According to Éric Rebillard and Jörg Rüpke, the late antique Roman world was characterized by “a profound complexity of interactions between group identity and religious individuality.”Footnote 1 This complexity is precisely what the rabbinic authors of the Mishnah imagine for the ritual that once took place in the Jerusalem Temple. Temple ritual, in the rabbinic view, functioned to bring individual and collective frames of experience together and to integrate them in nuanced ways. This can be seen in the how the mishnaic authors narrate the Temple ritual of the past.
In multiple Temple-ritual narratives in the Mishnah, there is a recurring shifting back and forth between individual and collective group. These shifts in type of ritual actor correlate with movement in other ritual variables: space, action, and object. Together these shifts suggest that in the rabbinic understanding, ritual activity itself creates a complex relationship between what Rebillard and Rüpke term “group identity” and “religious individuality.” Temple ritual, the rabbis seem to have understood, brought individuals together to form the collective while also allowing them to retain their individuality. It enabled the ritualist to experience what he or she did in the Temple through both frames simultaneously.
The nature of the collective side of the experience in the Mishnah, moreover, was itself not monolithic. In the Mishnah's ritual-narrative genre, the rabbinic authors imagine three different types of collective groups acting within Temple ritual performance. Most frequently, it is the entire people of Israel. Also quite common are the local geographic groups within the Land of Israel and groups determined by lineage: priests, Levites, and Israelites. Temple ritual, as the rabbis understood it, thus further functioned to activate and reinforce multiple levels of group identification and a multifaceted sense of groupness. It imbued individual and social life with significance by providing multiple avenues in which to gain a sense of solidarity, belonging, and meaning.Footnote 2
Methodology for the Interpretation of (Temple) Ritual
Theoretical work on the study of ritual provides powerful analytic tools to examine the rabbinic conceptions of how rituals work, what they do, and how they achieve their particular effects. The rabbinic authors of the Mishnah, like any authors, made choices in how to narrate the regular activities that once took place in the Jerusalem Temple.Footnote 3 One factor that shaped these choices is the rabbis’ interests and realities. As such, mishnaic accounts of Temple ritual can be read as discourse, which, in the Foucauldian sense, works to negotiate power relations and assert rabbinic authority.Footnote 4 However, to read them only as such would be quite limiting. Rather, a second factor that has shaped these choices is the rabbis’ own understanding of the nature and significance of ritual itself. As Michael Swartz suggests for the narration of the Day of Atonement ritual in M. Yoma, the mishnaic account is a “systematic discourse about the meaning and function of ritual.” Swartz thus terms the mishnaic construction of ritual within the Temple-ritual narrative genre as “ancient ritual theory.”Footnote 5
The category of ritual is of course not native to the ancient text of the Mishnah, but it can nevertheless be a productive lens through which to interpret many of the activities described and legislated therein. Particularly helpful, I believe, is the neostructuralist approach developed by Ronald Grimes, which he has recently synthesized in his book The Craft of Ritual Studies.Footnote 6 Grimes suggests that ritual enactments can be broken down into a variety of component parts, and the interrelationship among these parts or elements can illuminate some of the fundamental questions about ritual activity: how to understand its nature, its dynamics, its effects, the ways in which it is meaningful, and the ultimate question of why people do it.Footnote 7
Grimes's approach has two key aspects: first, he posits that there are multiple sets of encompassing variables by which to investigate ritual, which may or may not come into play in any given ritual enactment. These include what he calls “family characteristics” of ritualization, such as traditionalizing, repeating, and stylizing; “ritual modes,” such as decorum and ceremony, or “moods,” such as polite and exuberant; and “elements of ritual,” such as actors, actions, and times.Footnote 8 Second, he takes a family characteristics approach to ritual more generally, asserting that a given ritual or enactment will have some features, but need not have any of the particular elements from the wide array of potential features. In embracing this multidimensional and family characteristics approach, Grimes not only allows for a wide set of actions to be considered together under the rubric of ritual, but establishes a more flexible means of interpreting these actions and of bringing out the subtle nuances in how they work and achieve their effects.Footnote 9 In his view, there is no single universal type of ritual and there is no single purpose or meaning of ritual activity. Interpreting ritual does not involve shoehorning particular enactments or systems into a universal paradigm or simply applying such a paradigm to the case at hand on the assumption that it is in fact universal. Rather, it involves an incredibly wide array of variables through which to view enactments, or in the case of the Mishnah, representation of enactments. Drawing on the work of many different theorists, Grimes creates a toolbox useful for approaching the Mishnah's Temple-ritual discourse, particularly because it allows the emphasis in the text itself to come out.
For the sake of the following analysis, I focus on one of Grimes's sets of variables, what he calls “elements of ritual,” which in his view are the basic building blocks of ritual enactment. Prior to Grimes, most theorists of ritual have tended to focus only on particular, limited elements of ritual in order to approach the basic questions about how ritual works. Thus, Jonathan Z. Smith, in work that is particularly relevant for understanding the Jerusalem Temple, emphasizes the role and function of place. According to Smith, “Place [is] a fundamental component of ritual” because it “directs attention.” Further, “within the temple, the ordinary … becomes significant, becomes ‘sacred,’ simply by being there.” Not only is place a key to what ritual accomplishes, the impact of ritual objects and actions arises from the spaces in which they are located. Thus, Smith's poetic pronouncement: “Sacrality is, above all, a category of emplacement.”Footnote 10 Sacredness, in Smith's view, stems primarily from sacred place.
While Smith's formulations are insightful and theoretically useful, Grimes takes him to task for overemphasizing the role of place.Footnote 11 Grimes writes that he “agree[s] that place is important in ritual” but not “that either sacrality or ritual is a function of place, or that there is a compelling reason for privileging space.” Rather, Grimes would prefer to emphasize the multiple components of ritual performance, or, “how people act” when ritualizing. For Grimes, sacrality and ritual as a whole come into being through the interplay of ritual's multiple components: ritual actions, ritual actors, ritual places, ritual times, ritual objects, ritual languages, and ritual groups.Footnote 12 Grimes himself highlights the provisional and heuristic nature of these categories, and stresses their multiplicity and their interaction.
For the study of the Mishnah's representations of Temple ritual, the component categories set out by Grimes (based on the work of many others) together with theoretical analysis of how these components can function, provide a basis for approaching these larger questions about ritual and the significance of ritual in the Mishnah. Place is a key variable for interpreting Temple ritual in the Mishnah, but so is action, actor, and object.Footnote 13 For the Temple-ritual narratives, the most important elements to which the Mishnah devotes the most proverbial ink are: actor, action, object, place, and as I shall suggest, group—although group can in fact be viewed as a subset of ritual actor. I begin precisely here, with the category that highlights one of the key unique elements of the Mishnah's version of the Temple: ritual actor.
Ritual Actors in the Temple: Between Group and Individual
In mishnaic memory, Temple rituals were performed in the past by a wide array of characters. Social interaction between these characters, in the rabbinic view, was a regular component of what once took place in the most sacred site in Jerusalem.Footnote 14 But one key recurring type of interaction is unusual, and the Mishnah emphasizes it: that between individual and group. The Mishnah's accounts not only narrate direct interaction between individuals and groups as they carry out various rituals; they also create an unusual and insistent shift between framing the ritual actors as a group, typically using the grammatical plural, and as individuals, using the singular. In the Mishnah's Temple-ritual narratives, both individuals and groups play important roles, and the very same ritual actors function simultaneously as both.Footnote 15 Taking up Grimes's terminology, in the mishnaic accounts, there is a dynamic interaction and relationship between the two types of ritual actor and between the distinctive variables of singular ritual actor and group. In the mishnaic rabbinic understanding, one function of ritual, I suggest, is to create this very interplay between individual and collective.
The most striking example of a ritual narrative that highlights the simultaneous presence of group and individual and the relationship between the two in the course of ritual enactment is the midsize narrative of the paschal offering in M. Pesaḥim 5:5–10. The account begins with the group:
The Passover sacrifice was slaughtered in three groups [כיתים], as it says, “All the community of the congregation of Israel slaughtered it” [Exodus 12:6]. The first group entered and the Temple courtyard was filled up. They locked [נעלו] the gates of the Temple courtyard and they blew a teki‘ah blast, a teru‘ah blast, and a teki‘ah blast [תקעו והריעו ותקעו]. The priests [כהנים] stand [עומדין] in rows and in their hands [ובידיהם] were silver and gold bowls. A row of silver was only silver and a row of gold was only gold. (M. Pesaḥim 5:5)Footnote 16
The actors in this opening paragraph are all groups. The entire people is divided up arbitrarily into three smaller groups, with each of these groups forming a large collectivity for the sake of the ritual. The first group of Israelites enters the central ritual place and is big enough to “fill” that very large space.Footnote 17 In addition to the Israelites, there are anonymous ritual actors—most likely priests—who lock the gates and blow trumpet blasts. These, too, are plural agents acting together, as indicated by the plural verbs תקעו, הריעו, נעלו. Finally, there are the explicitly labeled priests, those on sacrificial duty, who stand (עומדין). The next paragraph (5:6), however, shifts to the individual:
The Israelite slaughtered [שחט ישראל] and the priest received the blood [וקבל הכהן]. He would hand it [נותנו] to his fellow and his fellow to his fellow. He would receive [מקבל] the full [bowl] and return [ומחזיר] the empty one. The priest [כהן] nearest to the altar would sprinkle [זורקו] once toward the base of the altar.
The actors in this paragraph are only singular Israelites and priests, and the verbs are all singular.
In the subsequent paragraphs, there is a further shifting back and forth between individual/singular and group/plural. In 5:7, the “group” (though it takes singular verbs it is certainly a group) becomes the focus of the action. In 5:8, the priests (כהנים), plural, do some cleaning (מדיחין). R. Judah's view at the end of 5:8 returns to the individual priest, using a singular verb (זורקו; he sprinkles). Mishnah 5:9 begins in the plural, referring to the Israelites “hanging and flaying” (pl., תולין ומפשיטין) their animals, but switches back to the singular to describe the flaying in detail for those who did not find their own hook in the wall: “He places [a stick] on his shoulder and on his fellow's shoulder, and he hangs and flays [sing.].” Mishnah 5:10 continues with the individual processing his animal, “He ripped it open and removed its entrails; he placed them in a pan and burned them on the altar.” But the narrative ends back with the group, sitting in a particular spot in the Temple complex until the Sabbath is over (when it is the Sabbath), and finally with the Israelites, now in the plural, who exit (pl., יצאו) and roast their Passover lambs (וצלו את פסחיהם). The shifts can be summarized in the following table:
The seesawing between group and individual, primarily expressed through the peculiar grammatical shifts in person,Footnote 18 also occurs in a second medium-sized narrative in which the Israelites are a prominent group, the firstfruits narrative in M. Bikkurim 3:1–8. As I have detailed elsewhere, it is ambiguous in this narrative in particular where the telling begins and ends, but if we take 3:1 as the start, it begins with the individual (אדם) in the field (3:1).Footnote 19 Shortly thereafter, following a seemingly new introductory rhetorical question, “How do they bring up the firstfruits [to Jerusalem]?,” the subjects become primarily plural, as the people of the cities/towns (עיירות) gather and their actions are indicated with plural verbs (3:2–4) and with plural pronoun designations: “those who arise early” (3:2), and “those who live near … those who live far” (3:3). The group at this stage interacts with other plural groups along the way to the Temple: the Temple officials (3:3) and the craftsmen of Jerusalem (3:3). Twice during this stretch, secondary ritual actors do appear as individuals (see table below), and thus create a switching. The main and most striking switch occurs in the middle of the narrative, when the primary subjects and verbs switch back to the singular that occurred in 3:1. In 3:4, immediately after the plural verb is used—“until they arrive at the Temple Mount”—the action switches somewhat jarringly to singular—“even King Agrippa takes the basket on his shoulder until he arrives at the Temple courtyard”—and the subsequent ritual within the Temple takes place only (primarily) between singular Israelite and singular priest. Only in 3:8, if this is indeed to be taken as part of the narrative, is there a return to the plural, to “the rich” (pl., העשירים) and the “the poor” (pl., העניים), who “bring” (pl., מביאין) their firstfruits in particular kinds of vessels. This narrative can be charted as follows:
In M. Bikkurim, the pattern of shifting is slightly more complex, but the back and forth between individual and group, between singular and plural, is just as strong. The Mishnah's choice in M. Bikkurim to switch between singular and plural is even more noteworthy because of the backdrop of the biblical account on which it draws (Deuteronomy 26:1–11), which is entirely grammatically singular.Footnote 20 The mishnaic authors have chosen to switch part of the language to plural.Footnote 21
These two narratives are not isolated examples. In the long ritual narrative in M. Tamid, a similar dynamic shifting between singular and plural occurs within the subcategory of the priests. Throughout the long series of ritual events that purportedly take place in the Temple every day, there is an intermingling of priests acting as individuals and as a collectivity. A few examples from the much longer narrative illustrate the same pattern as seen in M. Pesaḥim and M. Bikkurim. The tractate begins with priests acting in plural:
The priests stand guard [הכהנים שומרים] in three places in the Temple … And the young men guard there … And the elders of the patrilineal division sleep there, and the keys to the Temple courtyard are in their hands. And the priests [are there as well], each with his mattress on the ground. They would not sleep in the sacred garments, but would strip, fold them up, and place them under their heads. And they would cover themselves with their own personal garment. (M. Tamid 1:1)
The Mishnah opens with the priests as a group in the Temple, all plural. The end of 1:1, however, switches to the singular, with the case of when “one of them had a seminal emission” and the procedure for washing up and exiting the Temple. More pertinent to the day's ritual, 1:2 continues with this focus on the individual priest: “Whoever wanted to clear the ashes from the altar would arise early and immerse himself before the appointed one arrived.” This is all singular: the individual priest participating in the day's rites and also the appointed one (ממונה), an individual priest with a particular ritual role. As the paragraph progresses, the appointed one now interacts with all of the priests, called “them.” And in 1:3, the priests act as a group, in the plural. As the narrative continues, individual priests are singled out for particular tasks, interacting with the full group of the rest of the priests on duty and also performing their particular tasks as individuals. This interplay between individual priests and the group comes to a head toward the very end of the narrative, in 7:2, as each priest who has been singled out acts simultaneously as an individual and as a member of the group:
They came and stood on the steps of the porch. The first ones stood to the south of their priestly brothers, with five vessels in their hands. The teni in the hands of one; the kuz in the hands of another; the coal pan in the hands of the third; the dish in the hands of the fourth; and the scoop and its cover in the hands of the fifth. And they blessed the people with a single blessing.
At the start of this paragraph, the priests who have participated in offering the incense are a group, “they.” They join up with the rest of the priests, forming a larger group of priests. At the same time, those who performed the incense are singled out one by one and enumerated. They stand as a group but also as individual ritual actors. Finally, at the end of this paragraph, all the priests act together to bless. As in each of the examples, the Mishnah narrates an intense interplay between individual and group in the performance of Temple ritual.
Individual and Group as Mishnaic Categories
The recurring shifting between singular and plural strongly suggests that the mishnaic authors conceived of individual and group as differentiated but interrelated ritual actors, or ways of framing those who act ritually in the Temple. While Temple-ritual narratives do not generally name them explicitly, these very categories as a binary pair, yah ̣id (יחיד) and z ̣ibur (ציבור) (or rabim, רבים), do appear frequently in the Mishnah as a whole. The prevalence of these categories in the Mishnah grounds my claim that individual and group are distinct as ritual actors within the mishnaic subgenre of the Temple-ritual narrative.Footnote 22
Individual (yaḥid) and community/group (z ̣ibur or rabim) are legal categories in a variety of different realms in the Mishnah, especially important in civil laws, Sabbath laws, and in rules about prayer and related rituals. Most relevant is their centrality to the categorizing in rabbinic sacrificial laws. For instance, M. Yoma 2:7 makes a categorical distinction in a particular case between communal offerings (קרבנות הציבור) and individual offerings (קרבנות היחיד). M. Zevaḥim 5:3 provides a title for a list that follows: “communal sin offerings and individual sin offerings.” M. Menaḥot repeatedly groups the two categories together (8:1, 9:4, 9:6, 9:7, 9:9). And M. Temurah 2:1ff contains a typical comparison between the individual and communal offerings as general categories based on a variety of types of rules.
In these less-narrative passages pertaining to Temple worship, the categories of individual and community are not about ritual actors, but rather about the responsibility and source of funding for the offerings.Footnote 23 Nevertheless, the existence of the categories themselves provides a context for the shifting that occurs in the Temple-ritual narratives. The differentiation between types of actors is grounded in the mishnaic categories. Further, the Mishnah describes a set of rituals applicable without a temple in which these categories do differentiate types of ritual actors. In M. Sukkah 3:9 and 3:13, plural actors ritually take the lulav during prayer (3:9) and “the entire people” takes the lulav in the synagogue (3:13), parallel to their ritual activity in the Temple in 4:4. At the same time, the Mishnah refers to individuals, in the singular, who take the lulav ritually as well (3:7 and 3:9). Fast-day ritual is also performed sometimes by “individuals” (yeh ̣idim) (M. Ta‘anit 1:4 and 1:7) and sometimes by the “community” (z ̣ibur) (M. Ta‘anit 1:5, 1:6, and 2:9; and see 2:1–7).Footnote 24 Blowing the shofar (or perhaps reciting prayer) is explicitly labeled both an individual and communal obligation (M. Rosh Ha-shanah 4:9). Although not every individual performs this ritual, there is one individual who does on behalf of the community, the shaliah ̣ z ̣ibur, the emissary of the community. The mishnaic rules pertaining to prayer and to the reading of the scroll of Esther do not explicitly engage these binary categories, but they hint at their relevance. More strikingly, both tractates Berakhot and Megillah shift their language between plural, or collective ritual agents, and singular, or individual ritual agents, quite similarly to the shifting that occurs in the Temple-ritual narratives discussed above.Footnote 25
While Temple-ritual narratives do not use the terminology of these categories, in one passage (M. Menaḥot 10:1) that leads into the narrative of the bringing of the ‘omer barley offering (M. Menaḥot 10:3–5), one of the categories is mentioned explicitly. A certain Rabbi Ḥananiah argues that when the ritual coincides with the Sabbath, it ought to be done in an individual setting, be-yah ̣id, thus contrasting the Mishnah's description of the communal ritual in 10:3–5 with potentially performing it noncommunally on the Sabbath, invoking the legal binary categories. This passage, together with the prevalence of the categories both in the conceptualization of sacrifice and of the performance of certain non-Temple rituals, provides strong evidence that the mishnaic authors drew on these categories when narrating Temple ritual. Individual and group, for these authors, are distinct ritual actors in the Temple and enacting Temple rituals brings individual and group into a dynamic relationship.
More Dynamics: Places, Actions, and Objects, and Their Relationship to Actors
Ritual actor is not the only variable among the types elaborated by Grimes in which the Temple-ritual narratives describe shifting during the course of the enactment. These narratives create a similar movement within the variables of objects, actions, and especially spaces. Moreover, the changes that happen in these other variables partially converge with those that happen in the variable of ritual actor.Footnote 26 This convergence tends to highlight even further the unusual shifting back and forth between individual and group actors and to suggest how, in the rabbinic understanding, objects, actions, and space may impact those who enact the rituals by bringing the individual and collective aspects of experience into dynamic interplay.
The most common and prevalent shifting occurs with the multitude of objects used and actions done at various stages of Temple-ritual procedures. These form the backbone of what took place in the Temple in mishnaic narratives. To take one example, in the Passover sacrifice narrative (M. Pesaḥim 5:5–10), participants close doors, collect and pass blood with golden silver vessels, sound trumpets, and flay animals with hooks and sticks. The different objects and actions mark new stages in the ritual. The flaying with hooks and sticks in 5:9, for instance, is a distinct stage in the procedure, very different from the slaughtering and blood-oriented activities in the preceding paragraphs. Shifts in object and action are a prime driving force in the progression of the ritual. At the same time, certain objects, such as the paschal lamb in M. Pesaḥim, or the firstfruits in the M. Bikkurim narrative, are used throughout—even as different actions are done with them.
Equally and perhaps even more distinctive in the Temple-ritual narratives is the element of space, or what Jonathan Z. Smith prefers to call “place.”Footnote 27 The mishnaic narratives frequently underscore the movement of ritual actors between spaces. In The Memory of the Temple and the Making of the Rabbis, I demonstrated that reference to entering and exiting ritual space is part of a larger narration trend in this genre and shows how boundary crossing is ritualized and serves to mark and even create sacred space.Footnote 28 Entry and exit also serve as a dynamic element in the ritual variable space. But these are not the only types of movement within space that are crucial to the ritual dynamics described. In the most detailed example of movement between spaces in the genre, the firstfruits narrative (M. Bikkurim 3:1–8), there is a plethora of movement. The action begins in the field (3:1), moves to cities/towns (‘ayarot) and to the central city/town of the district (3:2). The ensuing pilgrimage moves to “near Jerusalem” (3:3), “the Temple Mount” (3:4), “the Temple courtyard” (3:4), and “next to the altar” (3:6), until finally at the very end the pilgrim “exits” (3:6). Movement through space is particularly important in this narrative, emphasized by the repeated formula: “until they arrived at …; when they arrived at …” (3:3, 3:4 [twice]).
While each ritual variable is important in its own right, the convergence of variables, as Grimes stresses, creates a larger dynamic of the entire enactment. In many of the Temple-ritual narratives, these dynamics (as narrated) involve a simultaneous shifting in all of these variables. This correlation in shifts can be seen in the two primary examples that I have examined. In M. Bikkurim 3:1–8, the first stage, the individual person (’adam) (in the subsection labeled “I” above), begins in the individual's field (sadeh). The object of the reed used to tie up the growing fruit and the act of naming the fruit as firstfruits are unique to this stage. When the narrative, in its second phase, shifts to the group (beginning with subsection IIa), the location shifts to the capital city/town of the district and the city/town square, where the people sleep. Between the first stage in 3:1 and the second in 3:2–4, there is a shift in every one of the four variables I have analyzed thus far: individual to group; certain actions and objects (tying with a reed; declaring bikkurim) to others (gathering, travelling, ox, flute, and many more); and one place (the field) to other places (cities/towns and then the road to Jerusalem and eventually to the Temple). All that remains the same is the presence of the firstfruits. As the firstfruits narrative progresses, multiple spatial shifts are marked by similar changes in the other variables. The back-and-forth shifting between singular and plural is accompanied especially by movement through space, emphasized by the repeated formula: “until they arrived at …; when they arrived at …” (3:3, 3:4 [twice]), as noted above.Footnote 29 The correlation between shifts in the different variables appears in the following table (based on the chart above):
On the macro level, there is a main progression, from individual in the field (I), to the group moving through stages of pilgrimage (II), to individual Israelite and priest enacting the ritual within the Temple (III). At the same time, there are more minor but still narrated shifts. Both the larger and smaller shifts in person are accompanied by changes in action, location, and sometimes object. The narrative as a whole involves a complex orchestration of correlated movements in each of these components of ritual.
Though the Passover sacrifice narrative has fewer shifts than the firstfruits narrative, a very similar kind of correlation occurs. Stage I (M. Pesaḥim 5:5) involves one of the groups of Israelites entering the Temple courtyard, the doors being locked, and trumpets being blown. In stage II (5:6), the individual Israelite and priest have not changed location, but we have a new set of actions, those of the sacrifice itself: the slaughter, collecting the blood, passing it, and throwing it onto the altar. Stage III (5:7–8), back to the groups, involves both shifts in space through the repeated mention of exiting and entering and the new actions of reciting the Hallel psalms of praise and the priests mopping up. Stage IV is minor, but the shift back to the group in stage V (5:9) moves the action to a whole new activity, flaying the carcasses. Stage VI, back to individuals, involves minor changes, mostly introducing new actions and objects within the sacrificial procedure. In stage VII (5:10), we are back to the groups, and again there is dramatic emphasis on space and movements in space: the groups, presumably when it is the Sabbath, exit and sit in particular locations throughout the Temple complex, and finally exit when it gets dark.
In the M. Pesaḥim narrative, shifts in space, actions, and objects are associated with change in actor in a different manner than in the M. Bikkurim narrative, though with similar overall effect. Here, there is not as much frenetic change in every variable. When the narrative shifts to the group, there are changes in location; when it moves to individuals, new objects and actions are mentioned. Thus, the correlation works in a slightly different way, but in both cases the overall ritual dynamics involve overlaps between the shifts in ritual actor between individual and collective, and shifts in location, object, and action. The space limitations of an article do not allow a full elaboration of the larger dynamics of the daily tamid offering in M. Tamid, but in the passages quoted above, it is possible to observe some similar shifts in location, object, and action that accompany shifts between priests acting as individuals and as a group. Here, too, shifts in ritual actor correspond to shifts in additional ritual variables.
The larger ritual dynamics in the Temple-ritual narratives in M. Bikkurim, M. Pesaḥim, and M. Tamid show that, as imagined by the mishnaic rabbis, Temple activities involved movement in multiple ritual variables, which together helped create the process of ritual.Footnote 30 Because the Mishnah did not need to note the shift between individual and group at all, which is mostly a matter of how those involved are being construed as ritual actors, and, at the same time, because these movements are oscillatory and do not move the narrative forward as do shifts in place, action, and object, they stand out among the changes in the variables of ritual. The rabbis thus spotlight the shifting frame of how the ritual actors are construed; by creating a correlation between shifts in the other variables, they reinforce the constant back and forth occurring in the course of ritual and the importance of this particular interplay in the larger dynamics of the ritual.
Between Individual and Group: Interpreting the Mishnah's Temple-Ritual Dynamics
The surprising and insistent shifting in multiple Temple-ritual narratives between individual and collective group provides an important clue about the rabbinic understanding of what Temple ritual does or accomplishes. It suggests that in the rabbinic conception, performance of Temple ritual enables the people of Israel to be both individual and group simultaneously. Previously, I have argued that in Temple-ritual narratives the imagined rituals are understood to act in the realm of the social, facilitating positive social interactions and avoiding the breakdown of social relations.Footnote 31 The analysis here points to a further manner in which the rabbinic authors understood Temple ritual to work: it moves ritual actors between functioning as individuals and acting as collective members of groups. Reference to groups “gathering together” (מיתכנסות) in both M. Bikkurim 3:2 and M. Menaḥot 10:3 suggests that the rabbis believed that performance of Temple ritual creates collectivity.Footnote 32 Yet this formation of the collective through Temple ritual does not erase individuality. It may be true, as Mira Balberg has argued, that the Mishnah downplays the role of the individual owner in the performance of sacrifice and valorizes the collective ownership and contribution towards the regular daily offering, but the Mishnah does not at all eliminate the singular individual from the performance of many Temple rituals, as I have shown.Footnote 33 Rather, it insists that individual and collective group coexist. Individuals join together to form groups, but they become individuals again, and back and forth again. As already noted, such a complex relationship between individual and collective was typical in the Roman world in this period.Footnote 34 The mishnaic rabbis were participating in a wider discourse in the Roman world concerning the nature of society and of human activity, and the relationship between being and acting as an individual and as a collective.
Charlotte Fonrobert considers the relationship between individual and collective in the mishnaic understanding to be fully overlapping. Noting the rabbinic linguistic innovation of using the very same word, yisra'el, to refer both to the collective people and to the individual Israelite, she argues that “it is in the individual Jew that the collective is instantiated. He is Israel and not merely part of it.” Similarly, “One ‘Israel’ (the individual person) has a synecdochal relationship to ‘Israel,’ the collective”—the individual stands for the whole.Footnote 35 In this insightful way of understanding the coexistence of individual and collective in the Mishnah, the two are utterly overlapping, even as they are distinctive.
My analysis of Temple-ritual narratives suggests, however, that the interrelationship of group and individual may not have been entirely synecdochal and overlapping. These narratives highlight the shifting that occurs between the two frames. Sometimes there is indeed a full overlap, but at other times the two are distinct, and an oscillation occurs. Ritual enactment in the Temple is a medium by which the participant is both an individual and part of a group. The tension between these two frames creates an energy and momentum that drives the ritual. The ritual, in turn, brings the two into dynamic relationship through the other elements of ritual I have discussed—actions with objects, shifts between particular actions and objects, and movements between particular places.
The notion that ritual activity mediates between individual and group may echo one feature of Émile Durkheim's theory of ritual. As Catherine Bell puts it, “In Durkheim's model the ritual activity of cult constitutes the necessary interaction between the collective representations of social life (as a type of mental or metamental category) and the individual experience or behavior (as a category of activity).”Footnote 36 Bell, however, critiques this approach and so many other similar approaches that treat “ritual as … a medium of integration or synthesis of opposing sociocultural forces” or “a mechanism for the resolution of basic oppositions or contradictions.”Footnote 37 Her objection is that theorists have generated all such contradictions from one single opposition that has simply been assumed, that between thought and action. The various further binary oppositions are in fact only artifacts of the original assumption. Similarly, Bell points out that it is merely a methodological assumption that ritual resolves or integrates these oppositions.
In contrast to the many examples that Bell marshals, however, the distinction between individual and group ritual actor that I have found in the Mishnah is not a contradiction that is resolved, nor does it differentiate in any way between thought and action. These are simply two ways of framing those who act ritually. More to the point, I am not attempting to spin out a universal theory of ritual, but rather excavating the rabbinic understanding of ritual. The question is not whether their understanding is true or not, but how they understand ritual. The repeated mishnaic invocation of the binary legal categories of yah ̣ id and z ̣ ibur (sometimes rabim) shows that the rabbis construct a dichotomous relationship between individual and group. They are the ones who frame the ritual actors as both individual and group and create a movement between the two in the choices they make in how to narrate the enactment of Temple ritual. It is the rabbis who are somewhat Durkheimian (or, perhaps presage some of his ideas) in their understanding of how ritual works and what it does. The enactment of Temple ritual, as they narrate it, creates an interplay between individuality and collectivity—at times an overlap and at other times an oscillating dance. Temple ritual creates the social group, but it also allows the participant in the collective to function as an individual. Temple ritual itself fosters the complex interrelationship that Rebillard and Rüpke claim was so typical of the Roman world.
The Collective People in the Temple: Nation, Locale, and Lineal Grouping
The collective group that the rabbis of the Mishnah imagined as playing an important role in Temple ritual and coexisting in dynamic tension with the individual was itself not monolithic. The Temple-ritual narrative genre depicts three distinct collective groups who participate in ritual enactment; this multiplicity points to the role the rabbis imagined that Temple ritual played in creating a nuanced and multifaceted sense of groupness, group identification, and peoplehood.Footnote 38
The most prevalent group that appears in this mishnaic subgenre is the entire people of Israel, suggesting that Temple ritual has national significance and is central to the creation and maintenance of this aspect of group identification. The example that best highlights the centrality of the people of Israel as a group and a collectivity is the Day of Atonement narrative in the first seven chapters of M. Yoma. This extended ritual narrative very subtly but consistently imagines the presence and even participation of the nation in the powerful rituals of the Day of Atonement.
In stark contrast to the biblical description of high priest's sacrificial activities on this day (Leviticus 16), which imagines the rituals taking place in priestly seclusion, the Mishnah's description of the same ritual repeatedly mentions the crowd of Israelites that was an audience to the events of the day.Footnote 39 Even before the proceedings begin, according to M. Yoma, a crowd has gathered: “Cock's crow had not yet even arrived, and the Temple courtyard would be filled with the people of Israel [מלאה מישראל]” (1:8). The nation as a whole, as a group, then reappears throughout the narrative. In 3:4 and 3:6 they are called “the people” (העם), and sheets are spread “between [the high priest] and [them]” so that he can change in privacy between the different garments he must wear. As the ritual continues, this crowd of Israelites/the people witnesses the important ritual events of the day, and even participates briefly. In 3:8 and again in 4:1, “they” hear the high priest's confessions and, upon hearing God's sacred name, respond with their famous utterance, “Blessed be the name of the glory of His kingdom forever.”Footnote 40 In 4:1, which describes the ceremony for drawing the lots to determine which goat is for God and which for Azazel (the scapegoat), not only do they hear what the high priest exclaims, but they see him lifting up the lots. Presumably the high priest is instructed to “raise your hand!” (with the lot) specifically so that the group that is watching can see it. While the Mishnah does not explicitly mention the people here in 4:1, the parallel Tosefta passage does, stating that the two goats were at the eastern gate, north of the altar, “with their faces toward the people [העם]” (T. Kippurim 2:2). Similarly, the Tosefta avers that if the lot “for the Name” came up into the high priest's right hand “all of Israel [כל ישראל] was happy,” but if into his left, “all of Israel was not happy” (T. Kippurim 2:9).
In 5:1, the mishnaic narrative again mentions yisra'el, the people of Israel, in passing: as the high priest exits the holy of holies “he prays a short prayer in the outer chamber, and he does not lengthen [the prayer] so as not to terrify the people of Israel.” Presumably this is the very same crowd of “Israel” that has gathered from even before dawn in 1:8.Footnote 41 Twice more in the narrative the people appear, though now more obliquely. When the scapegoat is finally sent out, the Mishnah claims that a special ramp was built for its path, to protect it from the crowds—from the “Babylonians [i.e., Babylonian Jews; Tosefta: Alexandrian Jews] who would pull out its fur” as it passed. Finally, the description of the prayer service led by the high priest, in 7:1, assumes the presence of a crowd, which the high priest directly addresses (“I have read before you [plural]”). Although this crowd could theoretically be only priests, the continuation suggests otherwise: there was a typical spectator, הרואה, “the one who sees”—significantly, an individual—presumably the typical member of the original crowd of Israelites and the people who has been present since dawn, who would have to choose between “watching” the high priest read from the Torah or the sacrifices being burnt (7:1–2). Again the Tosefta makes the presence of this crowd manifest, claiming that when the high priest recited the blessings assigned him (listed in M. Yoma 7:1), “the entire people [כל העם] would recite the [blessings] assigned to them in order to showcase its [or: their] beauty in public” (T. Kippurim 3:18).
Mishnah Yoma, especially taken together with Tosefta Kippurim, thus gives special emphasis to the presence and modest participation of the people of Israel within the rituals of the day. By referring to the group as “Israel” and “the people,” the Mishnah considers the group and their participation in this ritual to have national significance. Further, the expression in the Tosefta, “the entire people”—which appears in the Mishnah elsewhere in the Temple-ritual narrative genre (M. Sukkah 4:4 and 4:9 and M. Rosh Ha-shanah 2:7; see further below)—suggests that the people as ritual actor represent the full and complete people of Israel. Throughout M. Yoma, this group acts as a collectivity in the different ritual processes and procedures that are enacted. The collective whole in this example is the entire nation, and participation in the ritual itself constitutes the people and gives their collective experience meaning.
The very same people as a national whole reappears multiple times throughout the Temple-ritual narrative genre, highlighting the national nature of the collective group that participates. In two of the short descriptions of different rituals performed during the festival of Sukkot, the Mishnah makes “the entire people” (כל העם) a central character, bringing their lulavim to the Temple Mount before the festival starts and retrieving them the next day (M. Sukkah 4:4),Footnote 42 and pelting the priest with their etrogim one year because of a ritual mistake he made (M. Sukkah 4:9).Footnote 43 The whole people appears on the festival of Passover in the Temple, too, according to the ritual narrative in M. Pesaḥim 5:5–10, though here it is within a quotation from Exodus 12:6.
Outside of the festivals, the people reappear just as frequently in the Temple-ritual narrative genre and in some peripheral descriptions of ritual associated with the Temple. In M. Rosh Ha-shanah 2:7, “the entire people” responds to the court with repeated ritual utterances that help to sanctify the new month. During the daily tamid sacrificial offerings in tractate Tamid, the people (העם) appear a few times, as the object of the priests’ blessings in 5:1 and 7:2, as vacating the premises while the priest offers the incense in 6:3, and most importantly, bowing in the dramatic spectacle that concludes the narrative in 7:3, when the Levites would sing, and at the end of each section, the trumpets would be sounded and “the people would bow down.” Similarly, in two very brief passages that could possibly be considered part of the genre, disqualified sacred loaves are placed on top of the Temple portico to indicate when “the entire people” should burn the leavened bread on the eve of Passover (M. Pesaḥim 1:5) and new Temple curtains are aired out in the same place so that that “the people [העם] may see how lovely the work is” (M. Shekalim 8:4). Though not precisely within the Temple-ritual narrative genre, the descriptions in M. Sanhedrin 2:1 and 2:3 about how “the entire people” engages in condolence rituals with the high priest when he is bereaved do take place in the Temple. And in two related adjudicatory ritual narratives, in M. Sanhedrin 6:4 and 11:4, the “entire people” and “all Israel” are present for ritual spectacles of capital punishment.Footnote 44
In each of the examples marshaled thus far, the collective agent that participates in the performance of Temple ritual is the whole people of Israel in its entirety. However, there is an extensive set of examples within the genre in which a collective group as ritual actor is not the whole people but only a large subset of the nation defined by their geographic locale within Israel, typically centered on a town/city or a cluster of towns/cities.
The geographic locale as the crucial frame for the collectivity is exemplified by the firstfruits narrative (M. Bikkurim 3:2–8), which I have already elaborated in some detail. Particularly striking in this case is the shift from the singular ritualist in the biblical account (Deuteronomy 26:1–11). The Bible uses only the singular, focusing on the individual farmer/worshipper who brings his fruits to the priest in the Temple. Perhaps for this reason Philo distinguishes the occasion of bringing the firstfruits from the main pilgrimage festivals, claiming explicitly that it is not performed by the collective group, by the “entire people” (ἐκ πολλῶν οὔτε γὰρ τοῦ ἔθνους), instead placing the emphasis on the individual (Special Laws 2.215–22).
The mishnaic account, in contrast, makes the bringing of the firstfruits into a group event. As already noted, the individual remains important, but the shift to the collective seems to be a rabbinic innovation. In this case the collective ritual actor is not the entire nation, but a subset: the local district (ma‘amad) within the Land of Israel, comprising a number of cities or towns in proximity of each other.
A very similar, more localized group appears elsewhere in the genre as well. In M. Menaḥot 10:3, the ‘omer barley-offering narrative, “all the cities/towns near to [the site for cutting the barley] would gather together there,” and this collective group is involved in a back and forth of ritual utterances with the one cutting the barley.Footnote 45 Even more similar to the group centered on a locale in Bikkurim are those groupings that appear in two different passages in M. Ta‘anit. M. Ta‘anit 4:2 claims that “when the time of the [particular] priestly watch arrived, the priests and Levites would go up to Jerusalem and the Israelites in that watch would gather in their cities/towns and read the story of the creation [in Genesis].” Though the word ma‘amad is also used slightly differently here (‘amud, in addition to ma‘amadot), and does not appear in the narration itself, the proximity of the word to the brief narrative links this local group who participates in Temple-related ritual to the very same group who gathers to make pilgrimage and bring the firstfruits. Earlier in M. Ta‘anit, in 2:1–5, there is a similar evocation of the M. Bikkurim narrative, as the people of the local area, centered on the city or town, gather in the “city/town square” (רחובה שלעיר).Footnote 46
These examples together show that a second important large-scale group that serves as ritual actor in Temple-ritual narratives is the locale, a particular area within the Land of Israel, made up of people from a set of cities or towns, and perhaps even from a single city or town. This second type of collective ritual actor, a subdivision of the larger national group, broken down by geography, plays an important role especially in rituals that are associated with the Temple but take place outside of it.
In addition to these two collective ritual actors who represent both the whole of the people and local geographic subdivisions, a third type of collective ritual actor also subdivides the whole people, not by geography but by lineage and role. A handful of the narratives already mentioned include the classical tripartite subdivision of priests, Levites, and Israelites. In the brief example in M. Ta‘anit 4:2, just quoted, the priests and Levites—in the plural—go to Jerusalem, and the Israelites, also plural, “gather” (מתכנסין) and “read” from the Torah (קורין). Elsewhere in the Temple-ritual narrative genre, this framing of ritual actors is most prominent in M. Tamid, in which priests act collectively throughout the narrative, the Levites act collectively twice (5:6 and 7:3), and the “nation,” presumably the Israelites, participate by bowing as well (7:3). In three other examples, M. Sukkah 5:1–5, M. Pesaḥim 5:5–10, and M. Bikkurim 3:2–8, the presence of two of the groups is explicit and the third is implied.Footnote 47 While this way of labeling ritual actors tends to divide the people based on their lineage and family background, when taken together they form a complete set and again suggest the participation of the entire nation.Footnote 48
All three recurring identities of the collective group in the Mishnah's Temple-ritual narratives thus focus on the nation and point to the centrality of the Temple and its ritual in the construction and maintenance of groupness and self-identification. The Temple-ritual narratives are a crucial component of what Cynthia Baker terms the mishnaic “discourse of Jewish peoplehood.”Footnote 49 The multiple framings of the group and its breakdown into smaller subgroups means that in the rabbinic understanding, national identity, or more precisely, the self-identification as Israel and the sense of belonging to this larger group, is also about important subgroups within the people as a whole. Temple ritual facilitates collective identification, groupness, and a sense of belonging to smaller geographic locales within the Land of Israel and with the lineal groups that determine particular social roles as well. Peoplehood was important, but it did not erase the smaller units of the subgroupings. At the same time, it did not erase the individual agent whose experience as an individual intermingled with her/his experience as part of a group. Participation in the nationwide center of the past, the Temple, for the rabbis, meant contributing as a singular person, as a member of a geographical locale, and as a member of a lineal grouping. Each of these components of identification could and did come into play in the Temple, and was fed by and reinforced by Temple ritual. The enactments in the Temple, in the rabbinic understanding, seem to be precisely what enabled the participants to join together and become collective entities and at the same time allow each of these aspects of identification to coexist simultaneously, and to provide the ritual participants with a sense of belonging and solidarity at multiple levels.
Conclusion: Collective and Individual in Ritual in the Rabbis’ Own Time
The dynamics that the mishnaic rabbis imagine for Temple ritual are not limited to the Temple. A very similar, though not identical, interplay occurs outside of the Temple-ritual narrative genre in a variety of rules about practices centered on prayer. Ritual centered on prayer activities, in the rabbinic conception, thus worked in comparable ways and achieved similar effects, even in the absence of the Temple.
As I have already noted, the Mishnah, in passages more focused on legal rulings than on extended narrative, explicitly frames ritual actors who use the lulav, perform the shofar ritual, and engage in fast-day ritual as both individuals and collective groups.Footnote 50 Sometimes the ritual actor who takes the palm branch, blows the ram's horn, or fasts is specifically an individual, but sometimes it is a plural community. Similarly, the mishnaic text shifts between plural and singular when detailing rules about daily prayer in M. Berakhot and about reading the scroll of Esther in M. Megillah—exactly as the narratives in M. Pesaḥim, M. Bikkurim, and M. Tamid do when describing the Temple ritual of the past.
In addition to creating an analogous dynamic interrelationship between individual and collective, the non-Temple prayer-centered examples in the Mishnah bring out the same three elements of collective identification as do the Temple-ritual narratives. For the lulav ritual in the synagogue, the Mishnah twice (M. Sukkah 3:9, 3:13) frames the ritual actor as כל העם, “the entire people.”Footnote 51 In M. Ta‘anit 2:1 (and see 3:3–7), in contrast, the collective ritual actor (צבור, z ̣ ibur) is specifically within the local town (עיר, ‘ir). Similarly, in M. Megillah 1:2, the anonymous rabbinic rule treats the village or city or town itself as the ritual agent: “villages and big cities read [the scroll of Esther]” … “big cities read” … “big cities and those surrounded by a wall read.” And in one instance, M. Gittin 5:8, the lineal identifications of priest, Levite, and Israelite function as crucial labels for the ritual actors who participate in the regular reading of the Torah.Footnote 52 Just like Temple rituals, therefore, the various non-Temple rituals in the Mishnah related to prayer not only bring together individual and collective group but engage the same three sides of collective identification—nation, geographic locale centered on cities/towns, and lineal and role-based grouping.
This similarity is not coincidental. In constructing the Temple ritual of the past through narrative and in setting out rulings about how ritual that also functioned without a temple ought to be done, the rabbis of the Mishnah created a fundamental parallel. Non-Temple ritual, according to them, has a similar dynamic to Temple ritual and achieves similar effects. In their own time, as in the past, ritual creates the collective, activating multiple levels of group identification, while at the same time centering the individual as well. When performing the prayer-type rituals of the post-Temple era, one additional element of meaning was the similarity to what was once done in the Temple.Footnote 53 Blowing the shofar, waving the lulav, reading the scroll of Esther, and all the prayer-centered activities create a sense of groupness and integrated collective and individual experience precisely as the exclusively Temple rituals had in the past, and this was part of what imbues the post-Temple rituals with meaning.
While my analysis highlights the dynamics, consequences, and meaning of ritual in the rabbinic understanding, ultimately, this understanding cannot be separated from the claims for authority the rabbis put forth for themselves and their own teachings. Elsewhere, building on the work of Daniel Boyarin, I have argued that in creating a heresiology, namely a particular argument about what constituted heresy, the rabbis of the Mishnah placed themselves at the authoritative center of the people of Israel as a whole. At the same time, the rabbis imagined a role for themselves in instructing the people of cities/towns—the geographic locale—in the proper way to observe the traditional practices.Footnote 54 The collective group, both in the form of the nation as a whole and the geographic locale, was thus important for the rabbis not only because it provided a sense of solidarity and belonging for Jews in general, but because it was fundamental to establishing their own place in Jewish society as well. The rabbinic understanding of ritual cannot be extricated from the negotiations for power in which the rabbis were engaged and their claims for authority to determine that very ritual. However, this understanding was not only about rabbinic self-interest. The rabbis were also invested in construing ritual activity in a way that would be effective and meaningful for the Jews of geographic locales in Israel and for all of Israel, over whom they claimed this authority. Drawing on currents in the Roman world and on the social realities of Jewish Roman Palestine, they imagined and framed ritual as binding together every Israelite with the collective whole, while simultaneously allowing for individuality, and as creating a sense of solidarity and belonging within multiple levels of Jewish collective life, all the while connecting present ritual life with that of the hallowed past, when the Temple still existed in Jerusalem.
