Making God's Word Work: A Guide to the Mishnah

378 Pages·2004·21.6 MB·English

by  Jacob Neusner

Making God's Word Work
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Making God's
Word Work
A Guide to the Mishnah
JACOB NEUSNER
continuum
NEW YORK • LONDON
In Memory of
RAFI ZAIMAN
(1968-1980)
2004
The Continuum International Publishing Group Inc
15 East 26 Street, New York, NY 10010
The Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX
Copyright © 2004 by Jacob Neusner
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying,
recording, or otherwise, without the written permission of the publishers.
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Neusner, Jacob, 1932-
Making God's word work : a guide to the Mishnah / Jacob Neusner.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-8264-1556-3 (he : alk. paper) - ISBN 0-8264-1557-1 (pbk. :
alk. paper)
1. Mishnah—Criticism, interpretation, etc. I. Title.
BM497.8.N4764 2004
296.1'2306-dc22
2003015423
Contents
Preface: A Personal Note 7
Introduction 11
Bibliography 19
THE MISHNAH IN RELIGIOUS CONTEXT
1. Making God's Word Work
Tractate Abot 27
MONOTHEISM AND JUSTICE
2. God's Justice and the Ordeal of the Accused Wife
Tractate Sotah 47
3. God's Justice: Israel and the Gentiles
Tractates Sanhedrin-Makkot and Abodah Zarah 63
CORPORATE ISRAEL AND THE INDIVIDUAL ISRAELITE
4. Corporate Israel as a Moral Entity
Tractates Sheqalim and Bikkurim 85
5. Personal Autonomy
Tractates Arakhin and Nedarim-Nazir 100
6. Ownership and Possession
Tractates ShebHt and Shabbat-Erubin 118
7. The Norm and the Exception
Tractates Demaci and Tohorot 137
8. When Israelites Deliberately Violate the Norms
Tractates Sanhedrin-Makkot, Keritot, and Horayot 155
5
6 II Contents
ii
ISRAEL: THE FAMILY AND THE HOUSEHOLD
9. The Israelite Family
Tractates Qiddushin, Ketubot, Sotah, Gittin, and Yebamot 175
10. The Israelite Household: Responsibility and Intentionality
Tractates Baba Qamma and Baba Mesia (Chapters 1-5) 194
11. The Israelite Household: When Intention Does Not Count
Tractates Baba Mesia (Chapters 6-10) and Baba Batra 213
GOD'S PRESENCE IN ISRAEL'S SOCIAL ORDER
12. God's Perpetual Presence in Israelite Contention: The Oath
Tractate Shebifot 231
13. God the Landlord, Israel the Tenant
God the Landlord: Tractates ShebUt, cOrlah, and Kilayim
Israel the Tenant: Tractates Macaserot
and Hallah-Makhshirin 247
14. Eating Together: Israel's Presence in God's House
Tractates Hagigah, Macaser Sheni, and
Bikkurim (Again) 268
15. Dwelling Together: God's Presence in the Israelite Household
Tractates Pesahim, Sukkah, and Yoma 286
ISRAEL IN GOD'S CONTEXT
16. God and the Individual Israelite
Tractate Hullin 307
17. Israel in History and in Eternity: The Messiah
Tractates Rosh Hashanah, Tacanit, Zebahim, and Sotah 325
THE MISHNAH AS MODEL
18. How the Topical, Rhetorical and Logical Media
of the Mishnah Convey its Theological Message 349
19. The Mishnah in Context: Making God's Word Work Today 365
Acknowledgments 375
Preface
A Personal Note
One time [after the destruction of the Temple in August 70] Rabban Yohanan ben
Zakkai was going forth from Jerusalem, with R. Joshua following after him. He saw the
house of the sanctuary lying in ruins.
R. Joshua said, "Woe is us for this place that lies in ruins, the place in which the
sins of Israel used to be atoned for."
He said to him, "My son, do not be distressed. We have another mode of atonement,
which is like [atonement through sacrifice], and what is that? It is deeds of loving kind-
ness.
"For so it is said, 'For I desire mercy and not sacrifice, and the knowledge of God
rather than burnt offerings' (Hos. 6:6)."
—THE FATHERS ACCORDING TO RABBI NATHAN IV:V. 2
AS I WRITE THESE WORDS, I turn seventy-one. I have lived out my allotted
seventy years, spending most of my time from age twenty-two on in the
study of the Mishnah and the documents that carried it forward. These are
the Tosefta, the two Talmuds, and the Midrash compilations of late antiquity,
the first six centuries of the Common Era (C.E.). I have walked an absolutely
straight path, each step directly linked to the one before and leading to the one
following. That choice of a life's work came about as a direct consequence of
the formation of a young Jew's consciousness in the shadow of the Holocaust
and in the light of the sequential, and consequential, creation of the State of
Israel. Mine has been a life lived in response to the age in which it took place.
I celebrated becoming a bar mitzvah at age thirteen on Shemini Aseret of
5706, the 29th of September of 1945. At that very season the concentration
camps still harbored Jews, and death factories were just cooling down. The Jew-
ish world had not yet transformed the catastrophe into its mythopoeic event.
A whole generation would pass before Jewry in the exilic communities formu-
lated its identification around what came to be called the Holocaust. For me,
the murder of the Jews of Europe by Germany and its allies was vastly over-
shadowed and outmatched by the drama of the creation of the State of Israel
7
8 || Preface
and its difficult War of Independence in 1948-1949. As to what only much
later, around 1960, we learned to call the Shoah, I had only the vaguest sense.
But then, in autumn 1953, I found myself profoundly changed by my ini-
tial intellectual encounter with the horror. That took place when, as a student
at Oxford, I found at Blackwells in Oxford Gerald Reitlinger's Final Solution. It
had just appeared. That was in my first weeks there, separated from home and
family by three thousand miles of ocean. At that age I would read anything Jew-
ish—from my earliest years, as early as I can remember, I aspired to become a
Reform rabbi—and here was something about a subject of acute interest. As a
boy, I had heard of the matter, though I knew of no one lost in the calamity.
My family had long ago lost all touch with whatever relatives we might have
had in Europe. Nor was there anyone I knew in the State of Israel. Now, here
I was back in Europe where it had happened.
I spent the next days reading Reitlinger's book and doing little else, and
for weeks afterward I found it difficult to speak to any gentiles. I went off as
soon as I could to see Germany and meet people who had done such things.
But my main perplexity concerned the future: how were we Jews to respond,
to rebuild? My reading on the German war against the Jews of Europe, as fur-
ther memoirs and historical accounts appeared, then led me to ask how prior
generations had coped with catastrophe, rebuilding broken hearts and ruined
lives. I concluded that the age closest in its principal issues to the one in which
I would make my life, an age of reconstruction and renewal, was late antiquity,
when the Temple of Jerusalem was destroyed and Jewry reconstructed its life
on the foundations of hope. I saw the world as "before" and "after," and I saw
myself as one among the fortunate few who had survived to find solace.
It was then that I discovered the question that would define my life: What
next? Can there be another chapter in the biography of God's people? I wanted
to know, what do people do after the old world ends, in the shadow of disas-
ter, but as survivors? The human situation is captured by Joshua's question to
his master, Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai, what do we do now? Most genera-
tions need not ask, because they are nurtured by answers long ago worked out
and well established in the social order. But ours did—and does—ask.
To pursue my question, I needed an education in Judaism, which my
upbringing in a Reform temple in West Hartford, Connecticut, had not amply
provided. To learn how to read the pertinent writings I spent the next six year
of study in a U.S. rabbinical school (1954-1960), including a year at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem and at an Israeli yeshivah. In the last of those
years, at a nearby university I also completed my doctoral studies in the acad-
emic study of religion. For my doctoral dissertation I chose the life of Yohanan
ben Zakkai, because he was universally represented as the man who in the sum-
mer of 70 C.E. had led the circle of Torah-sages and their disciples out of
Jerusalem on the very eve of its destruction. He and his disciples had formed
for Judaism the foundations of its long and vital life thereafter. There I found
A Personal Note || 9
my model for the new age. One thing led to another, and now, five decades
later, I am still engaged by the same documents, trying to solve the same prob-
lems of rebuilding, reconstruction, and renewal.
Here is what I have found out. In the pages of this book I show how the
law, religion, theology, history, and literature of formative Rabbinic Judaism
speak a single message. I define that message. But the medium of the Torah's
theological message and religious encounter would be, and is, mainly law:
norms of conduct realizing norms of conviction.
When, therefore, I say in the opening lines of the Introduction that the
Mishnah is the crown jewel of Rabbinic Judaism in its formative age, I main-
tain a bold claim. It is that that document, in partnership with Scripture, pro-
vides a model and a guide for generations beyond catastrophe. It addresses the
age of survivors of the end of the old era and the beginning of what we have
power to define by ourselves.
God lives in the details of the law of the Torah. The Mishnah does not
make its statement in so many words, but in so many deeds of action or
restraint. Furthermore, to ask the Mishnah to address the agenda of our issues
—those of theodicy, for example, or even of theology, history, and eschatology—
is to deny it its own integrity and authentic hearing. The Mishnah's law focuses
our attention on other matters altogether, matters of normative behavior and
of the theory of Israel's social order lived in the aspect of eternity. We are the
ones who intuit the context of calamity and recovery that we think brought
into being these long-ago writings, the Torah and the Mishnah alike.
But to reduce the legal system and the social theology set forth by the
Mishnah to its historical setting is to misrepresent as a matter of history what
was a system of ahistorical, logical thought. The Mishnah aimed at transcend-
ing the transient world of time and circumstance. Actions cohered with atti-
tudes, behavior with belief, the whole a statement of the human condition
when sanctified in God's model: "You shall be holy, for I the Lord your God
am holy" (Lev. 19:2).
And that account of matters describes the intent of the shank of this book,
which is to show precisely how theology inheres in law, each component of the
religious system of the Halakhah embodied in its full and detailed particular-
ity.
I regard as a singular Zekhut that my lifelong friends Rabbi Joel H. and
Mrs. Ann Zaiman have accepted this book as a memorial for their son, Rafi.
These eighteen chapters plus one are meant as a living monument to his
memory.
Jacob Neusner
Bard College
Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, USA
July 28, 2003