Season 1: Episode 12 - The Portable Homeland

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Those who not learn history are doomed to repeat it. It seems that Santayana's quote was actually, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. But we know that the Holy Baal Shem Tov taught us, Zichira hi sod ha-gi'ula, that memory is the secret of redemption. I'm Rav Mike Foyer, and though we're telling a story of the past, it's all about taking us to the future of which we dream. Episode 12, The Portable Homeland. The smoke had barely cleared from the devastation of the Bar Kokhorevold, and its dead are still not yet buried. In fact, it looks like they might never be buried, because the Midrash teaches us that Hadrian, in his rage at the obstinacy of the Jews, had decreed that the dead of Betar would never be buried.

Now, this was not just simply a wanton act of cruelty, because if the dead aren't buried then we can never know who is truly dead and who is truly missing which means that society on some level is stuck in the past children can't inherit women can't remarry and there was indeed a great danger in the wake of the tragedy of the revolt that could freeze Am Yisrael in time and anyone who's ever experienced trauma or who loves someone who has knows that this is one of the real great dangers of any trauma that the past can overwhelm us and prevent us from actually living our lives. And so the Midrash goes on to say that Rav Hun teaches, on the day when the dead of Beitar were allowed burial, the brachah, the blessing, who is good and does good, was instituted in the grace after meals.

Who is good, speaking of God, because the bodies did not rot and they were able to identify who was indeed dead and who does good because they were allowed burial. now that's a little astounding that our liturgical memory of God is good and does good is tied to the fact that the dead of Betar were allowed burial but just appreciate the power of choosing to move forward because the power of choosing to move forward not in spite of but because of tragedy is the power of memory which is the model for this entire Jewish story it's an absolute commitment to the goodness of God that allows us to integrate the past, no matter how horrible, into a present identity, which is prepared to build the future which we want to inhabit.

And so in our story right now, those that build the future will be the students of Rebbe Akiva, those who watched his martyrdom and even questioned his commitment in that ultimate moment, seeing Rebbe even now. The Gemara teaches us that originally Rebbe Akiva had 12,000 pairs of students and that they all died at the same time because they didn't treat each other with respect. It says that the world remained desolate, empty of Torah, until Rabbi Kiva came to our masters in the South and taught the Torah to them. And they were the ones who revived the Torah. And they were Rabbi Meir, Rabbi Yehuda Bar Yelai, Rabbi Yossi, Rabbi Shun Bar Yochai, and Rabbi Elzar Ben Shemua. And it says they were the ones who revived the Torah at that time.

now, Rav Haig Gaon in a work much much later written around a thousand of the common era maintains that Rabbi Akiva's 24,000 students weren't killed in a plague as the Gemara goes on to say but were rather victims of the Bar Kokhba rebellion, remember he was its spiritual leader and it's reasonable to think that his students were involved and if that's the case is that line in the Gemara that they died because they didn't treat each other with respect a code to teach us something else I think you can actually read it as a sign that the sectarian anger, that Sinat Chinam, that causeless hatred, which had torn apart society in the Second Temple period, and had been bound up with the learning of Torah and that quest to be true Israel, was not quite over in the time of the Bar Kokhah revolt.

This first phase of Rabbi Akiva's students had not yet learned to relate to Torah as something so big that you don't have to be wrong in order for me to be right. that was going to require a more generational shift. And this transition that the Gemara describes between 24,005 isn't just quantitative, it's qualitative, because these are the sages who will carry for you the truth of the Torah in a fashion that will allow us not only to survive, but to thrive in the long exile to come. And they would ultimately, by the way, extend the project of Mishnahh and Midrash, of law and story, to embrace the entire world as the exile scatters us throughout. But first, they had to get out of town. Because it wasn't enough that these were the repositories of the knowledge that they gained from Rebbe Akiva.

They were his musmachim, his ordained students. He had laid his hands on them in a tradition stretching back to Moshe and Joshua. And in doing so, he ensured that when they taught his Torah, his students would not only hear its truth and attribute authority to it they would say, oh, Rabbi Meir stood before his teacher and received his blessing and that's the ultimate source of his authority but the truth is, Rabbi Akiva didn't live to give smicha to these students, it was one of his companions who did so because the Gemara teaches us that the wicked government of Rome had issued a decree that anyone who ordains a rabbi will be killed and furthermore he who is ordained shall be killed and the town in which the ordination takes place will be destroyed and the entire region in which the ordination is held will be laid to waste and so what did Rabbi Yehudah bin Bava do he was a student of Rabbi Akiva who was ordained because smicha ordination had to pass physically from hand to hand he went, Gemara says, and sat between two mountains and between two large towns between two regions, meaning so that the Romans couldn't blame what he was about to do on anyone in particular.

They were between Usha and Shafaram, which is up in the north in the Galilee. We'll speak about why that region is important later. And there he, Rabbi Yehuda ben Baba, ordained five masters. Rabbi Meir, Rabbi Yehuda bar Eli, Rabbi Yossi, Rabbi Shimon, and Rabbi Eleazar ben Shamua. Those are the five that the previous Kamara mentioned. And then on seeing that they were detected by the Romans, he said to them, flee my children. And they said to him, But you, Rabbi, what about you? And he said, I will stand before them, even as a stone that is not turned. They were in a narrow wadi, in a little canyon, gulch. And he blocked the entrance as his students fled. And it says that the Romans couldn't move him from there until they drove 300 iron spears through his body and made his corpse like a sieve.

And so these five got away. And they fled in the meantime, it appears, to Babel, to the community of Babylon, in order to lay low until the persecutions had ceased. Now, what exactly was the Torah of Rebbe Akiva that they managed to carry forward? First of all, we have to remember that Rebbe Akiva is the master of the saying, V'hafte l'erecha kemocha, Ani Hashem, You shall love your fellow as yourself, I am the Lord. Ze chlal gadol batorah. This is a fundamental principle of the Torah. meaning that Rebbe Akiva understood that this was the commandment which is in essence the goal of all the other commandments the sort of meta-legal principle toward which we are striving meaning that law has an end goal it is not simply an end unto itself furthermore, they carry the Mishnahh of Rebbe Akiva and to understand what this means we have to touch a bit on the history of the development of the oral law Now, classically, oral law has two forms of articulation, what we call midrash and mishnah.

I've been calling them story and law, but let's get a little bit deeper into the matter. So midrash is a process of deriving meaning through textual analysis and interpretation. That can be hermeneutic, meaning narrative meaning. I'm deriving stories and telling sermons on moral principles derived from my understanding of the text. And it can also be an understanding of law gained through the analysis of the text, be it direct commandments or other statements. But the key is that Midrash represents the oral law as a continuity of engagement with the story and the text. Then there is Mishnahh. Mishnahh is what's known as apodictic law, meaning it's law which is derived from custom and decree and is transmitted without any explanation.

This is the aspect of the oral law, which is a continuity as embedded in practice. meaning this is what we do and we don't necessarily tell you why and in that sense it's critical to understand that one facet of the meaning of the word Mishnahh is actually rooted in the word for repetition shinui shinui, repetition will become a mode of learning and teaching so much so that it will actually come to mean teaching because this is a mode of learning and teaching where repetition is not just a means for memorization it's actually a process whereby one becomes the law itself just think of what happens when you repeat a statement over and over it's not what you know any longer but it rather becomes the way in which you know the world and that's ultimately what the Mishnahh is it's an absorbing of law in order that you not only know what to do but you become the type of person who can teach now there's a huge academic question about which comes first, the Mishnahh or the Midrash.

It's a big argument, and I'm not going to stick my head in between the mountains here. But I can tell you for sure that Rebbe Akiva hand is all over both There something called the Midrash Halakha which is the legal corpus that bound to the text of the Torah Again, as I said, it is a process of deriving law from the narrative. And then there is the Mishnahh, which we'll speak about further. What seems to me is that as a literary form, it appears that the Midrash is indeed older, but it's clear that these are natural partners in the development of the oral law, and it's not critical to us which came first. One thing which is actually critical to us is the fact that the sages will teach us, when we look at the Mishnahh, Stam Mishnahh ki Rebbe Meir, that the unattributed statement in the Mishnahh actually belongs to Rebbe Meir.

Remember, Rebbe Meir was one of those five students of Rebbe Akiva who survived the destruction and indeed received ordination. Ultimately, that tells us that what Rebbe, the redactor of the Mishnahh who we'll speak about momentarily, what he handed down to us was from Rebbe Akiva through Rebbe Meir. And, by the way, why through Rebbe Meir, but not in the name of Rebbe Meir? Remember that the sages teach us that one who says something in the name of he who said it originally actually brings redemption to the world. So this is a real question. First of all, it appears clear to me that because Rebbe Mayer was handing down the Torah of his teacher, Rebbe Akiva, it was not actually his Torah, and it wasn't going to be said in his name.

Second of all, we see that when Rebbe Yehudah HaNasi puts together the Mishnahh, he makes opinions anonymous instead of attributing them to individual teachers in order to give them the weight of decisive, accepted truth. And third of all, because Rebbe Meir's fellow sages could never actually get to the bottom of what he thought. Legendarily, Rav Ahabar Hanina says, Galuy Vidui Lifnei Mi Shema Amar Vahaya Olam it's revealed and known before him who spoke and the world came into being that in the time of Rebbe Meir no one was equal to him. He was the greatest of the great. I, says the Gemara, then why wasn't the halacha, why wasn't the law fixed in agreement with his opinion? Because nobody could get to the bottom of his mind.

He would declare something impure to be pure, and declare something pure to be impure, and he would supply such strong proofs for both sides that no one could know what the law actually was. Amazing. But of course, he wasn't the only student of Rabbi Akiva that people couldn't fathom. Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai, the legendary master of the mystical Torah, was also Rabbi Akiva's student. Rabbi Akiva, after all, was one of the Arba She'Nich Nasulah Pardes, one of the four masters who went into Pardes as the Gemara Chagiga tells us that four entered Pardes Ben Azai, Ben Zoma Achir, the other, and Rabbi Akiva Ben Azai looked and died Ben Zoma looked and went mad Achir became a heretic Rabbi Akiva entered in peace and departed in peace and as long as we're talking about Pardes and just remind all my listeners that the Pardes Institute is a great supporter of this podcast.

You should go check out great stuff on their website, El Maud. And if you want to understand the full framework of historical vision, which informs this podcast, you can look on the Sulam Yaakov SoundCloud account to find teachings about the Pardes of history. Or you can shoot me an email at info at sulamyaakov.com and I'll send you back some documents. But either way, Rabbi Akiva went into this mystical vision and came out. And Rabbi Shimon, his student, is also famous for an entry and a departure. The Umar and Shabbat asked a question which is related to our time period. It says, why is Rabbi Yehuda known as the first speaker? Well, because in the time following the flight of these five students of Rabbi Akiva, when things had calmed down enough to return, but had not quite settled.

The Gemara tells the following story. It says that Rabbi Yehuda, who will be known as first speaker, Rabbi Yossi and Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai were sitting. And there was one that Yehuda ben Gerim near them. And they opened up with a conversation. Rabbi Yehuda said, how good are the acts of this nation, meaning Rome. They established the markets. They established the bathhouses. They built the bridges. Rabbi Yossi was silent. Rabbi Shimon bar Yochai said, everything they did, they did for themselves. It wasn't for us. By the way, any Monty Python fans out there must realize that the life of Brian is actually a paraphrasing of this Gemara. What did the Romans ever do for us? But Rabbi Yehuda Ben-Gerim got up and went and told their words to the Romans.

And so they said, Rabbi Yehuda, who praised them, will be the first speaker. Rabbi Yosi, who kept silent, was sent into exile. And Rabbi Shimon, who called them out, let him be killed. and so Rabbi Shimon famously flees to his cave and he's there in the cave for years and years praying, learning and he merits after 12 years to hear a vision from Eliyahu from Elijah the prophet who told him it was time to leave because the emperor had died and the degree against him was annulled and so they went out, he and his son who had been hiding with him and they saw people plowing and planting and Rabbi Shimon went berserk he said, how could they abandon Chai Olam, eternal life and busy themselves with the life of the world and every place he and his son looked burst into flames and so a heavenly voice came out and said, what?

you came out just to destroy my world? go back in your cave and they went back into the cave because as Gemara says, the sentence of the wicked in hell is 12 months, they were back for another year and then the heavenly voice came again and told them to go out and this time when they came out everywhere that his son Eleazar looked was still burned but everywhere Rabbi Shimon looked would be healed and then they had an amazing experience because they saw an old man running, holding two bunches of myrtle and they said what's this for? and he said to honor Shabbat, the Sabbath and they said, wouldn't one suffice? and he said, no, no, no, you have to have two one for remember the Shabbat, Zachor and one for observe the Shabbat Shamor.

And then Rabbi Shimon says to his son, see how dear a commandment is to Israel. And his son's mind was set at ease. Now there are amazing depths in this cave, but it's critical for our story to take out one point. It's that this was a retreat from the world. One aspect of Rabbi Kiva's teaching was indeed that the world is lost to us. That the whole project which found its height in the first temple period in the building of the kingdom which could actually embody the will of God in the world has been lost and the second attempt to build that kingdom fell with the second temple and now it might just be that we need to reject the world just as their early Christian compatriots had decided and so Rabbi Shimon indeed does retreat from the world because the world is a mean, nasty place the Malchut, the kingdom, is now Rome and yet in coming out he discovers that there is a place in which we must engage in the world, and that is through the commandments, through law.

Law will now become the ultimate articulation of the belief that the world is not only redeemable, but is the primary place in which we will encounter God. And so, Rabbi Shimon comes out, and there's much more to the story, but what's critical is at the end of the story, he comes and he purifies the city of Teveria from ritual impurity and allows the Sanhedrin to re-enter it. Because Rabbi Shimon prepares the ground of the physical place for the Mishnahh, which will be largely written into the area, and Rabbi Meir, the other student of Rabbi Akiva, will carry its seeds in the form of Rabbi Akiva's Mishnahh. But it was Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi, Rabbi Yehuda the Prince, the Holy Sage, known as Rabbeinu HaKodesh, our Holy Teacher, or simply as Rabbi.

son of the Nasi, Rabbi Shimon Ben Gamliel II he was the one who will actually redact the Mishnahh now, what is redaction anyway? now, I've actually called him the redactor of the Mishnahh so many times for years in class and I had to look it up when I realized I couldn't give you a good definition and the Latin word is redactio apparently, the act of reducing or compressing to bring back or together because it means that he was working with multi-source material. And that's certainly true because we know that the three generations from Yavna, from that group of sages that Rabbi Yochanan ben Zakkai saved through the agency of Vespasian from the destruction of the Second Temple, from those sages to the time of Tiveria where the Mishnahh will be written, there were actually multiple Mishnahyot that developed, meaning there were many systemizations of a predictic law, of that law which is taught based on custom and decree and not as textual analysis.

And not only were these many systemizations of law, but they were actually parallel lived traditions. What do I mean? Everybody knows that today the law is Jews don't eat meat and milk. And many people are probably aware that chicken is included by the sages in that band of mixture. But when you look in the Mishnahh, there is an opinion of Rabbi Yossi HaGalili Rabbi Yossi the Galilean that permits eating chicken with milk and this is not Rabbi Yossi HaGalili's opinion in the hall of study in the town of Rabbi Yossi HaGalili they ate chicken parmesan and it will only be later when the Mishnahh is redacted when all these parallel lived traditions are compressed into one well we won say quite what the Mishnahh is yet one Mishnahh then we will actually get a uniform practice But before we get to what exactly the Mishnahh is we need to just mention Rebbe connection to Rebbe Akiva and a little bit of his own life story, because as I mentioned in the previous episode, the Midrash teaches that Rebbe was born on the day that Rebbe Akiva died, on the day that his flesh was torn from him by the Romans, and the Roman Empire seemed ascendant over the world of the Torah, Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi, the prince, was born.

And of course, that means that his circumcision was only eight days later, at the height of the Hadrianic persecutions, remembering that circumcision was one of the things which Hadrian clearly outlawed. Now the Tosafot, the medieval commentary on the Gemara, tell the story that of course Rabbi Shimon ben Gamliel II and his wife were going to bring their son into the covenant of Abba Mavino. They weren't going to not circumcise their child just because some Roman persecutor said they couldn't. But also, of course, because of their importance, they were being watched. And we know from many historical sources that informers were a terrifying reality during these days of persecution. And when the accusation was eventually made that they'd circumcised their son, the couple was summoned before Caesar.

And as they awaited their audience, certain of their doom, Rabbi Shimon ben Gamliel's wife befriended a Roman woman there, also the mother of a newborn. And these two young mothers became such fast friends that this Roman woman gave her child to Rabbi Shimon's wife and nursed the young Rabbi while they had their audience with Caesar. Now you can imagine the surprise and frustration when the couple displays their suddenly uncircumcised child. And despite the rage of Caesar, they were released. and according to tradition this Roman baby was none other than the future emperor Antoninus who became Rebbe's fast friend his mentor and ultimately his student and the Jerusalem Talmud, Yerushalmi actually teaches that at the end of his life he himself closed the circle of this story and entered into the covenant through circumcision now, there was never any emperor Antoninus and the stories that the Gemara tells about the relationship between Rebbe and Antoninus are fantastic, to say the least.

But it's traditionally understood that Antoninus was actually the emperor Marcus Aurelius, the so-called philosopher emperor. And no matter how one chooses to understand this tradition, Rebbe came to maturity after the waves of persecution had peaked and receded. so much so that the life of Am Yisrael in its land began to flower once again consecrated largely in the rich agricultural lands of the north in the Galilee and that Rebbe would embody the return of self-rule and dignity, what we call malchut kingship, but not in the true sense, to Am Yisrael and would preside over a growing closeness with the Roman powers who only a generation before, had persecuted them. It was Rebbe's father, Rebbe Shimon Ben Gamliel II, who actually moved the Sanhedrin, the high Jewish court north, out of Yavna, where it would eventually come to rest in Tveria and their stay until it ceased to function in the early part of the 5th century.

And so, that's Rebbe Yehudah HaNasi. He redacted the Mishnahh. Now, what exactly does that mean? First of all, it appears that Rebbe inherited and kept the structure of the Mishnahh from Rebbe Akiva. There are six orders of Mishnahh and 63 tractates within it. The orders are Zrayim, seeds. These are the agricultural laws which make up so much of our relationship to the land of Israel and to the world as a whole. Moed, the order of sacred times. So much of our lives are bound up with the spiritual rhythms of the Jewish calendar. Nashim, family law, relationships with men and women. Nizikim, damages, this is tort law as it is in all general law. Kodshim, these are the laws of the temple and the sacrifices.

And Taharot, the laws of ritual purity. And it's critical to understand that those last two orders, not tractates, but entire one-third of the Mishnahh are devoted to practices which in Rabbi's day appeared to have disappeared perhaps forever because the temple was gone. But not only was he committed that the temple speedily be rebuilt, let it be soon, let it be now, but he also understood that these are the body of the Torah, which cannot be separated. So Rebbe, having inherited this mass of teachings and the structure within which it was ordered, made the decisions about how to select and present particular judgments. Because at first glance, the Mishnahh appears to be case law, And we're going to speak about a little bit more of what it is in a moment, but first a more basic question.

Was the Mishnahh actually written down by Rebbe? This itself is, once again, an argument. It's an argument amongst traditional sources. Rav Shreira Gaon, who writes a very important historiography in the 11th century that we'll speak about when we get to it at the time, and the Rambam, the famous Maimonides, in his introduction to his Alachic work, the Mishnahh Torah, both say yes, Rebbe actually wrote it down. But Rashi, the famed biblical and Talmudic commentator, says no. And the academics have a similar dispute. Now, nobody argues against Rebbe being the redactor, meaning he gave a uniform structure to what had been these parallel systemizations and parallel lived traditions. It's only a question of whether he actually committed it to writing.

And you have to understand the distinction between oral and written text in order to appreciate the importance of that distinction. Especially in light of our own present textual culture. What do I mean? If I asked you to copy something, you take it from me and put it in a photocopier. Or you might just say, hey, just send me the digital copy. Why waste the trees? Because our relationship to the integrity of text is as exact replication. And that's an outgrowth of the print culture. Not just the print culture, now it's the digital age. Historically, though, it was not so. Ami Yisrael had to create a whole culture of scribal precision just to ensure the integrity of the Torah scroll. Now, when it comes to something like the Mishnahh, which certainly began as an oral text, meaning an ordered, structured text, which was memorized rather than written down, here a problem of the definition of integrity presents itself.

because particularly in a text which is constructed to provoke questions of meaning and application. It's laconic. It leaves lots of things out in order to beg questions from the reader, from the learner. Where does one who has it memorized draw the line between the text itself and their understanding of it? And as I communicate it forward, am I going to communicate it the way I learn it or the way I understand it? This relationship to the integrity of text will be a critical part of our story, and we're going to come back to it in many, many times. So, what then is the Mishnahh? Aside from being six orders and 63 tractates that appear to be case law, in essence, the Mishnahh is Rebbe's attempt to preserve law and tradition, and also to create a vessel which could hold machlokit, could hold disagreement as a driver for creative religiosity, instead of as a cause for sectarianism.

Remember, it was argument that tore apart the second temple. But the loss of the temple itself will take a tremendous amount of the rancor out of those sectarian battles because there's no longer any center in which true Israel must reign supreme in order to win the eschatological battle. Now, machloket argument can be an expression of what we call that both these and those are the words of the living God even if they appear to disagree because machloket on that level is a reflection of the limitations of a single perspective which is trying to grasp a truth which is larger than it let me give you an example I went to college, undergrad university in the Colorado College out in Colorado Springs and it was dominated by a beautiful 14,000 foot peak called Pikes Peak.

Perhaps you've been there, maybe you've been on top. So I want you to imagine that you're on the west side of Pikes Peak and I'm on the east side of Pikes Peak and we're speaking to each other on a cell phone. And I say to you, amazing, you see this mountain, isn't it incredible? You say, yeah. And I say, oh gosh, this 1,400 foot pink granite headwall, it's astounding. And you say to me, what are you talking about? I don't have a granite headwall here. This is a brown, snow-covered, pine-clad mountain. We start to argue, no, it's like this, no, it's like that. Well, who's right? The answer is not me, and it's not you. The answer is actually not even both of us. The answer is the argument is what carries the truth.

Because the truth is larger than any single perspective can grasp. Therefore, the Mishnahh, with all of its argumentation, is indeed a legal code, but just as critically, it is a process by which one can map God's will in creation through law. And this is related to that classic question of why Rebbe chose to maintain non-authoritative opinions in the Mishnahh. Meaning if it case law then why do I care about the wrong opinion Just tell me who was right and I know what to do But the reason for that was actually explicitly stated in the Mishnahh itself in the opening Mishnahh of Eidu Yod, which according to most scholars was actually the proto-Mishnahh, it's one of the earliest portions of the document that we have.

There it says that Rebbe kept these non-authoritative minority opinions in order that a future Sanhedrin will be able to rely on minority opinions if it should warrant it. Now this is critical. What does that mean? That suddenly, what was the right decision now? Some other court is going to come along and have to decide no, it's wrong and the minority opinion is correct now? The answer to that is yes. In order to appreciate the depth of the process which Rabbi embedded into the Mishnahh, one has to understand the difference between halakha and psak. Halacha is the general word for Jewish law, and it means, or it's rooted in, rather, the word halicha, to go. It's a process orientation to law. Psak, which comes from the word nachasik, to stop, is actually the word we use if I go to a rabbi and I ask a particular question about a specific case, he gives me psak, he gives me an answer.

Now, if you want to understand the relationship between these two, I'll tell you a story. I've told the story to a lot of people. I apologize if you've heard it before. Just imagine you're a farmer. You're a poor Jewish farmer, and you've got a celebration, and because of the celebration, you're going to eat meat. You're going to bring a chicken. You have a very special occasion, so you go and you take a chicken out of the yard, and you slaughter a chicken, and oh, it appears that you might not have done it right. And maybe the chicken isn't kosher. Well, being a loyal Jew, you don't want to eat anything non-kosher, so you decide to take a chicken to the rabbi, let him tell you whether you can eat it or not take the chicken to the Beit Midrash in the house of study you bring, there's the rabbi and all the students you bring in the chicken, oh, Shalom Aleichem let me see the chicken, they look at it he says a few things to his students, they all mumble and humble and they're, yeah, it's okay, he says you can eat the chicken, so you're thrilled this is great news, not only are you thrilled but it took a lot less time than you thought it would and you don't often get to be in the house of study you figure maybe I'll just, I'll do a little bit of learning you sit down, you put the chicken down you take a mission off the shelf, you start to learn suddenly you notice that the conversation has not ceased not only has it not ceased but it seems that the rabbi's students are still speaking about your chicken furthermore it sounds like from what they're saying that perhaps your chicken's not so kosher after all so you start to get agitated more upset, finally you jump up and say hey wait a minute, you told me that chicken was kosher the rabbi and his students turn around and say what?

you still here? listen, you want to eat the chicken, take the chicken home and eat the chicken you want to learn some Torah, put the chicken in the freezer or sit down and learn Torah. You can't have them both. Because halakha, law, is a process orientation to articulating a truth which is larger than we are. And therefore, it is never truly over. Psak, the need to stop that process and answer a specific question, is a concession to the realities of life. Because some questions are truly equal when approached from opposite perspective. Because both perspectives actually reflect an aspect of essence in divine will, which becomes expressed through a particular case. And the premise of the Mishnahh is not just case law.

The premise of the Mishnahh is that it can train me to be the type of person who can differ with someone while still being part of the same process. Which then in turn leads me to realize that if we don't want to shrink God's will to fit our limited understanding, then the diversity of perspectives which actually creates machloket, which creates argument, is not just secondary, it's critical. Now note, that the ability to believe that I'm correct, really believe, and nevertheless to accept that you don't agree with me, is going to depend on my ability to love and respect you because of our mutual commitment to a process of unfolding divine truth which is larger than either of us. And thus the tragedy of Rabbi Akiva's students that we started with.

Their inability to love and respect each other was really rooted in an inability to accept the reality that the truth is bigger than us all. Because those three generations, between Yavna and Rabbi Yehuda, redacted in Mishnahh, they saw the development of parallel lived traditions. Everybody backed off into their own little parochial corner and just live the law the way they saw fit. But the Mishnahh is unlike any previous work of Am Yisrael in bringing together that diversity because it's based on elasticity instead of entirety. Remember, the need to own the story and to exclude all other interpretations has driven us since the days of Ezra, and it has ended. It didn't just end it, it blew up in our faces with the destruction of the Second Temple.

The Mishnahh is the acceptance that the story is bigger than us, and that if we want to live out the will of God in law, then we have to work at it together and throughout time. Therefore, Rebbe consolidated practice in the Mishnahh, but preserved the aspect of a conversation of meaning, which actually underlies the divergence of opinions. Now there's a question that we need to touch. which is, is the Mishnahh just an accident of history? It was produced basically because of historical circumstance? Or is it an engagement of that circumstance which can allow us to express a much more fundamental reality which may never have come to be without it? This goes back to that question that we have, what's the purpose of exile?

Is it an accident, or is it there to bring out newness? because we can follow a string of decisions from Shimon Tzadik way back in the encounter with Greece who said it's a time to act for God and took the eight vestments of the high priest out on the road to meet Alexander and we can follow it right to Matityahu and his struggle against the Greeks when he was in that cave and he said you know it's true that the law forbids us from fighting on Shabbat but if we don't break the rules to save the story there won't be anyone around to keep the Shabbat anymore. And we can trace it right to Rebbe, who institutionalizes Machloket, who creates an intellectual space which can be co-occupied beyond the constraints of time and space, and manages to unify a nation through orthopraxis, through a unification of practice, by breaking the law, by writing down that which was never meant to be written, because the Gemara itself later will teach us, Kotei halachod kesorif ha-Torah.

Those who write down the law are like those who burn the Torah. And furthermore, those who learn from the written law have no reward. Because the Gemara goes on to say, that which was handed down in a written form may never be communicated from memory, but that which was handed down in the oral form cannot be written. So what was Rabbi doing? Why now? so the easiest answer was now or never because though we are in a time of calm with Rebbe and this warming of a relationship between Am Yisrael and Rome which is really embodied in the legends of Rebbe's friendship with the emperor Antoninus nevertheless we are on the heels of a period of incredible development in law and awful persecution because the law flourished while those who cultivated it were hunted down and killed and Rabbi sees that life is not getting any easier ultimately Greco-Roman culture is set against us, they have absorbed the notion that we are the indigestible element of their empire and as we know Christianity will double down on that by claiming to have replaced us and when they adopt the Roman Empire oi va voi so life is not getting any easier and this exile has no foreseeable end so now is the time to craft the portable homeland now is the time that Rebbe will create that space which transcends chronology and geography a space which many of my students occupy on a daily basis that I myself enter into conversation with people who haven't lived for 2,000 years and this portable homeland will actually carry the conversation forward for generations to come.

Now with Rabbi Yehudah Anasi, the time of the Tenayim, the authors of the Mishnahh, comes to a close. It will be one of his chief students, Rav, Abba Aricha, who will make the Mishnahh truly portable and take it with him as he leaves the land of Israel and heads out to Babylon, to Babel, and marks the beginning of a whole new era. I just want to thank a few people especially, you know, there's only 28 people who give their hard-earned money to make this material free, available, and syndicated if you want to join them in supporting this project you can go to www.patreon.com and you can find my page there to donate I'd also like to thank the Pardes Institute pardes.org.il for giving me a platform from which to teach such a broad swath of Am Yisrael.

I'd like to thank the folks at the Land of Israel Network for getting my voice out to such an amazing, amazing group of the world. And I'd like to thank Suomiakov.com because it's my home. I'm Rav Mike Boyer and this is The Jewish Story.