On the Derech

Here's the text of a Minchah-Maariv mini-shiur given by Jeremy Phillips on Tuesday 11 August 2026, during Rabbi Kenigsberg's summer vacation. 

Let’s look at a teaching from Avot that, in very different ways, relates to the value of Torah and not why, or how, but where you should learn it. It’s a baraita at Avot 6:9 that goes like this (omitting the proof pasukim):

אָמַר רַבִּי יוֹסֵי בֶּן קִסְמָא: פַּֽעַם אֶחָת הָיִֽיתִי מְהַלֵּךְ בַּדֶּֽרֶךְ, וּפָגַע בִּי אָדָם אֶחָד, וְנָתַן לִי שָׁלוֹם, וְהֶחֱזַֽרְתִּי לוֹ שָׁלוֹם, אָמַר לִי: רַבִּי, מֵאֵיזֶה מָקוֹם אָֽתָּה, אָמַֽרְתִּי לוֹ: מֵעִיר גְּדוֹלָה שֶׁל חֲכָמִים וְשֶׁל סוֹפְרִים אָֽנִי. אָמַר לִי: רַבִּי, רְצוֹנְךָ שֶׁתָּדוּר עִמָּֽנוּ בִּמְקוֹמֵֽנוּ, וַאֲנִי אֶתֵּן לָךְ אֶֽלֶף אֲלָפִי דִּנְרֵי זָהָב וַאֲבָנִים טוֹבוֹת וּמַרְגָּלִיּוֹת. אָמַֽרְתִּי לוֹ: אִם אַתָּה נוֹתֵן לִי כָּל כֶּֽסֶף וְזָהָב וַאֲבָנִים טוֹבוֹת וּמַרְגָּלִיּוֹת שֶׁבָּעוֹלָם, אֵינִי דָר אֶלָּא בִּמְקוֹם תּוֹרָה

Rabbi Yossei ben Kisma said: Once I was traveling and I encountered a man. He greeted me and I returned his greetings. He said to me: "Rabbi, where are you from?" I said to him: "From a great city of sages and scholars, am I." He said to me: "Rabbi, would you like to live with us in our place? I will give you a million dinars of silver, gold, precious stones and pearls." I said to him: "If you were to give me all the silver, gold, precious stones and pearls in the world, I would not live anywhere but in a place of Torah.

Incidentally, it’s not clear whether this baraita should be here in Avot at all.  Some editions of Avot leave it out—and, while it’s also found in Kallah Rabbati, it’s not in Eliyahu Zuta.

Be that as it may, on the surface this looks like a straightforward message. A rich man meets talmid chacham, asks him to come to his town as the rabbi and offers a large inducement. The talmid chacham says no. The moral of the story? Torah is worth more than any money can buy. The first of the proof pasukim cited in support of this baraita validates this understanding. As we sing on Simchat Torah, טוֹב לִי תוֹרַת פִּֽיךָ, מֵאַלְפֵי זָהָב וָכָֽסֶף

But things are never as easy as they seem.

First, let’s look at the man himself. Who was Rabbi Yose ben Kisma?. We only know a little about him, but what we know is quite significant. He lived in Kisari, now Caesarea. Was this a “great city of sages and scholars?” That’s a tricky one. It may well have been originally a great city of sages and scholars—but it was not at the time Rabbi Yose was there. He lived there in the middle of the 2^nd century, when what was formerly a city with an active Jewish population had become a prosperous Roman market town. It was not to become an עִיר גְּדוֹלָה שֶׁל חֲכָמִים וְשֶׁל סוֹפְרִים until more than a century later, under the influence of Rabbi Abbahu and the third generation of Amoraim. Anyway, when Rabbi Yose died, some time after the Bar Kochba revolt, Kisari was a veritable citadel of Roman culture. Rabbi Yose was himself on good terms with the Romans. Indeed, a Gemara in Avoda Zara tells how the local Roman administrators attended his funeral as a sign of respect.

So where was Rabbi Yose going on his journey? If Kisari was a great city of scholars and sages, he wouldn’t need to be going anywhere. According to Rabbi Shmuel di Uceda, author of the Midrash Shmuel, this was indeed the case, as the opening words of the narrative suggest. Says the Midrash Shmuel, don’t think the words pa’am achat mean “once upon a time”; they mean this: “Look at me! I only left the Beit Midrash once and suddenly I was beset by all these temptations – gold, silver, kavod”. This leaves an interesting question, though. If Rabbi Yose hardly ever left the Beit Midrash and the Roman governors probably never had any reason to enter it, how did they become such good friends that the Romans turned up at his funeral?

But let’s leave Rabbi Yose aside and take a look at the man who encounters him on his journey and tries to buy him. Who is this man? Do we even need to know? No, we don’t, if all we are supposed to learn from this baraita is that we shouldn’t sell out and make our Torah subordinate to our material wealth. But the Maharal of Prague disagrees. In his Derech Chaim, the Maharal regards it is highly significant that we don’t know who this man is because, paradoxically, the fact that we don’t know who he is means that we do know who he is. Who turns up in many stories when no-one recognizes him? Why, of course, it’s Eliyahu haNavi! Several times in aggadic passages in the Gemara, Eliyahu turns up incognito. This man who encounters Rabbi Yose must therefore be Eliyahu. Since Eliyahu is an emissary of Hashem, it follows that Rabbi Yose is being tested by God himself, the implication being that even if the gold and silver that you are offered is a reward, as it were, for services rendered in this world, you should have the strength of character to refuse it.

In case the Maharal is wrong about this, and the mysterious man is not Eliyahu haNavi, there’s someone else he might be, someone else who alsoturns up incognito offering great things. And that’s the Satan. This hypothesis is also quite plausible since the level of the bribe to take the position of town rabbi is so great and no other terms of engagement are specified. This suggests that the magnitude of the wealth on offer should be sufficient to blind Rabbi Yose to all other considerations.

So, we’ve dealt with the basic story and we’ve said a bit about Rabbi Yose and the stranger he encounters. Now let’s look at the moment they meet.

Strangely, the first person to speak is the stranger, who greets the rabbi. Isn’t this wrong? It’s axiomatic that a learned rabbi who knows his Pirkei Avot should implement the teaching of Rabbi Masya ben Chorosh in perek 4 and be the first to greet others—and the Gemara teaches that Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai was first to greet everyone—even the non-Jews he met in the shuk—so why doesn’t Rabbi Yose do the same? Now here the Maharal’s explanation comes in handy. Whether the stranger is Eliyahu haNavi or the Satan, he would simply have appeared before the rabbi’s eyes without giving the latter a chance to see him coming! And even if this is wrong, we may conjecture that Rabbi Yose—even on his journey—was so engrossed in his Torah learning that he wasn’t looking around to admire the scenery (which might incur a spiritual death penalty if he stopped learning long enough to admire the scenery: per Rabbi Yaakov in Avot perek 3), and he wouldn’t have seen anyone coming at all.

Another mystery is why the stranger opens the dialogue by asking Rabbi Yose straight away where he comes from. It’s much more normal to say something like “who are you? What’s your name? even “Where are you heading?” I’ll come back to this later.

But perhaps the biggest mystery in this baraita, at least for the many rabbis who have commented on it, is the size of the booty offered to Rabbi Yose to go with the stranger and take the job. Put at its simplest level—and this is good news for Rabbi Kenigsberg—there is no halachic limit to the amount a rabbi can earn or own. The Gemara in Kiddushin cites the case of Rabbi Elazar ben Charsom, whose name was a byword for unimaginable affluence and he was praised for being able to learn Torah despite the responsibility he bore for his massive wealth. While Rabbi Tzadok in the fourth perek of Avot, citing Hillel, insists that one must not use one’s Torah as a spade to dig with, there’s no problem with anyone showering their favourite rabbi with gold, silver, share stock in AI start-ups or even tickets to fly El Al. But while the good news for Rabbi Kenigsberg is that the sky is the limit for what he can earn, there’s some bad news too. Nobody in the real world pays rabbis that much. And if you ask rabbis if they are same’ach b’chelkom, contented with their lot, they may ask you what you mean by “lot”. In short, their lot is not usually a happily affluent one.

This factor has coloured commentaries on our Baraita. Rabbi Yisrael Lipschitz, for example, the Tiferet Yisrael, says that the million gold dinars, gold, pearls and precious gems were never intended to be taken literally. No, he says, they are simply an invitation to Rabbi Yose to name his price, presumably on the normal rabbinical scale of his time. Rabbi Shmuel di Uceda takes a different line. When the stranger offers to give Rabbi Yose the million dinars and so on, what he really means to do is to comfort Rabbi Yose by saying “don’t worry. You won’t have to go collecting door-to-door to collect your pay. I’ll do that for you”. I suspect that this was not intended as a serious explanation of our baraita. Rather, it was a cry from the heart from Rabbi Shmuel di Uceda, who lived in Safed at the time when Sultan Murad III deported the city’s 1,500 richest Jewish citizens to Cyprus and left the poor man having to go knocking on doors to collect his own pay.

Now, if Rabbi Yose had accepted the offer and become rabbi in the stranger’s town, what would his job have looked like? The key word here is bimkomeinu; “in our place”. This word is double-edged. It can either mean “right here in our town” or it can mean “in place of us”. This double meaning was almost certainly unknown to Rabbi Yose in his day and age, where the concept of the “middle of the road”, nominally orthodox Jewish community had yet to develop. But we do know, particularly in some English-speaking parts of the diaspora, that there are places where people would really like to say: “We want a rabbi to be frum” in our place”, meaning “in place of us”. He can do all the religious stuff—we are happy to leave that to him, so long as he lets us get on with our lives and do our own thing”. In this sense a rabbi can earn a large salary and enjoy a comfortable lifestyle, though he may find that he is the only member of his community to keep Shabbat, observe the laws of kashrut outside as well as inside the home, or to do any Torah learning.

Incidentally, the tendency of all commentators is to side with Rabbi Yose and praise him for his principled approach in refusing any amount of money and treasure for the sake of Torah. Not one commentator that I know of has a kind word for the stranger who tries to buy Rabbi Yose’s knowledge and scholarship though. I think this is really sad. Here’s a man who, it is assumed, comes from a place that is not a makom Torah—and just look how much he is prepared to part with in order to get a Rav! How many of us would pay so much under similar conditions. The outrageously large sum offered to Rabbi Yose for his Torah presence is as much a praise for the value of the Torah as is his rejection of it.

Now to close with a few random points.

First, is the position of this baraita within the sixth perek significant? Some mefarshim make a great play of learning each mishnah or Baraita from what the one that came before it says. The Baraita that comes before ours, learned by Rabbi Shimon ben Yehudah in the name of Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai, sings the praises of both wealth and honour as being things that are no’eh latzadikim, things that befit the righteous and which, therefore, are things that holy rabbis are entitled to enjoy. Our teaching says yes, wealth and honour are indeed befitting for a tzaddik—but you shouldn’t compromise your Torah learning in order to get them.

Secondly, we have no idea whether the events recorded in this baraita ever happened. From the strange circumstances of the encounter and the many questions that arise from the dialogue, it may be that this whole thing is an invention of Rabbi Yose, a teaching device that conveys a powerful message: that our Torah is a treasure beyond worth.

In this context, we may be reading here a parable for the workings of the human mind.  Let’s read it like this: when Rabbi Yose says הָיִֽיתִי מְהַלֵּךְ בַּדֶּֽרֶךְ, he isn’t on a physical journey at all: he is telling us that he was on the derech, the derech yasharah, the straight and narrow. The adam who meets him is his own yetzer yara, who was poga, who encounters him unexpectedly (we daven on a daily basis for this sort of meeting not to happen when we ask to be spared a pega ra). Rabbi Yose and his yetzer hara don’t need to exchange names since they already know each other pretty well. The yetzer hara then challenges Rabbi Yose to look at where he is in life and to ask him: “don’t you think you could do better for yourself than to be a big rabbi in this relative Torah desert?” Rabbi Yose realizes that he could do much better in material terms, but he also recognizes that he has a good routine for learning Torah where he is, and that he doesn’t need to exchange the routine he knows for the uncertainties of a move to another place—particularly if it involves the disruptions involved in becoming the local celebrity Rav somewhere else. That would be like using the Torah as a spade to dig with.

Finally, here’s the question that troubles many laymen. Why didn’t Rabbi Yose just take the money and use it to set up a well-funded Beit Midrash from where he could be marbitz Torah and create a new generation of talmidei chachamim? I leave the answer to you.