{"id":11623,"date":"2008-11-08T14:36:09","date_gmt":"2008-11-08T19:36:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2008\/11\/08\/11623.html"},"modified":"2018-06-11T09:57:12","modified_gmt":"2018-06-11T14:57:12","slug":"pirke-avot-second-verse-avodah","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2008\/11\/08\/pirke-avot-second-verse-avodah\/","title":{"rendered":"Pirke Avot, verse two: avodah"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Second verse, second leg, which is the tricky one for translation. Since I started the first leg<\/a> with the Hertz, I’ll keep using it for cut-and-paste convenience:
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Simon the Just was one of the last survivors of the Great Assembly: He used to say, Upon three things the world is based: upon the Torah, upon Divine service<\/strong>, and upon the practice of charity.<\/blockquote>
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The word here is avodah<\/i>, which means… well, it means work<\/i>, first of all, toiling in the fields sort of work, as in Exodus 1:14<\/a>: And they made their lives bitter with hard bondage, in morter, and in brick, and in all manner of service in the field: all their service, wherein they made them serve, [was] with rigour.<\/i> The word then comes to mean Divine service (as Hertz has it), first the observance of the Passover and the service of the mishkan<\/i> and the service of the Temple. The word avodah<\/i> then becomes the word for the entirety of the sacrificial rite. That’s the sense in which Simon would most likely have used the word, since he administered it. But wait! There’s more, so much more.
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When the Temple was destroyed, and we replaced animal sacrifice with the siddur<\/i>, we kept the word, so that avodah<\/I> is one of the words we use for the prayer service. Avodah<\/i> is used to mean prayer, specifically the communal prayers services, throughout the rabbinic period. But it is also<\/i> used to mean meditative prayer, fervent devotional prayer, and is eventually used by the Chasids to talk about their emphasis on ecstatic prayer. And then<\/i> the nineteenth- and twentieth-century kibbutz movement picks up that early meaning of avodah<\/i> as work to link labor with the Divine, and ascribe a devotional nature to, for instance, planting trees in Israel.
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Simple, yes? Labor, observance, the Temple ritual, the recitation of prayers, the act of praying, and labor. Any and all of those could be the second leg. And no, just because Righteous Simon predated the use of those words in a particular manner does not rule out our understanding them in that manner, which is part of the miracle of Scripture. This is, after all, a transmission of the Divine Revelation at Sinai, which contains a lot of events that happen after Sinai, because the Divine isn’t bound by linear time<\/i>. So Simon could well have been talking about the kibbutz, and speaking to<\/I> us two thousand years later, at the same time as he was talking to his contemporaries about animal sacrifice.
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And with all of those meanings, we can get more meanings when we pair them up with the different possible meanings of torah<\/i>. Are torah<\/I> and avodah<\/i> study and practice? Or are they the Law and the Ritual? Or are they the words and the feelings? Or are they the two great texts of Judaism, the unchanging Torah and the constantly revised siddur? Or are they the observance of the Mosaic law, strictly defined, and the Cohenic administration of the ritual in the Temple? Because there’s a line of interpretation which says that Simon is talking about the Law and the Temple, and here let’s go back to the wicket image, and when those two wickets go down, the whole world will be destroyed.
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And it was.
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And then, by this interpretation, the miracle of the Divine keeps the world balanced, with all the weight on the last remaining leg. Which we’ll be talking about next, right?
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Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger destroys the whole world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[207],"tags":[212],"class_list":["post-11623","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scripture","tag-pirkeavot"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11623","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11623"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11623\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18577,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11623\/revisions\/18577"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11623"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11623"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11623"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}