GEN412 “My business is in an extremely competitive industry. Is there anything wrong with demanding long hours and hard work from my employees?”  Hard work is in itself an admirable trait. It is true that the decree to the first man, “By the sweat of your brow shall you eat bread,” is presented as a curse, but the sages of the Talmud Pesachim 118a explain that it also contains a blessing: Rabbi Yehoshua ben Levi said, “When the Holy One, blessed be He, said to Adam, [this verse], his eyes flowed with tears. He said to Him,” Master of the universe, will I eat from the same trough as my donkey?” But when He said to him, “By the sweat of your brow shall you eat bread,” Genesis 3:19 he was consoled.  Untamed nature is hostile to man and reduces him to a beast, eating the same food as a donkey. But man has the ability to perform directed work that refines and improves nature. Through hard physical work as well as intellectual labor (thus “the sweat of your brow”), complex human cultivation and processing of wheat makes into bread. Our lifestyle based on the highly developed products of human labor distinguishes us from the beasts. We see, too, that Jacob was proud of the dedicated service he gave his father-in-law, telling his wives, “I served your father with all my might.” Genesis 31:6  The Torah is concerned that man may be reduced to a mere working machine. To this end, the Ten Commandments specifically gives the Sabbath day as a day of rest for everyone—the Torah further tells us that we are not to give our servants “crushing work,” Leviticus 25:43 and this ethical principle applies to ordinary workers as well. Sefer Ha-Hinnuch 346.  Where do we draw the line between admirable and excessive work? According to Jewish law, this distinction is not based primarily on how much exertion is involved. The nature of the work is just as important. In particular, we have to be careful not to assign work that is gratuitous or demeaning. GRATUITOUS LABOR  Rashi’s commentary on the Torah explains the definition of crushing work is “work which is unnecessary, in order to dominate him. [For instance,] Don’t tell him, “Warm this cup”, when you do not need it.” It goes without saying that open busy-work (demanding unneeded tasks) is demeaning, but Rashi goes on to explain that it is improper even when the servant does not know the work is not necessary. The average employee probably does not need to be told that giving busywork is not the best way to show respect to employees, but many modern workplaces, especially the 24/7 variety, exhibit various kinds of hidden busy-work. These can violate the spirit of Jewish law and also can be counterproductive.  This kind of overtime can encourage employees to take “under time.” This is a term coined by Tara Parker-Pope of the Wall Street Journal for all of the tricks employees use to pretend they are on-the-job when they really taking care of personal affairs. For example, in large corporations in one country, it used to be the custom that in the early evening the managers would all leave the office. But they didn’t head home to their families; instead they went together to a local bar. And woe betide any aspiring manager who dared skip this nightly ritual! It goes without saying that not much work was accomplished on these jobs, but an employee who did not participate was nearly sure to be passed over for advancement. While this is an extreme example, employers and high-pressure workplaces would do well to review the demands they make on their workers. Most of what the workers do is probably needed, and it’s certainly legitimate to cultivate a professional and collegial atmosphere. For instance, face time, dress codes, and occasional company social gatherings are certainly not gratuitous. But if there is an ongoing pattern of norms that exist only to display assiduousness, then there is a good chance that you are imposing “crushing work” on your employees. An example would be if the employees are ashamed to be the first to leave the office, even if they have finished their work satisfactorily. Human beings naturally have a limited ability for effective work. Anyone can stay in the office for 24 hours, but few can accomplish more than ten or twelve hours of genuinely productive activity. So if the employer is careful not to demand gratuitous sacrifices from employees, the other aspects of a balanced workplace, including providing adequate opportunities for family life and personal development, will often take care of themselves. INTRUSIVE DEMANDS Many managers today do not really work very hard. They’re usually no more than 10 hours a day in the office, and they’re home by seven-thirty, or at the latest eight. Of course, sometimes they have to make one or two phone calls in the evening, but that’s not a major demand. Of course, they can enjoy a leisurely game of golf on Sunday (with a client); but is it really such a burden to glance at your email on your personal digital assistant between holes? That’s dead time anyway. The results of all of these demands is that while the actual amount of work is no more than fifty or sixty hours a week, the employee is effectively on call for 24 hours a day. Jewish law and tradition strongly emphasize the need to have part of the week, and part of each day, which are completely inviolable. Each week has Shabbat, when we are not allowed to do work or even talk about it. The prophet Isaiah tells us that we will be worthy of delighting in God’s blessing if we observe the Sabbath appropriately: “If you turn away due to the Sabbath from doing your business on My holy day, and you call the Sabbath a delight, and honor what is holy to the Lord; to dignify it by refraining from your customary ways, pursuing your business and speaking of it.” Is not enough to avoid actual work; one day a week we need to refrain completely from all business pursuits and speech. And each day needs to have fixed times set aside for prayer and study, when no other considerations are allowed to intrude. The Shulchan Arukh states, “A person should establish a time for study, and this time should be rigid, so that he will not miss it even if he thinks he can make a great profit.” Shulchan Arukh, Orah Hayyim 155 We find in Jewish law that an indentured servant is exempt from most positive time bound commandments. He does not have to sit in the sukkah, for instance, even if he has the time to do so. Maimonides, Sofar 6:1.  The condition of servitude is intimately bound up with the idea that your time is not your own; it belongs to the master.  An employer should take steps to make sure that his employees are not reduced to slaves, with no time to call their own. The workplace routine should ensure that each employee has a reasonable amount of time each day and each week that is completely free of working intrusions. MEIR 190-193

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GEN413 [Man] is comparable to a field possessing poor soil; with all the effort to improve it and with all the toil in cultivating it, the field will [still] produce [only] a small amount of grain.  Yet, if no effort is put into its improvement, it will not sprout or raise up any sort of vegetation; only thorns and thistles will grow.  Just sowing the field, without any effort at its cultivation, is beneficial only by a field rich in soil.   GATES 149

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GEN414 Where there is no flour [bread] there is no Torah Book & Portion; where there is no Torah, there is no flour [bread] Pirkei Avot III:21  … we could interpret it to mean that “if there is no Torah,” all your eating has accomplished nothing more than “no flour”; you have made a certain amount of food disappear.  You have obtained and used a certain amount of calories.  That is all.  If there is no Torah in your life, if your existence is not informed by some higher purpose, if there is no transcendent value and goal to which all hour physical activities are dedicated, then your entire life is only a consumption of energy.  Before, you had food, time, energy.  Now they are gone; there is simply “no flour.” Indeed, flour for bread is itself a symbol of a higher level of civilization. When Adam sinned he was told in punishment, “Thorns and thistles shall it [the earth] bring forth to you, and you shall eat the grass of the field.” Genesis 3:18 At this, says Rabbi Joshua ben Levi, tears ran from his eyes. “O Master of the world,“ he cried, “shall I and my donkey eat our food from the same trough?” Once the Almighty continued, “By the sweat of your brow shall you eat bread,” [this verse], Adam was calmed.  Talmud Pesachim 118a.  Man does not accept what he is given in the form that it is given him; he builds it up, improves on it, develops it, and transforms it.  In the hands of man, wheat becomes flour, and flour becomes bread.  Thus, flour signifies man’s superiority over the beast, his rise to a civilized state. Hence, “if there is no Torah,” if one neglects his obligation to reach a higher level of spirituality, of humanity, through Torah, and is content to live by the values of the animal, then in truth he is entitled to no more than grass and oats; for him “there is no flour.” SINAI1 342

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GEN415 Something over which we have complete ownership implies that it is something over which we have complete control. …this is something that everyone knows is not completely true when it comes to the body. … Whether or not one actually believes that the body is a gift from God is in truth irrelevant.  Perhaps more truthful is the notion from [this verse], “For dust you are, and to dust you shall return.” The bottom line, regardless of which one seems more plausible is that our bodies are not wholly ours; they are in in a very real sense, on loan. (By Adam Goodkind) DORFFBOD 40-1

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GEN416 Jewish tradition confronts rather than avoids the inevitability or the reality of death. At the very beginning of the Hebrew Scriptures, we are told [this verse]. Ecclesiastes (3:1-2) forthrightly states, “A season is set for everything a time for every experience under heaven: a time for being born, and, a time for dying.” Ecclesiastes (7:2) further counsels that “it is better to go to a house of mourning than to a house of feasting: for that [i.e. death] is the end of every person, and the living one should take it to heart.  The awareness of human finitude found in the Hebrew Scriptures is amplified in rabbinic literature.  For example, the Talmud recounts that “when Rabbi Jonathan finished the Book of Job, he used to say: the end of man is to die, and the end of a beast is to be slaughtered, and all are doomed to death” Berachot 17a. A verse in Psalms (144:4) reads, “One’s days are like a passing shadow.” On this verse, a midrash comments: “What kind of shadow? If life is like a shadow cast by a wall, it endures … Rabbi Huna said in the name of Rabbi Aha: Life is like a bird that flies past, and its shadow flies past with it.  But Samuel said: Life is like the shadow of a bee that has no substance at all” Ecclesiastes Rabbah, Chap. 1, sec. 1.  While rejecting an escapist attitude toward death, and while advocating a frank confrontation with death and dying, Jewish tradition considers the encounter with human mortality to be an invitation neither to morbidity nor to nihilism.  The attitude satirized by the prophet Isaiah (22:13), “Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die,” finds no resonance in Jewish thought.  Rather, the candid awareness of human mortality is treated by Jewish religious literature as an opportunity to confront the quest for and the creation of human purpose and meaning.  Since life is a blind date with an uncertain future, each moment is considered a summons to begin or to continue the project of creating the ultimate work of art-one’s own existence.  Commenting on Hillel’s famous statement, “If not now, when? (Palestinian Talmud, chap. 1, sec. 14), a medieval Jewish writer observed that Hillel did not say, “If not today, when? But “If not now, when?” because “even today is in doubt regarding whether one will survive or not for at any instant one can die.” Consequently, “one cannot wait even a day or two to exert oneself in the pursuit of human [moral] fulfillment” (Gerondi 1971, 115). A candid confrontation with death can compel one to examine and improve the moral quality of life.   For example, “Rabbi Eliezer said: Repent one day before your death. His disciples asked him: Does then one know on what day he will die? Then all the more reason to repent today, he replied, lest he die tomorrow” Shabbat, 153a.  Another text advises: “One should always incite the good inclination to fight against the evil inclination. … If he subdues it, well and good. If not, let him study the Torah. … If he subdues it, well and good. If not, let him recite the Shema. … If he subdues it, well and good.  If not, let him remind himself on the day of death” Berachot 5a. SHER20C 36-8

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GEN417 See [[GEN409]] Genesis 3:17 listened TZADIK 255

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GEN418 Jewish law opposes cremation, and regards it as an extreme lack of respect for the dead body.  Although no explicit biblical law prohibits cremation, the prophet Amos, writing over 2,700 years ago, speaks of the punishment of the nation of Moab for its many sins, specifying that it had “burned the bones of the king of Edom into lime” Amos 2:1.  The Torah takes burial and the gradual decomposition of the dead body for granted.  Genesis 23 details the great lengths to which Abraham went to purchase a large burial plot for his wife, Sarah, which later served as the burial plot for him and many of his descendants.  Obviously, Abraham would have saved time and money if he had arranged for Sarah’s body to be cremated, but he didn’t.  Also, God’s burial of Moses serves as an important precedent for Jews, since Torah law instructs its adherents to imitate God Deuteronomy 28:9.  Maimonides rules that, if prior to death, a person expresses an explicit wish not to be buried (but presumably to be cremated instead), this wish should be ignored Laws of Mourning 12:1.  Nonetheless, if a person is cremated, there is no explicit prohibition against burying the ashes in a Jewish cemetery, although many Jewish cemeteries do not allow cremated remains to be buried on their grounds.  TELVOL 1:100-101

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GEN419 The intensity of Judaism’s opposition to cremation is fueled by several factors.  Most significantly, because the body, though now dead, once housed the soul, it is believed to retain certain sanctity.  A second reason is an emotional one, rooted in recent Jewish historical experience.  Burning bodies is what the Nazis did to the Jews after they gassed them, and cremation, fairly or unfairly, remains associated in the psyche of many Jews with the Nazis’ behavior.  What the Nazis did to Jewish bodies, many feel, Jews must not do to themselves or to each other.  Rabbi Eli Spitz articulates an additional reason not to cremate, which he terms “concern for the welfare of the mourner.’  In Spitz’s words: “Burial helps the mourner by providing a sense of closure.  When the mourner sees the coffin being lowered into the earth and when he hears the sound of pebbles and soil hitting the coffin, it hurts terribly, but from that moment on, he knows that death is real … Cremation always takes place out of sight of the family, for it is a violent act.  And so, for the mourner, there is no act that marks closure.  A grave is an address to which a family can come ever afterward in order to commune with its memories.”  Spitz, Why Bury? In Reimer, Jewish Insights on Death and Mourning, 125-126. TELVOL 1:101-102

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GEN420 See [[GEN226]] Genesis 2:7 breathed SINAI2 197

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GEN421 After eating the forbidden fruit, Adam was told that he would eat bread only by the sweat of his brow [this verse], and the Talmud (Pesachim 118A) notes that he felt relieved upon hearing this because he understood that making bread involved toil that would separate him from the other animals.  While work conveys dignity, idleness is often portrayed as dangerous. The Mishna (Ketubot 5.5) states that people who can afford not to work should work anyway because idleness can lead to lewdness or depression.  The rabbis say that no matter how wealthy one is, one has an obligation to personally play some role in the preparations for Shabbat. Without making the effort to prepare for Shabbat, we would not be able to fully appreciate the rest and joy that it brings.  A midrash (Tanhuma Vayetze 13) says that “when a person toils with both hands, God grants blessing.” While we might not all agree with the theology of this passage, the point it makes about work is clear—our lives are shaped and given meaning, in part, by the work that we do.  Of course not all work conveys dignity. Oppressive work conditions, poor treatment of workers and devaluing the results of labor remove the meaning and satisfaction from work.  Labor that is dehumanizing or degrading robs the worker of kavod (dignity or honor). Leading a life of kavod is one of the important reasons to work. Thus, a good society is one that ensures meaningful work to those who are willing and able to do it.  Work should not be understood in purely selfish terms as producing value only for the workers.  One rabbinic tale (Vayikra Rabba 25.5) describes an old man planting a tree.  The emperor Hadrian happens by and asks why the old man is planting the tree since it will take many years to bear fruit and the old man will not benefit.  The old man replies that just as his ancestors planted for him so is he planting for those who will come after him.  Work can be a generative and redemptive act.  Employers must meet several conditions for work to produce kavod for their employers.  The employer must treat the worker as a person who has kavod.  The worker must see the work as accomplishing something worthwhile.  And the conditions under which the worker labors must be compatible with worker dignity in terms of hours, expectations, safety, physical surroundings, compensation and so on.  AGTJL 329-31

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