Rabbi says: which is an upright path for which a person should opt? – One which is honourable for those who do it and which [also] brings honour from mankind. Be as careful with a simple mitzvah as with a serious one, since you do not know the reward for each mitzvah. Calculate the loss of a mitzvah against its reward, and the reward of a sin against its loss. Watch for three things and you will not come to sin: know what is above you – a seeing eye, a listening ear and all your deeds written in the book.
40:
We can now turn our attention to the contents of the sole mishnah in this tractate which is dedicated to the teachings of Rabbi. The format of our present mishnah seems simple but, in fact, is rather enigmatic. In order to simplify our reading of the mishnah I am going to suggest a framework for its understanding – fully recognizing that other interpretations may be equally or even more valid.
41:
It seems to me that the mishnah consists of a proem – an introductory sentence – and three different propositions concerning one topic. The introduction simply asks a question and proposes an answer. The question is: What is the upright path that a person should opt for in life? The proposed response is: "One which is honourable for those who do it and which is also honourable in the eyes of mankind." It seems to me that the question is how a person who wishes to live an upright life should comport themselves. The answer seems to be that one should always do the honourable thing.
42:
However, that response is not really very helpful. Most people are decent and wish to lead an upright life; but the fact is that not everyone is always successful in this. Often we fail, giving in to pressures from within or from without – pressures that lead us to stray from that honourable path that we would like to follow. So the question is really how to deal with those pressures. It seems to me that Rabbi now proposes three different answers. It may be that each answer is directed towards a certain typical mindset; it may be that each answer is directed towards a certain typical situation in which a person might find himself or herself. What seems clear to me is that Rabbi is expecting us to select the answer which is most appropriate for us.
43:
Be as careful with a simple mitzvah as with a serious one, since you do not know the reward for each mitzvah. Clearly, for Rabbi, the honourable path is one which involves observance of God's commandments, the mitzvot. Those people who make a sincere attempt to observe the mitzvot will often fall into the misleading thought that a certain mitzvah must be observed because it is very important while another might possibly be overlooked 'just this once' because it clearly is not that important. Clearly some mitzvot really are more important than others; otherwise how are we to explain that the punishments for non-observance given in the Torah vary from capital punishment to metaphoric finger-wagging and "Nu, nu, nu"? However, if one looks carefully at these mitzvot we discover that almost all the mitzvot that are accompanied with a warning of a specific punishment are negative commandments: "thou shalt not". Very few indeed, comparatively, are the positive commandments which have an implied reward; and even then the reward is enigmatic rather than specific: Honour your parents so that you may live long and so forth.
44:
So perhaps Rabbi's advice here is concerned with the issue of the observance of the positive commands. (It is psychologically easier to refrain from doing something wrong than to force oneself to do what is right.) What he seems to be saying is that we cannot really know the intrinsic worth of each mitzvah: what seems to us to be of no great import may, in fact, have far-reaching implications. Therefore, the best thing is to observe all the positive commandments as best you can "since you do not know the reward for each mitzvah".
45:
It is quite easy to appreciate that Rabbi's first answer is directed towards a person whose thinking is simple: they observe the commandments either from hope of reward or from fear of punishment. This kind of motivation is, of course, rather simplistic. It is, perhaps, less common in our more sophisticated age that it was in previous ages, but it is still widely observable. Just think how many 'sages' recently attributed the tsunami in South-East Asia to heavenly punishment. One rabbi in Israel even claimed that the tsunami was a punishment for the projected evacuation of parts of Eretz-Israel! (I cannot understand a Jew whose God would deliberately kill hundreds of thousands of people who have absolutely no connection whatsoever with the proposed evacuation as a 'punishment'.) Clearly, for many thinking people such a simplistic philosophy as outlined in Rabbi's first answer will not suffice. This is why he also offers a second philosophy.
To be continued.
