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 argue for rabbinic authority is the concept of “discourse” set out by Michel Foucault and developed in a number of ways by subsequent theorists. According to Foucault and his scholarly followers, groups (or larger societies) produce “discourses”—coherent bodies of writing, speech, and practices pertaining to a given topic (such as mental illness, sexuality, femininity)—that can have a real impact on the ways in which people think and act.47 Undergirded by “discursive frameworks”—rules or “structures which make those statements make sense and give them their force”—discourses help form what Foucault calls “knowledge” or particular ways of thinking about the given topic; they shape individuals’ understanding of what is true and what is not; and they have concrete effects on behavior and social relations.48 It is the last of these consequences that are of particular interest in this book, for it is here that discourses have “effects of power.”49 As Foucault puts it, “relations of power which permeate, characterise, and constitute the social body” are “established, consolidated, [and] implemented [through] the production, accumulation, circulation and functioning of discourse.”50 Discourse, paradoxically, both shapes power relations and is shaped by them. Moreover, discourse—or perhaps competing, interrelated discourses—may be the site of resistance to and contestation for power. As feminist and postcolonial theorists have shown, those at the margins of power may employ discourse as a strategy of asserting their own agency. Discourse, therefore, can function as a means of negotiating power relations.51
In the Mishnah, the sheer abundance of Temple material shows that the rabbis were heavily invested in speaking or writing about the Temple—in other words, that they were creating discourse about the Temple. Building on Foucault and those in his tradition, I suggest that the production of this discourse was part of a rabbinic desire to establish and negotiate relations of power, namely, to assert their authority over other members of the people of Israel, or Judaeans, living in Roman Palestine. It is not clear to what extent the text of the Mishnah, whether in written or oral form and whether conveyed precisely or filtered somehow through the process of communication, was conveyed to those outside of the rabbinic group. Yet even if parts of the Mishnah—and the Temple discourse they contain—circulated only in limited ways, the very existence of rabbinic Temple discourse reveals a desire on the part of the rabbis to create such “effects of power” for themselves.
Rabbinic Temple Memory/Discourse in the Context of Competing Temple Memories/Discourses
At the same time that the rabbis were looking back at the Temple ritual of the past and creating “Temple discourse,” other groups in the Roman Empire were producing discourse about the Jerusalem Temple that similarly expressed their own identities, argued for the legitimacy and primacy of their own ideas and practices, and expressed unique and competing claims for power. The very difference between each way of talking about the Temple points to the ways in which each group shaped the memory of the Temple and to the relationship between the particular ways of discussing the Temple and each group’s unique place in society. The rabbis, in producing their own Temple discourse and in remembering the Temple and its ritual in their own way, were laying a claim for legitimacy and authority among many competing claims.
Since the Temple and its ritual were a focal point for the competing claims of a variety of Judaeans, Christians, and Romans (as well as others who cannot be classified so easily) living in the Roman Empire in the second and early third centuries, they provide a fruitful lens for scrutinizing the cultural negotiation that was taking place between these different groups. They show, moreover, the complex and dynamic nature of this larger society.
Within this social and cultural landscape, the rabbis attempted to carve out their own particular niche, believing that their authority and their understanding of Judaean tradition should be recognized by all. When they looked back at the Temple and its ritual, the rabbis of the Mishnah remembered it in a way that reflected how they understood themselves and their place in society and in a way that argued for the centrality of rabbinic legal opinion and the rabbinic version of the Judaean way of life.
Plan of the Book
In Chapter 1 of this book, I establish the context for reading Temple ritual narratives as memory and discourse. I argue that the rabbis asserted for themselves a legal role within Judaean society, one fashioned in the image of the Roman jurist and shaped by the political realities of Roman Syria Palaestina. By portraying themselves as jurists of Judaean ritual law, the rabbis asserted authority over traditional practices and the traditional way of life—against the competing claims of leaders or authorities to whom other groups of Judaeans would likely have turned.
Within this political and social context, and in light of the way the rabbis portrayed themselves and imagined their role in society, I set out to demonstrate three ways in which the Mishnah’s Temple ritual narratives make specific claims for rabbinic authority. In Chapter 2, I show that the rabbis refashioned the earlier institution of the council into a powerful Court to which they gave ultimate authority over Temple ritual. They constructed this Court and its members as their predecessors from Temple times from whom they inherited their tradition and authority. Imagining the past in a way that mirrored the present (or the desired present), the rabbis essentially invented this Court, giving it a hybrid legal-ritual authority something like the power that they wished to have themselves. The invented Court of the past thus helped justify and authorize the hybrid legal-ritual role that they claimed for themselves in the present.
In Chapter 3, I argue that the narratives buttress rabbinic authority not only in content but also in form. The narrative form, in the specific ways that it conveys the chronologically unfolding “events”
