The Daily Mishna

[thedailymishna]

Qinnim: Chapter 3, Mishnayot 5-6; Kelim: Chapter 1, Mishna 1

Death brings an orchestra.  While an animal lives, it has but a single voice; following death, seven.  Horns become trumpets, leg bones, flutes.  Its hide, a drum; stomach parts, lyres; innards, harp strings.  

Eternity inheres within us all.

[thedailymishna]

Qinnim: Chapter 2, Mishnayot 1-3

El’azar Hisma states: Qinnim and Niddah, these are the essence of the laws; calculations of the seasons and geometry, the desserts to wisdom.  Abot 3:18.

Qinnim departs from the typical direct language of mishnayot, so frequently bending to concision, almost to the point of abruptness.  Our tractate, frequently cited as the most difficult in the entire mishnaic corpus, utilizes the distinct and elaborate language of complex mathematical logic.  Qinnim, according to tradition, was said to be authored by R Joshua. 

Certain sections of Niddah similarly read like increasingly complex and knotty hypothetical puzzles.  The authority named in these sections is none other than the same tanna, R Joshua.

Problems of logic, including its application in astrological calculations and gematria, were philosophical constructs, not of traditional Jewish thought, but of contemporary philosophers of Greek thought.  R Joshua was known for his openness to the logic puzzles of the Alexandrine Greeks, as well as maintaining continuing dialogue with philosophers of Greek thought.

In his statement, R El’azar Hisma, a student of R Joshua, seeks to defend his teacher’s work.  All these subject matters utilize a uniform methodology, traditionally employed in Greek thought.  One might think the utilization of this foreign methodology adversely affects the spiritual appraisal of these texts.  

For R El’azar, methodology matters less than the substance.  Despite the use of Greek logic puzzles, Qinnim and Niddah are still classified, as other areas of study of holy law, as “essentials.” Astrological calculations and gematria, subjects from which we may glean some academic pleasure, these qualify as mere aftercourses of wisdom.  

[thedailymishna]

Qinnim: Chapter 1, Mishnayot 2-4

Mishnaic permutations, circumscribed by limitlessness.  The biblical and logical rules of the qen are simple and few.  A pair of birds offered in fulfillment of an obligation is divided into a sin offering and a burnt offering.  A pair of birds brought in fulfillment of a vow is offered wholly as a burnt offering.  

If birds offered as burnt offerings are mixed up with those designated as sin offerings, or if different pairs of birds brought for diverse purposes are mixed up, we have to figure out how to reckon with the subsequent confusion.  Jacob Nuesner, A History of the Mishnaic Law of Holy Things, Part Six: The Mishnaic System of Sacrifice and Sanctuary (1980) at 210.  

Basic facts, repeated, reinscribed, multiplied; the text introduces incremental complexity, secondary combinations, known and unknown factors.  The irrefutable logic of Qinnim, flickering between comprehension and repudiation.

For those who read Hebrew, helpful diagrams can be downloaded here.

While strolling the kids to our apartment, a visit to the birdhouse by the window at the end of the hall.  An egalitarian design.  The holes to access seeds are located just slightly above the perches.  Result being that only small birds can sit and eat.  Larger birds wait beneath, collecting shards.

[thedailymishna]

Middot: Chapter 5, Mishnayot 3-4; Qinnim: Chapter 1, Mishna 1

Memorized texts, admissions of forgetfulness.  Eli’ezer b Ya’aqob confesses that he cannot recall the use of the Chamber of the Wood and the southwestern corner of the courtyard.  In each situation, Abba Shaul supplies the answer.

The mishnaic spools frequently contain conflicting opinions, but rarely incorporate statements of memory lapse.  The editorial decision to include this admission, particularly in a work prizing brevity, is striking in its strangeness.  The text could have merely supplied the answer.

One resolution unpacks the process of fixing mishnaic formulae.  According to Huna, Eli’ezer b Ya’aqob is the author of Middot.  Yoma 16a.  The original form of the tractate perhaps included only Eli’ezer’s confession; Abba Shaul’s statements perhaps a later gloss.  But when the time came to fix the text, the mishnaic editor did not remove Eli’ezer’s initial difficulty, perhaps had no authority to disturb the original author’s statement.

The loftiness of Middot’s concluding sentiment suggest that it was the last tractate of the order.  And in certain readings, Qinnim is actually read prior to Tamid.

[thedailymishna]

Middot: Chapter 4, Mishna 7; Chapter 5, Mishnayot 1-2

Among the arts, architecture is unique in that it is inseparable from its function. And yet as an art, its form must still inspire. The temple, narrow in the back and wide in the front, like a lion on its haunches; the building, as if living, breathing.  Architecture, engineering veneration.

Or aspiring to horror.

The effect was that of a Cyclopean city of no architecture known to man or to human imagination, with vast aggregations of night-black masonry embodying monstrous perversions of geometrical laws and attaining the most grotesque extremes of sinister bizarrerie. There were truncated cones, sometimes terraced or fluted, surmounted by tall cylindrical shafts here and there bulbously enlarged and often capped with tiers of thinnish scalloped discs; and strange beetling, table-like constructions suggesting piles of multitudinous rectangular slabs or circular plates or five-pointed stars with each one overlapping the one beneath.

H.P. Lovecraft, “At the Mountains of Madness,” in The Complete Fiction Collection, vol I (2012) at 393-94.  See also Jorge Luis Borges, “There Are More Things,” in Collected Fictions (1999) at 437 (dedicated in memory of Lovecraft).

[thedailymishna]

Middot: Chapter 4, Mishnayot 4-6

Mishnaic mystics.  The temple’s physical description in yesterday’s mishna is not taken from the historical Herodian building, but from Yehezqel’s eschatological visions.  Not so much floor plans for future construction, as grist for mystical speculation: 

[The mishnaic model of the temple] served as the model for esoteric discourse.  In this fashion the ancient rabbi could “move” in his mind through the different parts of the Temple and reach the inner Sanctuary where the Shekhina dwells, as did R Ishmael ben Elisha, who, although living after the destruction of the Temple, was able mentally to enter into the inner Sanctuary and offer the sacraments of the High Priest.

Jose Faur, Homo Mysticus: A Guide to Maimonides’ Guide to the Perplexed (1999) at 37.

Spiritual heights through architecture.

[thedailymishna]

Middot: Chapter 4, Mishnayot 1-3

All doors open into holiness.

[thedailymishna]

Middot: Chapter 3, Mishnayot 3-5

Iron cannot touch the stones used to build the altar, because “iron was created to shorten men’s lives.”  

Or, as Ted Hughes once described the innovations of the Iron Age, “Violence is an extrapolation of the cutting edge into the orbit of the smile.”  Ted Hughes, Tales From Ovid (1997) at 11.

[thedailymishna]

Middot: Chapter 2, Mishnayot 3-5

Days of future past.  Contra Nuesner, our mishna actually purports to describe historical practice and, using Yehezqel's prophecy, tells of the third temple.  The women’s court did not contain a roof, but this is the way it will be in the future.

A simple, literal translation of the latter clause's original Hebrew suggests a different interpretation.  “Kakh hayu ‘atidot lihyot” is phrased in the past tense, and pluralized; lit., “this how the futures were to be.”  Less a dogmatic certitude regarding the stylistic details of the future temple, than a statement of how past believers thought one of many futures might turn out.

No matter the size of the pilgrimage, Jerusalem always had adequate capacity.  Across millennia, half a world away, 300,000 protestors descend upon Manhattan in a protest against climate change; the city swallows them whole.

[thedailymishna]

Middot: Chapter 1, Mishna 9; Chapter 2, Mishnayot 1-2

Pythagorean tradition dictates the proper way to enter a temple is to go in from the right, make the rotation and leave from the left, matching the statement in our Mishnah.  The use of the left was standard in chthonian rites, which is in keeping with the behavior of the mourner and the excommunicated person.  Saul Lieberman, Hellenism in Jewish Palestine (1994) at 166. 

While ostensibly publicly marked, striking that the excommunicated person is still permitted access to the temple rites.

[thedailymishna]

Middot: Chapter 1, Mishnayot 6-8

In the northeastern alcove the sons of the Hasmoneans hid the stones of the altar that were defiled by the kings of Greece.  Why retain defiled stones?  The Apocrypha provides an answer.

Then Judah chose priests who cleansed the sanctuary, and bare out the defiled stones into an unclean place.  And when as they consulted what to do with the altar of burnt offerings, which was profaned, they thought it best to pull it down, lest it should be a reproach to them, because the heathen had defiled it.  So they pulled it down, and laid up the stones in the mountain of the temple in a convenient place, until there should come a prophet to show what should be done with them.

I Maccabees 4:41-46 (ellipses omitted).  

[thedailymishna]

Middot: Chapter 1, Mishnayot 3-5

Repetitions and accumulations.  Hulda, Kiphonos, Tadi, names of the gates. Tadi, the name of the southern gate referenced in Tamid, as a gate through which no human has ever entered.  Suggesting, by distinction, that this is the gate through which only the divine enters.

In a structure dedicated to a tradition of iconoclasm, the eastern gate displays an illustration of the temple itself.

[thedailymishna]

Tamid: Chapter 7, Mishna 4; Middot: Chapter 1, Mishnayot 1-2

Liturgical consistency span millennia.  Subsequent to details concerning the priestly benediction, laws related to the song of the day.  ”The Lord is My Shepherd,” in Christian tradition, a funerary psalm.  In the Hebrew liturgy recited every shabbat; an aspirational hymn for the day of redemption, the day that is wholly shabbat.

Levites nodding off during their watch are hit on their thighs, their clothing may be lit on fire.  Their screams, heard outside of the temple walls. In an odd symmetry to real life, the running back Adrian Peterson recently suspended for disciplining his son with a switch.

[thedailymishna]

Tamid: Chapter 7, Mishnayot 1-3

In the final chapter of a tractate with but a single argument, a description of the priestly benediction of peace.  In the temple, unlike the countryside, the blessing would be recited as a single benediction without “amens,” with the authentic divine name, with priests raising their hands above their heads.  

Distinctions perhaps grounded in concession.  In truth, the sole effective blessing is the one recited in Jerusalem.  After all, the divine name can be heard as far away as Jericho.  And yet, to meet popular demand, halakhic authorities permit the benediction to be recited in the villages outside of the capital.

Rosen-Zvi describes the live, almost biological, connective tissue between the temple and synagogues:

An understanding of the preoccupation of halakhists with the Temple as an existing praxis, which is not reduced to past memory or future anticipation, sheds light on other phenomena such as the Temple’s presence in synagogues, through different practices, references during prayer, piyyut and architecture.  Thus Michael Swartz claimed that the piyyutim of the order of worship on Yom Kippur are not only a memory of the past or an anticipation of things to come, but an act of worship themselves, a verbal performance of worship on the Day of Atonement. 

In the same vein, we may consider the massive presence of Temple symbolism in mosaics found in Palestinian synagogues not as a commemoration of the Temple and an anticipation of its rebuilding, not even as a visual expression of the predominance of the priestly class, but as an integral part of the staging of the synagogue, as a “little sanctuary,” to the congregation.

Ishay Rosen-Levi, The Mishnaic Sotah Ritual: Temple, Gender and Midrash (2012) at 252.

[thedailymishna]

Tamid: Chapter 5, Mishnayot 4-6

The temple as center of the universe.  The sounds and scents of the temple's proceedings fill the Jerusalem air and reach as far as Jericho.  The throwing of the magrephah, the recitation of the divine name, the turning of Ben Kattin's machine, the aroma of the incense offering, the latter causing goats on the hills of Michvar to sneeze.

The narrative mishnayot never make any direct claim to historical accuracy.  That we moderns define authenticity solely in this manner is more an issue for ourselves, not the tannaitic editors.

[thedailymishna]

Tamid: Chapter 5, Mishnayot 1-3

The mishnaic description of prayer ritual need not be understood as later retrojection onto past practice.  The liturgical conjunction of the ten commandments and the shema finds support in the Nash Papyrus, a document dated back to the 2nd century BCE.

Report from NPR: Scientists now believe that most of our memories are not accurate recall of an actual event, but are wholly reconstituted.

[thedailymishna]

Tamid: Chapter 4, Mishnayot 1-3

If, per Neusner, mishna is not a work for the past or the future, it cannot properly be said to be a work of the present either.  In this context, if one seeks within its walls a modern-style historicity, it is difficult to avoid the charge that mishna, and by extension the whole of the talmudic enterprise, represents six orders of cognitive dissonance.

It may be instinctual to shunt aside a reality of destruction by seeking refuge in worlds imagined.  But overly furrowing into the realm of the mind perhaps creates an all-consuming nostalgia.

The priestly slaughterer only sometimes stares at the sun.  Each time the tamid is offered, he always faces west.  The result is that in the mornings he faces away from the sun, in the evenings the sun is there, right before his eyes.