Minding our own business

At Avot 4:12 Rabbi Meir offers the following advice:

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

Minimise your business activity, but do occupy yourself with Torah. Be humble before everyone. If you neglect the Torah, there will be many excuses that you can give yourself; but if you toil greatly in Torah, there is much reward to give to you.

Doing less business and learning more Torah—the maxim opens this teaching—is a leitmotiv that runs through the Oral Torah, and particularly through Pirkei Avot: for example, Hillel (at 2:6) cautions that a person who is too heavily steeped in business activities will never be a chacham and an anonymous baraita (6:6) lists reduction of business activity as one of the 48 steps towards the acquisition of Torah. The need to work for one’s living is accepted, but one is obliged to strike a balance between work and one’s obligation to learn Torah because you can’t have one without the other (3:21). In any event, it is a blend of the two that causes sin to be forgotten (2:2).

Rabbi Shlomo P. Toperoff (Lev Avot) emphasises the specifically Oral Law aspect of this teaching, which was something that had not occurred to me before. He writes:

“The word asak used here for business is also common in modern Hebrew, but it is not found in the Bible. Originally we were an agricultural people; we came from the village, not from the city. In the Hebrew language there are ten words, all synonyms for rain, whereas we have no word which precisely expresses business or commerce. The Bible is a history of a shepherd people…. There are a number of words in the Bible which are connected with trading and merchants, but they do not specifically deal with business”

This does not mean that the Torah does not apply to traders and business transactions. As the Lev Avot explains, what it means is that the Torah addresses modes of behaviour: they must be honest and honourable. This is the case whether that behaviour is termed, “business”, “trade” or anything else.

This observation illustrates the argument powerfully made by Rabbi Aubrey Hersh in his History for the Curious podcasts on the Oral Law, that it is only through the necessary medium of the Oral Law and its rules for interpreting and applying the Written Law that the latter is enabled to remain relevant today. The Torah may not use the label ‘business’, or even recognise the concept, but the Oral Law provides the means of elucidating its principles and making them relevant to every aspect of human endeavour to develop after the giving of the law at Sinai.

Incidentally, can anyone list the ten Hebrew words for “rain”?

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Fire that the rain won't extinguish

As I watch the rain trickle down my window on this wet Jerusalem morning, I am reminded of the teaching in Pirkei Avot (5:7) that ten miracles enhanced our enjoyment of the Temple in times gone by. Number 5 in this list is this:

“The rains did not extinguish the wood-fire burning upon the altar’s woodpile.”

Miracle or no miracle? Water and fire are “opposites” in that they do not naturally share the same space. This is why the plague of hail, inflicted on Pharaoh and the Egyptians for refusing to release the Children of Israel from slavery, was miraculous (the Torah describes the hail as descending together with fire: Exodus 9:23-24).

But is this truly a miracle? Readers may have personal experiences of their own regarding bonfires and camp fires that have continued to burn notwithstanding the rain. They are not alone. The same phenomenon has been noted on a far larger scale too (see Jake Spring, “Rain will not extinguish Amazon fires for weeks, weather experts say,” Reuters, 27 August 2019, here).

Only if there is sustained and heavy rain will a well-established fire be at risk of being extinguished. The fire on the altar’s woodpile, being carefully prepared and dutifully tended, should therefore stand a good chance of surviving any given downpour. Be that as it may, the persistent survival of this fire in the two Temples for an aggregate of nearly a thousand years does rather suggest something more than chance or coincidence: this mishnah therefore attributes it to divine intervention.

There is surely a bigger message in this mishnah, and I would suggest that it is this.

The symbolism of fire and water in this miracle cannot be ignored. Some commentators have taken the Temple to be a metaphor for man, or even as an allegory of man’s relationship with God. Fire represents flaming desire, a passion in man’s heart: where those flames are kindled on the altar of man’s service to God, they cannot be extinguished.

A second explanation is founded on the symbolism of the word used here for wood, עץ (etz, “wood” or "tree"), together with that of גשמים (geshamim, “rains”). The etz here is an allusion to Torah, described as “a tree of life to those who grasp it,” (Proverbs 3:17) and the גשמים here allude to גשמיות (gashmi’ut, “materialism,” “non-spiritual matters”). Employing this symbolism, the dedicated student who lays himself out, as it were, on the altar of Torah will be ablaze with the fire of Torah, a fire that the waters of materialism and the pleasures of the physical world cannot extinguish.

This imagery is both powerful and attractive. However, even though it is accepted that learning Torah is something that requires divine assistance as well as human effort, some may be a little sad to think that, if a serious Torah student pursues his studies so enthusiastically that he cannot be derailed by the distractions of gashmi’ut, we should have to regard that as a miracle.