Brachot 5a: (Giving>Selling)
CW: Edgy theological gloss on today’s daf (Brachot 5)
אָמַר רַבִּי זֵירָא וְאִיתֵּימָא רַבִּי חֲנִינָא בַּר פָּפָּא: בֹּא וּרְאֵה שֶׁלֹּא כְּמִדַּת הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא מִדַּת בָּשָׂר וָדָם. מִדַּת בָּשָׂר וָדָם, אָדָם מוֹכֵר חֵפֶץ לַחֲבֵירוֹ, מוֹכֵר עָצֵב, וְלוֹקֵחַ שָׂמֵחַ, אֲבָל הַקָּדוֹשׁ בָּרוּךְ הוּא אֵינוֹ כֵּן, נָתַן לָהֶם תּוֹרָה לְיִשְׂרָאֵל — וְשָׂמַח, שֶׁנֶּאֱמַר: ״כִּי לֶקַח טוֹב נָתַתִּי לָכֶם תּוֹרָתִי אַל תַּעֲזֹבוּ״.
Rabbi Zeira, and some say Rabbi Ḥanina bar Pappa, said: Come and see how the characteristics of the Holy One, Blessed be He (God), are unlike the characteristics of flesh and blood (humanity). It is characteristic of flesh and blood that when one sells an object to another person, the seller grieves the loss of his possession and the buyer rejoices. With regard to the Holy One, Blessed be He, however, this is not so. He gave the Torah to Israel and rejoiced, as it is stated: “For I have given you a good portion, My Torah, do not abandon it.”
The plain meaning of the text is that while God is happy to part w/ valuable objects, humans are sad. But there’s a slippage, as God’s transaction is described as gift-giving, whereas ours is described as a sale. This intensifies the point; even when a person is compensated for his loss, he’s still sad.
Yet we know that gift giving isn’t purely altruistic. It’s also a business strategy, a la “fremium,” a la “Youtility”; going back to ancient cultures, as the anthropologist Marcel Mauss describes, gift giving is a way of binding a community through the principle of “reciprocity.” A gift creates a debt. So of course God is happy! Because the Torah is not worth as much to God as the relationship with the Jewish people is; the Torah is simply God’s marketing trick for establishing covenant.
Here’s the appropriate analogy; when you go to a restaurant and the waiter says “this dish is on the house.” Is the waiter sad to part w/ the precious dish? No! Because the act of giving something away creates an expectation of a higher tip. So too, God gets a better deal by giving the Torah away. This is the meaning of “grace”; it’s not about how we don’t deserve the gift, but about the obligation we now feel to repay it, and which we wouldn’t have felt if we had earned it; then it would have just been what was due us. The psychological underbelly of the text is not about the difference between God and man, but between a sale that is poorly negotiated and a more complex, but more sustainable sale, rooted in the principle of generating customer loyalty by building trust.
#dafyomi
