It seems to me (from the Mishnah Berurah) that beautification of a commandment is a commandment (an optional, fulfillment-type commandment) and not an obligation (a mandatory commandment). Still, from the wording of the Talmud it really does seem that the obligation is active (“Make before Him a beautiful sukkah, a beautiful lulav…” and so on). And even though that isn’t talking about beautifying a commandment up to one-third extra, but rather about something basic—that commandment objects should ideally be made nice from the outset. But then something strange comes out: there is no basic-price version of the commandment item at all… because the cheaper one would be forbidden to buy (as neglect of a positive commandment).

Simply speaking, beautification of a commandment is a full obligation, except that as I explained it does not invalidate the commandment itself. True, we do find commentators (see Ritva on Sukkah 11b and others) who wrote to prove that it is not from the Torah because it does not invalidate the commandment, but that is quite puzzling reasoning (what does one thing have to do with the other?).
The beautification of a commandment up to one-third is this very beautification. There is no other beautification. The obligation is to buy a beautified item at a price one-third higher (calculated internally or externally; see Bava Kamma 9a).
I didn’t understand the difficulty. If one buys the cheap one, he fulfills the obligation of the commandment but neglects the positive commandment of beautification. In order to fulfill the beautification, one must spend another third, as above.

I understand. I was only saying that there are 2 sources with 2 different formulations: Bava Kamma 9, which speaks about “beautification of a commandment,” and Sabbath on some page in the 100s, which speaks about “the beauty of a commandment.” It’s not completely clear to me that it’s really the same thing. It may be that “beauty” just means making nice-looking objects. And I haven’t even mentioned “the choicest way to perform a commandment.”

Sorry—Sabbath 133.

Making nice objects is exactly the law of beautification of a commandment. “The choicest way to perform a commandment” is a completely different concept. There we are talking about halakhic beautification, meaning doing something beyond what the law strictly requires. That is not specifically beautification of the commandment object. This latter concept is definitely an ideal preference and does not invalidate, unlike beautification.
By the way, in the passage in Sabbath 133 I did not find the term “the beauty of a commandment.” The Talmud there on 133b discusses beautification of a commandment. The term “sukkah ornaments” does appear in the Talmud, and in my understanding that is simply an application of beautification of a commandment. It’s just that beautification refers to the commandment, while beauty refers to the object. Making the object beautiful is beautification of the commandment.

The Rabbi is probably right. I’m just a bit Brisker, with a tendency to conceptualize every different word separately. There it says, “Beautify yourself before Him in the commandments,” and that’s what I meant by “the beauty of a commandment.” And it’s also probably obvious that the term hadar in the Talmud is not like in our Hebrew today, where hadar means something different from beauty. In our Hebrew, hadar is something with added little details that adorn it—like there’s a woman, and there’s a beautiful woman, and a “magnificent” woman, so to speak, would be a beautiful woman with jewelry. (And beyond a certain amount of detail, magnificence turns into splendor.) But in what the Rabbi said—that beautification of a commandment is something more general than the beauty of an object—he is also mistaken, because without noticing he’s using the modern sense of hadar, for example the way we mean it when we say “mehudar tefillin”: not prettier tefillin, but tefillin made according to stricter standards so as to satisfy all opinions—that is, halakhic beautification.

The way I understand “the choicest way to perform a commandment,” it’s connected to the idea that performing positive commandments (not commandment-objects) is like bringing an offering, and with an offering there is a commandment (a fulfillment-type one) to bring the best—meaning the best animal you have. “Cursed be the deceiver who has a male in his flock, and vows, and sacrifices to the Lord a blemished thing…” So too, one should perform the commandment in the finest way one can. But it may be that part of this also includes that if an object is involved in performing the commandment, then it should be as beautiful as you can make it. And according to the offering analogy, this is not about doing more than you are obligated to do, because even a choice offering does not have more limbs than a non-choice animal; it is simply fatter. So we are not talking about adding extra components to the act, but about the character and quality of the performance (unless we say that the rules of the commandment are the limbs and its details are like the fat). Doing more than the law requires is piety, which is not even considered a fulfillment-type commandment (and in legal matters—going beyond the letter of the law. Though perhaps even there there is an obligation of “you shall do what is right and good,” because of the story in Bava Metzia about that amora who hired workers and they broke his barrels—but then there is a logical problem with being obligated to do what you are not obligated to do).

Hello Ailon. I’m not following you.
Beautification of a commandment means performing a commandment in a beautified way, that is, making the commandment object beautiful. “The choicest way to perform a commandment” is something else; there we are talking about a halakhically better way to fulfill the commandment (see Horayot 10b regarding gross eating on Passover, and many other examples). Piety, or going beyond the letter of the law, or acting so as to satisfy Heaven, are somewhat similar to “the choicest way to perform a commandment” (except that those usually involve interpersonal matters). And indeed beautification of a commandment is a commandment, while all the others are not commandments, not even fulfillment-type ones.
So what exactly is the argument about, if there even is one?

I’m not arguing about the result, only about the route. In the language of the Talmud, the word “commandment” in the phrase “beautification of a commandment” is an object—commandment-objects, even though the Talmud there talks about fringes of flesh that do not invalidate circumcision, and Rashi explicitly refers to that there as beautification of a commandment, even though there is no object there at all. (Though from his words it sounds like the complete removal of the foreskin is the beautiful result of the circumcision, or that he is talking about the sexual organ being nicer without the non-invalidating shreds—“beautifying the flesh,” but a sexual organ is not a commandment-object.) I don’t know what the Rabbi means by the words “performing a commandment in a beautified way,” but I understand that to mean performing an action in a beautified way. In Hebrew, a commandment is an action, not an object—like eating, drinking, fasting, etc. But tefillin are not a commandment, they are an object by means of which one performs a commandment. I also agree that there is probably such a concept as a beautified action, but I have no source for it in the language of the Talmud. The Rabbi claims—as I understand him—that a beautified action indeed exists, and that preparing nice tefillin is part of implementing beautification in the commandment of laying tefillin. But that isn’t clear to me, because there is no commandment in preparing or buying tefillin (or building a sukkah), only in putting them on. When I speak of a beautified action, I probably mean the product of the action. (The tefillin are positioned nicely on the arm, say. And if we speak about the action itself, then rather absurdly it would mean something like noble hand motions while doing it, like speaking of a graceful shot into a basket, for example.)

But really most people, and maybe the Rabbi too, would chuckle at this discussion, but for me it’s important that everything fit in its proper place.

As for “the choicest way to perform a commandment,” I was only noting a basic insight of mine on the subject. I understand very well what the Rabbi said, and I’m not arguing, because in fact I still haven’t formed a view on what exactly the difference is—if there is one at all—between a “beautified action,” in my sense (which would be part of beautification of a commandment, though even there one is not obligated, only that it is a better mode of performance), and “the choicest way to perform a commandment” from the Talmud there in Horayot. What the Talmud means by both concepts is clear to me. But it doesn’t fit so well for me with the usage in modern Hebrew of the term “commandment,” and I feel that this is not a sterile discussion but a conceptual development of the halakhic concepts from the Talmud (with practical halakhic ramifications).

Hello Ailon.
I think we’ve exhausted the topic, and I’ll only note that the organ of circumcision is definitely an object of a commandment. From there we derive the oath taken while holding an object, from Eliezer, who placed his hand under Abraham’s thigh when he swore to him while holding a commandment-object.