Kaisipang Hudyo sa Mga Kawikaan 3:6: Eight Chapters

Such striving does the Almighty require of us, according to the words, “Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might”,¹¹Deut. VI, 5. that is, with all the faculties of thy soul, each faculty having as its sole ideal the love of God.¹²Cf. Moreh, I, 39 (end) which refers to this passage in the Peraḳim, and to the Mishneh Torah (Yesode ha-Torah, II, 2). The prophets, similarly, urge us on in saying, “In all thy ways know Him”,¹³Prov. III, 6. in commenting upon which the sages said, “even as regards a transgression (of the ritual or ceremonial law),”¹⁴Berakot, 63a. This does not imply that the end justifies the means; that crime may be committed to bring about religious or charitable ends. It refers only to the violation of the ceremonial or ritual laws, as the breaking of the Sabbath, and eating on Yom Kippur, for the sake of saving life, etc. Cf. Ketubot, 5a, “You must remove debris to save a life on the Sabbath”; and Shabbat, 30b, “Better to extinguish the light on the Sabbath than to extinguish life, which is God’s light”, etc. The distinction in regard to the various kinds of transgressions which M. makes below, Chapter VI, pp. 76—78, applies here. See Shemonah Peraḳim, ed. Wolf, 1876, p. 53, n. 5. meaning thereby that thou shouldst set for every action a goal, namely, the truth, even though it be, from a certain point of view, a transgression.¹⁵Cf. M.’s Commentary on Berakot, IX, 5: ובכל לבבך בשני יצריך ביצר הטוב וביצר הרע. Cf. also his Commentary on Abot, V, 20 (Rawicz, Commentar, p. 108), and Moreh, III, 22 (end). The sages of blessed memory, too, have summed up this idea in so few words and so concisely, at the same time elucidating the whole matter with such complete thoroughness, that when one considers the brevity with which they expressed this great and mighty thought in its entirety, about which others have written whole books and yet without adequately explaining it, one truly recognizes that the Rabbis undoubtedly spoke through divine inspiration. This saying is found among their precepts (in this tractate), and is, “Let all thy deeds be done for the sake of God”.¹⁶Abot, II, 12. This, then, is the thought we have been dwelling upon in the present chapter, and what we have said must be considered sufficient for the needs of this introduction.¹⁷That is, the Shemonah Peraḳim, which constitute M.’s introduction to his Commentary on Abot. See Introduction, p. 5. H. Deot, III, 3 contains a summary of the contents of the latter part of this chapter.