Mishna 1:1 Conversations with the Fathers
Ein Yaakov
- The World of Talmudic Aggada
By Dr.
Moshe Simon-Shoshan
Lecture 3
- Mishna 1:1
Conversations with the Fathers
What is
the Ein Yaakov?
This class
will use the Ein Yaakov as its text.
The Ein Yaakov, perhaps the most important and popular aggadic
collection ever to be compiled, was authored by R. Yaakov Ibn Habib. R. Yaakov was a Sephardic rabbi who
fled
The Ein
Yaakov is a collection of all the aggadic sections of the Talmud, with a
commentary by R. Yaakov. It is, in a
sense, a photo negative of the
We will use
the Ein Yaakovs selections as a guide to studying Aggada in the first
chapter of Massekhet Berakhot.
As we shall see, it is not always clear what motivated R. Yaakov ibn
Habib to identify certain passages as aggadic.
This merely emphasizes the difficulty in distinguishing between Halakha
and Aggada in the Talmud, and the need to read them in light of each other.
Passage
#1: The very first mishna
The Ein
Yaakov opens with the very first mishna in Berakhot and in the entire
six orders of the Mishna. I am not
entirely sure why this text is considered Aggada, but it offers us an
opportunity to consider some of the literary aspects of the Mishna. The text reads:
From what
time may one recite the Shema in the evening?
From the time
that the priests enter [their houses] in order to eat their teruma, until
the end of the first watch.
These are the
words of R. Eliezer.
The Sages
say: Until midnight.
R. Gamliel
says: Until the dawn comes up.
Once it
happened that his sons came home [late] from a wedding feast and they said to
him: We have not yet recited the [evening] Shema.
He said to
them: If the dawn has not yet come up you are still bound to recite.
And not in
respect to this alone did they so decide, but wherever the Sages say until
midnight, the precept may be performed until the dawn comes up. The precept of
burning the fat and the [sacrificial] pieces, too, may be performed until the
dawn comes up. Similarly, all the
[offerings] that are to be eaten within one day may lawfully be consumed until
the coming up of the dawn.
Why then did
the Sages say until midnight?
In order to
keep a man far from transgression.
This opening
mishna drives home that Mishna is not, as it is often claimed to be, some sort
of code or handbook, meant to systematically delineate the requirements of
Halakha. In order to get a sharper
picture of the Mishnas distinctive style, it will be helpful to compare this
passage to the parallel text in the Mishneh Torah of the Rambam. The Mishneh Torah is the
halakhic code par excellence. As
Rambam writes in his introduction, the Mishneh Torah is meant to be an
all-inclusive work; the Jew only needs to learn the Mishneh Torah and the
Bible to know everything he or she needs to serve God in this word. The Rambam opens up us discussion of
the laws of Shema as follows:
1)
We [are obligated to] recite keriat shema twice daily - in the evening and in the
morning - as [Deuteronomy 6:7] states:
"...when you lie down and when you rise" - i.e., when people are accustomed to
sleep - this being the night - and when people are accustomed to rise - this
being daytime.
2)
And what is it that one recites? These
three sections
The Rambam
opens by establishing that there is a requirement to say keriat shema
twice a day. He then presents a
source from the Torah for this obligation.
Next, the Rambam defines the term keriat shema by listing the
exact passages from the Torah that must be recited. Everything is laid out in an orderly
and systematic fashion, starting with basic principles and primary sources and
moving on to more specific detail.
Note that he does not get into a discussion of the technical question of the
parameters of night and day until halakha number nine.
The Mishna,
in contrast, opens with the question, From what time may one recite the
Shema in the evening? The Mishna never stops to inform us that there is a
requirement to say keriat shema, or to tell us when we are required to do
so, or even to define the term keriat shema. Rather, the Mishna
simply opens with a question about a detail of the evening keriat shema. How are we to understand the
difference between the Mishnas and the Mishneh Torahs presentations?
In order to
answer this question, let us consider two possible openings for a short story.
The first
possibility is as follows:
At the end of the 19th century, in a Ukrainian town called Boyberik
(AKA Anatevka), there lived a pious man named Tevye, who was a milkman. He had seven daughters and many
problems.
The other
possibility is to open the story with a monologue of a man talking about his
life. We know nothing about the man. Only gradually do we deduce that the
mans name is Tevye, and that he is a milkman with seven daughters who lives in
Boyberik.
The first
possibility lays out the world of the story to the reader at the outset, while
the second one draws the reader in by making him work to figure out what is
going on in the story, making him a partner in the creation of the world of the
story. So too we might argue that
the Rambam lays out the world of the Halakha clearly and unambiguously to the
passive reader, while the Mishna engages the reader, forcing him to reconstruct
the underlying assumption of the Mishnas question about the time for the
evening keriat shema, namely
- there is something called keriat shema that must be read at night.
However, one
can understand the second approach to telling the story in another way, which
more closely approximates the Mishnas style in this case. Perhaps the author assumes that the
reader has read other stories about Tevye and knows all about him. The reader is expected to instantly
recognize Tevyes distinctive voice and to bring all of his knowledge about
Tevye to the new story. The reader
who needs to reconstruct Tevyes world from the details of the story is an
outsider, not the intended reader of the story.
So too, while
the Mishneh Torah is designed for a reader who knows nothing about
Judaism, except for what he has read in the Bible, the Mishna assumes that the
reader is intimately familiar with halakhic life.
There is no need to introduce the practice of keriat shema,
because it is familiar to every Jewish child.
The child knows all the words by heart and, by the time he studies this
Mishna, presumably even knows that the requirement to say the Shema twice
a day is derived from the verse, When you lie down and when you rise.
The Mishna is
not a text that stands alone, that presents itself in a clear, self-explanatory
voice. Rather, it is a dialogic
text. Its voice can be understood
only in the context of other voices such as the practices with which the
reader is presumed to be familiar.
The Mishna exists only within the context of the living tradition of Oral Law
and is meant to be studied by those who live in that context.
The problem
is that this tradition, for all its continuity, is in constant flux. As a result, the Mishna is often
inherently ambiguous. The way one
reads the Mishna depends on where and when one is situated within the tradition. As the context in which the Mishna is
read changes, so will its meaning.
This quality of the Mishna leads to the many different interpretations of the
Mishna offered by the different rabbis of the Talmud.
Another way
in which the Mishna is dialogic is the range of different forms that the Mishna
uses. The Mishna mixes together
statements of basic principle with reports and stories, as well as case law, in
a way that is very unusual for a legal document.
The different forms can also be seen as different voices that are in
constant conversation within the Mishna.
The interaction between our mishnas story and the rest of the mishna
offers a good illustration of how this works.
Once again the story reads:
Once it
happened that [R. Gamliels] sons came home [late] from a wedding feast and they
said to him: We have not yet recited the [evening] Shema.
He said to
them: If the dawn has not yet come up you are still bound to recite.
I have loved
this story ever since I first studied it as a child. I pictured R. Gamliels sons
stumbling through the backdoor of their house in the wee hours of the morning,
hoping not to disturb their sleeping family.
To their surprise, they find their father at the kitchen table in his
dressing gown, poring over a Talmudic folio.
The sight of their father reminds them that the festivities have
distracted them from their obligation to accept the yolk of Heaven through the
recitation of the Shema.
Their father looks up from his book with a mixture of concern and rebuke. He informs them that they can still
rectify their lax behavior, as long as the night has not yet ended.
This story is
thus a classic family drama which raises some of the most universal tensions in
human existence: the tension between fathers and sons and the tension between
the need for creativity and self-expression, represented by the wedding, and the
Halakhas demand that we live an orderly and well-regulated life, represented by
the requirement to say keriat shema.
In the end, order is restored.
The sons return to the house of their father and fulfill their
obligations to their Father in Heaven.
However, it
would be simplistic to read this story as a triumph of regularity, demanded by
Halakha and the older generation, over youthful exuberance. Indeed, the Halakha requires that
these young men rejoice in front of their friends bride no less that it
requires them to proclaim their allegiance to the one true God by reciting the
Shema. Both sides of this
conflict are rooted in the Halakha, and there is no simple way to reconcile
them. There will be other late
nights, and they may not end with all obligations fulfilled.
But what is
this story, and scores of others like it, doing in the Mishna, a work of law? The story does communicate R.
Gamliels position that one may recite the evening Shema throughout the
night. However, this cannot be the
storys primary function within the Mishnas discourse. Right before the Mishna tells this
story, it delineates in concise, apodictic terms the range of positions
regarding the latest time to recite the Shema:
until the
end of the first watch.
These are the
words of R. Eliezer.
The Sages
say: Until midnight.
R. Gamliel
says: Until the dawn comes up.
By the time
the reader gets to the story, he already knows R. Gamliels position. In general, laws that the rabbis
transmit through stories could just as well be formulated as more abstract legal
rulings or principles. What then
drives these jurists to become storytellers? What role do stories like this play
in the Mishna and in classical halakhic discourse in general?
Let us think
about the implications of choosing a particular formulation to transmit a
halakha. When the Mishna states that R. Gamliel says the Shema can be
recited, until the dawn comes up, it is expressing a general rule. In all places and at all times, the
Shema can be said until dawn.
Halakha is thus presented as a universal and eternal set of norms. When an individual says the Shema
at the right time, he links himself to this wider framework.
When we tell
the story of R. Gamliel and his sons, we also teach that one can say the
Shema so long as the dawn has not yet come up. Now, however, we move from
specific to general. The Halakha
does not emerge from a universal norm but from a one-time event that involves
specific people. The focus of
Halakha becomes individual actions at a given time and place, not universal
norms. These actions generate the
rules, and not vice versa.
So while the
two parts of our mishna teach the same practical halakha, they express
two very different views on the nature of that halakha and Halakha in
general. One the one hand, the first
part of the mishna expresses a view of Halakha as an abstract system of
universal norms, whose application to the practical world is ultimately
secondary. On the other hand, the
second part of the mishna sees Halakha as nothing but a series of discrete
actions taken by individuals in different contexts and at different times and
places.
These two
views of Halakha are embodied by two different types of modern halakhic works. On the one hand, we have works of
lomdus, works of conceptual and analytic halakhic analysis as exemplified
(perhaps) by
On the other
hand, we have practical halakhic works of the sort that have become so popular
in recent years, the paradigm of which is the Shemirat Shabbat Ke-hilkhata. These works do organize the
Halakha in a certain way. However,
their main purpose is to provide practical rulings on a wide range of subjects
and different situations that the contemporary Jew may encounter. These works do not provide extensive
explanations of the theory behind their rulings.
The important thing is for the individual Jew to do the right thing in
any given situation.
While today
books generally take one or another of these approaches to Halakha but not
both - depending on their intended audience, the Mishna combines these two
approaches by presenting Halakha using different formulations and approaches. Often, as in our case, the same
halakha is presented twice, as both a universal norm and a story which was a
one-time event. The Mishna advocates
both of these potentially contradictory approaches to Halakha, bringing them
into dialogue with each other and urging us, paradoxically, to embrace both.
Finally, I
would like to call attention to one last aspect of this mishna, which also
illustrates that the Mishna is a dialogic text rather than one which seeks to
communicate a single, unambiguous truth.
The Mishna makes repeated references to the world of priests and
sacrifices. At the beginning,
instead of simply saying that the requirement to say the evening Shema
begins at nightfall, the Mishna somewhat cryptically states that the requirement
begins from the time the priests enter [their houses] in order to eat their
teruma. The Mishna, in using this circumlocution, seems almost as if it is
going out of its way to link the laws of the Shema with the laws of
purity and sacrifices. At the end of
the passage, the Mishna adds that R. Gamliels ruling that the Shema
really can be said until dawn, and not till midnight as often stated, also
applies to various sacrifices, whose stated deadline for consumption is
midnight.
The Mishna
seems to be establishing a dialogue between the world of the
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