The Mishnah as a
Response to Catastrophe
The Mishnah reflects an attempt by the rabbis to create an eternal Judaism,
unaffected by the kinds of catastrophes that had afflicted the Jewish people in
the preceding two centuries.
By George Robinson
Robinson’s emphasis on the Mishnah as a response to
catastrophe reflects both the traditional description ascribed to Sherira Gaon
and the modern writing of Jacob Neusner (whom he credits). Some may consider his assumption about early
rabbinic academies to be anachronistic, but otherwise Robinson’s description
reflects much of current scholarship on the Mishnah. Reprinted with permission
from Essential
Judaism: A complete guide to beliefs, customs, and rituals, published by
Pocket Books.
As they had in times
of crisis before, the religious leaders of the Jewish people turned their gaze
inward [after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE] and found strength
in Torah. And as they had before, they adapted to a new situation. The
synagogues had evolved as a response to the Babylonian exile. Ezra had used the
"scroll of Moses" as a rallying point for the Jewish masses.
Now the rabbis would turn their attention to the
codification of Jewish law, shifting the focus of Judaism from Temple to Torah,
to creating a Judaism whose invisible walls could not be breached by any
intruder, no matter how heavily armed.
In the period following the destruction of the Second
Temple, the rabbis would establish the canon of the Tanakh, set the basic
structure of the prayer service, and begin the lengthy process of codifying the
Law, of creating the Oral Torah.
There had been collections of halakhic [legal]
rulings in the past. Rabbi Meir had recorded and arranged the rulings of his
mentor, Rabbi Akiba, in the second century C.E. Tannaim of earlier
generations had also collected oral rulings, particularly those handed down in
their own academies. But it was Judah Ha-Nasi (also known as Judah the Prince
and Rabbi) who undertook the monumental task of creating a comprehensive book
of halakhah up to his time, the Mishnah (from the Hebrew shanah/to
repeat, "teaching by oral transmission").
Over a roughly 20-year period between 200 and 220 C.E.,
Judah Ha-Nasi created a veritable constitution, an authoritative guide to Jewish
law for judges and teachers to use. By doing so, he and the rabbis with whom he
worked were asserting the continuing uniqueness of the Jewish people. At the
same time, they were creating an authoritative version that would be the center
of discussion, classification, and interpretation for generations to come.
But it did more. Not only did the Mishnah present a
practical solution to a real-life problem—creating a manageable handbook of
legal opinions—it also sent a message to the Jewish people in a time of
darkness. With its focus on the immutable nature of worship—the endless rhythms
of the Jewish calendar, the unchanging problems of ritual cleanliness and
impurity—the Mishnah presented Judaism as a faith and practice not bound by the
fleeting passage of historical time.
Bar Kokhba is defeated? The new moon still will come this
month and need to be welcomed on Rosh Chodesh [the first of the new month]. The
Romansoppress us yet again? Spring still means Pesach and summer
Shavuot. Whether Jerusalem is in the hands of the Persians, the Greeks, the
Romans, or the Turks, Jews will still get married, give birth and be born, eat,
work, and die, and the rituals that govern those realities must be themselves
governed. Thus the Mishnah is a book of "an eternal present," as it
has been phrased by Jacob Neusner.
Essentially, the Mishnah is a collection of legal rulings
and opinions, written in what has come to be known as Mishnaic Hebrew. Distinct
from biblical Hebrew grammatically and, to some extent, in vocabulary,
Mishnaic Hebrew has been proven by archaeological finds to have been the
everyday language of the Hebrews of Judea at the time of Bar Kokhba. However,
when the centers of rabbinic learning shifted to the Galilee, where Aramaic was
the common tongue, Mishnaic Hebrew was destined to become a dead language, and
by the end of the tannaitic period it had.
The Mishnah is divided into six sedarim (orders), a
structure that the Tosefta (a supplementary collection compiled
anonymously in the same period) and both the Palestinian and Babylonian Talmuds
will follow. This order also gives Talmud one of its nicknames, shas, an
acronym derived from shishah sedarim (six orders). Each of
the Orders, in turn, has between seven and 12 subdivisions called masechtot (tractates,
sing. masechet), of which the Mishnah contains 63. The tractates are
divided into perakim / chapters, and the smallest units are designated
as mishnayot (sing. mishnah) in the Babylonian Talmud or halakhot
in the Palestinian Talmud. The tractates are given in order of length,
beginning with the ones with the most chapters and continuing to those with the
fewest.
Each of the six orders is named in a way that suggests one
of its primary topics. The first order, Zeraim (Seeds) deals particularly
with laws of agriculture. The second order, Mo'ed (Appointed Seasons),
covers the laws governing the festivals, fast days, and the Sabbath. The third
order, Nashim (Women) primarily is concerned with laws governing
marriage, divorce, betrothal, and adultery (although this order also contains
the tractates Nedarim [Vows] and Nazir, which deals with the
Nazirite vows of asceticism). The fourth order is Nezikin/Damages,
and is largely concerned with what modern Anglo-American courts would call
civil and criminal law, but also includes laws governing the treatment of idolaters,
and the most commonly read tractate of the Mishnah, Pirkei Avot (Sayings
of the Fathers), a collection of ethical maxims. The fifth order, Kodashim (Holy
Things) covers such Temple-related matters as sacrifices, ritual slaughter,
and the priesthood. The sixth and final order is Tohorot /Purities,
and the majority of the tractates within it deal with issues of ritual purity
and impurity.
Several things are immediately apparent from a survey of the
six orders of the Mishnah. First, the structure of the book, despite some
attempt at a systematic organization, is more than a bit haphazard. In part,
the problem lies in Judah's decision to incorporate large sections of material
intact from earlier sources; earlier collections often grouped rulings by their
authors rather than subjects. For instance, in the middle of the Tractate Rosh
Hashanah, we find a series of rulings from Yohanan ben Zakkai that have nothing
to do with the festival of the New Year. However, the structure also reveals
the associative techniques that were often typical of the rabbinic mind at
work; the order Nashim includes betrothal and marriage, wouldn't it make
sense to include other laws governing vows as well? After all, each of these
kinds of vows—betrothal and marriage, legal and financial—involved what was
considered in ancient times to be a transfer of title to property [marriage
is a transfer which is related but clearly distinct from a property
transfer—ed.]. On the other hand, within each tractate only one subject is
pursued.
Second, the prominence given to issues relating to the
Temple—virtually the entirety of Kodashim and sections of all the other
orders except Nashim—suggests that the Tannaim were committed to
preserving Jewish continuity in the face of disaster. Perhaps the Temple had
been destroyed more than 100 years ago, but they would carry on as if it were
eternal, as sure as the turning of the earth. (Not every great Jewish thinker
agreed with this focus on the long-defunct cultic rituals. Abraham Ibn Ezra,
for one, decried scholars who devoted their time to the study of halakhah
that had no practical relevance.)
Third, in its unusual
focus on the quotidian—laws governing agriculture, criminal and civil law,
rules governing the nuts and bolts of religious observance—the Mishnah is an
elegant reminder of one of the governing principles of Judaism as a
belief-system: that everything we do, no matter how mundane, has a spark of the
holy within it. If we run through the areas of concern expressed in the
tractates of the Mishnah, we can see how its worldview shaped Judaism.
George Robinson is an award-winning journalist whose
writing appears frequently in the national and Jewish press.
