and uncertainty. We crave peace but know too well that one man’s peace (and indeed one nation’s peace) may be incompatible with another’s—and that even what appears to be genuine peace may be quite meaningless. Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel however shows us how these same issues can be viewed, when considered from God’s perspective. To Him, truth, justice and peace are absolutes. They can be achieved if only we can approach them from God’s standpoint and not from ours. 

The point that we cannot understand God’s ways is poignantly recalled when we reflect on Rabbi Akiva’s own fate, as a faithful and brilliant Torah scholar who met a martyr’s death at the hands of Israel’s Roman conquerors. From Rav Yehudah’s aggadic account (below) of his martyrdom in the Talmud we see how this explanation of Rabbi Akiva’s own words applies: his death is foreseen though he still had the option not to teach Torah; God’s judgement is for the good even though we cannot understand how or why this is so, and the Romans followed the usual path of executing troublesome enemies in order to maintain peace in Israel in the form of the pax Romana, this being man’s path to peace but not that of God.

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Rav Yehudah's account of the death of Rabbi Akiva (Menachot 29b)

Rav Yehudah said in the name of Rav: ‘When Moses ascended on High, he found the Holy One, Blessed be He, engaged in fixing crowns on to the letters [of the Torah]. Moses said, ‘Lord of the Universe, What’s holding things up?’ He answered: ‘A man will arise, after many generations—Akiva ben Yosef—who will expound, upon each little crown, heaps and heaps of laws.’ ‘Lord of the Universe,’ said Moses, ‘let me see him.’ [Moses then has a vision in which he finds himself sitting at the back of a Torah class which he could not understand at all]. They came to a certain subject and the disciples said to their teacher, ‘Where do you know this from?’ When the latter answered, ‘It is a law given to Moses at Sinai’ he was comforted. [Moses then exclaims], ‘Lord of the Universe, even though you have such a man, You give the Torah through me!’ God replies: ‘Be silent, for such is My decree.’ Then Moses said, ‘Lord of the Universe, You have shown me his Torah, so show me his reward.’ ‘[Moses then has another vision, in which Rabbi Akiva’s flesh is being weighed out on market stalls]. Moses cried out: ‘Lord of the Universe, this is Torah, and this is the reward?’ He replied, ‘Be silent, for such is My decree.’