Avos 3:16

בס׳ד

אבות ג:טז

He used to teach: Everything is given for a down payment, but a snare is spread over all living things. And the shopkeeper is keeping accounts; the account book is open, and the hand is writing; Anyone who wants to borrow may borrow, and the collectors make their rounds each day; They collect from you whether you agree or not, and they have plenty of evidence; The judgement is a true one, and everything is prepared for the meal.

הוּא הָיָה אוֹמֵר, הַכֹּל נָתוּן בְּעֵרָבוֹן, וּמְצוּדָה פְרוּסָה עַל כָּל הַחַיִּים. הַחֲנוּת פְּתוּחָה, וְהַחֶנְוָנִי מֵקִיף, וְהַפִּנְקָס פָּתוּחַ, וְהַיָּד כּוֹתֶבֶת, וְכָל הָרוֹצֶה לִלְווֹת יָבֹא וְיִלְוֶה, וְהַגַּבָּאִים מַחֲזִירִים תָּדִיר בְּכָל יוֹם, וְנִפְרָעִין מִן הָאָדָם מִדַּעְתּוֹ וְשֶׁלֹּא מִדַּעְתּוֹ, וְיֵשׁ לָהֶם עַל מַה שֶּׁיִּסְמֹכוּ, וְהַדִּין דִּין אֱמֶת, וְהַכֹּל מְתֻקָּן לַסְּעוּדָה:

        Rabbi Aqiva’s parable of life as a shop in the market can be interpreted on many different levels.  I think it continues his thoughts about the freedom of human choice in the context of a world in which everything comes from HaShem.

        Let’s begin with the ideas of the down payment (Hebrew: eravon) and the snare (metzudah).  A down payment is a small amount we pay in order to establish our entitlement to something.  Even though we haven’t paid the entire amount, the item is “ours” as long as we continue to make payments.  According to Rabbi Aqiva, we have all made a down payment on the Life of the World to Come through our relationship to Torah.  The down payment is our initial response to the opportunity of living in the presence of HaShem’s Torah - the first steps we take in trying to live up to what the Torah requires.  No matter how far we fall short, the small down payment of our attempts at obedience continues to secure our stake in the original promise of the Torah to offer us “long life and length of days.”  Little by little, as we make our payments of deeds and learning, we acquire a little more Torah until, in the fullness of time, we have acquired that portion of it we can master.

        What accounts for the difficulty we often have in making our payments?  This is where the idea of a snare comes in.  This is the snare of desire, particularly the desire to replace the freedom of obedience to Torah with the illusion of freedom we gain by submitting to our own desires.  In short, our life is lived out in a struggle between our desire, on the one hand, to keep making our payments on our stake in Torah and, on the other hand, the desire to be free of the down payments and “spend my money the way I want.”  We see all kinds of “products” around us that promise us all sorts of immediate pleasures. We’d rather take our down payment on Torah and use it instead to purchase something whose pleasures are more immediately tangible.

        So there we stand: we’ve made a down payment.  We want Torah and the transformed life it promises.  But we stand in danger of squandering it and everything it holds out to us. What do we do now? Well, we enter the shop - the world of decisions in which we have to determine real value from flash and packaging.  HaShem, the shopkeeper, keeps careful tabs on our decisions - what we choose and how much we’re willing to pay.  If we choose to go into further debt in order to acquire trinkets that promise immediate pleasures, we’ll be diminishing our ability to keep making payments in Torah.  The collectors will be ready to ask us to ante-up!  Life in all its unexpectedness will rush up to greet us, and we will meet it without the cushion of Torah-discipline and knowledge. We’ll meet it with our own shallow resources and, perhaps, squander our chances to transform the snares of life into moments of illumination and nourishment.

        We won’t, in fact, know how we’ve done in our “marketing” until we leave the shop and the final accounting has taken place.  Only then, at the end of life, will we know what we’ve purchased or squandered. And what will tell us?  “The meal” - when, at the end of life, we take stock of the “fruits we have eaten in This World and the plentitude that awaits us in the Coming Future” (Mishnah Peah 1:1).  If we have made the right decisions, we’ll know then - when we see the pattern of our choices forming a complex tapestry, its design moving slowly, windingly, but unstoppably toward the Image of our original Creation. We purchase - or lose - that final tapestry in the moment of every decision.  We make it ourselves or squander it ourselves.  All with our choices.

        This mishnah concludes the teachings of Rabbi Aqiva.  They are among the most profound and most unsettling of all the teachings collected in Avos.  It takes a lifetime to fully expose every level of meaning they contain.  No wonder we learn in Mishnah Sotah 9:15: “When Rabbi Aqiva died, all the glory of Torah ceased!”

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