Who knows six? I know six, six are the books of the Mishnah.
Before the
Temple fell, the Rabbis already planning for the future of Judaism. Sacrifices
would no longer be possible. The Priestly class had become, variously, corrupt
or belligerent. The entire apparatus of ritual purity that was such an
important part of Temple-based Judaism was crumbling. What was needed was a way
of evolving and protecting our religious heritage. The Rabbis chose a series of
terse, sometimes memorable, sayings which could connect the complexity of
existence to a Jewish sense of how to behave. They chose Mishnah.
In the dozen
decades after the fall of the Temple over 4,000 of these sayings cohered,
organised around the six great challenges of life, viewed from the perspective
of ancient (male!) rabbinic leaders; Seeds, Sacred Time, Women (I did say they
were men), Civil Damages, Sacrificial Offerings and Ritual Purity.
For the
last six years I’ve been studying Mishnah at a rate of one Seder a year. I’ve presented
my learning annually on the eve of Passover. There is a rabbinic fast, for the
firstborn, where we share an empathy with those who died on the eve of that
first celebration of freedom. But a feast to celebrate the completion of a
Seder of Mishnah trumps that obligation to fast.
This year,
this Friday morning, I will be completing my sixth Siyum of Mishnah, and with
it, a completion of the Six Orders we sing about over the Seder Dinner. I invite
you to join me. We will be davening at 8:30 in our usual Zoom room. The Siyum
will be shortly after 9am – you will have to bring your own feast.
And what
have I learnt? Let me share three observations.
I often use
the analogy of a diamond to describe rabbinic Judaism. It doesn’t really matter
where one starts – any facet will serve as a place to begin. The key is to keep
exploring and eventually enough facets will emerge to allow an over-arching
shape to be grasped. I’m not done with rabbinic learning – far from it – but at
this point I’ve passed over each facet of our spiritual diamond. And it is
beautiful. Beauty is a huge part of the joy of studying Mishnah; mnemonics,
poetry, wit, metaphor are all at play. If you want to survive, it helps to be
delightful.
The Mishnah
is a celebration of the importance of human action. It’s all but entirely God-free
and it has almost no interest in our emotional state. Mishnah calls on each of
us to roll up our sleeves and get on with things. There is no waiting around
for miracles or divine intervention. There is no interest in how we do or don’t
feel. The world, says the Mishnah, is shaped by human actions; so many
different human actions – how we dress, how we eat, how we treat one another,
we greet life, marriage, death, summer, spring and winter. The message of the
4,000+ Mishnayot is that each of our actions is of incredible importance. That,
I think, is healthy, clarifying and powerful.
Finally,
Mishnah is about survival. In a moment of tremendous threat, we, rabbinic Jews,
chose Mishnah to vouchsafe our existence. And it has worked. We are still here,
still learning Mishnah. Mishnah is complex – this last Seder is particularly abstruse;
maybe that’s how both it, and we, have survived. Life is complex and it turns
out that simplification might not be the best path to follow. Mishnah is also
full of debate and contradiction. One rabbi says yes, the other says no. Maybe,
in the multi-vocality of acceptable voices, there is a greater strength than we
realise. Maybe we are stronger if we know how to disagree with honour and integrity
than if we would insist on a uniformity of opinion and practice that effaces
the necessary plurality of the beauty that is humanity.
It's an
incredible privilege to come to the end of this journey. And I hope you will
consider joining me to celebrate its conclusion, again – this Friday, Erev
Pesach, in our regular Zoom room, at 8:30 for Shacharit of from shortly after
9am.
And then,
on to Pesach.
Rabbi
Jeremy
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