The Amazing Mishnah
Neusner, Jacob
In the entire history of civilization, the Mishnah stands nearly alone for its enduring power to hold together the life of an entire people and to impart meaning and order to a society. There are...
...Because of its tiresome babble about details, the Mishnah permits us to try to test our theories of the whole...
...ended with the destruction of the Temple and the burning of Jerusalem...
...This is also true, although to a somewhat lesser extent, of other divisions...
...The Mishnah is the other side of the creation tale: a picture of that well-ordered, stable world that God called blessed, and sanctified...
...Approximately two-thirds of the attributed sayings belong to the later group of names...
...It is as if people sat down to write anonymous letters about things they had never seen, to people they did not know...
...3) Nashim, laws regarding the transfer of women (and property) from one man (the father) to another (the husband...
...The Mishnah does not cite Scripture because it does not have to...
...The Mishnah is divided into six divisions or orders, which are further sub-divided into a total of 62 tractates (plus Pirkei Avot...
...there was no Temple to which it could apply...
...And this is the Torah that has defined Israel, the Jewish people...
...The Judaism reflected in the Mishnah is concrete, not abstract...
...There is a measure of existential congruence between the Age of Mishnah and our own age...
...Its message is one of small achievements and modest hope...
...The message of the Mishnah is that what a person wants is important...
...We cannot explain why it commences where it does or why it ends where it does...
...In its strange portrait of a Utopian never-never-land, the Mishnah told Israel, the Jewish people, about that basic structure of life in society by which, wherever Israel made its home, the holy people of God could live...
...Pretty opaque...
...In an age following catastrophe, the problem was to reorder a world adrift and off course, to reorient an age in which the sun has at last come out after the long night...
...The writers are located in Utopia, writing "to whom it may concern," at an indeterminate time and to nowhere in particular...
...But it would be a very long time before the psychological effects of the dislocation and disorientation would pass...
...Structure, language and content conform to and reinforce each other...
...Then the honeycomb is broken and the honey collected...
...3:11, which stands for Mishnah Tractate Uqsin ("Connections") in the division Taharot ("Purities"), Chapter 3, paragraph 11: Honeycombs: From what point are they susceptible to uncleanness as liquid...
...This is far different from a simple narrative...
...So much of the Mishnah speaks of matters not in being because the Mishnah wishes to make a statement about what is really important...
...These are ordinary things that everyone knows about...
...A. [The topic is the honey from] honeycombs: From what point [is the honey from honeycombs] susceptible to [the laws of] uncleanness as a liquid...
...Even though the language is our own, the substance is not...
...But in larger measure, it builds a social system on beams of hope...
...of stems of pomegranates and stalks of leeks...
...We feel as if we are in a transit lounge at a distant airport, listening to the words people say but baffled by their meanings and concerns, and, above all, by the urgency in their voices...
...The authorities the Mishnah cites generally fall into two groups...
...Returning to our passage, we must ask ourselves what is really at stake in this alike—in one way or another...
...Not only was the Temple not rebuilt and the cult not restored, but Jerusalem itself was declared off-limits to Israelites...
...The Temple had been destroyed once before— by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.E...
...Yet it transcends all three—law code, schoolbook and corpus of tradition—and accomplishes more than the triple goals that on the surface form the components of its purpose...
...But the Mishnah still shapes the life of the people that produced it, in exactly the same way as it did at the time of its origins...
...of rain and earth and wood, metal, glass and hide...
...The book contains very few names of sages who lived before the Roman destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E...
...To this must be • Tanaih is .i Hebrew acronym, composed of Torah (the Pentaleuch;, \eii'im (Ihe Prophets) and tKttmtim (the Writings,., :ln- three divisions of the Hebrew Bible...
...With extraordinary concision, a debate is created...
...C. The House of Hillel says: "[From the time] when one will have broken [up the honeycomb so that the honey is acfu-ally accessible...
...When is a particular substance—honey—susceptible to unclean-ness as a liquid, pursuant to the laws derived from Leviticus...
...The city was rebuilt as a Roman city named Aelia Capitolina in honor of the rather odd debate...
...ifi1...
...IV Ezra, written between 95 and 100 C E., is a book of visions attributed to Ezra Baruch is a work ascribed to Jeremiah's scribe, Baruch, it was written in the first or second century C.E...
...This time around, what happened was incomprehensible...
...It is the five books of Moses...
...In truth, many of the matters discussed are not only wholly remote from our own world, but they were alien to the world of the people who made the Mishnah...
...The Mishnah does not speak of holy things but of pots and pans, of menstruation and dead creeping things...
...The Mishnah captures a whole vision of a complete world...
...a question...
...And that accounts for the amazing power of the Mishnah to speak from age to age, even to our own...
...As to all questions of authorship, the Mishnah itself is mute: where, when, why, for what purpose, to which audience...
...4) Nezikin, a system of civil and criminal law...
...It describes how things "are," based on sherds and remnants of reality...
...How can the Mishnah be a book of religion, a program for consecration, a mode of sanctification...
...The Mishnah is a document of imagination and fantasy...
...From the first line to the last, the Mishnah provides information without establishing context...
...But it never tells us why one topic is introduced and another is omitted, or what the agglutination of these particular topics is meant to convey as part of a system...
...It rarely cites a verse of Scripture, or refers to Scripture as an entity, or links its own ideas to Scripture...
...Hence, liquid that is not at all accessible to human use (in this context) is deemed unsusceptible to uncleanness...
...Within a century, the social and agricultural effects of the wars had worn off...
...Next lefs see what these words mean...
...since you have access to the honey, it is susceptible to the laws of uncleanness as applied to liquids For the House of Hillel, only when you have actually broken the honeycomb, and the honey is in fact accessible, is it susceptible to uncleanness...
...Galilean synagogues of the third and fourth centuries testify to an age of material surplus and considerable comfort...
...That seems to me remarkable courage...
...The sages of the Mishnah addressed Israel at the end of a thousand-year life of sancti-fication through God's service in the Temple...
...Interestingly, the two Talmuds take the position that the Mishnah is wholly dependent upon Scripture...
...That message is delivered to an Israelite world that cannot shape its own affairs in any important way...
...the answer invariably is, "As it is said in Scripture: . . . . " In its monotonous tone of voice, lacking both eloquence and style, the Mishnah covers a carefully defined program of topics...
...Yet it is entirely obvious that little in its content evokes either the character or the moral authority of the written Torah of Moses...
...At this point we can at least understand what the words mean...
...no one claims to cite or correctly interpret things that Moses said, or to have had a revelation like Moses...
...Although the Mishnah addresses the Jewish people, it is remarkably indifferent to the Hebrew Scriptures and rarely cites a biblical verse...
...It is not written in narrative prose, with flowing declarative sentences, but in brief thought units with a question (normally implicit) and an answer or answers, set forth in a disciplined way...
...For the House of Shammai, the honey is susceptible to uncleanness as soon as it is potentially accessible—when the bees have been driven out For the House of Shammai, it is susceptible to uncleanness only when the honey is actually accessible—after the honeycomb has been broken...
...Unlike the pseudepigrapha—say, IV Ezra or Baruch—the Mishnah does not attribute its sayings to biblical heroes, prophets or holy men of the Hebrew Scriptures.* Unlike the biblical Hebrew prophets or the apocalyptic literature of the 400-year period before the Mishnah was set down, the Mishnah does not claim to emerge from a fresh encounter with God through revelation.** All the devices by which other Israelite writers gained credence for their messages are ignored...
...A pagan sanctuary was built on the Temple Mount...
...But the pattern established in the cycle of the first destruction and restoration now failed to repeat itself...
...It is we who must translate its details into a message we can make our own...
...The document is orderly, repetitious, careful in both language and message...
...Now we can express the passage in fuller form...
...The Mishnah is something else again...
...Most of the Mishnah is written this way...
...The author has enormous respect for us, the readers, assuming that we read and hear with so astute and sentient an inferiority as to gain the message even in the subtle media through which the message is conveyed...
...The parallels to our own age, which also looks back on the destruction caused by two terrible wars, are obvious...
...Sets of thought-units follow a repeated syntactic and grammatical pattern...
...The Mishnah begins nowhere and ends abruptly...
...The writer wants us to learn the point by having to put together things that are given to us, to draw conclusions that are not spelled out for us—a warm compliment to us as readers We must read this discourse in three dimensions: (1) how things are said, (2) what is said, and (3) what lies beneath the surface of what is said...
...In this limited way, the Mishnah is a law code (but it does not prescribe punishments for infractions) and it is also a schoolbook...
...Its very inaccessibility is one reason it amazes...
...Joshua to the elders...
...So, all in all, the Mishnah represents the thinking of Jewish sages who flourished about the middle of the second century...
...2) Mo'ed, laws governing appointed seasons— Sabbaths and festivals...
...We know none of the answers to these basic questions...
...It stands on the same plane as Scripture...
...For someone who has never seen the Mishnah before, it surely must seem puzzling and opaque...
...the Temple was restored...
...But that time the prophetic promise of divine forgiveness had been kept...
...B. The House of Shammai says: "[From the time] when one will smoke out [the bees...
...We are also expected to know how honey is extracted from honeycombs...
...Again the Temple lay in ruins for three generations...
...They are shaped so as to impart lessons, not merely rules to be kept...
...The Mishnah is a document of imagination and fantasy...
...On this point both the House of Shammai and the House of Hillel seem to agree...
...Most ongoing traditions of learning—like philosophy and mathematics—have suffered breaks from their past...
...We cannot but be impressed with the Mishnah's expectation of sophistication and profound sensitivity to order and form on the part of its impalpable audience...
...But what is at stake...
...It is not an interest in mere antiquarianism, nor even knowledge "for its own sake," whatever that means...
...and about 200 C.E., when the book was compiled under the sponsorship of Judah the Patriarch (Yehuda haNasi), the head of the Jewish community of the land of Israel at the end of the second century...
...The second group of authorities cited in the Mishnah flourished between the end of the Second Jewish Revolt (135 C.E...
...the other, when one has broken the honeycomb to collect the honey...
...It harnesses the power of the mind and the heart to find order in chaos and reframe a reliable and predictable mode of being, in an age of calamities...
...Even today, Jewish institutions flourish wherever Jews live because Torah, oral and written, is studied precisely as it has been studied from the very beginning...
...The Mishnah took shape as a written document about 200 CE...
...The heirs of heroes build an unheroic folk in a new and ordinary age...
...After it was compiled, the Mishnah was represented as a part of the "whole Torah of Moses, our rabbi" that had been formulated and transmitted orally...
...If Talmud has a double meaning, Torah has a triple meaning—at least...
...of menstruation and dead creeping things...
...But the Mishnah itself never gives a hint about its authors' intent...
...The Mishnah's apologists claim the most one can claim on behalf of a book that, in fact, bears the names of men who lived 50 years or so before the apologists themselves...
...The Mishnah does contain prescriptive laws...
...These two groups of authorities form two distinct sets of names, the names within one set randomly appearing together, but rarely, if ever, with names of the other set...
...The six divisions are (1) Zera'im, agricultural rules...
...C. The House of Hillel says: "[From the time] when one will have broken [up the honeycombs...
...two successive, alternative, autonomous answers...
...It builds a social system on beams of hope...
...So there was no priestly cult, no Temple, no holy city at the time of the Mishnah to which mishnaic laws could be applied...
...The readers are invited to enter it No answer is given...
...Interestingly enough, in the aftermath of two terrible wars—the First and Second Jewish Revolts against Rome—culminating in two terrible defeats, the material condition of the Jews was not that bad...
...But because of the peculiar and particular way in which the Mishnah is formed and formalized, this same language expresses a deeply embedded ontology and methodology of the sacred, by which the sacred can be found within the secular...
...With such a compliment, how can we decline the invitation to study all 63 tractates, 531 chapters in all!—J.N...
...Moreover, the structure of the passage is reflected in the language: a topic...
...In the aftermath of the Second Jewish Revolt against Rome, the Bar Kokhba Revolt (132-135 C.E...
...But it tells us everything about how a small group of men wanted things to be...
...The Mishnah stands in contrast with the world to which it originally spoke...
...Incidentally, all this makes it relatively easy for the student to memorize...
...For the Mishnah, the human mind imposes meaning upon the world of sense perceptions...
...The task of the hearer is not solely or primarily to obey, but to participate in the process of discovering principles and uncovering patterns of meaning.* * See "The Rebbe's Gavel," p. 24...
...The premise of the question is that up to a certain point, honey is not susceptible to uncleanness...
...One party, however, maintains that the honey is susceptible to uncleanness when one has smoked out the bees from the honeycomb...
...For the House of Shammai, the potential is treated as equivalent to what is actual: Once you have smoked out the bees, you have access to the honey...
...In this way the Mishnah, along with Scripture, presents us with the amazing fact of longevity and continuing vitality, practically unique in the history of civilization...
...The fact of it cannot be questioned: The Mishnah and the two great documents that formed around the Mishnah, which serve, in part, as commentaries to it—the Babylonian Talmud and the Palestinian Talmud—form the center of the curriculum of Judaism as a living religion...
...In contrast, however, to our expanded formulation (and we shall soon expand it even further), the original formulation is very tight...
...After the second destruction, in 70 C.E., it was different...
...Thus, well over half the document speaks anachronistically of cult, Temple, government and priesthood...
...But a question of puzzling philosophical depth has been raised...
...In some ways, for the Jewish people they never have...
...It enjoys the same authority as Scripture...
...First, smoke from a fire is used to drive out the bees so that the honey can be safely collected...
...The Holy Spirit is not alleged to speak here...
...Judaism has thus defined Torah in two media, written and oral...
...What the second-century sages of the Mishnah have to teach the generations of the last decades of the 20th century and the first of the 21st, is how to use imagination and fantasy to confront, defy, and overcome chaos and disorder...
...If we ask ourselves why people in our own age should take an interest in this program of long ago, the answer is not difficult to find...
...Its wise sayings, laws and outlook lie in the background of much of the law and lore of contemporary Judaism...
...5) Kodashim, laws for the conduct of the priestly cult and the Temple...
...Pseudepigraphic works date primarily from the first two centuries before the common era to the first two centuries after...
...was anachronistic...
...The reason is, the Mishnah constitutes Torah...
...In Hebrew, the alternative answers of the school of Shammai and the school of Hillel each contain exactly the same number of syllables...
...All things are in order, and therefore all things are hallowed by a God who orders all things: so said the priests' creation-tale...
...This is not surprising, since these are the named authorities whose mostly unnamed students collected, organized and laid out the document as we now have it...
...The very center was inaccessible...
...Or should we treat as fact only what has actually happened...
...Let us see if we can make some sense out of, and even learn from, this wonderful passage...
...after three generations the exiles returned...
...Paradoxically, most of the authorities named in the Mishnah lived in the century and a half prior to the promulgation of the document, so the claim that its contents derived from Moses at Sinai through a long chain of oral tradition is contradicted by facts stated in the document itself...
...of ordinary water that, because of the circumstance of its collection and location, possesses extraordinary power, of the commonplace corpse and ubiquitous diseased person...
...Jerusalem was closed to the Jews...
...Both therefore also agree that once we have access to the honey, so that we may make use of it, the honey is susceptible to uncleanness...
...And so the debate is opened...
...The difference between the two houses is the difference between the potential and the actual...
...The Mishnah does not speak of sacred symbols and holy things but of pots and pans...
...The House of Shammai says "When one will smoke out" And the House of Hillel says, "When one will have broken...
...What is potential is not taken into account, only what is actual...
...It is small-minded, picayune, obvious, dull, routine— everything its age was not...
...In applying the law, should we take account of what potentially may happen...
...For example, the fourth division, on civil and criminal law, describes an elaborate political structure involving king, priest, Temple and court...
...The Hebrew has a balance that is difficult, if not impossible, to reproduce in English...
...Its disputes are about matters that are hardly urgent and the disputants are faceless...
...and (6) Taharot, laws regarding the preservation of cultic purity both in the Temple and under certain domestic circumstances, with special reference to the table and bed...
...of genitalia and excrement, toilet seats and the flux of penises...
...That enormous task, undertaken by each generation, accounts for the power of the Mishnah to speak to age succeeding age...
...We are, of course, expected to know that Chapters 11 through 15 of Leviticus deal with questions of cleanness and uncleanness and that Leviticus 11:34 deals specifically with the uncleanness of liquids...
...In the next 300 or 400 years it was amplified by the Gemara, or Talmuds, in two versions: Babylonian and Palestinian...
...Apocalyptic writings purport to reveal mysteries beyond the understanding of human knowledge—for example, the end of time, the messianic age Both IV Ezra and Baruch are apocalyptic books, exploring through their visions the nature of God, the function and names of angels, and the end of days...
...The AMAZING Mishnah JACOB NEUSER added the oral law—the Talmud, comprised of the Mishnah and Gemara...
...Thus, unlike many of the writers of the Dead Sea Scrolls, the authors of the Mishnah make no effort at imitating the Hebrew of the Hebrew Bible...
...Discourse on a theme begins and ends as if all things are self-evident...
...The First Jewish Revolt against Rome (6670 C.E...
...The Mishnah therefore makes a judgment that imagination and will can reshape reality, regain a system, reestablish an order upon which a trustworthy existence can be built...
...The Hebrew Bible is relatively accessible...
...The discourse takes up questions internal to a system that is never introduced and identified...
...First, lefs give it a little structure...
...With this background we can restate the Mishnah, interpolating words that would be understood by any intelligent reader: A. [The topic is honey from] honeycombs: From what point [is the honey from honeycombs] susceptible to uncleanness as liquid...
...indeed, it is a kind of poetry...
...Although the text does not make it explicit, it is nonetheless clear that to complete the Mishnah and comprehend it there must be the presence of an active intellect, a participant who is the hearer...
...and the prophets handed it down to the men of the Great Assembly" (Pirkei Avot, 1:1...
...Because the Mishnah does not generalize, it allows us to look for what is general in all of its particularities...
...The whole of the fifth division (the conduct of the priestly cult) and sixth division (the maintenance of cultic purity in the sacrificial system along the lines laid out in the book of Leviticus), as well as a good part of the second division (which takes up the conduct of the cult on special days, e.g., the sacrifices offered on the Day of Atonement, Passover, etc...
...Since it covers topics of both practical and theoretical interest, we might suppose it is a schoolbook...
...That group collected what was handed down from the preceding century and from the legacy of Israelite literature before that time, and revised and reshaped the whole into the Mishnah...
...Since it cites the claims of authorities now dead, it is also a corpus of tradition...
...It seems clear that what we have here is the announcement of a topic, followed by a question relating to the topic, and then two alternative answers: A. Honeycombs: From what point are they susceptible to uncleanness as liquid...
...the Temple area was declared permanently off-limits to Jews...
...We are in the presence of the old philosophical problem of the acorn and the oak, the egg and the chicken...
...B. The House of Shammai says, "When one will smoke out" C. The House of Hillel says, "When one will have broken...
...Once the Talmuds cite a Mishnah pericope, they commonly ask, "What is the source of these words...
...In this context, it is not difficult to find points of commonality between one age of uncertainty and another, also cut loose from its ancient moorings...
...The first group includes those who lived between the destruction of the Temple in 70 C.E...
...But that is only background...
...In the opening chapter of the tractate Pirkei Avot (Sayings of the Fathers), the Mishnah is linked to Moses on Sinai through the ages down to the earliest-named authorities of the Mishnah: "Moses received the Torah at Sinai and handed it down to Joshua...
...the elders to the prophets...
...Roman emperor Hadrian (Aelius Hadrianus) and the Roman god Jupiter Capitolinus...
...But it is also Scripture as a whole, the Hebrew Bible, Tanach.* But even this is only the written law...
...Even today the Mishnah, together with the Talmuds and related writings, is studied and guides the life of Jews throughout the world—Reform, Orthodox, Conservative, Reconstructionist and secular A Brief Mishnah Lesson: Try It, You Can Do It Too Here is the final paragraph of the Mishnah, M.Uqs...
...It means to defy a world of large disorders and immodest demands...
...Then a great and noble war was fought to regain Jerusalem, rebuild the Temple and restore the cult...
...Together, the Mishnah and the Gemara are also the Talmud, a somewhat confusing double use of the word Talmud...
...So too did the Mishnah...
...And it is the hearer who ultimately makes sense of, perceives the sense in, the Mishnah...
...B. The House of Shammai says: "[From the time] when one will smoke out [the bees, so that the honey is potentially accessible...
...There are a few other such documents— the Vedas in India, the Zoroastrian Avesta in Iran and India, the Koran in Islam, and, in the Christian West, the Bible—the Old and New Testaments as Christianity put them together...
...On the surface, the issue is one of cleanness...
...Regulation creates sanctification within the ordinary...
...While the Mishnah clearly addresses Israel, the Jewish people, it is remarkably indifferent to the Hebrew Scriptures...
...But its laws require the active participation of the mind of the hearer, and thus are meant to be learned through reason, not merely obeyed as ritual...
...And * Pseudepigrapha refers to a genre of writing in which authorship is attributed (falsely) to an ancient worthy, e.g , the patriarchs, Moses, David, Solomon...
...and the end of the second century...
...The Mishnah is made up of sayings bearing the names of authorities who lived for the most part between 70 C.E...
...These writings shaped worlds...
...What are they trying to say...
...No one pretends to talk like Moses, or write like Moses...
...Since the Mishnah makes statements describing what people should and should not do, we might suppose it is a law code...
...Israel regained its homeland...
...So the Mishnah bore the status of divine revelation right alongside the Pentateuch...
...It describes the house and household of Israel, an architect's plan in tedious detail, as useful plans must be...
...What is the principle...
...Both challenge the imagination and the will...
...the culmination of the First Jewish Revolt against Rome) and the advent of the Second Jewish Revolt against Rome, the latter led by Simeon Bar Kokhba between 132 and 135 C.E...
...Moreover, the later set of names is represented far more abundantly than the earlier...
...Why should Jews from the end of the second century to our own day regard the study of the Mishnah as a holy act, a deed of service to God...
...But at the time of the Mishnah it was not the Jews and their kings, priests and judges, but the Romans who conducted the government in the land of Israel...
...The Mishnah tells us something about how things were...
...The authors efface all traces not only of individuality but even of their own participation in the formation of the document...
Vol. 14 • January 1989 • No. 1
