Pirkei Avot: Hate The Rabbinate?

“Shemaiah and Avtalion received [the oral tradition] from them. Shemaiah used to say: love work, hate acting the superior, and do not attempt to draw near to the ruling authority.” (1:10)

Shemaiah and Avtalion served as the fourth Zug (couple) during the second Temple. At this time, the wars between the different factions of the Jewish people and major tensions between the different branches of the Jewish government.

To add to all of this, Shemaiah and Avtalion also came from a family of converts, and according to the Talmud, they were descendants of the wicked Sancheriv, who expelled the ten tribes from Israel. 

The Talmud (Yoma 71B) shares the following story about Shmaya and Avtalyon, which highlights Shmaya and Avtalyon’s background and how it impacted Jerusalem at the time. The Talmud shares:

“There was an incident involving one High Priest who exited the Holy Temple, and everyone followed him. When they saw Shemaya and Avtalyon, the heads of the Sanhedrin, walking along in deference to them, they left the High Priest by himself and walked after Shemaya and Avtalyon. Eventually, Shemaya and Avtalyon came to take leave of the High Priest before returning to their homes. Envious of the attention they received, he angrily said to them: Let the descendants of the gentile nations come in peace. They said to him: Let the descendants of the gentile nations come in peace, who perform the acts of Aaron, who loved and pursued peace; and let not a descendant of Aaron come in peace, who does not perform the acts of Aaron and who speaks condescendingly to descendants of converts.”

It is in this environment that Shemaya and Avtalyon’s humility was able to shine against the hostility they often saw for coming from a humble background and it is with this that their deep appreciation for merit over baseless power continued to grow. 

“Shemaiah used to say: love work, hate acting the superior”–we often, think of these two dictums and informing one another; love work, as opposed to loving getting the credit while not doing the work. In this view, work is seen in the light of being the opposite of taking advantage of undeserved authority or reward. This is true in our lives, too. We often think of work as necessary because of its alternative; if we do not work, we might go hungry. Work is seen as the lesser of two evils. If we do not pursue work, worse things will follow. 

The Mishna and Talmud (Kiddushin 30b) very much echo this line of thinking: “Rabbi Yehuda says: Any father who does not teach his son a trade teaches him banditry. The Gemara asks: Can it enter your mind that he actually teaches him banditry? Rather, the baraita means that it is as if he taught him banditry.” That is to say, if the father does not teach his child how to earn an honest living, this will likely lead to the child to engage in banditry and questionable means so that he can earn a living. Work and a profession exist so that we can be productive and earn an honest living. 

Yet when looking at the way this Mishna is outlined and detailed in Avot D’Rabi Natan (a work from the Geonic period with a Midrashic elaboration on the Mishnas of Pirkei Avot) we get a completely different picture. 

Avot D’Rabi Natan states: “Love work.” How so? This teaches us that a person should love work and not hate work. For just as the Torah was given in a covenant, so work was given in a covenant, as it says (Exodus 20:10), “For six days you shall labor and do all your work, and the seventh day is the Sabbath of the Eternal your God.” 

Rabbi Akiva would say: Sometimes a person labors and escapes death, and sometimes a person does not labor and becomes liable for death from Heaven. How so? Say a person sat around all week and did no labor, and then on the eve of the Sabbath, he had nothing to eat. But he had money that had been designated [to the Temple] in his house. So he took from this and ate, and thus became liable to death from Heaven.

Rabbi Yehudah ben Beteira would say: If someone who has no work to do, what should he do? If he has a dilapidated yard or field, he should go and work on them, as it says (Exodus 20:10), “Six days you shall labor and do all your work.” What do we learn from the phrase, “do all your work”? That even someone who has dilapidated yards or fields should work on them.

Rabbi Yosei HaGalili would say: A person dies only because of idleness, as it says (Genesis 49:33), “And he expired [or: exhausted himself], and so was gathered to his people.” And see, if someone is pushed and falls over on his own craftwork and dies, we know his death was because of idleness. And if he was standing on the top of the roof, the top of a palace, or the top of any building, or at the edge of the river, and he fell and died, we know his death was because of idleness.”

These very strong statements from Avot D’ Rabi Natan highlight the extraordinary virtue the great rabbis of the Mishna saw in any kind of work. In fact, Rabbi Yehuda Ben Beteira goes as far as saying that if someone is no longer working for a living, they should go out to their field and clear the field from stones. So critical is the value of working that the rabbis saw the commandment to rest on Shabbat as paralleling another obligation—the obligation to work during the week. “For six days you shall labor and do all your work” is not just a prelude to tell us we must rest on Shabbat, but it is also a reminder to make sure we work during the week. Resting on Shabbat shows our faith in God’s resting from creation; working during the weekdays makes us partners with God in creation. Just as God is a creator who created this world, we, too, must strive to work and create in this world. Above that, Avot D’Rabi Natan highlights the inherent human need for work.

When we do not work, our body and spirit can decay. When my wife worked in one of New York’s large hospitals, a professor of medicine decided that after working into his early eighties, he would retire so he could enjoy this world, perhaps go see more places, and see what life was like outside his medical clinic. My wife and her colleagues made the man a goodbye party on Thursday. On Monday, they were shocked to hear that the man had sadly passed away over the weekend. This story is not uncommon. It is often work that keeps us going, allows us to find purpose and meaning, and gives us the opportunity to socially interact with others and to keep our bodies going. 

Shemaya’s lesson to us is that we should not only work out of a sense of necessity, but out of a knowledge that work is something good for us. In this sense, the lesson about loving work does not have to be tied into the lesson about authority. It is a stand-alone lesson about the importance of work. 

There is a very different way to learn this lesson Shmaya is teaching us. I remember hearing this in a class by the late Rabbi Noach Weinberg, head of the Aish HaTorah yeshiva in Jerusalem. When you do work, make sure it is work that you love. There is a famous saying that if you work at a job that you love, you will not end up working a single day in your life. The emphasis on the word “love” here comes to teach us that no only is there an imperative that we work, but we also should try to do work that we love. 

“Hate acting the superior”- the complexity of this statement makes it very hard to give it a proper translation. The Mishna tells us: “Sna et harabanut”. While today the word Rabbanut is used most often in the context a rabbi or rabbis, the word’s meaning predates the era of the rabbi. 

The Talmud (Brachot 55a) states: “Rav Yehuda said: Three things shorten a person’s days and years: …and one who conducts himself with an air of superiority–rabanut…as Rabbi Ḥama, son of Rabbi Ḥanina, said: Why did Joseph die before his brothers Because he conducted himself with superiority–rabanut–, and those who did not serve in a leadership role lived on after he died.”

A more poignant example can be found with what the Talmud (Psachim 87b) says about the kings of Israel: “Rabbi Yoḥanan said: Woe to authority–rabanut–which shortens the life and buries its holders. This is evident from the fact that you don’t have any prophet who did not outlast four kings in his lifetime, as the kings’ positions of authority caused them to die young.“ 

The fact that it was common for prophets to often outlive four different kings in one lifetime is another example of how being in a position of authority shortens one’s life. 

Yet while both of statements of Shmaya–one about loving work and the other about despising authority–each stand on their own, they also inform one another. It is too often that people seek positions of authority so that they can avoid doing hard work. Too often, when large financial crimes are revealed and their consequences become clear, we realize that had the person been willing to work harder when things did not work out, had they been willing to work at what was considered a “lesser” job, much pain could have been avoided. 

The great Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin who founded the first modern day Yeshiva (rabbinical school), with the purpose of producing rabbis who would be able to serve in communal roles addressed this Mishna, both to his students and in his commentary to this Mishna. He explained that when the Mishna says to love working and abhor authority—rabbanut—it is not a moral rejection of taking on positions of authority or becoming a rabbi. What it means is that if you do indeed become a rabbi, or someone in a position of authority, you should love the hard work of the job–not the authority. We have all seen this in real life. There are rabbis who fill rabbinical positions and are more focused on the honors, letting people know what they think, addressing large gatherings, and so on.

On the other hand there are rabbis who are hard at work visiting people in hospitals, giving daily classes, opening new Hebrew schools and day schools, and making sure more Kosher food is accessible to their community. Rabbi Chaim of Volozhin implored his students to become the latter kind of rabbis rather than the former. Make sure you love the hard work your position offers you, and not the perks of authority. Make sure you love being a person of service rather than a person asking others to pay them respect. 

This guideline is true not only for rabbis, but any position of authority. From elected officials, to school principals and police officers, to any other position of authority, one should always look for the hard work and difference they can make rather than the honor they can receive for being in their position.

“and do not attempt to draw near to the ruling authority.”- tragically, this statement of Shemaya is one that is soaked in blood. Throughout the generations, Jews had to balance their passion for leading a life of family, community, and insular religious piety with the need to maintain good relationships with the government for our very survival. For one to be effective in government advocacy, one also has to familiarize oneself with the government. Striking the right balance between government advocacy and avoiding that same government’s wrath when it turns on its own subjects was hardest during the time of the Roman Empire–when Shnaya was a leader of the Jewish people at the time. Connections with Rome were chaotic and bipolar. One day, they meant a great deal of thriving and support, while another day, Rome was a source of death and destruction.   

Rabbi Shimon Ben Tzemach, the Rashbatz (Spain 1361–1444) of Palma de Mallorca, in his commentary, connects Shmaya’s warning about being too close to the government to the previous statement about hating authority. During the time of the Second Temple, many of the priests, high priests, and kings and queens of the Jewish people saught and bought their positions from Rome. Finding favor in the eyes of Rome was the key to power in those days. Yet, at the same time, the same Roman Empire appointed local officials and tax collectors based on briberies and lobbying. Yet those same Romans who would be swayed to favor one candidate over the other would often turn on the person they previously favored and mercilessly punish them. A similar situation is also familiar to us from our history with the Yevseksia (the Jewish section of the KGB and communist party in Soviet Russia in the 1920s and 1930s). The same people who persecuted my own family for continuing to practice religion and observe their faith in communist Russia ended up being rounded up by the Soviets, imprisoned, killed, and sent to the Gulags in Siberia. Those who thought they would find favor with the government by turning on their own brethren ended up being horrifically persecuted by the government. 

Tragically, this was also true of some Jews during the Holocaust. Jews who joined Judenrats (Jewish Councils or Jewish police), sometimes out of good intentions, others with bad intentions, most often lost everything. On the one hand, they lost their integrity by collaborating with the Nazis. Later on, the Nazis broke promises they made to them and went on to kill them and their families. 

It is in this context that Shemaya warns us about being too close to the government. Sometimes, being familiar with an evil government can yield positive results in advocating for just causes and helping your community get out of imperiling situations. In other cases, that same familiarity will lead the government to target you first. It is important to note that Shemaya is not saying that we should avoid government contact in all circumstances as some religious groups did during the Second Temple. Shmaya is rather telling us that if we do so we must do so with abundant caution, out of recognition of what interests the government is engaging us in the first place. 

My own great-grandfather Rabbi Eliezer Poupko and many other rabbis put in a great effort to help lobby the US government during WWII to see the plight of Europe’s Jews and the horrors of the holocaust. One of the main obstacles for rabbis at that time with the lack of governmental contacts and familiarity with the US government, as many of them, my great-grandfather included, were immigrants themselves. There are times were making sure we can make our voice heard to those in government is essential and even life-saving on a large scale. This is why Shemaya is not saying we should avoid such contact altogether, but rather that we should do it with caution. 

This final statement of the Mishna is also very much in line with the first two statements and approach to authority. In general, the pious rabbis of the Mishna teach us to choose a life of integrity and hard work over a life of accolades and undeserved authority. We must love hard work, we must abhor underserved or unnecessary authority, and we must also avoid getting ahead in life by finding the right connections in government that will give us promotions we do not deserve.