Another tricky one this week. Here is Judah Goldin’s translation:\n
Rabbi Johanan Ha-Sandelar says: Every assembly which is for the sake of Heaven will in the end endure; but one which is not for the sake of Heaven will not endure in the end.<\/blockquote>\n
The reason this is tricky is that pretty much every significant concept in the verse is ill-defined and vague. What, exactly, constitutes an assembly? What does it mean for an assembly to be for the sake of Heaven? What is Heaven? What does it mean for an assembly to endure? To endure in the end?\n
This is where I come down on that: Nothing endures in the end.<\/i> After the Roman Senate endured for a thousand years, it probably looked good to adapt and endure for another thousand. But it didn’t. The Zhou dynasty probably looked good after five hundred years, but that didn’t endure, either. The Egyptian New Kingdom looked back on time uncountable and forward to time even more uncountable; Ozymandius, King of Kings, lies in lone and level sands. Will there be someday a wilderness where London once stood? For how much?\n
So. Start with that: Nothing will in the end endure. Can we say, then, that there is no assembly that is for the sake of Heaven? We don’t want to reach that conclusion, do we? And yet—what assembly can we name with confidence that exists for the sake of Heaven? As an assembly, mind you. And as we aren’t counting a mere millennium or two on the one side, I don’t think we can count anything less than full and unanimous purity of purpose on the other. Were the sages assembled for the sake of Heaven? All of them? Was there no pride, no worldly purpose? Because the sages warn a lot<\/i> about the perils of seeking money or fame or respect through scholarship, and I expect that was through experience. No, the stories of bickering and one-upsmanship in the house of the sages are too numerous and frankly too interesting to ignore in order to claim that the assembly maintained its purpose for the sake of Heaven continuously and in consensus.\n
So. When Rabbi Johanan Ha-Sandelar says that all assemblies which are not for the sake of Heaven do not endure in the end, what has he told us? There are no such assemblies and nothing endures. When he says that all assemblies which are<\/I> for the sake of Heaven do endure, what has he told us? Not to give up hope.\n
When you enter into any project with anyone—a business, a marriage, a charitable foundation, a political party, a timeshare, a blog, a college course, a theatrical production, a cruise, a massively multi-player on-line role-playing game, a condominium, a date, a mural, a sex act, a city budget, a board game, a three-county killing spree, a reality show, a shul<\/i>, a trial, a race, a madrigal, a hug, a nation—you can do it (or in the end choose not to do it) for the sake of Heaven, so that the project will endure. It won’t, of course, not in the end, and you can’t guarantee that the assembly will maintain its purpose, but there is a great deal in the choosing, not the chosen. If you<\/i> enter into it for the sake of Heaven, if you seek out others to assemble with for the sake of Heaven, if you seek out projects for the sake of Heaven, then, even when they don’t really endure<\/i>, they have achieved a great deal. Even if it’s just meeting for lunch.\n
Of course, the real difficulty (note: all the other difficulties are also real) is in knowing what it means for something to be for the sake of Heaven. But here, again, the value is in trying to know, rather than in knowing, yes?\n
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Which Your Humble Blogger digs in to futility for the hopefulness therein.<\/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-13079","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\/13079","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=13079"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13079\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19107,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13079\/revisions\/19107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13079"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13079"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13079"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}