Balancing priorities

Two mishnayot in Avot discuss the relative importance of the many commandments  that govern the life of the practising Jew. At 2:1 Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi says:

וֶהֱוֵי זָהִיר בְּמִצְוָה קַלָּה כְּבַחֲמוּרָה, שֶׁאֵין אַתָּה יוֹדֵֽעַ מַתַּן שְׂכָרָן שֶׁל מִצְוֹת, וֶהֱוֵי מְחַשֵּׁב הֶפְסֵד מִצְוָה כְּנֶֽגֶד שְׂכָרָהּ, וּשְׂכַר עֲבֵרָה כְּנֶֽגֶד הֶפְסֵדָהּ

Be as careful with a minor mitzvah as with a major one, for you do not know the rewards of the mitzvot. Consider the cost of a mitzvah against its reward, and the reward of a transgression against its cost.

Then, at 4:2 Ben Azzai adds:

הֱוֵי רָץ לְמִצְוָה קַלָּה, וּבוֹרֵֽחַ מִן הָעֲבֵרָה, שֶׁמִּצְוָה גוֹרֶֽרֶת מִצְוָה, וַעֲבֵרָה גוֹרֶֽרֶת עֲבֵרָה, שֶׁשְּׂכַר מִצְוָה מִצְוָה, וּשְׂכַר עֲבֵרָה עֲבֵרָה

Run to pursue a minor mitzvah but flee from a transgression, because a mitzvah brings another mitzvah, and a transgression brings another transgression since the reward of a mitzvah is a mitzvah, and the reward of transgression is transgression.

The commentators concede that terms such as “minor mitzvah” and “major mitzvah” demand explanation since God in His wisdom chose not to do so. A stock explanation for this omission is that, if we knew which mitzvot carried the big rewards and which the small rewards, we would naturally focus on the big ones only and neglect the rest.

On the subject of rewards, many commentators make reference to the Jerusalem Talmud (Pe’ah 1:1), which points out that the same reward—a long life—is received for performing two mitzvot that  are polar opposites, as it were: honouring one’s father and one’s mother (Shemot 20:12), which is reckoned to be one of the very hardest mitzvot to perform, and shooing away the mother bird before taking her eggs (Devarim 22:7), regarded as one of the very easiest. The conclusions we are invited to draw are that, as Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi says, we do not (and indeed cannot) know how God chooses to reward those who carry out His orders, and the reward cannot on the available evidence be related to the ease or hardship that attends their performance.

Honouring one’s parents and shooing away the mother bird are often stated to be the only two mitzvot in the Torah that offer a long life in return. But this is not so. There is a third and it is found in Devarim 25:13-15: the commandment to have weights and scales for measuring one’s merchandise.

Now, if honouring one’s parents is a major mitzvah and shooing away the mother bird is a minor one, where does that leave the mitzvah of having just weighing apparatus? I have yet to find a commentator on Avot who asks this question. It might be suggested that this mitzvah is sometimes hard and sometimes easy to perform and that, therefore, the reward depends on the level of effort or difficulty faced by the person keeping it. This answer has the attraction that it invokes another mishnah in Avot, at the very end of the fifth perek (5:26), where Ben He He teaches: לְפוּם צַעֲרָא אַגְרָא (“According to the effort is the reward” or “where there is no pain there is no gain”).   However, this mishnah can also be applied to honouring one’s parents and shooing away mother birds.

Maybe the solution lies in an explanation I heard Rabbi Yehoshua Hartman give many years ago in a talk on the Maharal. It runs like this. Every mitzvah attracts two rewards: there is a standard reward for the tick-the-box act of completing the mitzvah, and there is a second reward which is attached to a variable scale, depending on difficulty in completing it and on other external factors. This would mean that “long life” (in the next world, I believe) would be the standard rate for both honouring one’s parents and shooing away the mother bird, while a further reward awaits those who struggled to do so.

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Our three best friends

At Avot 4:13 we learn that there’s more to being good than getting rewarded, and more to being bad than being punished. According to Rabbi Eliezer ben Yaakov our good and bad deeds effectively speak for us. Our actions, personalised in this way, can thus supply clues as to our motivation: they can expose our grace and generosity when we do good things—and the malice and madness with which we do the opposite. He explains:

הָעוֹשֶׂה מִצְוָה אַחַת, קֽוֹנֶה לּוֹ פְּרַקְלִיט אֶחָד, וְהָעוֹבֵר עֲבֵרָה אַחַת, קֽוֹנֶה לּוֹ קַטֵּגוֹר אֶחָד, תְּשׁוּבָה וּמַעֲשִׂים טוֹבִים כִּתְרִיס בִּפְנֵי הַפּוּרְעָנוּת

Someone who fulfils one mitzvah acquires for himself one advocate; but someone who commits one transgression gains himself one accuser. Repentance and good deeds are like a shield against retribution.

In other words it’s not enough to say simply that “actions speak louder than words”. In Rabbi Eliezer ben Yaakov’s view the actions speak both for themselves and for the person who commits them.  One’s actions are a matter of record. According to Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi (Avot 2:1) they are, so to speak, filmed, taped and recorded in writing. But the reasons for doing what we do are quite another matter. And that’s what our mishnah is about.

Gila Ross (Living Beautifully) describes the workings of this Mishnah in the following way:

A person gets a court summons. He has three friends to whom he reaches out for help.

His first friend says, “I’m sorry, I can’t help you”.

The second friend says, “You know what? I’ll come with you all the way to the courthouse, but from there you are on your own”.

His third friend says, “I will come, and I will be a character witness for you”.

Each of us has these three friends in our lives: Our first friend is the possessions that we have. They accompany us through life but, the moment life is over, they’ve gone. We can’t take any of our possessions with us. Then we have our family and our loved ones who are great friends throughout life. When a person passes on. They will accompany him until burial. Beyond that, they can’t really be with the person. There’s only one friend who stays with us all the way through to our accounting in the Next World. These are our actions and our good deeds; they are our character witnesses.

This idea of being accompanied into the Next World by nothing but one’s good deeds and Torah learning has a good Avot pedigree, being spelled out in a baraita at 6:9. But, however attractive this prospect appears, we are supposed—as Rabbi Eliezer ben Yaakov reminds us here—to remember the downside. It’s not just our friends who stick with us to the end and testify to our character. Our ‘enemies’ do so too—and there’s enough room in the metaphorical celestial courtroom for every one of them.

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