The second chapter of Avot closes with two Mishnayot recording the words of R. Tarfon, one of the teachers of R. Aqiva. I vividly remember a Pesah seder when I was about 9 or 10 when my uncle Ralph told the story of R. Tarfon being kidnapped. It seems a man grabbed R. Tarfon, not knowing who he was, threw him in a bag and was carrying him away. R. Tafon, fearing for his life, said "Oy lo le-Tarfon, she-zeh horgo, Oy for Tarfon, this man is going to kill him." The man, recognizing the name, put R. Tarfon down and ran away. The gemara adds that R. Tarfon spent the rest of his life regretting his words, since he used his Torah reputation for personal gain, when he could have just as easily offered the man money (R. Tarfon was very wealthy). The story made an impression on me for the kidnapper’s apparent respect for Torah scholars, despite his willingness to violate the Ten Commandments’ prohibition against kidnapping; in addition, R. Tarfon’s regret made me realize that it is not only our conscious, deliberate actions that we can regret. Sometimes, even recognizing that we were operating under tremendous pressures, we must nevertheless be saddened by the way we chose to handle the situation.

THE TEXT OF THE TWO MISHNAYOT

Both R. Tarfon’s paragraphs discuss the same issue, the need to work assiduously at our Torah endeavors, and the great reward that awaits us if we do. R. Tarfon says,

"The day is short and the work is great, the laborers are lazy, the reward is great, and the Master of the House is pressuring.

He [also] used to say: It is not for you to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it; if you have learned a great deal of Torah, they will give you great reward, and the Master of your labor is trustworthy to pay you the reward for your work, and know that the reward for the righteous is in the World to Come."

The first paragraph seems redundant (a redundancy that earlier commentators, such as R. Shim`on b. Zemah Duran had already noticed), since if the day is short, it doesn’t matter how great the work is and vice verse (if the work is great, even a long period will not suffice). Maharal is also bothered by the notion of the Master pressuring—what is the point of having pressure from God mentioned in the Mishnah?

SURPRISE—THE PHYSICAL IS THE ISSUE!

In Maharal’s reading of that first Mishnah, the whole point is to encourage people to work hard at learning Torah. In that vein, the Mishnah mentions two daunting aspects of the challenge of mastering Torah, the shortness of the day (human lives) and the length of the material (Torah). Given those two sides, Jews will recognize their need to struggle even harder to absorb Torah.

That same emphasis on effort and struggle to achieve explains the references to the laziness of the workers and the pressure of the Master. The laziness of people in terms of Torah stems from their physical selves; God does not share that flaw since He is not physical in any way. The resulting situation is that God is watching for us to learn and put effort into our learning, while our physical sides encourage us not to.

EFFORT OR ACCOMPLISHMENT—THE SECOND MISHNAH

Maharal contrasts the second Mishnah, which says that we are not required to complete the work, and that we get reward for whatever Torah we have learned with a Mishnah in Menahot that says "ehad hamarbeh ve-ehad hamam`it, u-bilvad she-yekhaven libo lashamayim, roughly translated as it doesn’t matter how much you do, as long as your intentions are pure." Maharal points out that if our Mishnah meant to make the same point, it should have said "if you have labored in Torah," rather than "if you have learned a great deal of Torah."

Maharal decides therefore that this Mishnah is making a different point. He notes that there are two kinds of reward, the reward for effort and the reward for the action itself. In each, the Mishnah needs to clear up a possible misconception. Regarding effort, one might have thought that the size of one’s sacrifice to God outweighed the effort that went into the procuring of it. The Mishnah therefore tells us that, in terms of how God rewards our effort, the actual size of the offering does not matter.

PAYMENT UPON COMPLETION?

Our Mishnah, however, is combating another possible misconception. Many jobs in life depend on completion for payment—a contractor, for example, does not get payment until the job is done. With Torah study as well, we might imagine that until we have learned all of the Torah, we would not get any of the reward—in halakhah, this concept is known as "ein la-sekhirut ela le-vasof, the remuneration for a job accrues only at the end." The Mishnah therefore points out that we have no responsibility to complete the job, and will receive compensation for however much we accomplish.

Then Maharal questions the verb in the phrase "you will be given a great deal of reward." If we are discussing the reward for the action itself, not the effort alone, then the verb should be "paid" rather than "given." Maharal answers that the notion of payment does not allow for the use of the term "a great deal." Since reward includes reward for effort, though, it is a great deal of reward.

The reminder that the reward comes in the World to Come, in Maharal’s view, points out another similarity between our labor in Torah and the work of a contractor. While it may be true that we are not required to finish the job, it is nevertheless true that our compensation only comes once we have finished whatever work we are going to do on that job. Although Maharal does not say so explicitly, the notion that we only get our reward once our work is over (even though we will not complete the job) suggests that how much we do affects the reward we get qualitatively as well as quantitatively.

If each piece of Torah we learn is equal, it seems to me, then there is no particular reason to insist that the reward come at the end (and it’s kind of crazy to say that God just doesn’t want to have to settle accounts until our lives end)., so Maharal’s interpretation almost demands that we consider it import.

One possibility would be that God only wants to give us reward of the best kind, which would be Olam haBa, the World to Come. In fact, when explaining why reward doesn’t come to the end, Maharal offers an analogy to a worker in the fields, who will receive payment from the new harvest, suggesting that the material of reward is not available until our lives end.

I think, however, that another way to see it is at least as interesting. The thrust of Maharal’s comments is that we do not get our reward until our participation in the work has ended. That suggests that while we are still involved in the endeavor of learning Torah (meaning over the course of our lives, not while we are actually studying), it is not yet relevant to give us our reward. (Let me repeat: the next piece is my own, but it seems to me to fit with what Maharal is saying). That, in turn, suggests that as we learn more Torah, all of our Torah is affected by it; Torah is not simply cumulative, each new piece builds on what came before, and therefore adds more than arithmetically. If so, when the Mishnah says "if you’ve learned a great deal of Torah, you will be given a great deal of reward," it means that our reward depends on each piece of Torah that we learn. Until the end of our lives, then, as we add to our personal Torah-banks, we are not just adding to our reward incrementally, but changing it fundamentally.