You can look -- but can you like?

One of the teachings in Avot that seems particularly strange to contemporary readers is that of R’ Yaakov (or, according to some texts, R’ Shimon) at Avot 3:9:

הַמְהַלֵּךְ בַּדֶּֽרֶךְ וְשׁוֹנֶה, וּמַפְסִיק מִמִּשְׁנָתוֹ וְאוֹמֵר: מַה נָּאֶה אִילָן זֶה, מַה נָּאֶה נִיר זֶה, מַעֲלֶה עָלָיו הַכָּתוּב כְּאִלּוּ מִתְחַיֵּב בְּנַפְשׁוֹ

Someone who goes along the road and studies, but interrupts his study to say "How beautiful is this tree!", "How beautiful is this ploughed field!"—the Torah regards him as if he had sinned against his soul.

The message of this mishnah appears to be clear: if you voluntarily stop your learning for an activity of lesser value, you fundamentally damage your soul—this being a euphemism for forfeiting one’s life. It is an uncompromising message that is intended for Torah scholars, who are expected to take it to heart. This appears to be the view of the Bartenura, who adds that this teaching applies not just to praise of trees and fields but to any speech unrelated to one’s learning—and even to the person who pauses his learning in order to recite a blessing on a beautiful sight. The commentary ascribed to Rashi explains that a person is protected against accusations by the Satan for as long as he carries on learning, but this protection stops the moment he does. The Me’iri cautions against interrupting learning with any unnecessary speech, even if one is merely reviewing that he already knows. Rambam is however silent, presumably on the basis that R’ Yaakov’s words are self-explanatory.

Not all the commentators are quite so severe, but they are still highly critical of our traveller. R’ Moshe Almosnino (Pirkei Moshe) concedes that interruptions of one’s train of thought can be quite inadvertent: it is the uttering of subsequent unnecessary words that the mishnah condemns. Others see this teaching as a metaphor. For R’ Marcus Lehmann (Meir Netiv), “going along the road” alludes to one’s passage through life, his “study” is the result of the good influence of his family and teachers. The “tree” is however the forbidden “tree of knowledge”—secular philosophy and modern ideologies that claim his admiration, and that is the cause of his downfall.

Moving further away from the original mishnah and forging a fresh understanding that is more apposite for anyone who lives a Jewish life in an essentially non-Jewish world, R’ Yisroel Miller writes this:

“Perhaps R’ Yaakov is warning us: Someone who interrupts his learning for trivia knows he is wasting his time and will hopefully regret it and improve in the future. But someone who interrupts learning to admire beauty, who is engaged in an aesthetic activity, may mistakenly believe it is a spiritual experience, i.e. an elevation of soul comparable to talmud Torah”.

He then mitigates the force of this proposition, adding:

“People who truly appreciate great art, classical music, or beautiful sunsets can be deeply moved by the experience, and a person of what used to be called high culture was considered a superior human being. I believe there is much to be said in favor of high culture, but R’ Yaakov warns us not to confuse the aesthetic with ruchnius [spirituality], and certainly not to allow it to compete for our affection with Toras Hashem”.

Heading in the same direction as R’ Miller’s words but focusing more on the road travelled than the nature of the distraction, Gila Ross has this to say about our difficult mishnah:

“Mitzvos and Torah study are like the primary highway of connection to God. Getting closer to God through nature is a secondary road. A person must appreciate that Torah study means being involved with the crown of God and that his life depends on it. ‘’’[I]t’s not a time to interrupt with ‘small talk’”.

I’m not sure whether R’ Miller’s words are a concession or a confession, but in either case they show how far the meaning of a mishnah can travel from the blunt and uncompromising words of the Tanna who first spoke them. Gila Ross does the same, seeking to make this teaching more palatable. In a generation where religion, morality and a belief in God can no longer be taken for granted, it is difficult to see how this sort of approach can be avoided by any author on Avot who seriously wants to influence the thoughts and maybe even change the behaviour and lifestyle of the reader.

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Torah learning and the Garden of Eden

Avot 3:9 is a difficult Mishnah in which Rabbi Ya’akov teaches that a person who is learning while on a journey, but who stops to admire a beautiful tree or field, risks spiritual suicide.

It is possible to link this mishnah to the earliest narrative of human life in the Bible—the story of Adam, Eve and a tree that had monumental significance for the future of humanity. In short, on the Sixth Day of Creation Adam is told not to eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge; this instruction is passed on to Eve; Eve sees the tree and declares it to be “a delight to the eyes.” After the forbidden fruit is consumed, Adam’s punishment is that he is condemned to feed himself forever more through the sweat of his brow, God telling him: “you shall eat the plants [literally ‘grass’ or ‘herb’] of the field.”

There is a long, strong tradition that, if Adam and Eve had fulfilled that one instruction which God had given them, entering the World’s first-ever Shabbat with an unblemished record, mankind would have achieved perfection there and then, and there would have been no need for God to give the Torah as a means of serving Him since they would not need to exercise their free will in order to choose good over evil.

Putting this all together, one might speculate that the teaching in this mishnah is this: here is a hypothetical scholar, committed to a life of Torah learning. He is on a journey, but this is not a physical journey: it is a metaphorical one, his journey through life. This journey is long and hard since the pursuit of Torah is an onerous task that can never be completed. Our scholar could well be feeling frustrated or dejected by what he feels is a lack of progress, or bored by the necessary revision that fixes his studies firmly in his mind.

Closing his mind to his Torah studies, our scholar pauses to contemplate two scenarios in which he is free from this unending commitment. In the first scenario he imagines what his life would have been like if Adam and Eve had never eaten from that beautiful but forbidden tree, when life would have been ideal in all respects and he could contemplate the majesty of God without the need for any effort; in the second he wonders if tilling the fields and toiling in the soil might not be a preferable alternative to Torah learning, since at the end of the day the farmer can at least sit back, admire the sight of the crops that result from his hard work and look forward to eating the fruit of his labour.

Each of these scenarios has an appeal that he may not experience in his own journey. This is because, for the true Torah scholar, every achievement is met not by a feeling of complacency or accomplishment but by a greater realisation of how much more there is to achieve. Might it just be that this hypothetical scholar of ours is precisely the person to whom Rabbi Ya’akov says in this mishnah:

“Stick to your journey! Deviate and you put your very soul at stake.”

This might seem like a somewhat harsh warning to administer to a wavering Torah scholar whose thoughts may be drawn towards pleasures that do not appear to be included in the bundle of benefits available to him, but in the next chapter of Avot Rabbi Ya’akov redresses this by describing the unimaginably blissful state that awaits him in the World to Come.