both among ritualists and among theorists. In Schieffelin’s view, there are two fundamentally different ways ritual is thought to fail: the ritual performance can fail; or the ritual can fail to achieve its desired ends. The latter is a matter of “process” and the former a matter of “outcome.”26
In Yoma 2:2, the ashes-clearing ritual has failed because it devolved into violence. One priest aggressively pushed another and caused an injury simply to win the right to perform the ritual. This suggests that the cause of the failure was a combination of a flaw in the procedure and a natural human tendency toward competition and conflict. The performance of the ritual failed because of the way the ritual was set up as a race and because one person executing the ritual acted inappropriately.27 But this may be a matter of a failed outcome as well. The daily sacrificial rituals, following biblical ideology, were meant to ensure God’s presence and God’s favor, and the Day of Atonement ritual to effect purgation or atonement. Yet the way violence is pictured suddenly breaking out may suggest that this ritual is also normally meant to contain human conflict (through the ritual process itself).28 But it did not in this case. As a result of failure of performance and the result of violence (whether or not this was a failure of the desired ends), the Court, according to the narrative, intervened and permanently changed the procedure to stem the violence and the “danger” it posed. A similar process of failure and the very same response can be seen in the example of the ritual for distributing lulāvim (ritual palm branches) in Sukkah 4:4:
מצות הלולב כיצד כל העם מוליכין את לולביהם להר הבית והחזנים
מקבלים מידם וסודרין על גג האיסטווה והזקנים מניחין את שלהן בלשכה
ומלמדין אותם לומר כל מי שהגיע לולבי בידו הרי הוא לו מתנה למחרת
משכימים ובאין והחזנים מזרקין לפניהם והן מחטפין ומכין איש את
חבירו וכשראו בית דין שהן באין לידי סכנה התקינו שיהא כל אחד
ואחד נוטל בביתו
The ritual of the lulāv [palm branch], how so?29 The entire nation brings their lulāvim to the Temple Mount [on the day before the festival that coincided with the Sabbath]. And the superintendents used to receive [the lulāvim] and arrange them on the roof of the stoa. And the elders leave their [lulāvim] in the chamber [of hewn stone]. And they teach [the people] to say, “Whoever gets my lulāv, it is a gift for him.”
The next morning, they would arise early and come [to the Temple] and the superintendents throw [the lulāvim] to them, and they grab and hit one another.
And when the bēit din [Court] saw that they had come to danger, they decreed that henceforth each person shall ritually take the lulāv at home.
In this example, there is an apparent flaw in the procedure, which, because the people have a strong desire to get their own lulāv back, allows and even seems to encourage them to grab and beat one another up in attempt to get the one they want. Here, the violence and the danger it poses are prevented by the change that the Court makes to the procedure. The change corrects the apparent flaw and ensures that the natural competitiveness that leads to violence will be kept in check.
The question for my study of why ritual has failed in these mishnaic narratives is not a matter of social dynamics and ritual dynamics, as it would be for a cultural anthropologist or ritual theorist. The questions are not: How do the rituals function? What do the rituals do? Rather, because Temple ritual narratives are rabbinic representations of Temple ritual, the question of why ritual failed is more a matter of how and why the mishnaic authors claimed that Temple ritual failed.
As Grimes points out in his analysis of infelicitous ritual performance, ritual failure is a matter of judgment. For him, this is a theoretical problem. Yet for the study of a text as discourse, this is precisely what is of interest: Why do the rabbinic authors of these narratives engage in what Grimes terms “ritual criticism,” or judging the rite and its effectiveness?30 Most fundamentally, as I have suggested, the rabbis’ portrayal of ritual failure asserts the authority of the Court to fix the ritual. The details of the ritual failure as narrated suggest certain nuances in the authority being claimed here. In imagining the court responding to the ritual failures and thus correcting the flaws, preventing improper actions by the ritualists, and ensuring that competitiveness and violence are contained, the narratives suggest that the Court had the authority to determine the details of the ritual procedure, to control the ritual actors, and to ensure harmony among the people of Israel.31 The Court, in this memory of the past, played an important role in the functioning of the Temple and, by extension, Israelite society.
The distance from which the Court makes these changes to ritual procedure, its absence from the performance itself, points to the nature of the ritual authority that the narratives give them.32 This particular expression of authority seems to derive from the Court’s expertise on Jewish ritual and law as well as from a power to legislate or, more precisely, to determine what the law is.
Comparative Evidence for the Court of Temple Times: A Rabbinic Invention
The elders and the Court who play such an important role in Temple ritual narratives do appear in earlier Jewish literature. The Hebrew Bible and the Septuagint frequently mention elders (זקנים [zĕkēnim] in Hebrew; presbyteroi, in Greek). In the Septuagint, the term gerousia, council, is frequently used where the Hebrew reads “elders,” suggesting a relationship between the two. Post-biblical texts, especially the works of Josephus and the Gospels and Acts, refer to both elders and councils, namely local political, legislative, or judicial bodies in Judaea in late Second Temple times, which are called synedrion, gerousia, boulē, or other Greek terms.33 These earlier references to councils include the infamous synedrion (council) that tried and convicted Jesus. Traditional scholarship has generally assumed that the Mishnah’s Court and these councils are identical for a number of reasons. First, the Mishnah uses the Greek term sanhedrin to refer to the Court in a few instances. Similarly, both the Court and the councils appear to have some power to mete out capital punishment. And each institution appears to have a central role in Judaean society.34 If we assume that the institution of the Court is the same as those appearing in earlier literature, or, more likely, that the rabbinic Great Court/Sanhedrin of the Mishnah is based (loosely) on the institution of the local council that existed in the past and is mentioned in earlier, pre-rabbinic, literature,35 we can compare the Mishnah and the earlier sources. Such a comparison reveals unequivocally that the Mishnah is unique in giving the Court (or similar institution) a role in and authority over Temple ritual.36 According to the pre-rabbinic sources, the earlier institutions were not involved in, and did not have authority over, ritual in the Temple.37
Earlier scholarship on the Great Court or Sanhedrin already noticed this difference between the nature of this institution in the Mishnah and in the earlier literature, particularly the Gospels and Acts and the works of Josephus. Solomon Zeitlin, for instance, proposed that there were two different “Sanhedrins”: a political “Synedrion,” evidenced in the works of Josephus and the New Testament, which tried capital political cases; and a religious “Sanhedrin,” evidenced in rabbinic literature, which tried capital religious cases.38 Adolf Büchler had already taken a similar position, arguing that there were two Sanhedrins: the one of rabbinic literature, which was a religious court dealing with religious law; and
