The Halachic Work Ethic - Work IV

Imagine the following scenario:
You work for a religious boss at an hourly rate. Included in your work agreement is a short lunch break, but only for lunch. One day, your boss walks in towards the end of lunch and notices that you've been reciting the entire bentching. He becomes irate and starts screaming at you: "You're wasting my time! I pay you to work and you sit around bentching!" When you begin to claim that bentching is actually part of "eating" (he should theoretically agree, as he is a religious man), he says, "Sure, but not the WHOLE THING!" If you want to bentch, that's fine, but all the "harachamans" the now comprise the second half of birkat hamazon are extra, and I can say them on my own time. When you suggest that you can get back to work screwing in widgets and recite the rest of the bentching by heart, he again refuses, claiming that you won't be able to concentrate fully on my job if you're bentching.
That's when you lose it: "You're supposed to be a frum guy! How can this not be part of bentching? Let's go ask a shialoh, and whatever the rav says we'll do. If he tells me to stop half-way through bentching, I'll agree, but there's no way he's going to agree with you!"
You make the call. What do you think that the rav would say?
It's a pretty safe bet to assume that the Rav will take the worker's side. After all, first of all, he wants to finish bentching! Moreover, is it really such a long period of time? What kind of boss won't give his employee the three extra minutes to bentch?
And yet, if you look in the Shulchan Aruch - that's right, the code of Jewish law, things are not at all clear. In Orach Chayyim 192 Rabbi Yosef Karo writes,

פועלים העושים מלאכה אצל בעל הבית, א מקצרין בבהמ"ז, כדי שלא לבטל מלאכת בעל הבית; כיצד, ברכה ראשונה כתקנה, ושנייה פותח בברכת הארץ (א) וכולל בה בונה ירושלים וחותם בברכת הארץ, ואין אומרים ברכת הטוב והמטיב (ב) כלל. בד"א, (ג) כשנוטלים שכר על מלאכתן מלבד הסעודה, אבל אם אין נוטלים שכר אלא הסעודה שאוכלים לבד, מברכין כל ד' ברכות כתקנן

Workers employed by the master of a house must shorten their blessing after meals, so that they do not waste the work of the master. How is this done? They recite the first blessing in its entirety, and the second blessing begins with the blessing on the Land and he includes in it the construction of Jerusalem, and he concludes with the blessing on the Land. And he does not say the [fourth] blessing of "Who is good and brings goodness" at all. When does this rule apply? When the workers receive payment for their work aside from the meal. But if their only payment is the meal that they are eating, then they recite all four blessings as they were instituted.

Don't get too excited. In the very next halachah, the Shulchan Aruch writes that nowadays no one is so meticulous a boss that he won't let his workers finish the actual text of birkat hamazon. Yet, the original halachah is actually a direct quote from the Gemara (Berachot 16a) which is also cited by Rambam (Hilchot Berachot 2:2). Yet, what i find so interesting is the work ethic underlying the halchah.
The gemara assumes that when I take a job to work for someone at an hourly rate, I'm on the clock. My time is now his time, which makes sense, because he's paying for it. But that principle goes so far, that I don't even have the right to recite any additional, unnecesary aspect of bentching, to the point that the rabbis made special accomodations for workers - in essence designing an entirely new type of brachah, just so that the workers could get back to the job.
Contrast that with our sense of work ethic today.
When I was in high school, I got a job at a local software shop that designed recruiting software for the US Army. My brother-in-law worked there, and he helped me get the job. First I did all kinds of research for them, but eventually they decided that I could handle a software mop-up project that required going through a zillion routines and making simple changes in the code. It was great money, and I wasn't a counselor in summer camp. I was happy.
Well, they just stuck me in an office which had an empty desk. There were a couple of other people in the office, and I have vivid memories of other workers - one particular woman in fact, who would come into the office sometime early in the morning, and just hang around and shmooze literally all morning. I even remember her once staying so long that she finally only left when it was lunchtime. And I'd sit there, changing my code wondering, don't these people get paid.
Now I was no angel. I could chat a little as well. But there was also a frum guy there who would literally not talk to anyone at all. He had a Talmudic work ethic. He was being paid to work - so he worked. Ironically, while people respected him for his computer knowledge, I can't say that they really related to him, which is also important if you want to advance in an office environment.
I was just struck by how far we've sunk. What happened to the work ethic of bentching; a sense that if you're being paid by the hour, you work a full hour? Somehow over time that's been lost. And I'm not sure that our society is better off because of it.

Physical Activity and Education: The Value of Physical Work, Part 3

Last week during a short car-ride, Rena shared with me a frustrating conversation she had with a good friend. Her friend's son was recently diagnosed with ADD - and it's rather severe. He simply cannot sit still in class. He walks around the room, disturbs other children, and often gets into fights and other altercations. His mother has taken to home-schooling him for some subjects, and noted that if there's "anything on the table at all, even a pencil" he'll immediately become distracted and lose focus.
I commented that it's sad that we think that every single child needs to sit in school for hours at a time reading, writing and studying. Some kids just aren't wired that way. I think that we need to begin to think about these issues in a completely different way.
Truth be told, how much learning do you really need to do to get along well in life? Obviously, if you're going to enter into a career in a specific field, then you need to develop an expertise in that area. But my son is now learning biology.
If a child becomes a lawyer, will the fact that he needed to memorize the different names of cell parts be remotely valuable or even useful to him - especially since by the end of this summer he will have forgotten them all. He's also learning Jewish history. It's great that he's getting a sense of Jewish history and the trials and tribulations, errors and triumphs of the Jewish people. But why in the world should a child memorize names and dates? Who really cares what the name of this or that Roman general was? You want to know a fact - look it up. On Wikipedia. On the other hand, I'm a big believer in skills knowledge. You need to know how to add. You have to know how to write and read. These critical skills build on each other and a child's ability to handle increasingly difficult challenges progresses as the level of difficulty increases.
(By the way, this discussion relates to me only to the fields of secular knowledge. In the world of Torah, every step and bit learned is, in and of itself valuable, and also serves as a springboard for future growth and learning.)
In his powerful article in the NY Times magazine, Matthew Crawford writes,

If the goal is to earn a living, then, maybe it isn’t really true that 18-year-olds need to be imparted with a sense of panic about getting into college (though they certainly need to learn). Some people are hustled off to college, then to the cubicle, against their own inclinations and natural bents, when they would rather be learning to build things or fix things. One shop teacher suggested to me that “in schools, we create artificial learning environments for our children that they know to be contrived and undeserving of their full attention and engagement. Without the opportunity to learn through the hands, the world remains abstract and distant, and the passions for learning will not be engaged.”
A gifted young person who chooses to become a mechanic rather than to accumulate academic credentials is viewed as eccentric, if not self-destructive. There is a pervasive anxiety among parents that there is only one track to success for their children. It runs through a series of gates controlled by prestigious institutions. Further, there is wide use of drugs to medicate boys, especially, against their natural tendency toward action, the better to “keep things on track.” I taught briefly in a public high school and would have loved to have set up a Ritalin fogger in my classroom. It is a rare person, male or female, who is naturally inclined to sit still for 17 years in school, and then indefinitely at work.

Why do we force our children sit for hours and hour on end learning material that will in no way be useful to them later in life? If a child doesn't like math, why should we force her to sit through Algebra 2, memorizing abstract principles that she doesn't understand or care about? Sure, she should learn percentages and fractions. Your son should know how to reliably halve a recipe and convert metrics to standard measurements. He should be able to figure out how much to tip a waiter, and calculate how long it will take him to drive to Chicago. From anywhere. Your daughter should know how to balance her checkbook and manage her money (which we shockingly don't teach). She should know how to figure out whether it's cheaper to buy the paper towels at Target in the large pack, or with coupons by the unit in the grocery store. But does any child not entering the world of advanced mathematics and science really need to know how to figure out the integral of an equation as it approaches infinity? I liked math - and even almost minored in it in college. But if you'd ask me how much math knowledge I use today? Minimal at best.
Education then, needs wholesale reconsideration. Are we giving our children life-skills to help them navigate the world? Why is it that high-school kids never really learn how to hammer and saw; build and construct? Every single person who owns a home will at one point need - absolutely need - to fix a light switch, hang shelves; plant a lawn. Why is it that we ignore these needs in school, and then have to hire specialists to do these things for us?
For the very children who hate school - who cannot sit still - might they not enjoy caring for farm animals; running a school canteen under the guidance of a teacher, where they'd learn issues of running a business, math, ordering supplies, the value of work, and so many other useful skills? What about the skills of cooking, sewing, first aid, basic machine repair? How many kids learn how to change a tire, or the oil on their car? Our kids are learning how to design Power Point presentations, which is good. But are we teaching them anything useful to present?
Apparently we can't teach them those things, because we're too busy teaching them French. Or European history (I got a 5 on my AP History exam. Don't remember a thing, other than that the word "defenestrate" means "to throw out of a window".)
Which, I'm sure, is what our friend's child wants to do to his books, teachers, and entire school career.

The Value of Physical Work, part 2

In my last post, I described the powerful feeling of successfully completing a physical, tangible task; the emotional (and even spiritual) pleasure of seeing the "fruit of one's labor". In truth, I have felt certain affinity for this topic for a long while, especially considering the fact that a large portion of the Jewish community disdains physical work, and considers work at the very most, a concession to fulfill our physical needs, but basically a waste of time. (I'll probably write more about this later.)
But the impetus for this post was this article in the New York Times magazine, which I read with a great sense of identification. The author writes about how he eschewed his PhD job in a think tank to open a motorcycle repair shop, and how he finds the latter far more intellectually challenging and fulfilling than the former. I would like to show how I believe that the Torah addresses this issue specifically.
At the beginning of Bereishit, we learn that after creating Adam, God places him in the Garden of Eden. But he doesn't just put him there to play Nintendo. Rather, God situates man in the Garden for a reason.

וַיִּקַּח יְהוָה אֱלֹהִים, אֶת-הָאָדָם; וַיַּנִּחֵהוּ בְגַן-עֵדֶן, לְעָבְדָהּ וּלְשָׁמְרָהּ.

And the LORD God took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden to dress it and to keep it. (Bereishit 2:15)

Don't just read the translation. I pulled it from a website to make my life easy. In truth, translating this verse raises serious questions, not the least of which is, What does it mean to "dress" a land? I have no idea. But the verse raises other questions, both linguistic and contextual:
1. Looking carefully at the last two words, they end in the feminine form: לעבדה ולשמרה - which I would translate as "to work it and to guard it." But the "it" here clearly refers to a feminine form. Otherwise the verse would have said לעבדו ולשמרו - in the male form. The problem here is that the word גן is a "male" word, so it's difficult to explain that the verbs modify the noun גן - garden. The problem then becomes, what did God place man in the garden to "work and guard" if not the garden itself?
2. The verse itself raises another question: what exactly is man supposed to do in this garden? Looking back at the previous six verses, we learn about how God had planted the garden, watered it, pretty much made it the best darn garden ever in history. Adam could eat whatever and as much as he wanted (other than that darn tree!) If God's your gardener, what's there left for Adam to do other than lounge around?
Because of these two issues, many commentators interpret this verse allegorically. Seforno, commenting on the word לעבדה - "to work it," explains simply, "לעבוד את נשמת חיים" - "to work on the soul of life." God placed man in His garden not to weed and prune the grass, but to weed and prune his soul; to improve himself and become more spiritual, ethical and moral.
Pirkei D'rabbi Eliezer states,

ומה עבודה היתה בגן, שאמר לעבדה ולשמרה - והלא כל האילנות נצמחות מאליהן? אלא לעסוק בדברי תורה ולשמור את דרך עץ החיים, ואין עץ חיים אלא תורה, שנאמר "עץ חיים היא למחזיקים בה"

What "work" was there in the garden, that God told him to "work it and to guard it" - for did not all the trees grow on their own? Rather, [the instruction refers to a commandment] to immerse in the words of Torah and to guard the ways of the "tree of life," for the tree of life refers to the Torah as it is written, "It is a tree of life to those who grab hold of it." (Mishlei 3:18)

Both of these commentators - and many more - interpret the work in the garden as spiritual, and not physical work. Their theory is strengthened by the curse God gives to Adam after he eats the forbidden fruit, בזעת אפיך תאכל לחם - "by the sweat of your brow shall you eat bread." After the sin and the curse, Adam needed to work to eat, implying that beforehand, he did not.
And yet these interpretations leave me wondering: why then did God give Adam a physical form? The garden seems to have been an actual, real place. If Adam's entire goal was spiritual perfection, why put him in a physical place? Why give him a body at all? Why write that God put Adam in the garden for "work" which seemingly implies physical toil? And finally - and perhaps most perplexingly - God never gave Adam the Torah. How was he supposed to grab hold of the Torah and keep the commandments that he never received?
Add to this the following Midrash:

תניא: רבי שמעון בן אלעזר אומר, גדולה מלאכה שאף אדם הראשון לא טעם כלום עד שעשה מלאכה, שנאמר "וינחהו בגן עדן לעבדה ולשמרה" והדר "מכל עץ הגן תאכל"

Said Rabbi Shimon ben Elazar: great is [the value of] work, for even original man did not taste a morsel until he performed some work as it is written, "and He placed him in the Garden of Eden to work it and to guard it" and only then it says, "From every tree in the garden you may eat." (Avot D'rabbi Natan 11)

On this Midrash Torah Temimah comments,

This is an allusion to the inhabitants of the world that it is unworthy to benefit from the world without bringing any benefit and pleasure to the world's population and its existence. For the world from its perspective gives benefit to man. Therefore it is appropriate from man's side to benefit the world.

According to Torah Temimah, we should not and cannot just be takers. We must also contribute in some way to the growth, development and completion of the world.
But to me it's more than that. It seems to me that in some way, God hard-wired into us the need to not only grow and develop spiritually and emotionally, but physically as well. By giving us a physical form and strengths and capabilities, God told us in a sense: Here's my garden. Here's the world. Let's see what you can do with it.
Living in a yishuv in Israel, I often find myself marveling at the fields as they grow and develop. The natural world has a great physical beauty when left untouched by human hands. But those rows of fields; or the clean, shining, golden stalks of wheat, swaying ever so softly in the wind - they have a different and perhaps no less stark beauty. The beauty of man's toil; the beauty of man "working and guarding" the garden.

The Value of Physical Work, part 1

Members of my (former) shul during the middle of this decade will probably remember my porch. The reason that they'll remember it is because I wouldn't stop talking about it. I decided one summer (don't remember which one) that I didn't like the trees in front of my house, and that I also wanted Rena to have a place to sit and watch the kids as they played in front of the house. I decided that we needed a porch. And that I was going to build one.
Truth be told, I have long enjoyed working with my hands. My first real project in the house was a small closet for toys in the basement. That went relatively well, so the deck also seemed doable. Rena didn't say much. I think she figured that while it was a nice idea, I was never going to actually build the thing. So I think she was somewhat surprised when I started pulling out trees and bushes. By hand.
I really didn't have much of an idea of what I was doing. But I took a couple of books out from the libary, and watched a video on deck building a couple of times, and off I went.
The project took weeks. I measured and designed. I drew a detailed sketch of the way I wanted the deck to look. I pulled out the shrubs (not easy at all), and dug the post holes by hand. It was back-breaking labor, having to dig four feet down below the frost line. I could have hired someone else to do the holes, but (a) I was cheap -- really cheap, and (b) something in me wanted to do the whole thing myself. I mixed concrete and poured the footings. I cut the wood and laid the foundation. I drilled the holes in the house and attached the main boards. From start to finish, it was an incredible challenge, but I found myself rushing home to get to the project. Once I finished the main porch, I added a fence and stained and was done.
And it felt great. I loved coming home and seeing that deck. I loved knowing where I had cheated to get the thing to look right - a little extra sanding here, a cut there. I loved sitting on the deck.
I also spoke about the deck in shul, probably too much. But it was good speech fodder, as much as I can remember.
I have a friend in the rabbinate who I discovered also liked working with his hands. He told me that he thought that the reason we enjoyed the physical labor so much was the imprecise nature of rabbinic work. You visit the sick, give classes, deliver sermons. Even when people react positively to your work, (which did happen, ever so rarely), you never really know how much tangible effect you actually had. Sure, you have a vague sense that the speech really went well; that a certain family's growth in mitzvot is related to your efforts. But it's all just that - vague.There no immediate sense of gratification and accomplishment, the way you feel when you've finished fixing a door, or installing a ceiling fan, or painting a room.
I think that in a certain way, we're hard-wired to only get this true sense of accomplishment out of real, tangible work.
I'll explain why in my next post on this topic.