Who Knows Six? – An Invitation to a Very Special Celebration

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