Who will be for me? And if not now, when?

What follows is an edited transcript of my remarks this past Shabbat.  I used Claude to clean up the punctuation and eliminate repeated phrases.  

What happens when you have a plan for what you want to say, a text you're sure says exactly that — and then you open the commentaries and discover they read it completely differently?

Lately I've been thinking a lot about the tension between the universal and the particular — the balance between how we, as individuals and as a Jewish community, think about our own spiritual, communal, and physical well-being, and how those needs align (or don't) with the needs of the world as a whole.

So I went looking for a text that seemed, on its face, to speak directly to that tension. I landed on Pirkei Avot, on the words of Hillel:

הוּא הָיָה אוֹמֵר, אִם אֵין אֲנִי לִי, מִי לִי. וּכְשֶׁאֲנִי לְעַצְמִי, מָה אֲנִי. וְאִם לֹא עַכְשָׁיו, אֵימָתָי

He used to say: If I am not for myself, who is for me? But if I am for my own self [only], what am I? And if not now, when? (Pirkei Avot 1:14)

Notice, by the way, that the "only" in the second line is often supplied by the translator — it isn't in the Hebrew. But read this way, on the surface, Hillel seems to be naming our tension exactly: I have my needs, my people's needs, and no one else is going to speak for us if we don't speak for ourselves. There is no guarantee that anyone will stand up for our community unless we do. And yet — if the only thing we care about is our own needs, the Torah has plenty to say about that too. We're commanded to see the whole world, the whole community, our whole family — not to end up as a nation of "me, me, me."

There's just one small problem: when I actually went to the commentators, I found they weren't reading this text about self-advocacy at all.

That's the beauty and the challenge of Torah — shivim panim laTorah, there are seventy faces to Torah. So it's fine that the early commentators saw something different. But it's worth sitting with what they actually saw.

Rabbeinu Yonah: The Discipline of Self-Rebuke

Rabbeinu Yonah doesn't read "If I am not for myself, who is for me?" as a statement about standing up for who we are or declaring our values to the world. He reads it as a question about whether we are living a life of Torah:

If I don't rebuke myself to be assiduous about the commandments, who is there to rebuke me and make me assiduous? Since the prompting of others is [only] good on a temporary basis. But when the person motivates himself each and every day, he increases to think of thoughts in order to do the work of God. And there is no forgetting before him, when his heart desires it, and it is a straight path in front of a person.

No one else is going to check whether I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing — except me. And this is, frankly, good developmental psychology: the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. Some of us grew up with the personal-pan-pizza incentive for reading books over the summer. If you were only reading for the pizza, you probably weren't going to keep reading once the pizza stopped coming. External motivation isn't sufficient. We need to build the internal kind.

So for Rabbeinu Yonah, the verse isn't about standing up for ourselves outwardly — it's about doing right from an internal sense of what's right, motivating ourselves daily until the desire for it is built into our own hearts.

Then he turns to the second clause — "But if I am for myself, what am I?" — and offers this parable:

To what is the thing similar? To a king that gave his field to his servants and agreed with them [that his portion would be] thirty kor. They toiled and they brought him five kor. The king said to them, "But didn't I agree with you that it be thirty kor?" They said to him, "Our master, the king, the field that you gave us was of low quality. We toiled greatly on it and we were not able to get out from it more than five kor."

Rabbeinu Yonah imagines us saying something similar to God: You gave me this body, You gave me this impulse — I've tried to be a good person, but I haven't succeeded, because what You gave me wasn't good enough. Even when a person toils to do what's right, we don't always accomplish everything we hoped to. And yet, he adds, if it weren't for that very evil impulse pushing against us, we might do nothing at all — the difficulty itself is what makes the toil meaningful. (There's a whole rich rabbinic literature on that idea — a subject for another day.)

Which brings us, finally, to "And if not now, when?" — the part of the teaching that hasn't moved an inch in any reading. Especially for the procrastinators among us — and I see you — sometimes we all need a little push, a little pressure, to actually finish the task.

The Rambam: Character as Self-Authorship

The Rambam offers something related, but not quite the same. On "If I am not for myself, who is for me?" he writes:

He said, "If I myself will not be the one that arouses my soul to virtue, who will arouse me, as I have no one to stimulate me from outside." … "And since it is in my power to incline my soul to any side that I want, what deed have I done from the good deeds?"

And on "But if I am for myself, what am I?":

It is as if he is questioning himself and saying, "What am I?" [This is] to say, "What is [becoming of] me? I am not complete, even if I did this matter."

For the Rambam, the question isn't who am I but what am I becoming — a challenge to examine our character and how we're actually living. Which brings us right back to this week's parasha, to its choices, and to that little holiday arriving next week: Rosh Hashanah.

Are we entering this new year thinking about our character — about how we motivate ourselves to do what's right? Or are we simply going about our lives as we would any other day? On "And if not now, when?" the Rambam adds a piece of his own:

"If I do not acquire these traits now in the days of my youth, when will I acquire them? Not in the days of old age, as it is difficult to veer from one's characteristics at that time because the acquisitions and the traits have hardened and settled — whether they are virtues or whether they are vices." And the wise one said (Proverbs 22:6), "Educate a youth according to his way, and he will also not veer from it when he gets old."

Back Where I Began

I want to return, though, to where I started. What I love about Torah is that generation after generation of rabbis can say, "here is what this meant, in our time, in our place." Rabbeinu Yonah and the Rambam offer beautiful readings about personal morality and our individual relationship to Torah. And I think the way many of us are reading this text in this particular moment — as a statement about communal self-advocacy — is just as relevant to us. Because we need to know not only who we are, but we have to show who we are.

In this week's parasha we read about what is done in secret and what is done in public. If we are proud to be Jewish only in secret, and never show it, that is its own kind of challenge for this world — and the more of us who hide who we are, the greater a challenge it becomes for the generations that follow.

As we move through these last few days of hearing the shofar, into Rosh Hashanah and the Aseret Yemei Teshuvah — the Ten Days of Repentance — we're asked to think about our character and who we are. But I think we also have to ask how we represent that in the world around us. And here the rabbis, looking at that same verse about secret and public, hand us another tension: on one hand, we're meant to do mitzvot quietly. If we help someone in need, we don't put up a billboard announcing it — look what I did for so-and-so. That's not how it works.

And yet — if no one ever says out loud, "I'm trying to take care of our community, I'm trying to care for those in need," then no one learns that this is a value worth having. So we have to hold both: doing the right thing quietly, and publicly demonstrating what it means to be a good person, a good Jew, living an upright life.

So, in true rabbinic fashion, I have no clean, simple answer for what to do between now and Rosh Hashanah. Instead, I hope you'll leave with more questions than answers. Ask them of yourself, of your children, of the people around you: How are you living your Jewish life this week? What will you do publicly? What will you do privately? And what will you add — this week, this month, this year to come?

Shabbat Shalom.