This is a long verse, isn’t it?
Rabbi (Jehudah the Prince) was in the habit of saying: “In choosing the right path, see that it is one which is honorable to thyself and without offence to others. Be as scrupulous about the lightest command as about the weightiest, for no man knoweth the result of his actions. Weigh the present temporal disadvantages of a dutiful course against the reward of the future, and the present desirable fruits of a sinful deed against the injury to thine immortal soul. In general, consider three things and thou wilt never fall into sin: remember that there is above thee an all-seeing eye, an all-hearing ear, and a record of all thine actions.”
Rabbi Hiyya told a story to illustrate this saying: when a king brought laborers into his orchards to pick the fruit, he did not tell them the scale of different payment for the different kinds of fruit. He reasoned that if he were to say that the figs, say, were the most valuable while the olives were the least, all the laborers would go and pick figs, and the olives would spoil on the tree. Thus we are not told which are the major and which the minor Mitzvot, nor are we told the rewards for individual Mitzvot, and it therefore behooves us to fulfill them all, and not neglect any that seem to us to be minor, for the reward for that commandment may be the greatest of all.
Now, that’s a horrible story with a human king, because, you know, the history of migrant farm workers does not lead me to believe that the king will be openhanded with his reward. But presumably the Divine will be both merciful and liberal, and he won’t put all the Wobblies in a freight car and then leave them in the desert to die. But it does illustrate pretty well the idea that as individuals, it’s a mistake to think we can, through logic or prayer or revelation, take the religion a la carte, and not later discover sheep in with the goats.
The problem with this, and with being proud of the humility and whatnot, is that the rabbis did in fact spend lots of time arguing about which where major and which minor commandments. There were arguments about exactly which sins went with which punishments, and arguments about which sins kept somebody from the World to Come, and arguments over which sins require excommunication, and all that sort of thing. So Rabbi’s saying doesn’t really pass into the mainstream of Judaism, after all.
And, of course, I do take the commandments a la carte, as most Jews do. We don’t feel it’s necessary to keep kosher, or if we do, we feel that avoiding pork and shellfish is enough, and keeping two sets of dishes is frum (or ostentatiously religious). We may wear fringes during prayer services, but we don’t wear them to work. We don’t go to three services a day, except perhaps on Yom Kippur, and we feel comfortable with charging interest on loans. We consider the Ten Commandments to be Major, and the mixing of wool and linen in our clothes to be Minor.
So, I think, the key thing to take from Judah the Prince here is that even while we are doing that to keep a certain humility about our own judgements. This is of course similar to my interpretation of the first leg of the tripod. Whether I am interpreting them that way because I feel strongly about humility regarding individual judgment, or whether I feel strongly about humility regarding individual judgment because I have been interpreting the Avot that way is difficult to ascertain. Certainly, I don’t trust my own judgment on that.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.