The Memory of the Temple and the Making of the Rabbis. Naftali S. Cohn
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definition: narratives tell of a “succession of events” that unfold chronologically in time.30 Gerald Prince adds further key characteristics that are linked to a narrative’s “dynamism”: “in a ‘true’ narrative as opposed to the mere recounting of a random series of changes of state, these situations and events also make up a whole, a sequence the first and last major terms of which are partial repetitions of each other, a structure having—to use Aristotle’s terminology—a beginning, a middle, and an end.”31
Though the Temple ritual narratives lack the specificity of many narratives, they have these other key elements of narrative. The various details of the first-fruits ritual, in our example, form a series of interrelated events that unfold in time and together make a whole. The narrative begins in the town with the pilgrims gathering together and concludes in the Temple, once the fruits have been given. In the view of many contemporary narrative theorists, this is sufficient to call them narratives.
The purpose of defining these passages as narrative is not merely to apply an essentialist narrative label, which would not be especially interesting. Rather, by identifying the narrative characteristics that these texts possess—their narrativity—we can see how the particular way in which the Mishnah describes Temple ritual tends to link these passages to one another intertextually and distinguish them from other passages in the Mishnah.32 As Simon-Shoshan argues, almost all segments of Mishnah can be differentiated by their degree of narrativity. In his view, this means the degree to which they possess specificity and dynamism. Building on this, and drawing on more recent theoretical work on the concept, I suggest that narrativity is not merely a product of two narrative characteristics, but of the degree to which a text has or does not have a whole range of narrative features.33 Most prominent among the Temple ritual narratives’ features are the fundamental telling of a sequential, chronologically unfolding series of events with a beginning, middle, and end, and the unique combining of the three different verb tenses to recount events that took place regularly and repeatedly in the past, as I have described.34
The third feature of the Temple ritual narratives that makes them distinct is the use of conventional words or phrases. In the first-fruits narrative, the phrase השתחוה ויצא, “he bowed down and exited” (3:6), is a stock phrase that appears frequently in the long narrative of the daily offering in Tamid. Similarly, the character King Agrippa (3:5) appears in the narrative in Soṭah. 7:8—and nowhere else in the Mishnah. In other narratives, the expression תקעו הריעו ותקעו, “they blew a tĕḳi‘āh blast, a tĕru‘āh blast, and a tĕḳi‘āh blast [on trumpets]” appears even more regularly (Pesaḥim 5:5; Sukkah 4:5, 4:9, and 5:4; Tamid 7:3; and a related phrasing in Ta‘anit 2:5). Aside from the recurring words or phrases that appear only in Temple ritual narratives, there are characters, objects, and places that are also conventional elements of the genre. These include Israelites, priests, various Temple officials, “the appointed one” (ממונה), the Temple Mount, the altar, gold implements, sacrificial animals, and musical instruments.35 Recurring characters, places, and objects help create the imagined narrative world shared by the various passages, one in which the Temple still exists and its rituals are still carried out.
The fourth key distinguishing feature of Temple ritual narratives is the use of an introductory formula containing the word כיצד (kēitsad), “how so?” This feature does not appear consistently in these passages nor is it unique to the genre, yet it marks many of the Temple ritual narratives as distinct from and embedded in the surrounding text by announcing the topic of the narrative that follows in a manner that is technically unnecessary.36 In this way, it makes the Temple ritual narrative similar to other mishnaic forms, particularly the list and the ma‘ăśeh, the “happening,” or brief story about something that occurred involving a rabbi.37 In both these cases, the textual pericope (passage) is marked as a distinct unit of text by an introductory formula: in the case of the list, by the words אלו (elu) or יש (yesh), meaning “these are …” or “there are …”; and in the example of the ma‘ăśeh, by the word מעשה (ma‘ăśeh)—usually followed by the particles ב (bē-), ש (she-) or ו (wē-), which indicate the person or people involved and the events or actions that happened. In each of these different forms, the use of typical introductory formulas suggests that the rabbinic authors consciously saw the ma‘ăśeh, the list, and the Temple ritual narrative as distinct subgenres within the Mishnah. Without additional evidence outside of the passages themselves, it is difficult to be certain, though, whether the rabbis understood these passages as forming a “genre,” especially in the case of the Temple ritual narrative, where the formula is applied less consistently and where the key formulaic word is also used for other purposes.
Regardless of whether the rabbinic authors consciously treat the Temple ritual narratives as a genre, the four features common to these narratives, which I have outlined, show that these passages are related to one another, are different from the other types of passages in the Mishnah, and are distinct from and thus embedded in the Mishnah’s running legal discourse. These passages, in other words, function as a genre.38 Together, the passages of this genre form a discrete body of interrelated Temple material that consciously represents Temple ritual procedures as events of the past.
Temple Ritual Narratives as Collective Memory
Because Temple ritual narratives look back at the past, it is appropriate to think of these texts as rabbinic collective memories of past events—or, more accurately, literary representations of rabbinic collective memory—which argue for the importance and authority of rabbis. In drawing on the theoretical study of collective memory, I do not intend to import a foreign concept to an ancient text but, as Jeffrey Olick puts it, to use this theory “as a starting point for inquiry” that opens up interpretive possibilities.39 The term itself, “collective memory” (and variations), refers to the notion that a group of people can share a common conception of what occurred in the past.40 Like individuals, who can look back and recollect events that they have experienced in the past or even the events that have been conveyed to them by others, groups can also—in a figurative sense—remember, or “reconstruct a shared past.”41 And as Maurice Halbwachs originally observed, groups tend to shape and construct this shared conception of the past in accordance with the present needs and realities of the group.42
One important implication of Halbwachs’s insight is that groups do not invent the past for insidious reasons, merely to aggrandize themselves or push their own ideology or agenda. Sometimes groups consciously engage in such propaganda; yet, for the most part, group memory is like individual memory. It is fallible and necessarily selective. Groups shape the past because this is in the nature of looking back and relating to the events of the past. And their motivations in usefully shaping the past are largely unconscious.43
Perhaps more important, the concept of memory laid out by Halbwachs implies that there is a direct relationship between a group’s present circumstances and the way in which it shapes the past. The past, as Barry Schwartz puts it, is a “mirror” or a “model” of the group in that it reflects the group’s “needs, problems, fears, mentality, or aspirations” or, more generally, its “social reality.”44 The group’s construction of the past is fundamentally shaped by these components of its present and so reflects them. The past, however, is not merely reflective of the present; it also serves a function for the group in the present. A group’s memory gives meaning to the past because that past leads teleologically to the group’s present and gives meaning to the present because the present is so thoroughly rooted in the past.45 In its collective memory of the past, a group expresses its shared identity and—in a subtle manner—its claim for power.46 This approach to “memory” that I have described provides a useful interpretive paradigm that highlights the choices that the rabbis have made in recounting the ritual of the past; and it stresses that these choices help lay a rabbinic claim for power.
Temple Ritual Narratives as Discourse
Another theoretical framework driving my contention that the Mishnah’s ritual narratives