He used to say: Do His will as your will so that He might do your will as His will. Nullify your will for His will so that He might nullify the will of others for your will.
1:
As we mentioned in the previous shiur, our working assumption must be that our present mishnah is to be attributed to Rabban Gamli'el, the son of Rabbi Yehudah the President of the Sanhedrin. As I also mentioned in the previous shiur, we shall have more to say on this matter when we study the next mishnah.
2:
At first reading the first clause of this mishnah is problematic from the theological point of view. It seems to be suggesting that we can maintain a kind of tit for tat relationship with the Deity: if we perform God's wishes – i.e. the mitzvot, the commandments – we may expect that God will fulfill the wishes of our own heart. Not only is such an approach theologically problematic but it is also psychologically unsound. It seems to be at a very childish level: just as a child might reason 'If I do what Daddy wants maybe Daddy will do what I want' the apparent reasoning of the first clause of our mishnah is that 'If I do what our Father in heaven wants He will do what I want'. This is, of course, nonsense. Judaism believes in a Deity that, ultimately, is benevolent and under normal circumstances will not grant our wishes if they are harmful to us. (This does not mean that man cannot do harm: it means that when man does harm – to himself or to others – it is not with God's permission and it does not accord with God's will.)
3:
The second clause of our mishnah is not much less problematic. If we become super-pious and bend our will to that of the Deity why should we expect that, in return as it were, God will bend the will of others to comply with our will? Why should we assume that our will, our desire, our aspiration is more worthy than someone else's?
4:
Rambam was never one to let an opportunity pass when he could hammer home a theological insight, especially if it was a rather daring innovation. But sometimes, even more telling that his pronouncements are Rambam's silences. Surely it is no accident that in his commentary on Avot Rambam treats our present mishnah with a resounding silence.
5:
Not so other commentators. Rabbi Ovadyah of Bertinoro seeks to limit the application of our mishnah to one specific area of human activity:
Spend your money in performance of the desire of Heaven as if you were spending it to achieve your own desires. If you do so, He will perform your will as His; that is to say: He will return you good with generosity.
It is difficult to even begin to understand why the good Rabbi gives such an interpretation, for there is nothing in the text to suggest it. Furthermore, his explanation does very little to reduce the theological difficulty of the teaching. When dealing with the second clause he even compounds the difficulty: he says that he has heard an explanation that "the will of others" is a euphemism and that it really is intended to indicate the will of God! He does not say whether he approves of this interpretation or not.
6:
A reasonable attempt to deal with the difficulty of this mishnah is made by Rabbi Yom-Tov Lippmann Heller in his commentary Tosefot Yom-Tov. He quotes a certain Rabbi Naĥmias who says that in a copy of Avot found in Jerusalem one letter is different – and that one change makes a great deal of difference. If we accept the change (and the two Hebrew letters, Kaf and Bet, do look alike) we get a different rendition of the mishnah: Do His will willingly.
This means that you should not perform a Mitzvah angrily and grumpily but willingly and happily so that He too may grant your wishes willingly. Sometimes God grants a person's desires in anger so that eventually he will be punished…
You may recall that in Avot 093 Warren Green suggested that
If you give those … mitzvot an infinite value than you can have the relationship ONE = MANY being true.
Jeff Shapiro writes:
It is true, as Warren says, that if the mitzvahs have an infinite value, than any one is equal to all the rest; we presume that 'infinite' is being used, in its usual sense, to mean infinitely large; its also true that any one is equal to all the rest, over and over again, if they all have zero value! That is, if each is done l'shma [with no ulterior motive – SR], not to gain points for olam hazeh [this world – SR], or for olam haba'a [the next world – SR].
