Finishing up this past week’s Pirke Avot verse:
He used to say: There is no boor who fears sin, and no pious man of the world; there is no shy student, and no angry teacher; there is no wise man who puts everything into business. And where there are no men, try to be a man.
I actually have no idea where the everything is supposed to go. Some people have it that not all businessmen are wise, some people have it that the person who is all in business is not wise. There’s definitely an all in there, but it’s not clear where it belongs. However, making it all businessmen ruins the lovely verse, I think, as well as being a fairly trivial piece of information as long as it’s not accompanied by some way to distinguish which businessmen are wise and which are not.
No, I think we have a category here of people who are all business, if you’ll pardon the expression, and they are not wise. And again, I don’t think it’s useful to consider this as a warning against investing everything into your own company, although of course as financial advice, that would be good, too. No, I think this is about, well, workaholics, in some sense, or perhaps the overlapping group of people who can judge their own success only in monetary terms.
Or perhaps, more generally, it’s about the futility of judging everything in monetary terms, or of monetizing everything. And again, it’s easy to look at this as vapid advice of the kind one would expect to find in a religious text; there’s more to life than work, says Hillel, and everybody nods. Is there more to it than that?
Is the wise workaholic like the sin-fearing boor or the pious am ha-aretz? That is, once we understand the category, more or less, is Hillel pointing us to a path away from it? Not very clearly, at least as far as I can see. Is the wise workaholic like the angry teacher or the shy student? Even less so, as in those cases we can draw the line more clearly between the desired activity and the behavioral impediment. No, I think this is a third kind of case, where Hillel really does seem (to YHB) to be simply saying that a narrow focus on work does not lead to wisdom. Which, given how people generally understand wisdom, shouldn’t come as a surprise to anybody.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.
By the way, Your Humble Blogger will be traveling later in the week; I don’t expect to be posting much if anything between Thursday and Tuesday. If I somehow get time to look at the next verse in advance, I may post it in advance, otherwise it’ll be a week off. Smoke ’em if you got ’em, but tampering with the smoke detectors in the restrooms of commercial passenger airplanes is a federal offense.