An Avot mishnah for Shabbat: Perek 2 (parashat Beha'alotecha)
Continuing our series of erev Shabbat posts on the perek of the week, we return to Perek 2.
At Avot 2:8 Hillel cautions against various examples of
excess. One of them reads like this:
מַרְבֶּה עֲבָדִים מַרְבֶּה גָזֵל
The one who increases [his]
manservants increases theft.
This reads a little awkwardly for the modern Torah student because
the vast majority of people today do not retain manservants: butlers, valets,
footmen and the like are the domain of costume dramas. Since manservants are no
longer a familiar part of daily life in Western society, if we want to see something
of the servant’s bond of loyalty and sense of commitment to his master we have
to refer to costume dramas like Downton Abbey or to literary works such
as P. G. Wodehouse’s series of Jeeves books and Kazuo Ishiguro’s prize-winning novel
The Remains of the Day.
If we take “manservant” literally in its classical English
context, what do we see? A “gentleman’s gentleman,” a man who serves but is
never servile, and whose wit and resources are entirely devoted to the needs of
his master. Belonging at the bottom of the hierarchy of society, such a servant
might be expected to earn the lowest of wages, a factor that might motivate him
to supplement his meagre income through theft of his master’s property. In the
case of any theft, the master with only one servant in his employ would have
little difficulty in identifying the likely culprit. However, with a multitude
of servants, not only would it be harder to point the accusatory finger at any
individual suspect; it would also be much more difficult to supervise the
duties and activities of all the servants, so opportunities for theft would
themselves increase.
But if we transfer the context of this mishnah from the
domestic sphere to the corporate world, we can see how very practical it is.
Statistically speaking, some 75% of employees steal from their employers and around
one-third of business bankruptcies have been triggered by the consequences of
employee theft [Figures taken from https://www.embroker.com/blog/employee-theft-statistics/].
Finally there’s a neat twist to this mishnah in the
explanation of R’ Shmuel de Ucida (Midrash Shmuel): whose thefts are we
talking about? When a person has a larger staff than he can afford, it’s not
the staff who work for him but he himself who does the thievery in order to pay
for his bloated and overmanned establishment. This explanation works just as
well in the commercial world as in the domestic one, as Gila Ross (Living
Beautifully) observes.
If you enjoyed this post or found it useful, please feel welcome to share it with others. Thank you.
