Mishlei 3;9-18

The verses we will study this week read as follows:

Honor God with your fortune, and the first of all your harvests; Then your barns will be filled with plenty, and your vats will burst forth with new wine; The training of the Lord, my son, do not reject, and do not spurn His rebuke; For it is he whom God loves that he rebukes, and like a father, He will appease His son; Happy is the man who has found wisdom, and the man who exudes understanding; For its merchandise is greater than the merchandise of money, and its harvest than fine gold; It is more precious than pearls, and all you might desire cannot be compared to it; Length of days is in its right hand, in its left, wealth and honor; Its ways are ways of pleasantness, and all of its paths are peace; It is a tree of life to those who hold fat to it, and those who support it are happy.

 

Rasag splits this passage into three logical subsets. The first two verses discuss wealth and the proper way to use it, the second two touch on God’s rebuke and how to react to it, and the final six encourage us to seek wisdom and extol its virtues. This gives us a stark reminder of the general assumption that Mishlei strews verses together relatively randomly. I suspect that that misses some of the book’s depth, that were we to spend the time and effort, we might find greater cohesion in Mishlei’s chapters, but that is an endeavor that takes more time and effort than currently available.

In those first two verses, the commentators point out several interesting aspects of our relationship to money and to God. Rashi mentions the inference drawn by the Pesikta, that the verse refers to fortune rather than money to teach that we are supposed to honor God with whatever natural talents we have. (Rashi singles out a pleasant voice, playing off the word honekha, which can be changed to gronkha, your throat; the Pesikta has a more general inference.) In this sense, the verse is not only requiring that we use our money for the service of God—a point actually made by the second half, in stressing that we have to give the first of everything we have to God—but all of our capabilities.

Gra similarly notes the difference between hon, fortune generally, and reshit tevuah, the first yields of a harvest. For him, these terms symbolize the different ways in which we give our money away. As a direct, specific obligation of the Torah, we give our tithes, portions of our harvest that the Torah has ordered us to give to certain segments of society; by following these commands we are, as it were, giving to God. In that giving experience, we have little creative input, we simply follow God’s orders. But we also give charity more generally, setting aside some portion of our money to give to worthy causes, and then using our internal senses of right, wrong, goodness, and beauty to govern where that money ends up. (Gra doesn’t say it that way, he simply points out the different terms and offers a definition of them).

Each of those types of giving is termed "honoring God," yet the honor involved would seem to differ significantly. In the first, the honor fundamentally comes from obeying God’s command (Rasag, who stresses only this type of giving in his interpretation, assumes that people are most attached to the first products of their efforts; yielding this to God, then, is particularly difficult and concomitantly a source of honor). In the second, the honor to God comes from the extent and way in which we convert unrestricted funds—there is little direct guidance in the Torah as to how much we are required to give, and even less about whom—into expressions of our understanding that we have a financial obligation to support those less fortunate than ourselves, and to contribute to bettering the world we inhabit. Each is honor, but of different kinds, and the reward is more such funds, to have greater abilities to continue this honor of God.

VERSES 11-12

In discussing Mishlei’s adjuration to graciously accept God’s rebuke, Rashi and Rasag agree that it means to emphasize that God only rebukes those He loves. If we can be confident that rebuke is actually a call to improvement, we can experience the suffering differently (not, perhaps, less painfully, but with a recognition that there is meaning behind it). As a parent punishes a child in an attempt to help the child recognize the boundaries between acceptable behavior and un-, we might see our sufferings as calling us to improvement as well. That does not always explain the suffering fully, but it at least gives us an avenue for growth and squeezing some meaning and value out of the haze of the pain involved.

Gra reads the phrase about a parent and child differently, in a way that is perhaps more important for our parenting skills than it is for our perception of suffering. He notes that loving rebuke differs from aggression in that the loving rebuker stays with the wayward child despite the child’s not absorbing the lesson immediately (or even after repeated efforts). In addition, after the lesson has finally been learned, the parent appeases the child (through gifts, a special outing, or whatever).

The comment reminds us that while rebuke is a necessary part of parenting, so is constancy (being there for the child throughout various phases of growth in life) and positive elements (times of fun, of acceptance, and of love). To the extent that we can recognize that God treats us this way—certainly He’s always there, and regularly provides us with goods we too often neglect to note (as the Modim prayer reminds us)—we can experience our suffering, or at least some of it, in a different light.

The next several verses, stressing the value and importance of wisdom, open up several interesting questions. First, when the verse refers to finding wisdom and exuding insight, Rashi sees that as meaning that the person learns Torah well enough to be able to repeat it verbally. My father a"h also used to stress the ability to coherently explain an idea to someone else as the essence of true understanding.

When Mishlei compares the value of Torah with that of merchandise, Rashi sees Torah as winning because its study is not a zero-sum game, as opposed to business. In business, an exchange involves each side providing a good or service to the other that makes the exchange worth the other party’s while. In Torah, in contrast, people can share pieces of knowledge they have with the other, and yet still retain it (eating their cake, and having it, too). In this sense, Torah creates value, where business just exchanges it.

Rasag agrees with that picture of wisdom, but lists other advantages over business as well. Wisdom protects a person (guiding people in the best ways to conduct their lives), whereas we need to protect our money; money doesn’t enrich our lives and lead us to the World to Come, while wisdom does; money might damage us, might be stolen from us, and might never be enjoyed and used by us—wisdom always belongs to the person who acquired it. The verses praise wisdom, in other words, for the tangible benefits it provides.

In discussing value, Gra makes an interesting economic point. He claims that people value objects either because of their scarcity (as I was taught in High School Economics, which says that value stems from scarcity), or because they need them for their lives. In each case, Torah is demonstrably more valuable. It is rarer than most rare objects (an interesting note, since Gra obviously means the hidden parts of Torah) and is also vitally necessary for life.

As the final issue we will take up this week, Gra and Rashi offer slightly different readings of the verse " there is length of days in Torah’s right hand, and wealth and honor in its left". Rashi, based on a passage in Tractate Shabbat, assumes that those who deal with the Torah in a right-handed fashion (meaning either that they expend the proper energy in mastering Torah or that they person engage in Torah without ulterior motive) will also receive wealth and honor. The verse, in that reading, means that those who engage Torah for less-than fully pure motives will not get the length of days promised in the first half of the verse; the pure students of Torah will, however, get both.

Gra, based on a different Midrashic reading of the verse, suggests that "length of days" refers to the World to Come. In that reading, at least as Gra presents it, it is not clear that the maymin, the "right-hander" of Torah, will gain wealth and honor. To judge from Gra’s life, for example, it could not have meant that. In Gra’s world, those who study Torah for the sake of gaining wealth and honor will get what they sought; those who study with purer motives, presumably, will see those desires fulfilled. (The notion of reward and punishment as actually a series of self-fulfilling prophecies is a fascinating one, worth tracking in greater depth).

Embedded in the different perspectives here is a fundamental difference about the value of wealth and honor. If they are worthwhile in some sense, it also makes sense that a proper student of Torah would get them in addition to Torah’s truest reward. If, however, they are problematic and a distraction, money and honor would only serve as a reward for those who cannot appreciate the higher rewards of the World to Come. Shabbat Shalom.