Avot de Rabbi Natan
Other than the Humash, the Five Books of Moses, and the Book of Psalms, the most popular Jewish text is Pirke Avot: The Ethics of the Fathers. It is the one book of the Mishnah that focuses solely on Aggadah rather than Jewish Law. In the Talmud which is made of encyclopedic commentary on the Mishnah, there is no commentary on Pirke Avot. However, there is another aggadic work that does provide a commentary. I did an intense study of Pirke Avot that took two and a half years. When I came to the end of that I thought that I could just transition to studying the other work, Avot de Rebbe Natan: The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan, but it didn’t work out. I found it strange by comparison with Pirke Avot. Periodically I try to start in on Pirke de Rebbe Natan and this week I have started to get into it again.
Rather than pushing through in order I did some flipping around. One of my favorite Mishnayot in Pirke Avot cites the figure Antigonus of Sokho. The Pirke Avot text is:
“Antigonus of Soko took over from Simeon the Righteous. He used to say: be not like slaves that serve a master for the sake of compensation; be rather like slaves who serve their master with no thought of compensation, and let the fear of heaven be upon you.”
For the modern, reading this Mishnah, it is hard not to get hung up on the image of the slave. There is something peculiar in the way the slave is being referred to. Slaves are kept in line by fear of punishment. Jews relate to God through a mixture of Yirah (fear/awe) and Ahavah (love) of God, and God is like a master who the Jews obey. This becomes clear in the final clause of the Mishnah. What appeals to me about the Mishnah is the idea that we would serve God only because of the desire to serve God and the feeling of satisfaction that can come from self-less service (a paradoxical benefit).
This Mishnah can be read to imply that one should behave ethically without concern for whether or not our relationship with God has any bearing on our actions, that we don’t need God in order to live ethical lives. The last clause in the Mishnah, “and let the fear of heaven be upon you,” seems to be an attempt to get the cat back into the bag, if this is how you read the Mishnah. I read the Mishnah as an invocation to focus on the work rather than the reward for the work, so I didn’t start off with the concern with this Mishnah.
Avot de Rebbe Natan adds to the Mishnah, “so that your reward may be doubled in the age to come.” This completely denies the intended meaning of the Mishnah, guiding one to display a kind of false modesty in the interest of an even greater reward that one might get for doing the right thing out of simple obedience. This bothered me enough, but the actual commentary went farther.
“Antigonos of Soko had two disciples who used to study his words. They taught them to their disciples. These proceeded to examine the words closely and demanded: ‘Why did our ancestors see fit to say this thing? Is it possible that a laborer should do his work all day and not take his reward in the evening? If our ancestors, forsooth, had known that there is another world and that there will be a resurrection of the dead, they would not have spoken in this manner.’
So they arose and withdrew from the Torah and split into two sects, the Sadducees and the Boethusians: Sadducees named after Zadok, Boethusians, after Boethius. And they used silver vessels and gold vessels all their lives - not because they were ostentatious; but the Sadducees said, ‘It is a tradition among the Pharisees to afflict themselves in this world; yet in the world to come they will have nothing.’”
There is an ambiguity in Hebrew over the word Eved. It means either servant, slave or worker. Judah Goldin, who provided the translation that I am using, uses the words slave and worker in the places where the speakers’ intentions lay out the correct usage. Antigonos’ students can’t even see themselves as slaves to God. As workers, the Torah commands that workers be given their pay each day at the end of the work day. From that they extrapolate their worldly philosophies. The Sadducees chose a service to God that was this worldly and ostentatious in its use of wealth. The Boethusians, to the extent that we know who they are, are known to sometimes insisted on doing sacred tasks at times that violated traditional norms.
I understand the desire of Avot de Rebbe Natan to push against the theological uncertainty that Antigonos is introducing. A tolerance for uncertainty is one of the demands of modern life. It may be the central aspect of “modernity.” My discomfort is a mirror of the discomfort of Avot de Rebbe Natan. The idea that I would be a slave, even in the symbolic sense, is an uncomfortable notion. American society is founded on the sense that personal liberty is a primary value and I am a product of that society. Nevertheless, I have come to see that my personal liberty has always been limited by the nature of creation itself. The idea that I might bind myself to the world as it is and always “let the fear of heaven be upon” me has seemed the most workable path to a meaningful life. That this may be an unworkable path for others is saddening, but not hard to imagine. But it is also saddening that there are others who neither trust nor are they willing to let others try to take that path.
