Avos 1:4, Serving the Creator

Do not be like the servants who service the Master on the condition to receive a prize but be like servants who serve the master on the condition not to receive a prize (or another version: not on the condition of receiving a reward) and fear which is of Heaven be upon you.

This enigmatic teaching confused Tsoedek and Boethus and it confuses us. There are in it several unusual expressions that indicate that Antigonos meant something specific and may help us reconstruct what it is. I will first restate the mishna as we would expect it in the rabbinic dialect (as best as I can do so in English) underlining each expected expression and then focus on each deviation from the expected.

Do not be like servant who serve their masters on the condition of receiving a reward but be like the servants who serve their master on the condition of not receiving a reward and you will fear God.

I list each unusual expression:

1.the Master - the usual expression would be their master or their masters. The change from the plural, servants, to singular, master, is unusual. Likewise, the usual expression in mishnaic Hebrew would be their masters, not the Master.

2.Service. Meshamshin connotes direct and personal service - putting on the masters shoes, washing his feet, and the like, not work in the fields, weaving, or plowing etc.

3. Instead of using the far more common word for reward, sachar, the mishna uses, pras. That word, Rambam points out ad. loc., like its cognate in English, prize, has the meaning of a random winning, like in a lottery.

4.service (meshamshin) - the expected would be serve (ovdim)

5.fear - Morah. Unlike the more common yiras Hashem, which describes a human emotion, mora shemaim is describing the awe-inspiring essence of God Himself. Furthermore, by using Heaven to stand for God, the meaning is broadened to include the entire Divine complex above us, including all the angels, powers and levels.

6. It is not entirely clear how the first and the last part of the mishna hang together; i.e. how serving God without expectation of reward leads to fearing heaven.

Careful attention to these peculiarities of language, coupled to the big issue of the day, spread and penetration of the classic culture of Greece, must lead to a more specific understanding of Antigonos message. I offer one possible understanding; others are also possible.

The Vilna Gaon in his commentary to Seder Olam explains that the statement that the attraction of idolatry died in the days of Anshei Knesses Hagedolah (Yoma 69) is best understood in the historical sense. This coincides with the spread of Hellenic outlook on life that replaced the sense of man's utter helplessness before personified powers of nature that they called gods, with the conviction of man's power over nature and his superiority within the natural order. This is after all what Greeks believed - that man can rule over nature, that logic can discover natural law and help man subjugate nature. Like goyim so go the Jews. With increasing distance between man and God, not only did idolatry wane, so did the power of prophecy. In this perspective, God becomes distant and His intervention in nature rare, infrequent and unusual. Greek gods, unlike pantheons of other pagan nations, did not fashion the world and they themselves were subjected to vagaries of Fortune. That does not mean that Jews of that period were as distant from the realization of God's omnipotence as we are (we yearn for one tenths of their power of faith), but, perhaps, they were just a bit more distant from it than their forefathers.

Perhaps, in that milieu they began to see God as the Overseer of public works, who passes by occasionally to supervise the ongoing constructions, dealing out occasional rewards to good workers whom he happens to notice and overlooking others who happen to not be present. Personal service is more likely to lead to a prize; a good shoeshine is more likely to be noticed and rewarded with a toss of a coin than decades of devoted toil in the fields. Antigonos was trying to paint an image with his choice of words ( I would add, a very Greek use of words), to his audience who were familiar with the reality he described. He decried the mentality of a personal servant who pines for an unexpected handout and wished to emphasize the fearsome nature of the Master, who must be worshiped for His own sake. That is why he used the metaphor of servants and why he set up the contrast between the grandeur of Heaven and the worthlessness of a servile approach to the service of Hashem.

Next week, please God, we will address the nature of heresy in Judaism.

Comments

[b]

I've long had a problem with this issue as well regarding the generation of Shimon HaTzadik and Antiginos.
Shimon was the last of the Anshei Kneset HaGedolah, which included "several prophets", so the generations of Shimon and Antiginos could be considered the link between the Era of the Prophets and the Era of the Tannaim, with either Shimon or Antiginos being considered the first of the Tannaim.
The latter Tannaim revered the earlier ones and the earlier ones revered the even earlier ones, so we can imagine that Shimon and Antiginos, who were closest to the Era of Prophesy, were greater than all who succeeded them. We should assume that they and their talmidim were men of the highest caliber of Torah knowledge and understanding.
Yet, when we read this story of Antiginos' disciples (or even if we take it to mean his second generation of disciples) the question is obvious: Are we dealing with idiots? אטו בטפשי עסקינן How can anyone with even a minimal degree of intelligence and Torah learning make such a gross mistake? Torah tradition is so full of references to the Afterlife that there is hardly a schoolchild who does not know that it is an integral part of our faith. I clearly remember when I learned this Mishnah the first time it was clear as day that it was coming to teach that one should do mitzvot "lishmah" rather than for the sake of being rewarded, although it was understood that reward comes anyway. And even if one of them did have such a question, didn't it ever dawn upon him, or any one of the others he might have discussed it with to raise the seeimgly conflicting teachings for clarification?
And this is not the only example. In Menahot 109b the Talmud tells of how Shimon appointed one of his sons to succeed him as Kohen Gadol, and how this son was such an unbelievable idiot and ignoramous even by the standards of today's yeshivot, let alone the standards of the Tannaim. See the story there. How can we understand all this?

[avakesh]

I think that as a part of an "approach" to aggadata we need to strip out the message of an aggaddata or saying and work to uderstand it on the level of advanced drush, mussar or kabbala and attribute some of such details to literary technique.

With Hashem help, I will address the error of Atnigonos' students in one of the next installments of Avos.