Thursday, February 15, 2007

Mishpatim 5767: Reading the Mishnah

Exodus 21:1-24:18

For the first time in the Torah cycle, there is very little narrative, found only at the end of the parsha. This week is a continuation of the same day God gave the Ten Commandments on Sinai, with God giving directly to Moses a rapid-fire nonstop set of mitzvot, mostly covering civil and criminal law. It includes other things, such as a more elaborate explanation of the Ten Commandments including Shabbat, honoring parents, not murdering, not being a false witness, and not stealing. There also the famous line about witches, and the schedule for the three pilgrimage festivals. Towards the end of this portion, Moses writes down this week portion, and then ascends Sinai for the forty days and nights to receive the rest of the Torah and the tablets.

This week’s section can be daunting to write about. Like a banquet there are so many choices. On the other hand, being all law and no story, it presents the issue of not being conducive for literary commentary. As I’ve done a few times in the last few months I want to talk about traditional perspectives on the text. This week’s potion, due to its law basis, provides us the opportunity to look at commentary on law, and the great corpus of law books that are know as the Oral Law. Before we look at the Oral Law, and one of its earliest parts, we first must pick a passage of Written Law, a passage of Torah. This week we read:

4. If you meet your enemy’s ox or his ass going astray, you shall surely bring it back to him again. 5. If you see the ass of one who hates you lying under its burden, you shall refrain from leaving it with him, you shall help him to lift it up. [Exodus 23:4-5]

The rules here seem simple enough. Lost property is to be returned and if an animal is in distress help it out. But to the rabbinic mind nothing is ever simple and in two such simple statements there are a lot of questions. And such questions are answered by the Oral Law.

The Oral Law by tradition was the parts that Moses learned orally from God and never wrote down. He transmitted them to Joshua, and so on through the generations. About a century or so after the destruction of the Temple those laws were written down by Rabbi Judah “the prince”, so they would not be forgotten. If you are one for a more practical approach describing the Oral Law, what we know of as the Talmud, it would be the ancient rulings and teachings of a learned class of teacher/judge/lawyers which we call Rabbis. They were students of a few select teachers of the first century, which spread into a larger movement after the destruction of the Temple.

But when we think of Talmud, we rarely break it into its two components. The Talmud is comprised of the older part known as the Mishnah and a part developed afterwards based on the Mishnah known as the Gemara. Structurally, the Gemara fills in gaps left by the Mishnah. Sometimes it provides different rulings and circumstances than the older work and adds more than a few stories about the Rabbis and the Biblical text. While there are two versions of the Gemara, one written in Israel and one in the Diaspora, the one best known is the Balvi or Babylonian Talmud. This work comprises legal works and stories from the minds of the Diaspora communities of what is today modern Iraq up until the time of the rise of Islam in the region.

And while everyone finds the “good stuff” for commentary in Gemara, it is very instructive to look at Mishnah on its own as a source for commentary. Quite terse in ite languange, it is composed of the earliest layer of Rabbininc thought. Mishnah provides an incredible learning opportunity even without the more verbose Gemara it is encumbered with on a folio of Talmud. As a corpus of legal rulings, it is not organized by Torah verses but by legal subjects breaking them down first into six major categories known as Orders. The major topics here are: (1)agricultural procedures, (2)holidays, (3)Gender relations issues, (4)civil and criminal law, (5)sacrificial rites and food practices relating to the Temple, and (6)laws of purity and impurity. In each of these orders there were tractates, which were sub categories of the major topic. For example, Order N’zikin dealing with civil and criminal law has one tractate known as Baba Metzia which has to do property and civil law, and starts on the issue of lost property. Our two verses from Torah actually inspired an entire book of law.

Mishnah starts it’s commentary by asking a question. Sometimes it will state the question, sometimes it will just give the answer and assume the reader understood the question. For example, Chapter 2 of Baba Metzia asks a rather simple question, and then gives a rather interesting answer:

What is lost property? If one finds an ass or a cow feeding by the road, that is not considered a lost property; [but if he finds] an ass with its trappings overturned, or a cow running among the vineyards, they are considered lost.[Baba Metzia 2:9]

Circumstances will determine if the animal is lost or not. In the case where a farmer places his cow to graze on the side of the road, that is not lost and one is not obligated to return it. One can assume that is the situation if one finds a cow in such a place. If a cow is wandering some where that a farmer would not put the animal, like a vineyard, this would be considered lost, and the finder is obligated to return it. The Mishnah continues:

If he returned it and it ran away, returned it and it ran away, even four or five times, he is still bound to restore it, for it is written, you will surely restore them.[Baba Metzia 2:9]

Here we have no question, so we have to understand the question the Mishnah is asking: How many times do I have to return the animal if it keeps getting itself lost? The answer is as many times as necessary. This Mishnah, unlike the one above, which assumes you know your Torah and can quote Exodus 23:4 off the top of your head quotes a specific phrase from that verse, you will surely restore them, indicating that the emphatic case here means you will always do it, even for a repetitive situation. Such a quote is important, since everything in Mishnah is based on biblical law, it must have a proof text in the Torah for it to be valid.

Further in chapter II we read:

If he finds it [an animal] in a stable, he has no responsibility toward it [to return it]; in the street, he is obliged [to return it]. But if it is in a cemetery, he must not defile himself for it.[Baba Metzia 2:10]

Much of this appears to be a repetition of the first case, with one exception, which indicates the question: We understand our obligations if the animal is somewhere its not supposed to be or if its somewhere it’s supposed to be, but what if a lost cow is somewhere the finder is not supposed to be? Touching the dead or being somewhere where there is contact with the dead such as a cemetery causes defilement, particularly for a priest. Should a priest defile himself to returning lost property? The answer here is no, defilement has a higher priority than returning the animal. So another question which could come to mind is: How high a priority does defilement have in this case? The Mishnah Continues:

If his father orders him to defile himself, or says to him, ‘do not return [it].’ he must not obey him. [Baba Metzia 2:10]

From last week’s portion Yitro, we remember from the Ten Commandments:

12. Honor your father and your mother; that your days may be long upon the land which the Lord your God gives you. [Exodus 20:12]

Yet here we are told not to obey our parent. Defilement and the returning property, both mitzvot from the Torah, have a higher priority even than honoring a parent wishes!

Talmud will follow threads once a ruling has been made. Following the issue of honoring parents, burdens, and lost property, the last section of Chapter II takes honoring parents to its ultimate conclusion:

If [a man's] own lost article and his father's lost article [need attention], his own takes precedence. His own and his teacher's — his own takes precedence; his father’s and his teacher's — his teacher's takes precedence, because his father brought him into this world, whereas his teacher, who instructed him in wisdom, brings him to the future world. But if his father is a sage, his father's takes precedence. If his father and his teacher were [each] carrying a burden, he must [first] assist his teacher to lay it down, and then assist his father. If his father and his teacher are in captivity, he must [first] redeem his teacher and then his father. But if his father is a sage, he must [first] redeem his father and then his teacher. [Baba Metzia 2:11]

A primary question the Mishnah asks here is: If I have a choice between my parent and my teacher, who do I honor more by helping first? Parents have a lesser priority than teachers, unless they are a teacher. Same thing if your teacher and father are kidnapped, or the burdens of their donkeys are too much, you have to help your teacher first. While very often we are not given reasons for why a ruling was made, here we are given a reason for that priority:

…because his father brought him into this world, whereas his teacher, who instructed him in wisdom, brings him to the future world.

While some might believe this has more in establishing the legitimacy of the rabbis, the implications of that statement are far more reaching once you begin to think about it. Is the body or the soul more important? Both are important according to the rabbis, but while virtually anyone can birth a baby into this world, it takes a very special and rare individual to birth a soul into the World to Come, to make the student a good ethical person, a good Jew. Such people are very valuable, and need to be honored even more than parents, for one teacher will birth far more than any parent could imagine doing. Note that if a parent is a sage, a teacher of teachers, the merits of their teaching others overrule the merits of one’s own teacher.

Thinking about my own teachers and how much they have taught and challenged me over the last decades I can see the wisdom of such a statement. My parents, of course taught me much of my ethical viewpoint, but much of my Jewish education came from my teachers. As those on the blog read a few weeks ago, I was rather stunned when one of those teachers wrote me back about collaboration. But it got me thinking, since he was not teaching religion, but harmonica, yet inspired much of my personal theology. Many times the teachers in our lives show up in places we do not expect, and we learn deep wisdom from them.

Such is true of Mishnah as well. We have the wisdom of teachers dead for almost two millennia, yet they can teach and instruct us. A very early Christian polemic claimed Rabbinic Judaism, namely the Mishnah, was too legal and pragmatic to be spiritual. I feel that misses the forest for the trees. Like a good teacher, as Mishnah challenges you over and over again on some minor point of when is a cow considered lost, we learn something else as well. Hidden in there are gems, questions answers and challenges that move forward our spiritual growth. Without the later garb of the Gemara or the medieval commentaries of Rashi or his grandsons the Tosafists, Mishnah can stand its own as a sacred text. It becomes as inscrutable as a Zen Koan of the mundane stuff of life, yet finds the holy in everything, even a lost cow.

Thus I encourage the study of Mishnah. You may or may not agree with the opinions expressed but in their way of expressing it, you will learn to more clearly see the holy in the everyday.

With that, however hard it is to just stop, may you have a wonderful restful Shabbos

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