Acknowledgements

The American Council of Learned Societies awarded me a substantial fellowship in support of research leading to this volume. The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded me a Summer Stipend in 1988 for related research. I thank also my students at the University of Minnesota. Several served as research assistants and contributed in many small but significant ways to this venture.

I recognize my debt to my Talmud teachers at Yeshiva University's Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary. I had the treasured privilege of studying the Babylonian Talmud as an undergraduate with Rabbi Gershom Yankelewitz and Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein and of receiving postgraduate instruction for four years in both the Talmud and Shulkhan Arukh from HaRav Joseph B. Soloveitchik.

I gratefully acknowledge the indelible influence on these studies of the work of my teacher and friend, Professor Jacob Neusner, the founding pillar of academic Jewish studies in the United States. He has shown us all how to analyze late antique rabbinism in contemporary terms through his own lucid and systematic work on the Mishnah, the Tosefta, the Talmud of the Land of Israel, the Babylonian Talmud, and the Midrash, and in his ongoing work on the remaining evidence of rabbinic Judaism.

I dedicate this book with great affection to my wife, Bernice. She read my words and offered criticism to every draft of this book. When I needed motivation, she reminded me of the value of learning and the importance of scholarship. She inspired me to complete this volume and see it through to publication. I am indeed lucky to have a wife with such exceptional beauty and taste, learning and judgment.

Tzvee Zahavy
University of Minnesota
Minneapolis, Minnesota USA

Contents

  Acknowledgements
I. Methods for the Analysis of Early Jewish Prayer
II. The Beginnings of Rabbinic Prayer: Textual Evidence
III. The Formative age: Berakhot Before 70
IV. The Age of Internal Conflicts, Self-definition and Transition: Berakhot at Yavneh
V. The Age of Standardization and Systematization: Berakhot at Usha
VI. The Mishnah-Redactor's Unified Theory of Prayer and Blessings
VII. The World of Early Rabbinic Prayer
VIII. The Synagogue in Mishnah, Tosefta and the Talmud of the Land of Israel
IX. The Scribal Influence on Prayer: The Shema`
X. Priestly and Patriarchal Influences on Prayer: The Eighteen Blessings
XI. From Temple to Synagogue: The Hallel in Early Rabbinic Judaism
XII. The Psychology of Early Rabbinic Prayer
XIII. A Rabbinic Compendium on Prayer: The Editorial Structure of the Talmud of the Land of Israel Tractate Berakhot
  Abbreviations
  Transliterations
   Bibliography

Chapter I

Methods for the Analysis of Early Jewish Prayer

In the past decade there has been renewed scholarly interest in the development of Jewish prayer in its most formative period, from 200 B.C.E. to 200 C.E. Current researchers are applying diverse social scientific and historical methods to the study of the ancient world in general, and specifically to the development of Judaic culture, enabling us to engage in a more complex and fruitful historical mode of reconstructing the emergence of Judaic liturgy and ritual in late antiquity.

The most original of the contemporary investigators have emphasized the need for interdisciplinary perspectives in this area and have developed new modes of social scientific and aesthetic criticism of Jewish liturgy.⁽¹⁾ This represents a third and diverse stage in the critical analysis of Jewish liturgical development. Scholarship early in this past century took a mainly reductionistic historical approach to Jewish prayer. That work is now outdated. The more recent form-critical method dominated the second phase of research. That mode of scholarship has proven unproductive.⁽²⁾

I briefly summarize some of the shortcomings of early reconstructions of liturgical development in these previous stages. Then I consider the advantages of interdisciplinary studies of Jewish prayer. In subsequent chapters I propose a fresh analysis of the crucial phases of the institutionalization of the core prayers of classical rabbinic liturgy that I hope modestly illustrates the advantages of advancing methods of analysis.

As a critique of earlier research, I outline nine methodological premises.

1. Many early reconstructions of liturgical development were often theological or apologetic.⁽³⁾No doubt the ideology of Jewish ritual was significant in its time of origin and continued to have theological impact as it was modified and interpreted in later epochs. Research in this area must nevertheless avoid theological-apologetic explanations of Judaic institutions and take care not to impute any unique or timeless value to the philosophical content of Judaic ritual.

2. Rabbinism was a new Judaic system that took shape after the destruction of the Temple in the first century. Its world views and ways of life represent distinct configurations in the history of Judaism, discontinuous in many ways with prior Israelite systems in Hellenistic Israel and the diaspora. Most scholarly works of early this century, and among them many attempted reconstructions of liturgical development, did not differentiate rabbinic Judaism as a new system of the post destruction era.

Research that sees Judaism as a single linear progression from Moses or Ezra through the classical age of rabbinism rests on a subtle form of historicistic apologetics. Scholars with theological intent incline, for instance, to posit the early origin of synagogue or the antiquity of certain prayers in the absence of evidence or in spite of abundant proof to the contrary.⁽⁴⁾

3. The Jews of first- to third-century Israel, the most formative interval of liturgical growth, lived under imperial Roman rule and within social configurations dominated by local leaders, often rabbis or other holy men. Their circumstance made them repress aspirations of national political sovereignty. Their cultural output, including the formation of liturgical rituals, must be understood as a facet of this context. Many early reconstructions of liturgical development were based on deficient models of the social and political realities of the times.⁽⁵⁾

4. The main creative forces of rabbinic religious development derived from internal conflict and competition among the leaders of factions within Judaism. Among those who called themselves "rabbis" we assume were scribes, priests, members of the patriarchal house and others seeking "leadership," that is to say, dominance and control, over local communal life.

S. Talmon has developed a more advanced social scientific approach to liturgical development for Qumran. Some of his basic premises are informative, as the following summary statement illustrates:

In order to compensate the loss of the sacrificial cult, and by reason of the group-centered ideology, the Covenanters especially promoted deindividualized, stereotyped forms of prayer that could be adapted without further qualification to communal devotion. Their egalitarian principles, the right of each member to scrutinize the deeds of his fellow, the hierarchical structure of the community, and the resulting system of close supervision of the lower-ranking by their superiors were conducive to the development of worship patterns fixed in time, openly observable, and removed from the sphere of subjective ad hoc decisions with their concomitant individualized forms of expression.⁽⁶⁾

We rarely find succinct, neutral assessments like this one in early reconstructions of liturgical development since they mainly misunderstood the internal dynamics, and especially the role of prayer, within Jewish culture and society in the first three centuries C.E.⁽⁷⁾

5. The artificial church-sect distinction of religious organizational life must be rejected as an inappropriate model for the description of the setting of late antique Judaism. We cannot simply attribute the dynamics of ritual development to reactions to heresies against normative practice and thought. Many early reconstructions of liturgical development clung to the notion that prayers often developed within a normative Judaism specifically to oppose sectarian heresies.

This supposition misled historians of Jewish liturgy to sort out variant traditions and locate the Urtext, which they associated with the imagined normative tradition, and deviant versions, which in some cases they connected to diverse heretical settings.⁽⁸⁾

6. We ought to assume that the primary targets of negative speech and action in ritual were those leaders closest in competition for allegiance of the populace at large. It is wrong to postulate readily that external challenges to the faith led to the formation of major components of Judaic rituals. Only where we find no likely candidate internal to the religion should we consider external competing systems of religion as targets of ritual polemic. Some early reconstructions of liturgical development placed too much emphasis on liturgy as a rebuttal to external forces such as early Christianity and Persian dualism.⁽⁹⁾

Hoffman describes the assumptions of the historicist approach:

The "original" prayer and subsequent additions to it all were explained as arising in response to various events and periods, as if prayer must always be a rational response to political persecution, a reaction to a foreign ideology, a blow against heresy, or an organism's response to the thousand and one other data that constitute a nation-folk's history.⁽¹⁰⁾

7. Both Hoffman and Sarason characterize how the philological approach dominated Jewish liturgical research and stood behind the work of the earlier historians and the form critics. Philologists did not claim to do Jewish history but did make many historical claims. Proponents of this text-based approach did not articulate a coherent model of social or historical circumstances for prayer and drew hasty and at times incomprehensible conclusions based mainly on unfounded assumptions.

8. Form-criticism, based on a model for relating religious ritual to social institutions, replaced philology as a dominant paradigm for research. A shortcoming of the form-critical approach was that it did not correlate these collective establishments to appropriate evidence of their existence or translate them into generalizable and comprehensible categories for the history of religion.

One of the most prominent historians of Jewish liturgy, Joseph Heinemann forcefully promoted this creative and provocative methodological model for the study of early rabbinic liturgy based on distinctions of social settings.⁽¹¹⁾ However, despite the breadth and depth of his studies, he based his form-critical theories on questionable assumptions.

Heinemann assumed that prayer was spread through adoption in one or another sitz im leben in early rabbinism. He associated prayers with the Bet Midrash or study hall, the Synagogue, the Law Court, and the Temple. Each of these was a complex and controversial institutional construct in its own right, a point to which Heinemann did not pay sufficient attention. He erred in his basic assumptions that these were uniform and mature institutions in the first and second centuries. His theory accordingly was built upon precarious foundations without establishing firm basis of support and lacks persuasiveness.

Hoffman's critique on this issue is milder, "Heinemann may at times have insufficient evidence to postulate details about the functioning of a given social institution, the workings of which he takes for granted in his etiology of a given prayer."⁽¹²⁾ The speculative and arbitrary bases of liturgical form criticism rendered it a somewhat sterile methodology, unable to lead others to additional insights based on its assertions and conclusions.

9. Other facets of Heinemann's basic theory are counterintuitive as, for example, "At first many different forms of the same basic prayer grew up in a somewhat haphazard fashion, and that only afterwards, gradually in the course of time, did the rabbis impose their legal norms on this vast body of material."⁽¹³⁾ Heinemann does not provide firm enough evidence to establish a historical basis for a loose populist process of development of prayer. Heinemann furthermore neglected the essential role of the leadership of the elite in propagating liturgy to serve their political and social interests. He too often employed the unspecified passive voice to describe the growth of liturgical ritual.

Other scholars both early and recent have lapsed often into the habit of describing liturgical growth as a kind of spontaneous generation. "Liturgy developed . . .," said Stefan Reif in an article. Sarason declared, "The Eighteen Benedictions did not all come into being . . . " At greater length Hoffman posits, "Worship is a category of human experience with rules of its own, and . . . these rules function in their own way to result in the formation of a liturgy."⁽¹⁴⁾

Considering these nine areas of weakness in the study of Jewish prayer we must take a fresh look at some basic issues. We ought not reject form criticism and return to the simple empirico-positivism of the past. We need to carry forward its basic idea that liturgy grows out of social and political institutional life. Fortunately, in the past few years Lee Levine has published an interdisciplinary study that represents one solid and sustained exercise in delineating the social ramifications of institutional structures in rabbinic culture.⁽¹⁵⁾ Together with Saldarini's recent inquiry and the extensive critical studies of Jacob Neusner that relate the major corpora of rabbinic literature to the social world of late antique Judaism, we now have firmer underpinnings for a revisit to the complex formative world of classic Judaic liturgy.⁽¹⁶⁾ The time has come to renegotiate aspects of the historical analysis of the growth of Jewish prayer in light of the current deeper and more complex understandings of the political and social circumstances of Judaism in Israel in late antiquity.

New analysis must be devoid of theological-apologetic intent. It must recognize the systemic discontinuities of rabbinism in Judaic history. It must take account of the relative influence of local and national forces over internal Jewish life and the role of religious ritual in those relationships. It must take seriously the effects of conflict on religious institutional change. It must broaden its view of religion and social life beyond the paradigm of norm against heresy. It must resist the temptation to posit changes in Judaism based on reactions to conditions outside the defined boundaries of the group's identity.

These stated desiderata serve as crucial, though often implicit grounding for my analysis, especially in chapters IV and V below where I engage in a discussion of the institutionalization of the main components of rabbinic liturgy. Those chapters take a topical approach to the political and social ramifications of the Shema` and Amidah in the first and second centuries.

In chapter III, I examine the evidence in the major corpora, Mishnah, Tosefta and Yerushalmi, of rabbinic involvement in the synagogues of Israel in the first to third centuries. In chapter II, I focus on Berakhot, a specific tractate in Mishnah and Tosefta, to draw out of that evidence a panorama of the evolution of rabbinic beliefs and activities related to its main agenda: prayer, the meal rituals and blessings.

In preparation for that exercise let me discuss the difficulties of using the evidence of Mishnah and Tosefta tractate Berakhot for an account of the history of early Jewish prayer.⁽¹⁷⁾

We face a variety of snares when we come to study traditional religious texts, such as the tractates Berakhot in Mishnah (M.) and Tosefta (T.). Since these are the first segments of authoritative rabbinic documents that were brought to their final form in Israel in the early part of the third century they are distant from us in space, time and culture. Ostensibly these legal and anecdotal statements represent valuable sets of data pertaining to some dimensions of the historical and intellectual life of the Jews of Israel of the first through third centuries. They appear to inform us of what some leading rabbis of that time thought about the world in which they lived, their philosophical concepts, their ideas and concerns on a variety of subjects.⁽¹⁸⁾

But these are not simple texts. Rabbis of the third century edited them with great care to exclude the materials they found objectionable and to include only those very few teachings that for theological or political reasons they wished to propound. They did not tell us outright what if any comprehensive social or philosophical viewpoints underlie these texts. I do hope in this essay and in future studies to intuit and reconstruct some semblance of the rabbinic outlooks, even some dimensions of the ethics and metaphysics of the Judaic leadership that taught their disciples that in these documents were elements of the oral Torah given to Moses on Mount Sinai.

The tractates of Berakhot in M. and T. dwell mainly on the subjects of prayer and blessings and of mealtime commensality. As far as we know, some followers of the rabbis adhered to these rules. Some did not. They cared enough about the rules to dispute, debate, catalogue and canonize them. Non-rabbinic Jews probably rejected or neglected most of the religious practices described in these short collections.

The rules deal with rituals, words and actions understood and accepted by a defined collective. What made these mannerisms and poetic declarations matter to the Jews of the rabbinic persuasion was their place within the political and social realities and relationships, amidst the complex struggle for leadership, dominance and control of the religious institutions and structures of an important religious community in Israel in that era.

Before I return to the historical motives of the rabbis, let me sketch out some basic background of this formative epoch. The age of early rabbinism spans three generations from the first through the third centuries C.E. Our texts contain declarations ascribed to rabbis of three generations prior to the age of the authoritative publication of the texts. A salient feature of the literary character of rabbinic teachings is the preservation of regulations in the traditional attributive form of discourse, in the name of a rabbi: "Rabbi X says" [followed by a ruling] or [a ruling followed by] "the words of Rabbi Y."

The rabbis named in Mishnah and Tosefta Berakhot lived in three somewhat disjointed periods in Jewish history. The latest, the Ushan masters, flourished mainly in the Lower Galilee in the middle to late second century after the defeat of the Bar Kokhba rebels in 135, and before the seat of rabbinic learning moved a short distance south to Bet Shearim at the end of the second century. That war severed many of their ties to the preceding generation, the Yavnean rabbis. In their centers on the coastal plain and elsewhere, these earlier masters thrived in a period of great turbulence from the traumatic destruction of the second Temple in Jerusalem in 70, the late first century, to the time of the equally disruptive Bar Kokhba war. The texts in Berakhot attribute several traditions to even earlier masters, the Houses of Hillel and Shammai, who were active in the early to middle first century in Jerusalem while the Temple was still standing.

The problem, to reiterate, is that because of the paucity of preserved teachings of each of these groups of masters, scattered selectively throughout the chapters of M. and T. in the process of redaction, I must proceed in stages to regain a historical perspective on the emergence of rabbinism.

Accordingly, in chapter II, I separate these strands of traditions attributed to masters of three generations and reassemble, reorganize and analyze them to get a better perspective on the contours of the gradual but distinct history and development of early Jewish prayer in the generations prior to the final closure of the Mishnaic corpus and in the era of redaction.

Let me make a few observations on my critical procedures. Wherever there is a warrant, I raise the issue of the authenticity of the attributions. In a few cases there is reason to question the attribution of a ruling to a given master, as for instance where a ruling on a matter of concern to a later authority is anachronistically attributed to an earlier master. But, the overwhelming majority of attributions stand at face value. I assume that the assigned rulings reflect the views of the rabbi to whom they are attributed, or at the very least to his school of immediate disciples or contemporaries. I give special attention to those ideas in earlier materials that are developed or refined further in traditions ascribed to masters in later generations. That form of attestation provides an additional argument for the earlier existence and authenticity of the attribution of a teaching.

Those are some elements in my approach to using rabbinic evidence. Let me briefly describe now the main topics of the tractate. At the time of the formation of M. in the early third century, three major components made up the rabbinic system of blessings and prayers: the recitation in the morning and evening of the Shema` with its blessings before and after; the recitation three times each day of the Prayer of Eighteen Blessings; the recitation of blessings before and after eating a meal.

Each of these elements of the system has a distinct history. Evidence reveals that the formal ritual of reciting the Shema` goes back to the period before 70 C.E. when the Temple was standing in Jerusalem. From the data we observe that the institution of the recitation of the Prayer of Eighteen Blessings may be traced back to Yavnean times, the turbulent period between the wars of 70 and 135. Based on our sources we infer further that the structured system of blessings before and after the meal developed most dramatically in the late second century in the time of the Ushan masters. I show that class and professional interests motivated the concern of those groups within rabbinism who sponsored these diverse religious practices.

By the third century I find postulated in tractate Berakhot as a whole statement a more fully articulated theory and theology. M.'s ultimate framers enunciated in the substantive selection and organization of early rabbinic rules for liturgical recitations, their clear, structured early rabbinic definition of a system of prayer and blessings, and a theology of practical value for the individual Jew and of hope for the Jewish people.

Chapter II

The Beginnings of Rabbinic Prayer: Textual Evidence

A. The Formative Age: Berakhot before 70

Before the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, scholars posit that three major social forces influenced the nascent formation of rabbinic Judaism: the priestly and aristocratic class, members of the scribal profession, and individuals within the class of householders who owned land and made substantive contributions to the economy of Judea and later to the Galilee and the Coastal Plain.

Neusner has argued that the early third century rabbinic compilations, Mishnah and Tosefta, including tractate Berakhot, derive from an amalgam of the interests of these three forces.⁽¹⁹⁾Neusner says, "There are these two social groups, not categorically symmetrical with one another, the priestly caste and the scribal profession, for whom the Mishnah makes self-evident statements. . . . We must notice that the Mishnah, for its part, speaks for the program of topics important to the priests. It takes up the persona of the scribes, speaking through their voice and in their manner."⁽²⁰⁾

Neusner rounds out this picture of the social components that speak through Mishnah with a third group, the class of householders, the audience for the document, the real and potential adherents at large of the religious system of the rabbis. This group he calls, "the basic productive unit of society, around which other economic activity is perceived to function."⁽²¹⁾

Mishnah, in Neusner's view, turns out to be a cogent system uniting the concerns and styles of discourse of its three constituents: scribes, priests and householders. The work of the ultimate redactor is so effective that "the Mishnah coalesces."⁽²²⁾ Not surprisingly, one of its main themes is the problem of mixtures. Having artificially combined the disparate views of competing social groups into one statement, the framers of Mishnah return repeatedly to their "prevailing motif" says Neusner, "the joining together of categories which are distinct."⁽²³⁾

Thus, the rabbinic philosophers who framed Mishnah created in that book an artificial world where opposing forces come together as parts of a whole. These intellectuals shared with us little concerning what they deemed important about the real issues of village social structures or national politics. They instead gave us a stylized book that alternates between anonymous statements of unanimous assent and attributed rules cast within disputes or debates.

One "proof" that Mishnah's redactor's successfully camouflaged the social conflict between its constituent groups from its readers is evident in the very way Neusner himself chooses to describe the contributions of various factions to the composite. He speaks plainly, without any hint that he has chosen euphemisms, of "The Gift of the Scribes,"⁽²⁴⁾ "The Gift of the Priests,"⁽²⁵⁾ and "The Gift of the Householders."⁽²⁶⁾ Apparently Mishnah's seamless synthesis remains intact even under modern critical scrutiny. The centuries of internecine struggle that produced the cultural components of the system of Mishnah recede into the deep background of its ultimately successful interweaving of traditional laws, anecdotes, and interpretations originally spawned by varied and conflicting historical and social contexts.

Unfortunately these texts provide us with exceedingly limited direct evidence about the origins and early development of Jewish prayer. The only explicitly attributed materials of any significance in the tractate for reconstructing the history of rabbinism before 70, when the Temple in Jerusalem was still standing, are the few lemmas ascribed to the Houses of Hillel and Shammai. These rules address but few liturgical subjects: the recitation of the Shema` and the recitation of "blessings" on Sabbaths and festivals.

On this basis, the establishment of the recitation of the Shema` as a popular scribal rite may be traced to the time of the Houses of Hillel and Shammai, wisdom fellowships commonly thought of as the immediate precursors of some rabbinic associations of the late first century and thereafter. Diverse evidence of rabbinic traditions such as M. Ber. 1:3 associates rules and practices for reciting the Shema` with the Houses and so supports this supposition.

Early Christian evidence also associates the Shema` with a group of scribes. The scriptural verses of the Shema` appear in phylacteries found at Qumran. I discuss these matters further in chapter IV.

Both the inclusions and exclusions of the contents of the standard text of the rabbinic liturgy clearly help us define its focus and original intent. The primary motifs of the national cult in Jerusalem are noticeably missing from both the Shema` and from the frame of blessings that surrounds it.<sup>(27)</sup> Such ideas and institutions as the Temple, the priesthood, Jerusalem, and Davidic lineage, all prominent motifs in the Amidah, the Prayer of Eighteen Blessings, are of no concern to the framers of the Shema`.

Conspicuously, the Houses do not debate the rules for the Prayer of Eighteen Blessings. I believe this glaring omission, with other positive warrants, strongly suggests that this liturgy became institutionalized within rabbinism no earlier than the end of the first century. On this I shall have more to say below.

Most of the remaining traditions attributed to the Houses in our tractates of M. and T. relate not surprisingly in some way to rituals and blessings of the meal or of the Sabbath, or to purity laws. Extensive recent research has shown that these topics dominate the interests of the rabbi-pharisees of the era before 70.⁽²⁸⁾ Let us look more closely at the early references to the Shema`. M. 1:3A-F suggests that the accepted and proper ritual for the recitation of the Shema` is patterned on a Hillelite conception. Apparently, the entire first chapter of Mishnah Berakhot is based on an understanding attributed to the Hillelites. They said that the Shema` must be recited twice each day, morning and evening.

The recitation of the Shema`, according to the rule ascribed to the Hillelites, formed a main component of the rabbinic daily liturgy. Later Yavnean rabbis accepted the Hillelite opinion of the nature of the ritual and explicitly built their conception of prayer around it. They went as far as to promulgate a tradition to ridicule those who accepted the competing Shammaite view of the nature of the liturgy. M. Ber. 1:3 reports that Tarfon, a later Yavnean master, who followed the Shammaite mode of practice, placed his life in jeopardy. He is portrayed as stating that he emulated the convention prescribed for the ritual by the Shammaites and by that placed himself in danger of attack by bandits. The rabbis accordingly told him, "Fittingly, you have yourself to blame [for what might have befallen you]. For you violated the words of the House of Hillel (M. 1:3H)."

A second pericope attributed to the Houses deals with the number of blessings recited in the Sabbath liturgy. In T. 3:13 the Houses dispute the number of blessings that one recites in the prayer of the New Year's day that coincides with the Sabbath and the procedure for reciting the prayer for the Festival that coincides with the Sabbath. The opinions are that one recites ten, nine, eight or seven blessings depending on the circumstance and authority. Noticeably, none of the alternatives suggests a liturgy of eighteen blessings.

One may question whether these disputes in T. are of any historical value, or are artificial and anachronistic units. On the one hand, a gloss to the unit, attributed to Rabbi, signifies that these pericopae may have been formulated at a late date. On the other hand, there is no reason to doubt that special prayers were recited on the Sabbaths, Festivals, and New Year's days during Temple times, even if a more formalized requirement of regular daily recitation was widely instituted only after 70 C.E. At most then, these disputes in Tosefta reflect an early interest of the Houses in the regulation of liturgies for the special days of the year and they were revised at the time of the redaction of T. to reflect the practices of this later period.

The bulk of the Houses' materials in Berakhot, concentrated in chapter eight of M. and its corresponding units in T., present rules for the Sabbath and Festival dinner and other regulations that may apply to any dinner. The order of blessings a person must recite for the Prayer of Sanctification for the Sabbath day, and over the wine that one drinks at that occasion, is the subject of the first unit.⁽²⁹⁾

Next, the Houses dispute the order of blessings for the Prayer of Division that was recited at the meal at the conclusion of the Sabbath.⁽³⁰⁾ These disputes presuppose that blessings were recited on periodic occasions, to sanctify the Sabbath at its start, and to divide it from the remainder of the week, at its conclusion.

Traditions ascribed to rabbis of later generations take for granted that a Jew must recite blessings before eating any foods. Surprisingly, only one early rule takes for granted that a person had to recite blessings before eating any fare at a meal. Two other units supply rules for the Prayer of Division service, which one could recite even apart from the meal.⁽³¹⁾ Another dispute concerning a ritual practice at the meal deals with the use of spiced oil, a custom not developed any further in rules ascribed to subsequent generations.⁽³²⁾

As I just suggested, we should not construe the references to blessings recited at a meal as evidence of an early first century practice of reciting blessings before consuming any foodstuff. The only food blessing mentioned in Berakhot ascribed to an authority who flourished before Ushan times is the blessing over wine debated in the Houses' disputes in M. Berakhot chapter eight. The Yavnean master, Tarfon, speaks of a blessing over water in M. 6:8, although this likely refers to a blessing recited after drinking. The absence of sustained ascription to early rabbis of rules on these subjects supports the view that the concept and practice of a full-fledged system of food blessings, recited before eating, was institutionalized at the earliest by the Ushan rabbis, a century later.

A few traditions ascribed to pre-70 authorities do refer to the blessings recited after a meal, not necessarily to the Sabbath meal. Two of these deal with the special circumstances following the meal: what to do if one forgot to recite the meal blessing after eating, and what one does to recite the meal blessing over one cup of wine obtained after the meal.⁽³³⁾

Three other pre-70 units speak to concerns of purity at the meal: how one keeps his table and the utensils of his meal, the cup or the napkin clean, or how one avoids rendering unclean scraps of food left over from the meal.⁽³⁴⁾ Questions like these relating to rules of purity are less relevant in later generations once the whole system of ritual cleanness loses its pertinence after the destruction of the Temple.

One final Houses-unit transmits to us a fragment of a tradition pertaining to the meal. M. 6:5 attributes a cryptic gloss to the Shammaites ("Not even a potted dish"). Even in its full context, its meaning is difficult to ascertain and its import for our understanding of the general character of this stratum of traditions relating to the meal and to blessings and prayers is therefore accordingly limited.

To sum up, the sayings in Berakhot attributed to the Houses reveal their interest in expected pharisaic-rabbinic concerns. They take up rules for the fellowship dinner and for the Sabbath meal in particular and rules for ritual purity at the table. The Sabbath Prayers of Sanctification and Division are associated with these masters, as is the blessing one recites over wine and the blessings recited at the end of the meal.

The regular recitation of the Shema` is closely associated with the Houses in the first century. Finally, there is a possible association of the Houses with liturgies for Sabbaths, festivals, and the New Year, though I suggested the connection of these rituals with the early masters may be anachronistic.

Several rules and subjects first mentioned here at this earliest stratum of the law are further developed and expanded in later periods as we shall see below in greater detail. At Yavneh, the rabbis developed formulary recitations for inaugurating and concluding the Sabbath and festivals, and for liturgical insertions into the prayers recited at those times. At Usha, the rabbis created a full-fledged system of blessings to be recited by the Jew before eating any foods or drinking liquids. Such complex innovations of later authorities are built on

simple prior notions associated with earlier masters such as the pre-70 convention that one recites a blessing before partaking of the wine at the dinner.

Although I have described the Jewish masters of the Houses of Hillel and Shammai as "rabbi-pharisees," their main concerns stem from a scribal agendum: the use of standardized prayers and blessings in the village, in the household at the table, and in the everyday life of the Jew. I now propose to show how such seemingly modest innovations in the first century serve as the firm basis for the more lavish articulation of rabbinic ritual in the subsequent generations.

B. The Age of Internal Conflicts, Self-definition and Transition:

Berakhot at Yavneh

The Yavneans of 70-135 were less notable as systematizers of religious practices than their Ushan successors would be in the next period, 135-200. They had to be more creative as innovators of new and modified religious institutions, to come to grips with the demise of the Temple and its rites and with military and economic threats to their very existence. Yet they refused to submit completely to the limitations of external domination within the Roman Empire.

In the midst of their turmoil, Yavneans built the recitation of the Shema` into a regular daily liturgy. They evolved through conflict and its resolution a requirement to recite daily the Prayer of Eighteen Blessings. Yavneans began to modify and institutionalize the formerly pharisaic fellowship meal into a rabbinic ritual. But for all that they did achieve, they remained preoccupied with maintaining their cultural independence and social vitality against the tremendous pressures of the forces around them. The Ushans, in the subsequent period of relative calm, ultimately undertook to create a system out of the powerful but disjointed components of rabbinic life left to them by their more charismatic Yavnean teachers.

Direct and unambiguous accounts tell us that in the time of Yavnean sages major rifts occurred within rabbinism over liturgical issues. The Talmud reports that the rabbis overthrew the Patriarch Gamaliel II because of a dispute over the obligation to recite the Evening Prayer. Eleazar ben Azariah replaced him as interim Patriarch, and a faction forced the rabbinic "academy" to open to a broader constituency.⁽³⁵⁾ Reforms of many different issues were enacted "On that day," that is, on the occasion of the rebellion against Patriarchal domination and the shift in power that ensued.⁽³⁶⁾

The narrative concerning the deposition of Gamaliel deserves attention because, as I said, it centers on the struggle between first-century factions over the imposition of a liturgical ritual as obligatory. According to this narrative, Gamaliel was deposed from the Patriarchate because he ruled that the rabbis should recite the Amidah at night. Goldenberg alludes to political motives for the turmoil, but does not associate such conflict with the legislation of liturgical reform:

The Patriarchal regime was just beginning to consolidate its power. The rabbinic conclave in general must have resented this. At least two rival groups, the priests and Yohanan's circle, are likely to have had aspirations of their own. The stakes in the struggle -- control over the remnant of Jewish autonomy in Palestine -- were large.⁽³⁷⁾

This observation does not account for the connection between politics and public prayers. This conflict exhibits how liturgy is a primary means of exercising influence, dominance and control over a community of the faithful. In chapter IV we review the two versions of this deposition-narrative.

Liturgical development closely mirrors political and social growth of rabbinism throughout its formative years in several discernable stages. During the initial transition after the destruction of the Temple, from about 70-90 C.E., the priests promulgated the Amidah to reinforce their authority and the scribes promoted the Shema`. At this time it would have been natural for the scribes to claim the Shema` was once part of the Temple Service, as we shall see.

In the second phase of development, from about 90-155 C.E., the Patriarchate sponsored the Amidah to counter a growing scribal faction within the rabbinic movement. Scribes countered by rallying popular support, deposed Gamaliel, and effectuated a lasting compromise. Both liturgies were adopted in tandem and made obligatory rabbinic rituals.

The rabbis in succeeding years further consolidated the compromise. This led in the era from about 155-220 C.E. to the shaping of the composite rabbinic service that survives down to the present day. The leadership within rabbinism amalgamated the Shema` and Amidah into a compound liturgy with varied rules and prescribed mannerisms.

Some specific results of this process of internal conflict were lasting liturgical innovations such as the revision of the Shema` to include the theme of Kingship. As a permanent social outcome of the era the priests were relegated to figurehead status in rabbinic communities. Politically, the Patriarch continued to observe the conventional boundaries of his authority established after the deposition and was excluded from internal rabbinic affairs.

In effect the scribal faction came to dominate the local communities of rabbinic Jews in the aftermath of the major crises of the internal rabbinic power struggle. This historical evolution fully divorced rabbinic ritual from national political power structures.

Let me review some evidence of how in a short span of sixty-five years, between the end of first war in 70 C.E. and the defeat in the second rebellion in 135 C.E., the rabbis transformed and constricted many aspects of Judaism. Whereas at the outset of this era Jewish religious life centered on special meals in the home and the national cultic procedures of the Temple, by the close of this era it had changed. The rabbinic system of religious practices limited its practical regulatory focus to the major aspects of the life of the late antique Jew, in the town or village and its related personal experiences.

Naturally, the dominant concerns of the rabbis at Yavneh, such as they were, reflected some primary issues of late antique religion and society in general within an imperialist Roman setting. A primary issue at the outset of the Yavnean age was, in a word, local survival. The rabbinic leadership struggled to assert some authority against the forces of foreign political domination. Rabbinic Jews, like many other subservient subordinate populations, were essentially powerless and accordingly indigent. Day after day the people had to struggle against the elemental forces of nature for rudimentary sustenance.

The rabbis turned their attention where they could. They espoused the view that through their knowledge and religious virtuosity a Jew could help fend off the powers of nature, protect persons from the harm of the elements and of the unknown, of sickness, and of the dangers that lurked throughout the world inside the village.⁽³⁸⁾

The rabbis in the age of Yavneh afforded the Jews means to control the immediate vicissitudes of nature. Through their teachings and practices, through the rabbinic Torah, and mainly through prayer, the masters of this time postulated that they could for instance bring rain, or stop the rain. They could avert the dangers of the natural world or the likelihood of attack by bandits or other potential human enemies. They offered the people a way to cure their diseases, or at least to foretell the outcome of sicknesses. In the Yavnean period after the fall of the Temple, the rabbi who employed prayer and engaged in the study of Torah evolved by the necessity of the context in which he thrived into the local holy man par excellence of Judaic life.

As the rabbis took control of more of the religious life of the Jews they advanced the transfer of the locus of holiness from its former center, the Temple in Jerusalem, to the domain of the rabbis, their places of congregation, and to the study hall where the rabbis taught their disciples the Torah. An isolated ruling in M. Berakhot 4:2 clearly reflects this major shift in religious authority from the Temple to the study hall and from priestly rituals of sacrifice to rabbinic practices of prayer:

A. R. Nehuniah b. Haqanah used to recite a short prayer when he entered the study hall and when he exited.

B. They said to him, "What is the nature of this prayer?"

C. He said to them, "When I enter I pray that I will cause no offense and when I exit I give thanks for my portion."

Nehuniah's prayer asks for protection lest the student or teacher make an error in studying, misinterpret the tradition and by that improperly unleash the forces of the holy. In the view of this Yavnean tradition, the study hall was the primary precinct of the sacred. One employed special prayers to defend himself from any spiritual or physical danger he might face as he would enter and exit this location.

A related source reports that the rabbis of the time also relied on prayer to protect and preserve them from more explicit tangible dangers they faced when they entered the study hall to congregate. To the governing Roman forces, a congregation of religious leaders was a potentially seditious mob and could have constituted an overt threat to the authority of Roman rule. When the rabbis called together crowds of followers, guards monitored them to restrain the temptation to activism. A pericope in T. 2:13 shows how prayer had the kind of power that afforded religious leaders the ability to strengthen social solidarity and mount a challenge against external control:

E. Said R. Meir, "Once we were sitting in the House of Study in front of R. Aqiba and we were reciting the Shema` to ourselves [i.e. silently]

F. "because a quaestor [a Roman guard] was sitting in the doorway."

G. They said to him, "One cannot derive a precedent [of law] from [an incident in] a time of danger."

Other traditions ascribed to Yavneans reflect the tenor of the imperial situation of these late antique times in Judaic circles. The attitude to prayers conveyed in the materials reflects a fundamental concern with the need for protection against both danger from natural forces and threats from within society itself. Some of the materials explain directly how via rabbinic practices one may protect himself. According to the explicit ruling in M. 4:4, a person recites a short prayer in a place of danger for protection from physical harm.

B. R. Joshua says, "One who goes through a dangerous place should recite a short prayer, [an abstract of eighteen].

C. "And he should say, `God save your people Israel. In all their crises let their needs come before you. Blessed art Thou, O Lord who hears our prayers and supplications.'"

A tradition in M. 9:4 proposes that prayers serve to protect a person from the dangers of the wilderness beyond the civilization of the village, and a concise liturgy serves to express one's thanks for returning safely to home after a dangerous journey abroad.

A. One who enters a town recites two prayers, one upon his arrival and one upon his departure.

B. B. Azzai says, "[He recites] four [prayers], two upon his arrival and two upon his departure.

C. "He gives thanks for the past and cries out for the future."

For the rabbinic Jew of the village, brief prayers protected a person from less ominous hazards. In their towns the heat and vapors of a bathhouse could cleanse and even cure, but also when out of control could cause injury or death. According to T. 6:17 a visit to this place merited the recitation of special formulae.

Within the range of rabbinic circles variation existed in the type and intensity of sanctity and power ascribed to the holy rabbis. When a great virtuoso in prayer, according to one tradition, was engaged in recitation he was protected from harm. Prayer prevented Haninah ben Dosa from the injury of a potentially lethal bite of a poisonous lizard. A story narrates how Ben Dosa was protected and the lizard died after biting him. "Woe to the person who is bitten by the lizard. Woe to the lizard which bit R. Haninah Ben Dosa," T. 3:20 reports.

Haninah also had the power through prayer to peer into the future. His recitations served as a kind of omen for the destiny of a sick person, as M. 5:5 indicates. By virtue of his prayer for the sick, Haninah could tell, "who would live and who would die."

For the Yavneans then, prayer had the power to protect the individual in the village. Through prayer a master also might gain the power of precognition of the future and a better perception of a person's present state.⁽³⁹⁾

Out of this understanding of the power of prayer in the life of the Jew, the Yavnean rabbis began to transform the practice of reciting prayers into a regular daily institution. Evidence suggests, as we saw, that Jews were reciting the Shema` even before the Temple was destroyed. Yavnean masters further ritualized this practice.

Formalization of the most prominent rabbinic liturgy of prayer, the liturgy of eighteen blessings, took hold as we argued earlier in the era of Yavneh. We see this process articulated indirectly in our sources in M. and T. Berakhot, as I shall show later.

Several late rabbinic traditions in the Talmud make this point more explicit. Consider the following [B. Meg. 17b]:

A. When did the Prayer [of Eighteen Blessings originate]?

B. It was taught: Simeon of Paqoli established the order of the [Prayer of] Eighteen Blessings before R. Gamaliel at Yavneh.

C. [The Talmud continues with an apparently contradictory tradition:] Said R. Yohanan, and it was also stated as a Tannaitic teaching:

D. It was taught: One hundred and twenty elders, and among them [were] several prophets, ordained the order of the [Prayer of] Eighteen Blessings.

The Talmud subsequently harmonizes the two conflicting traditions [B. Meg. 18a]:

A. If "One hundred and twenty elders, and among them [were] several prophets, ordained the order of the Eighteen Blessings," why then did Simeon of Paqoli have to establish [the order of the Prayer also]?

B. [Because the Jews] forgot the [blessings of the Prayer] and he came and established them again.

This tradition and other evidence indicate that the later Talmudic authorities believed that Yavnean rabbis sought to institute the regular standardized liturgy of the Prayer of Eighteen Blessings. I earlier surmised that this came about after serious struggle and conflict between rabbinic factions.

In the evidence of Mishnah we find several signs that some rabbis of the period resisted the formalization and institutionalization of prayer, claiming that regularization, qeba`, diminished the power of the liturgy. R. Eliezer says in M. 4:4, "One who fixes [the recitation of] his prayer, his prayer is not supplication."

This brief remark reflects the fluidity, the instability and the effervescence of the time. While some authorities sought to establish the best means to formalize prayer as a daily ritual, to further various motives, others resisted, seeking to maintain the more impromptu character of prayer.

Yavnean masters such as Gamaliel, Joshua and Aqiba developed rules and practices for the recitation of new prayers as we see for instance in M. 4:4-5. Rabbis of this era also further extended the existing practice of reciting the Shema` as a regular liturgy twice daily. Yavneans ruled in M. 1:2 on the proper times for the recitation of the Shema`.

In the context of their rules for the standardization of this liturgy, the Yavnean attitude toward prayer was that the proper recitation of the Shema` affords protection to an individual and, the converse of this claim, one who recites the wrong way, risks exposure to danger. Tarfon faced danger when he followed the Shammaite ritual for the recitation of the Shema` in the passage at M. 1:3G-H.⁽⁴⁰⁾

The Yavnean sources clearly show that the recitation of both prayers and the Shema` in accord with the directives of the rabbis will protect a villager from danger and from harm. Needless to say, the rabbis maintained that the power of the words of the prayers derived from God, the ultimate source of protection. God was the source of immediate safety and the fountain of final redemption, for the Jew of the towns. They were more imprecise about their promises of national salvation. After all, the religious leaders of this age witnessed the defeat of their people in two tragic wars fought by those who strove to gain freedom from Roman rule, under the banner of leaders who believed they could hasten the coming of the age of the messiah for the Jewish people.

The texts do make a link between the recitation of the Shema` and the quest for redemption in several Yavnean traditions in Berakhot. But the connection remains vague at best. In M. 1:5, the rabbis direct that the exodus from Egypt be mentioned in the Shema`. This suggestion of the bond between the liturgy and ultimate redemption is carried forward in T. 1:10-15, linking the recitation of the Shema` with the messianic age.

I have argued that the Yavnean masters were preoccupied with the dangers lurking around the village, and accordingly with providing the Jews of the time with the means to withstand them. Their rules regarding the recitation of the liturgy pay little attention to the internal state of mind of the person who recites the liturgy. The Yavnean rules for reciting the Shema`, for instance, mainly focus on external aspects of the recitation.⁽⁴¹⁾

In this era of transition under Roman domination the rabbis sought to establish some stability and shelter in their local communities by means of prayer and ritual. Not surprisingly Yavnean rulings provide us with no coherent attitudes toward public prayer, merely several isolated, independent rules.

Two of these rules are preserved in the name of the Ushan tradent Judah, who is associated with a particular Ushan attitude toward public prayer. The later Ushans legislated more openly and confidently on all aspects of public prayer, as we shall discuss below. Judah's traditions about the practices of the Yavneans primarily serve to express his own Ushan interests. Hence this further limits their value for reconstructing the development of rules for prayer at Yavneh.

One of these traditions at T. 3:5 about Aqiba claims that he prayed differently in public and in private, underlining the virtuosity of Aqiba in prayer. In M. 4:7, Eleazar ben Azariah says that the Additional Service on festivals and new moons is to be recited only with the congregation of the village. Although we presume that this means one may say the liturgy only in a public setting, reference to the congregation of the village elsewhere in our tractate or in rabbinic literature has been suppressed. As a result this isolated tradition is of limited value to us in reconstructing a broader picture of the dynamics of the development of the phenomena of public Jewish prayer in this period.

We may say the same of the institution of the synagogue. One of the few explicit references to the synagogue in our early material, M. 7:3, alludes to the practices of reciting prayer in the synagogue. The call to prayer was fixed in the synagogue, Aqiba said, regardless of how many people were there. Lacking a fuller context of several traditions on the same subject, this pericope is of restricted value in the reconstruction of the history of the Yavnean ideas and practices relating to prayer and the synagogue.

To recapitulate, Yavneans emphasized that prayer can protect the Jews. They instituted regular daily prayers. They did not completely formulate a system of regular public prayer. Their views on the matter and rules for the synagogue are either lacking or suppressed.

Finally, I see several secondary trends in the development of liturgical ritual in this era. Yavnean materials rule that some rituals, formerly associated solely with the table fellowship, may be integrated into the regular recitation of prayers. So, for example, the Prayer of Division, the recitation of formulae for the close of the Sabbath, or the Prayer of Sanctification, blessings for the inauguration of the Sabbath, may be recited as part of the regular prayer liturgy.⁽⁴²⁾

Yavneans propose that another short liturgy, the prayer for rain, which may have been recited previously as a separate rite, also may be integrated into the regular recitation of the Prayer of Eighteen.⁽⁴³⁾

Based on these examples, we may conclude that once Yavneans more firmly established the daily recitation of prayer as a recurring ritual, it dominated the liturgical life of the Jews and began to absorb into it other, formerly independent practices.

The Yavnean traditions convey a sense of the late antique quality of rabbinic notions of prayer in this period under imperial domination. The rabbis of this era emphasized that prayer can protect a person from dangers, be they natural danger, or the dangers inside or outside the village. In this period the rabbis acknowledged the power of the recitation of formal prayers. At Yavneh we find accordingly the beginnings of the formalization of regular daily liturgies of new prayers, and most prominently, the establishment of the recitation of the Prayer of Eighteen Blessings as a routine religious obligation.

As rabbinic ritual matured, the fellowship meal became an occasion of note for recitation of prayers and blessings. Yet from the traditions taken as a whole, it appears that the Yavneans placed the fellowship meal at the periphery of their concerns; it never became a dominant issue of religious life.⁽⁴⁴⁾

Linked to Yavneans are a few questions on the subject: How many individuals constitute a minimum for a collective meal, and what formula of invitation does one use to call the group together to recite the blessings after the meal (M. 7:3)?

Our materials associate Yavnean names with only a few rules regarding the blessings for foods and other rules for the meal. A Yavnean is associated with a ruling regarding the traditional blessing over wine. Ben Zoma explains in T. 4:12 one of M.'s rules about the recitation of the blessing over the wine that one drinks during the meal. This wine-blessing is associated, in a tradition concerning the recitation of the blessing (M. 8:1), with the earlier masters of the first century, the Houses of Hillel and Shammai. A Yavnean master merely carries forward a previously articulated issue.

Another tradition about wine ascribed to Yavneans discusses the nature of the substance itself. If one tastes it before one dilutes it to its normal strength for drinking, must he recite a blessing?⁽⁴⁵⁾

Yavneans are also associated with concerns for recitation of blessings after a meal. Indeed one issue is what foods make up a meal as we see in M. 6:8:

A. "If one ate figs or grapes or pomegranates [as the main dish of his meal] he recites over them [after eating] three blessings," the words of Rabban Gamaliel.

B. And sages say, "[He recites] one blessing [embodying three]."

C. R. Aqiba says, "Even if one ate cooked vegetables and that was [the main dish of] his meal, he recites over them [after eating] three blessings."

D. One who drinks water to quench his thirst says, "For all came into being by his word."

E. R. Tarfon says he says, "Creator of many souls and their needs."

The sense from this tradition and other material ascribed to masters of this age taken together is that Yavneans took interest in the blessings one recites at the conclusion of the meal (see T. 1:7). But they have no strong systematic conception of a formal fellowship meal. Their laws, and Aqiba's regarding vegetables in particular, apply more to the setting of the average villager, rather than to a patrician or member of the upper-class, to the basic subsistence consumption of a society on the edge of survival, not to the concerns of national leadership.

If the Yavneans addressed themselves to the concerns of those who were overwhelmed by their struggle to survive, and thus dealt with the aspects of daily life that buffeted their existence, as we suspect, then that explains why they did not have the motivation or the luxury to develop a detailed etiquette for the comfortable institution of the formal fellowship meal.

The Yavneans could not fully articulate some of the institutions within their group because they had directed their rulings to the villager whose energies went to fend off the daily pressures of external imperial rulership. Several sources like T. 2:6 on different subjects suggest that Yavneans gave priority to external political events over religious obligations. We are told by Meir, in T. 2:13, that one may in fact alter the performance of a ritual to avoid severe persecution, to survive against countervailing pressures.

Although this stance may have been a practical response to external political and social domination, at least one short lemma in our tractate shows that other attitudes might have been prevalent among the Yavnean masters. One should give his soul for the commandments, Ben Azzai remarks at T. 6:7.

In sum, the repertoire of Yavnean traditions provides us with strong evidence of some concerns of the era. These second century masters were preoccupied with survival in an imperial world, with a struggle against the elements of nature and the forces of political dominance. In their rules concerning prayers we saw repeated concerns for protection for the villager from local danger and from harm.

There emerged in this era some tendencies to formalize and regularize prayer. But, in general, the institution appears to have remained fluid and effervescent, reflecting the conflicting internal forces within rabbinic life of the time and the external pressures faced by followers of the rabbis.

Finally, in their rules concerning the fellowship meal and blessings for foods the Yavneans also do not far advance the formalization of these practices. One view has rabbis at Yavneh consider even cooked vegetables, even dates, as substance enough to constitute the main food for a collective meal.⁽⁴⁶⁾

As I next discuss, from the rulings ascribed to the masters of the generation at Usha, a different picture emerges. The rabbis of that age take a dissimilar approach to defining the meal. Under more flexible historical conditions, they develop an apparently original fully developed system of blessings to be recited before one eats any foods. They systematize the life of the rabbinic Jew through rigorously delineating and applying a scheme of ritual, especially of prayers, to daily life.

C. The Age of Standardization and Systematization:

Berakhot at Usha

The period following the unsuccessful Bar Kokhba revolt brought relative political and social stability to the Jewish centers of learning, then located mainly in Usha in the Lower Galilee. Unlike the previous two generations from 70 to 135 marked by wars and rebellions, this period returned rabbinic social and cultural life to a more serene routine with few major disruptions for an entire generation and for several more to follow.

One of the fruits of peace and stability was the significant stabilization and restraint of the intellectual and social life of rabbinism at Usha resulting in part in rabbinic work on the organization, systematization and development of the Jewish laws that emerged out of the turbulence of the prior two generations.

At Usha the rabbinic masters gathered, arranged and canonized their teachings and the received instruction from the masters of the past. They systematically assembled in formulaic compilations those rules and regulations, stories and anecdotes that best expressed their understanding of themselves and of the world. The canonical tractates of Mishnah and Tosefta emerged in the generation that followed the Ushan era, as a direct result of their contributions toward the organization of rabbinic knowledge.

Just as their work reveals an intense interest in the structure and organization of ideas and traditions of past teachers, their materials reflect their desire to systematize. From the numerous rules attributed to Ushans one gets an even more unmistakable impression that this period was a time of structuring, building and organizing within rabbinic society at large.

Let me illustrate this with a few remarks in the Ushan materials related to prayer and correlative rituals that manifest the idea of rank and hierarchy within the social order.

A tradition attributed to Meir, a leading Ushan, best conveys the temper of the process of transformation of rabbinic traditions on prayer from a corpus of scattered rabbinic rules into a system of liturgical regulations:

R. Meir used to say, "There is no person in Israel who does not perform one hundred commandments each day [and recite blessings for them]. One recites the Shema` and recites blessings before and after it. One eats his bread and recites blessings before and after. And one recites the Prayer of Eighteen blessings three times. And one performs all the other commandments and recites blessings over them [T. 6:24F-G]."

In the view of this Ushan master, all a person's prayers, meals and other religious obligations comprise parts of a larger system.

The recitation of variations of liturgical formulae, the blessings, associated with each religious event connects these disparate phenomena. Within this conception many rabbinic practices of prayer and blessings form part of a distinctive and coherent religious system of liturgy.

Further examination of the materials in our texts attributed to the Ushan masters illustrates how they reflect contention within Jewish life in the late second century for control over the community of the faithful through two major realms of religious activity: public prayer and table fellowship.

The struggle for political and social dominance over communal activity, such as liturgical practice, may be evident in a pericope attributed to an Ushan rabbi that deals with the proper recitation of the Shema`. The text reads:

Rabbi Simeon b. Gamaliel says, "Not all who wish to take [the liberty to recite] the name [of God in the Shema` and its blessings] may do so [M. 2:8]."

This statement implies that those who wish to invoke God's name in prayer may do so only in accord with the regulations of the rabbis who alone sanction the recitation of prayers in Judaic life. Another tradition underlines an additional social ramification of liturgical recitations: "From a man's blessings one can tell whether he is a boor or a disciple of the sages [T. 1:6]."

According to this brief unattributed lemma on liturgical formulae, reciting the correct or incorrect words signifies one's social status, i.e., that one belongs within one defined group or another. An Ushan lemma makes another closely related point. One must recite each day three blessings that reinforce the social distinctions of the group: Blessed art Thou O Lord our God who did not make me . . . a Gentile, a boor, or a woman (T. 6:18). Through blessings then, one may express some basic rabbinic notions of social stratification and division.

Several Ushan regulations governing the recitation of the Shema` and of the Prayer of Eighteen communicate directly or obliquely how these rabbis sought to establish their dominance in their fraternity within the study hall, the unquestioned domain of the sages, and over the synagogue, the popular province of the common folk, and in this way to control public prayer.⁽⁴⁷⁾

Besides the more direct social aspects, Ushans showed further interest in the regulation of other particulars of the liturgy. They extended the regulations of the time for the Shema` enunciated earlier by the Houses and developed at Yavneh. Simeon, for instance, points out an anomaly in the rules governing the times of the recitation of the Shema`, "Sometimes one recites the Shema`[twice in one night] (T. 1:1)."

Judah tells a story about two Yavnean masters who recited the Shema` late in the morning in T. 1:2. Interestingly, Judah's story portrayed the rabbis reciting the Shema`, "On the road." Although in several traditions we find Ushan regulations for the time of recitation, they ordinarily evince little concern with rules regarding the place of recitation. One can recite on the road, or in any location for that matter [that is not unclean]. The overt implication of several Ushan rulings is that one need not enter a specific place, e.g., a synagogue, to recite one's prayers.

Previously I discussed the friction and compromise among Yavneans leading to the acceptance of a requirement for reciting the Prayer of Eighteen three times each day. Ushans, according to the data, then established the more specific timetable for the daily recitation of this liturgy. Judah glossed the primary Mishnaic pericope on this subject in M 4:1, "The Morning Prayer [may be recited] until midday. R. Judah says, `Until the fourth hour, etc.'" This unit most likely was formulated at the time it was glossed, in Usha. Other evidence at T. 3:12 suggests that the masters of Usha sought to regulate the form of the prayers.

The Ushans introduced several new conceptions in their formulation of the requirements for the performance of the rituals by expanding and further regulating the existing religious practices of prayer. Analogy between prayer and Temple law was one such idea developed at Usha, as I outlined above. Another primary Ushan interest was the role of a person's intentions while reciting prayer.

Because it is difficult to define directly in a few words the nature of the concentration needed to perform properly this ritual, the rabbinic prescription specifies how, during the recitation, one must alter his relationship to the external distractions of the world around him, so that he may properly direct his internal consciousness.

Judah in T. 2:2 said that one who recites the Shema` must have the proper frame of mind. Judah and Meir debated in M. 2:1-2 the definition of the frame of mind that one must have for reciting the Shema`. They agreed that one must limit his social discourse during the recitation. But they disagreed over the means of doing this.

Judah and Meir disagreed concerning the propriety of extending or returning a greeting while reciting the Shema`. According to both rabbis one may vary his level of concentration during one's recitation. Meir said that between paragraphs one may relax his concentration and extend a normal greeting out of respect as in ordinary discourse. But while in the midst of reciting a paragraph, one may not lapse into an ordinary state of mind to extend or respond to a greeting unless he fears the consequences of ignoring some important person close by.

Judah was more lenient. While reciting a paragraph one may certainly extend a greeting to a person of authority whom he fears and one may respond even to a person deserving respect. Between sections of the Shema`, one may exchange common greetings. He may greet a person he respects and answer the greeting of any ordinary person.

Both rabbis agreed that one's concentration on the recitation of the Shema` establishes a state of mind that requires a person to modify his relation to other people nearby. Their dispute concerned the intensity of this change in ordinary social interaction necessary during the heightened consciousness of the recitation of the Shema`.

In a more subtle way, another tradition reflects Judah's concern with the need for a person to direct his intention during the performance of a ritual. Those who attend a funeral may or may not participate in the recitation of the Shema`. It all depends on the extent of their involvement in the rites of the funeral. Onlookers who are not directly engaged in the procedures of the funeral may be able to concentrate and therefore may recite. Participants involved directly in the funeral are presumed by T. 2:11 to be too distracted to recite properly the Shema`.

Another Ushan, Abba Saul, provided a scriptural basis from Ps. 10:17 for the general requirement that one must concentrate for the recitation of the Prayer. The only prayer that God hears, said this master at T. 3:4, is one that an individual who concentrates recites.

Related to the concept of intention is the idea of meditation, that is of "silent recitation" of prayer. This notion is associated with Ushans at M. 3:4. Judah's gloss in M. linked this unit with the Ushan era. T. 2:12 more directly linked this notion to Yose. Meditation is a subtle process. It is a daring idea to think that one may concentrate on a text without reciting it to fulfill the requirement of the religious obligation to pray.

So the traditions attributed to Ushans show two ways the masters of this era regulated the actual performance of the rituals of prayers. They controlled the timetable for recitation and they legislated regarding the kind of intention or concentration needed for an individual's recitation of the prayers.

In other ways too, the rabbis of this period sought to exercise their supervision of the institutions of the recitation of prayers in private and, formally, in public. As cited above, one Ushan unit made the simple point that all recitations of blessings and prayers must be sanctioned by the rabbis: "Rabban Simeon B. Gamaliel says, `Not all who wish to take [the liberty to recite] the name may do so (M. 2:8).'" Certain rules in particular, were directed toward the regulation of more formal gatherings for public prayer. In T. 1:9 Judah indicated how the participants in the public service must recite the blessings that followed the Shema` liturgy along with the leaders of the service.

In another unit, T. 3:5, Judah conveyed an anecdote about the way Aqiba would restrain himself to conform to the conventions of public prayer. The message of that pericope was that Aqiba, virtuoso of the rabbis, conformed to the rules of conduct for public prayer by not bowing too much. The ordinary rabbinic Jew then surely must follow the regulations of the rabbis for ceremonial public prayer.

In M. 4:7, Judah proposed a compromise between the views of Eleazar b. Azariah and sages on the public recitation of the Additional Service. The basic notion that an individual may indeed recite on behalf of the congregation or group was implied elsewhere in sources associated with Judah (T. 2:12). He said that one who was unclean by virtue of a rabbinic decree may not recite the liturgy. He by that limited the role of such an individual in the public recitation of prayer.

Even within the systematic treatment of Ushan legislation, several major issues remain vague. From our data we cannot tell whether at Usha the recitation of the Shema` was to be practiced as a public liturgical ritual of the community, or a private rite of individuals, or both.

One rule refers to the recitation of the Shema` in the synagogue. The rule itself is anonymous and its reference to the Shema` is only implicit from the context of the rule: "One who entered the synagogue and found that [the congregation] had [already] recited half [of the Shema`] and he completed it with them . . .(T. 2:4)." But in general the Ushan regulations in M. do not consider any distinction between the public or private recitation of the Shema`, as we see at M. 2:3. Such issues cannot be resolved based on the limited sources we have.

Ushans contributed to the tightening formalization of the literal content of prayer. One unit attributes to Yose an interest in the formulation of the liturgy: "If one did not mention the covenant in the blessing of the land [i.e., the third blessing in the grace after meals], they make him begin [the recitation] again (T. 3:9)."

In their rulings for the food and meal blessings Ushan masters maintained a similar scope of activity and interest. Through their rulings the Ushans solidified and extended rabbinic dominance over two major areas of the life of their community: the institution of collective public prayer, as shown, and the practice of commensality, that is, the collective fellowship meal.

Besides the many rules they promulgated for reciting liturgies and prayers, the Ushans created an intricate system of blessings to be recited before eating any foods. The rabbis justified the idea of requiring preliminary food blessings in a creative anonymous rabbinic tradition as follows:

One may not taste anything until he recites a blessing. For it says, "The Earth and all therein is the Lord's (Ps. 24:1)." One who derives benefit from the world without first reciting a blessing has committed a sacrilege. [It is as if he ate sanctified Temple produce.] [One may not derive any benefit] until [he fulfills all the obligations] that permit him [to derive benefit, i.e., recites the proper blessings] [T. 4:1].

The analogy of food blessings with Temple taboo served as a strong polemical basis for the legitimacy of these rituals. Through the blessings-system the rabbis could regulate the consumption of foods and by that the institutions of the commensual meal or the table fellowship, much as the priests in the Temple could exercise their dominance over the production and distribution of foods in a past era when the Temple in Jerusalem was standing. So to foster this analogy the rabbis promulgated their bold dictum: One who eats any foods without following the rules of the rabbis commits a sin as severe as the ancient transgression of sacrilege against the priest and their Temple property.

Accordingly, by requiring all Jews to recite the rabbinic blessings before eating, to follow the rabbinic rules of commensality, rabbis could directly govern a main affair of the daily life of every Jew.

The first Ushan unit of the tractate more subtly illustrates this connection. In T. 1:1, Meir paralleled the time for reciting the Shema` with the time for eating the Sabbath fellowship meal. Recall also that the earlier Yavneans in M. 1:1 had explicitly compared the timetable for the Shema` with the schedule of the Temple.

Other Ushan statements regarding the system of food blessings expressed a basic categorization of the natural world and of the edible produce of a second century cultural context [M. 6:1], reminiscent of the systematic priestly taxonomies of earlier ages.

The regulation of membership in the table fellowship, control of the institution of the meal, was an ongoing Ushan concern. In M. 7:2 Judah ruled on the minimum one must eat to be included in the quorum for the recitation of the blessings after eating the meal.

The Ushan conception was that the fellowship dinner was a formal full-course affair, not a meal of just vegetables or dates.⁽⁴⁸⁾ In this context advice on table etiquette was appropriate.⁽⁴⁹⁾ Simply by propounding rules of etiquette, the rabbis could not fully regulate, guide or control a complex institution like the collective meal. Much more is involved in governing this complex institution. The pharisaic leaders, for instance, regulated the table fellowship of their era by promulgating purity laws for foods and agricultural taboos, especially the laws of tithes for produce.⁽⁵⁰⁾

The rabbis of Usha did not reaffirm these rules as a means of directing the obligations of the collective meal in their era. There was no Temple, no active priesthood. So there was no gain in extending the rules of purity and uncleanness to the Jews of the second century and no way to justify the system of agricultural offerings and tithes.

Accordingly, the Ushan rabbis exercised control over the fellowship meal of their time by establishing a system of blessings to be recited before and after eating foods both at the formal dinner and, by extension, even outside the formal structures of the fellowship meal. As noted earlier, these authorities proclaimed that the whole world and all its contents were sacred. To eat from the fruit of the land was a sacrilege unless one performed the proper religious actions. For the rabbinic Jew of the late second century, the rituals that permitted a person to consume the foods of the earth were not the sacrifices of animals at the Temple, or the offerings of meal, or the separation from one's produce the gifts for the priests and levites. The Jew had to recite the proper formal blessing before eating and then could benefit from the produce of the land.

The rabbis provided little additional justification to gain support for their innovations. The few Biblical precedents for such ideas or practices are limited to at best remote hints of the practice of reciting blessings at a meal, such as in Deut. 8:10, "And you shall eat, and you shall be satisfied, and you shall bless the Lord . . . ."

The Temple, the locus of holiness in the world of the Jew in Israel, had been destroyed more than a generation earlier. The Yavneans learned through tragedy and trauma that the Temple would not be rebuilt in their times. The rabbis at Usha knew in their historical experiences only of a life of piety without a centralized place of holiness. Out of necessity, they refined and developed the pharisaic and early rabbinic notion that holiness centered on the household and that sacrality focused at the table of the ordinary villager.

Liturgy thus understood had some undeniably "rabbinic" facets. By the late second century, the rabbis were, more than anything else, a group of sages whose major concern was the study and formulation of their traditions. Accordingly one of their major preoccupations was the mastery and recitation of the traditions that later became the basis for the canonical documents of M. and T., highly formulaic documents made up of short lemmas in formalized diction. The recitation of blessings composed of brief, fixed formulae to express their conceptions of religious order and meaning at the formal setting of the dinner was definitely a ritual that reflected elements of the basic character of rabbinic culture.

Admittedly the primary notion that one recites a blessing over a food was not an original conception of the Ushan masters. As shown above, the Houses of Hillel and Shammai in their first century rules speak of the blessings over wine and refer to the recitation of other formulae (viz., chapter eight of M.). Rules concerning the recitation of the blessings after the meal were ascribed to Yavneans. Indeed, the Yavneans are said to have developed the formal daily prayer liturgy comprising eighteen formulaic blessings.

But in the era when rabbinism was centered at Usha the rabbis developed their complex system of blessings to be recited by the Jew before eating any food. As we have shown, this deceptively simple taxonomy of foods and their blessings of M. 6:1 enunciates the essence of the rabbinic scheme of blessings and makes a powerful statement.⁽⁵¹⁾ To eat of any food, the sancta of the earth, one must first carry out one's religious obligation, recitation of the formula of the appropriate rabbinic blessing.

Within the development of this system of religious practice at Usha, there emerged the dominant system of blessings expressed in the pericopae of Mishnah Berakhot. Rabbis of the era proposed other expanded categories and formulae, as indicated by rulings attributed to Judah, Meir and Yose in T. 4:4-5.

The establishment of a system of different blessings for various foods, and of the requirement to recite these blessings before eating any food, gave rise to a complex set of real and potential questions. For instance, when one ate more than one kind of food at the same meal, did one recite a blessing over each food? Did one recite a blessing over one food before one recited a blessing over another food? In other words, was there a hierarchy or rules for precedence within the system of food blessings? If so, by what criteria did one establish the rank and order of importance of foods?

Ushan units responded to these issues. Judah suggested that one may seek guidance regarding the issue of priority from a familiar source, Scripture. The seven types of foods mentioned in Deuteronomy 8:8 take precedence over other foods (M. 6:4). Another means of establishing hierarchy among foods, based on the quality of the food, was suggested elsewhere.⁽⁵²⁾

Within the framework of the meal, the consensus was that one does not need to recite a blessing over each food one eats. One recites a blessing over the primary food of the meal, usually bread, and other foods are exempt. Certain special foods, like salted relishes or desert cakes, were exceptions to this practice.⁽⁵³⁾ One recited a separate set of blessings for these items.

The complexity of the rules created a whole host of problems for the rabbis to solve. The nature of the principles makes it essential for the rabbis to establish a detailed set of governing priorities to guide the implementation of the system of blessings in the everyday life of the rabbinic Jew. Through this system of blessings the rabbis could guide the institution of the table fellowship, and to regulate the consumption of all foods.

This naturally engendered the circumstances in which the rabbi played a central and indispensable role. He was consulted to solve any new enigmas generated by the principles that govern the system of rules for reciting the food blessings. No one else had the expertise to make the decisions. So, by means of this system of blessings, the rabbis made themselves essential to the daily life of the Jew.

In the final analysis I have contended that one great contribution of the masters of the Ushan period was their successful systematization of rules and regulations for disparate phenomena, for the basic rituals and concepts of rabbinic Judaism. The Ushans took the scattered traditions of a group of charismatic holy men [the Yavneans] and transformed the independent rules of individual teachers into a systematic tradition, a Torah. The Ushans believed that all religious obligations were parts of the same Torah, and all were to be governed under the authority of the rabbis.

Meir accounted for this succinctly, as illustrated above (T. 6:24-5): Each day a person recites one hundred blessings. The Shema`, the mealtime blessings, the recitation of the prayers are indeed, in Meir's view, all part of the same system as those basic scriptural obligations of the adult male Israelite, i.e., wearing tefillin and fringes, and placing a mezuzah on his doorpost.

Such thoughts left open issues of precedence within the system. Consider the impact of the Shema` and its blessings on the theology of early rabbinic Judaism. The ritual of the recitation of the Shema` expressed a powerful basic underlying theological message. Scriptural obligations of each Jew [such as the use of tefillin, mezuzah and sisit] were parts of the same system as the rabbinic practices obligatory for the individual and practiced in fellowship with other Jews [the recitation of the Shema`, the recitation of other blessings and prayers, the meals in the home].

Once the Ushans had established the notion of a system of religious obligations for the Jew, the inevitable issue to be raised was the question of priorities. When there is a clash between two commandments, which one took precedence? Some examples of this process of clarification of priorities are to be found in traditions ascribed to Ushans. One matter at T. 2:6 was: Do scribes stop writing their sacred scrolls to recite the Shema` and the prayer? Another concern at T. 5:1-4 was: What takes priority, prayer in the study hall or the Sabbath eve meal?

Furthermore, may one who is unclean by virtue of a rabbinic form of uncleanness still fulfill the obligations established on the authority of the rabbis? May one still recite the blessings of the meal and of the Shema`?<sup>(54)</sup> A related question: Do social responsibilities take precedence over the requirements of religious obligations? Must one halt the processes of public administration for the recitation of the Shema` and the Prayer (T. 2:6)? Ushan rulings closed and settled some issues, left others open-ended and allowed for multiple responses to some. These options established at Usha paved the way for the fuller Talmudic analysis of generations to come.

To close this review of the Ushan contributions, consider the precepts for several miscellaneous practices associated with them. One must recite blessings for unusual natural events, when visiting national shrines or other special places, and for good or bad fortune. Through rules such as these requiring the recitation of blessings at various occasions, the rabbis consolidated even popular, personal, occasional prayers into their system of worship and religious practice.⁽⁵⁵⁾

In sum, the data in Berakhot demonstrate that Usha was a period in which the rabbis advanced their control over their followers through regulation of religious practice. They are credited with rulings concerning the control of the time of prayer. Their materials show interests in governing the intention of the individual during recitation of prayer. They made statements that indicated their concern with the public recitation of prayer.

In these traditions we find little to suggest that Ushans legislated rules for the synagogue. A conclusion one may draw from this lack of evidence is that rabbis did not have much influence over synagogue practice. It may be that the synagogue was yet to be sufficiently institutionalized in Israel by the end of the second century. Or it may be that rabbis simply could not manage and direct the ritual processes of that institution. By contrast, they did seek to direct the institution of the common dinner.

We do find that they issued rulings concerning blessings recited at fellowship meals. Other rules effectively attempted to link a person's status within the rabbinic group with one's virtuosity in rabbinic religious practice and mastery of rabbinic thought.

Above all, the Ushans saw all religious obligations, based on both rabbinic and scriptural authority, as parts of a larger system. One may say that at Usha we find the beginnings of the idea of a "halakhah" or integrated system of laws that governs all life's activities. The creativity of the Ushans in this regard undoubtedly paved the way for the formation of the canon of the Mishnah in the next generation and thereby for the genesis of the Talmuds of the generations thereafter and the forms of Judaism associated with those corpora.

D. The Mishnah-Redactor's Unified Theory of Prayer and Blessings

M. Berakhot appears on the surface to be a somewhat disjointed tractate comprising disparate units on a variety of loosely related topics. Its laws deal with the recitation of the Shema`, the recitation of the Prayer of Eighteen Blessings, blessings to be recited before one eats foods, the common recitation of blessings after the meal, other rules for the dinner, and blessings for other occasions.

On a basic level one common concern lends coherence to the diverse laws and rules of the tractate, the unifying principle that a person must recite one or more formulaic blessings in each instance of religious ritual mentioned in the tractate.⁽⁵⁶⁾ Hence the title: "Berakhot," "Blessings."

The requirement to recite a common formula connects a variety of clearly distinct religious rituals and personal or social occasions. Superficially, the various rules of the tractate and their subjects cohere.

Accordingly, M. rules that before and after the daily recitations of the biblical verses that constitute the Shema`, one recites blessings. For daily prayers, one recites a liturgy of eighteen blessings. At meals, one recites blessings before and after eating any foods. In times of danger, or when one obtains new clothes, or when one hears good news, or when one comes into a town from a trip abroad, or in a number of other instances, one recites blessings.

On further investigation we discover that M.'s redactors actually wove together a carefully selected group of formulaic rules on related topics to construct and articulate a fully developed and more coherent theory of prayer to define carefully the nature of many aspects of its larger concern--the nature of rabbinic liturgy and ritual, in particular the recitation of the standardized literary formulae of rabbinic prayer.

A principal assumption of M. Berakhot is the notion that blessings are performative utterances--words that a person recites to do something of religious significance--either to transform ordinary activities into special moments of ritual, or take on an independent ritual life themselves. Blessings before and after eating, for example, alter for the person who recites them the nature of the act of eating. They transform the meal from a mere biological act of eating to a moment of ritual sanctity.

The Shema`-liturgies, for one who recites them early in the morning and at night, serve to frame the activities of everyday life in sanctity. Blessings spoken before and after the Shema` frame the recitation of biblical verses with an outline of rabbinic actions and words and provide an interpretive framework for the traditional recitation of Scriptural selections.

Likewise those who perform other liturgical rituals such as the Qiddush, the Prayer of Sanctification at the beginning of the Sabbath, and the Habdalah, the Prayer of Division at the end of the Sabbath, frame with sanctity both the meals of the inauguration and conclusion of the Sabbath and the Sabbath day itself. In sum, by reciting the proper words a person can transform ordinary actions or periods of time into holy occasions, says Mishnah.⁽⁵⁷⁾

Mishnah also teaches that blessings may take on an independent existence, apart from other rituals. The recitation of the Prayer of Eighteen, for example, constitutes an autonomous ritual, with its own religious significance. Other blessings by themselves may sanctify time or action and may protect an individual from harm or may express an individual's thanksgiving for God's protection and grace.

Curiously, within this tractate one finds few restrictions on the location acceptable for reciting prayers and blessings. Contrary to our expectations, the institution of the synagogue does not serve as a central setting in this compilation for the recitation of the liturgies and prayers of the late antique Israelite. The laws themselves govern actions that may be performed throughout the village, in houses, streets, marketplaces, groves, or vineyards, near latrines, in bathhouses, and in synagogues and study halls as well.

We may conclude accordingly that the rabbis believed that an ordinary householder who recites prayers with proper intention and action transforms his locale, wherever that may be, into a place of sanctity. One brings the sacred into one's house and village by reciting the right words, with the correct intentions, at the proper time, under the appropriate circumstances.

The redactor begins the tractate appropriately with laws for the recitation of the Shema`. The central components of the Shema`, verses from Deuteronomy, distinctly affirm the obligations of the individual Israelite in the village. One must love God, take God's words into one's heart, and teach one's children. The verses of the Shema` in Scripture speak of places and times in the domain of the ordinary life of each person, from the doorpost of one's house to the village gates. The biblical passage alludes to the span of the typical day, from rising in the morning to retiring at night. The main obligations set forth in this section of Scripture relate to the normal existence of the individual householder. Each adult male must wear on his person tefillin and fringes. On the doorposts of each family's house there must be a mezuzah.

The Shema`-ritual is paradigmatic of rabbinic religious practice. Mishnah Berakhot as its main task imbeds a distinctive message in the basic rules for this and several other major rituals of rabbinic daily life. Words become effective sacred utterances of speech, i.e., prayers and blessings, only when properly uttered according to the principles the rabbis set forth.

Taken as a whole the tractate then goes on systematically to define rabbinic prayer. Through its substantive selection and organization of early rabbinic rules for liturgical recitations, it enunciates a clear, structured early rabbinic doctrine of prayer utilizing three broad major concepts and numerous subsidiary ideas. M.'s primary distinctions are:

(1) There are two types of prayers. The first, independent, primary prayers and blessings, constitute the main elements of a ritual. The other kind, dependent secondary prayers and blessings, serve as subsidiary adjuncts to other rituals.

(2) Texts of prayers often either are framed by accompanying materials or serve as frames for other rituals.

(3) Prayers comprise at least two elements: a verbal and a mental component, i.e., an act of recitation and a state of concentration.

To understand the first part of M.'s definition, consider how M. broadly organizes the material in this tractate. In the first half, chapters one through five, M. deals with those prayers that stand on their own as independent rituals--the daily liturgies of rabbinic Judaism. Throughout the first five chapters M. presents rules that regulate the rituals of the recitation of the texts of the Shema` and of the blessings that constitute the Prayer of Eighteen.

In the second part, chapters six through nine, M. takes up the rules for those prayers and blessings that serve as secondary elements of other rituals, first turning to regulations for the recitation of those blessings accompanying the meal. In actuality, the meals themselves are the focal rituals. The blessings merely frame the meal and establish it as a ritual occasion. Berakhot's laws propose that only through the recitation of the correct formulae before and after the meal can one define a situation of eating as a fellowship dinner (chapters six and seven).

The concluding section, chapter nine, spells out other secondary prayers and blessings--those one recites for special events. One says certain formulae to give thanks to God for deliverance from danger, to request protection from harm, or to recognize the national or historical importance of a place or the significance of an unusual natural event (chapter nine). These blessings have no function if they are recited detached from the events with which Mishnah connects them.

So, in the redactor's view the two related but distinct kinds of prayers are those independent prayers, such as the Shema` or the Prayer of Eighteen, which one recites apart from any other focal event or ritual, and those dependent blessings recited over foods or at various times, that are adjuncts to other actions.

Mishnah's second implicit interpretive concept is the idea that rituals need to be formally framed or demarcated. The rabbinic meal is one example of a ritual framed by the recitation of blessings before and after. They transform acts of consuming food, which they surround, into sacred occasions of ritual (cf. M. chapters six and seven). Likewise, the rabbinic blessings recited before and after the scriptural passages of the Shema` (see M. 1:4) serve to frame the recitation of these verses from the Torah, and transform the act from mere speech or study into liturgy. For M. rituals may be framed through the recitation of the formulae of prayers or blessings, and some prayers themselves may be framed by other liturgical devices.

Visible, but less urgent concerns of this tractate of Mishnah are such notions that prayers and other rituals may be differentiated from ordinary activities through a variety of "frames," not just through the recitation of other preliminary and concluding formulary texts. Physical signals such as posture, tone of voice, demeanor, dress, or the use of special objects, serve a similar purpose. In addition the physical locale or the social context of a prayer or another ritual may set it off from the profane endeavors of everyday life.⁽⁵⁸⁾

The third fundamental notion of M.'s definition of prayer, the definition of the needed intention for reciting blessings and prayers, inheres in a few choice rules governing the recitation of the liturgies. For an individual to recite the Shema` properly, M. requires that one achieve a certain level of concentration that shuts out some of the ordinary interactions of social life (M. 2:1). Likewise for the correct recitation of the Prayer of Eighteen, one must completely close out the distractions of the physical world and turn his attention inward, to prayer (M. 5:1). In addition Mishnah emphasizes that special positive forms of intention or concentration must accompany the recitation of prayers.⁽⁵⁹⁾

The rules of the tractate offer several subsidiary notions of prayers and blessings. In Mishnah's view, the Shema` and the Prayer of Eighteen play a role in demarcating the structure of daily life. The Shema` marks the beginning and end of every day (M. 1:1-3). The blessings that frame the Shema` express many rabbinic beliefs concerning the nature of the daily cycle of life and the importance and purpose of a person's daily endeavors.

The liturgical texts (blessings) that frame the morning Shema` mention God's role in the creation of light and darkness and in renewing each day his acts of creation of the world. They refer to the basic rabbinic beliefs in the revelation of the Torah, in redemption, and salvation. The blessings surrounding the evening Shema` refer to God's role in bringing the darkness of night, his love for his people Israel, his promise for the redemption of the people. In this liturgy one asks for God's protection through the night to come.

In a similar fashion, each Jew recites the blessings of the Prayer of Eighteen and invokes many important beliefs of rabbinism to mark the cycle of each passing day, morning, afternoon, and night.

Several rules in this tractate add conceptions subsidiary to the fundamental notion requiring intention or concentration for the recitation of prayers. For example, M. recognizes that the social realities of the pressures of a person's daily life may affect an individual's ability to concentrate for prayer. M. exempts from the obligation to recite the Shema` a newlywed who cannot properly concentrate because of emotional distractions (M. 2:5). Likewise the text recognizes the limitations of a mourner's ability to achieve the proper frame of mind for prayer because of grief (M. 3:1-2).

M. further rules that a craftsman may recite the Shema` while atop a tree (M. 2:4), but an ordinary householder should not because he cannot properly concentrate while high above the ground. This provides an additional derivative notion of how one must alter his awareness to make special efforts to concentrate during the recitation of the Shema` and the Prayer of Eighteen.

Other rulings, also subsidiary to the main ideas of the tractate, exclude certain classes, i.e., women, slaves and minors, individuals who suffered a pollution, and those who stand unclothed or near waste materials (M. 3:3-6), from participation in the rituals of prayer. M. also specifies how the level of a person's voice and the correct pronunciation of the words of liturgies contribute to the proper execution of the ritual. In addition, one's posture and bodily orientation are all factors in defining and properly framing liturgical recitations (M. 2:4-6, 1:3).

As I said earlier, the second half of the tractate develops ideas concerning those secondary prayers that accompany other rituals--the blessings one recites before and after eating and the blessings for other special events. M.'s simple system of those blessings to be recited before eating any foods represents a taxonomy of foods that distinguishes separate categories for bread and wine, for fruits, for vegetables, and for all other foods (M. 6:1-3). Besides its outline of the system of food blessings, M. spells out a second important substantive concept, that one must make exceedingly sparing use of these blessings presumably because they invoke the name of God (M. 6:4-7).

To review, these are the chief concerns of M.'s third-century rabbinic definition of prayer in the tractate:

The distinction of independent from dependent prayers.

Effective means to frame the texts of prayers to separate them from ordinary speech.

Employing blessings to bracket the rituals of prayer and of the fellowship meal.

Various other modes of framing the act of prayer with physical signals, such as voice, posture and orientation.

The nature of the effective and defective mental processes associated with prayer.

The relationship between real social structures and situations, and the theoretical demands of the recitation of prayers.

Utilization of blessings to support conceptions of taxonomic structures of natural produce.

Economical use of the formulae of blessings recited in the context of the meal.

E. The World of Early Rabbinic Prayer

The rabbinic Jew of the early third century led a complex double life. Aside from those ordinary responsibilities of the occupation that earned him his sustenance, he sought to fulfill many rabbinic religious obligations of daily being. Each day, for example, he was expected to dedicate some time to study the written Torah with the rabbinic interpretations, and the oral Torah of the rabbis. He was required to eat his meals according to rabbinic precepts, and to recite the daily rabbinic prayers. In addition, in their seasons, he had to prepare for and observe the feasts and fasts of the Jewish calendar according to rabbinic regulations.

For the rabbinic Jew, all these activities contributed to a distinctive style of existence and to a special understanding of the role of the individual Jew in the world. Through the texts in tractate Berakhot of Mishnah and Tosefta one gains some insight into several prominent ideas that represent the timbre of rabbinic Judaism during this formative period of late antiquity.

One supposition of the rabbis who organized M. Berakhot was that a person did not have to go to a specific locale to recite prayers. The Jew did not need to attend a synagogue, or go to a special building, or a designated area of the town or village. A person could pray in the street, in the house, on the road, or in the orchard. The rabbis taught that a person who prayed did not have to enter a special sacred room. Wherever one happened to recite prayers, those four cubits around a person became a sacred precinct because the individual Israelite constituted the primary locus of the sacred in the world.

Some specific concerns of the tractate relate to and rest implicitly on this notion that the Jew himself defines the place best suited for prayers. The editors of Mishnah assembled in Berakhot rules that govern the ways in which the individual Jew, engaged in the recitation of prayers and blessings, may relate to and interact with others around him and other proper modes of behavior during prayer.

They provide, as I discuss elsewhere for instance, those laws that deal with certain activities that distract a person from carrying out religious obligations. Other rules govern the ways in which an individual relates to the physical context of prayer, the places where a person may recite the formulae of prayers or blessings.

Behind the rules governing the special forms of concentration one must engage in during the recitation of liturgy lies the basic theological conception of early rabbinism that a Jew relates to God primarily as an individual under rabbinic authority and not through any other corporate or institutional structures. Based on this notion, the rabbis rule that the Jew does not need to go to the synagogue to pray, or to the assembly hall to recite the Shema` or to a special chamber to eat a meal and recite the blessings over the dinner. One may do all these things outside formal physical institutional structures and within rabbinic guidelines. Each rabbinic Jew can define the places of holiness in his world by following the regulations laid out by the masters.

Though ample evidence suggests that the collective performance of rituals in designated places was sometimes encouraged and common in late antique rabbinism, Mishnah, as we see it, does not concern itself with the obligations of the collective or the regulations for the precincts of public ritual. Mishnah is a document directed at articulating the obligations of each individual Israelite, a law code for a rabbinic Jew, independent of a fixed institutional place.

The orientation conveyed through the rules of that law code contrasts sharply with other possible Judaic conceptions. For instance, Mishnah plays down somewhat the power of the Scriptural idea that the Jew lives out daily existence as a member of a nation, a participant in a large corporate culture. It instead emphasizes the centrality of the context of the immediate community of the Jew, the neighborhood of the individual, for religious life and daily existence. This reflects, to be sure, the character of late antique life in general, that sought above all to make sense of and govern the face to face relations between members of small communities that dotted the landscape of the Near East in this era.⁽⁶⁰⁾

By late antique times, the Jew had learned from history that the existence of a religious system based on collective national public ritual was precarious. Twice in less than a century, the Jews witnessed the defeat of their centralized political leadership at the hands of stronger military authorities. If the destruction of the Temple and the defeat of Bar Kokhba taught the Jews any lessons at all, it taught them that they could not rely on the power of a centralized cult or a charismatic military leader to protect their nation. It is not surprising that the rabbis turned inward to emphasize the ultimate importance of the religious life of the individual Jew.

The rabbinic model of prayer emphasized the centrality of the person over the immediacy of a national institution; it reflected a personal-locative approach to the spiritual life of late antiquity. The rabbis chose consciously not to build on the institutional-locative model of religious life.

A rabbinic view of history taught that after the destruction of the national religious cult of the Temple in Jerusalem by the Romans, the religion that center on it crumbled. By contrast, the rabbinic system of religious observances would flourish despite the fate of national religious locales or institutions. The personal-locative mode of rabbinic Judaic practice could serve as the basis for an effective religious system in one larger cultural context or another. And when the economic and social life of Israel declined in the third and fourth centuries C.E. and the demographic and religious center of Judaism moved elsewhere, the rabbis could carry with them and implement with minor modification, first to Babylonia and later, in the middle ages, to Europe, a system of prayer and religion based primarily on their sense of reality and meaning and their innovative generative conceptions. The system of rabbinic spirituality was readily transplantable. It was possible to uproot, replant and watch it grow in more fertile cultural soils.

As we have seen, with the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem Judaism faced potential extinction. In the late antique period after the failure of the two revolts of 70 and 135, the rabbis established a system of religion that conveyed through its design, via its regulations, a definitive approach to the locus of the sacred in the religious life of the Jew. A single hill or building or city was not again to be the locus of holiness for the Jew. The center of religion shifted to the individual rabbinic Jew and his fellows, the community of study, worship and table fellowship. This basic model of religious life formed the ballast of rabbinic Judaism that kept it afloat in the turbulent sea of history through the next two millennia.

The core of Jewish spirituality was made portable. Wherever the individual Jew could go, he could carry out the central religious obligations of rabbinic life. As the rabbinic system of prayer and blessings flourished for many subsequent centuries, when in those later epochs of history material and demographic patterns permitted, the rabbis moved many elements of the rituals of prayer into an institutionalized synagogue context. But even then the crux of the rabbinic model remained intact to govern the nature of Jewish worship. Only after the complete reformation of Judaism in the nineteenth century did the worship of the Jew become grounded more in the synagogue, and did the institution begin to overshadow the primary rabbinic conceptions of the rituals of prayer that we have outlined herein.

Chapter III

The Synagogue in Mishnah, Tosefta and the Talmud of the Land of Israel

Our evidence constrains what we can know of rabbinic Jews at prayer. Unfortunately we have no way of producing a full-fledged anthropological study of synagogue life for late antique Judaism.⁽⁶¹⁾ The primary external testimonies from antiquity that refer to Jews at prayer are few. Some are apparently unsympathetic to Judaism.⁽⁶²⁾ Others are anecdotal.⁽⁶³⁾

To utilize any of the episodic literary evidence of composing a picture of late antique rabbinic Jews at prayer, we need to establish the contextual meaning of each relevant pericope whether in early rabbinic, Qumran, Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, or early Christian literature. Then may we establish the outlines of our knowledge based on the literary testimonies. We must exercise caution in using literary traditions and be alert for both the tendenz of the original source and the possibility of scribal alteration in transmission of the document.

Material remains of the period are another potential source of primary evidence on the nature of early Jewish prayer. As evidences these data are in some ways more reliable than literary traditions. The discovery and analysis of ritual objects used in prayer and of many synagogue sites provide us with a form of eyewitness evidence of Jewish prayer in late antiquity.

Unfortunately it is difficult for us to elicit direct answers to critical questions from these mute witnesses. Synagogue stones and structure rarely can tell us who prayed within their walls. Phylacteries and scrolls cannot disclose to us who used them. It is not easy to determine whether those who left us these remains were members of early rabbinic society, or among the Jews who ignored the authority of the rabbis. We cannot figure out with any certainty whether the Jews who worshipped in ancient synagogues recited those texts of classical prayer that interest historians and theologians. We cannot readily ascertain exactly when and if the early rabbis propounded all those conceptions of prayer and society that later rabbinic tractates preserve for us.

The material evidence alone cannot answer these questions. It serves a different agendum of inquiry, generated by the evidence itself and not imposed from without.

An example of recent research on synagogue remains illustrates this point. In an art historical study of Palestinian synagogue art and architecture, M. J. Chiat assembles a corpus of relevant data, and argues based on this evidence that it is essential to categorize synagogues for architectural analysis by geopolitical locale within Palestine.⁽⁶⁴⁾ Chiat emphasizes the value of associating sites by region rather than by a hypothetical country-wide system of classification. Her compilation shows significant distinction in architectural design from one region to another in various districts of Palestine.

She rejects, therefore, based on her study, the formerly prevalent theory of three epochs in Pan-Palestinian synagogue architecture--early, transitional and late--corresponding to the rise of Palestinian rabbinism (2nd-3rd centuries), its development (late third through fifth centuries), and its decline (5th-8th centuries).⁽⁶⁵⁾ She shows, for instance, significant variation in architectural form and decoration in the territories of Tiberias, Sepphoris, Scythopolis and Tetracomia in the Northern Region of Palestine.

This concurs well with M. Smith's observation of first-century Palestine that

the different parts of the country were so different, such gulfs of feeling and practice separated Idumea, Caesarea and Galilee that . . . [with regard to the local religion of the average people] there was probably no more agreement between them than between any one of them and a similar area in Diaspora.⁽⁶⁶⁾

Chiat concludes further regarding the Palestinian synagogue that

There was no overriding authority, or normative, accepted liturgy, which would dictate the form this building was to take. Rather it appears that each (regional) Jewish community tackled the problem individually by drawing on the resources available within their immediate area.⁽⁶⁷⁾

Variations in architecture confirm the regional divisions of late antique Palestine, she concludes.

Chiat's inquiry proposes, as it should, a solution to an art historical issue generated by the corpus of evidence that she seeks to interpret. It may be appropriate to address a secondary set of issues to these data, those questions that I mentioned above about prayer in general. Some might argue that by extending Chiat's results, for instance, it would be plausible to assume that prayers recited and the manner of praying in the various Palestinian synagogues varied from one locale to another.

Analogously, one might conclude that it is unlikely that a unitary liturgy for first, second, or third-century Palestine existed. The pattern of regional development of design and decoration then perhaps could be extended to synagogue life in general in Roman Palestine. Consequently, synagogue remains may provide information regarding patterns and types of style and decoration and their development and suggest broader conclusions as well. The art historical methods used, for instance, in the above study may indirectly inform us concerning the synagogue's function for prayer or another purpose though these may not be appropriate primary avenues of inquiry for this set of data.

Recent research on diaspora synagogues, however, suggests that the syna-gogue evidence may be more exhaustively exploited for the reconstruction of the function and life of the synagogue. A. T. Kraabel, in his study of the "Social System of Six Diaspora Synagogues,"⁽⁶⁸⁾ draws inferences from the synagogues' designs about the social significance of the buildings in their respective settings. More important for our present concerns, he suggests that from the evidence one may confidently hypothesize what may have been the nature of the liturgical activity inside the structures. He observes that from the evidence of "four sites one might assume that scriptures dominate the religious life of the community." Teaching, he further remarks, was an important activity of the synagogue. Based on the remains, we can know about the functionaries of the institutions, including the synagogue staff of officers, priests and communal leaders.

Now these general conclusions and observations do not represent the limits of our knowledge of the function of the ancient synagogue in Judaic life. It remains to be seen how the results of further sound, conservative, art-historical and archeological research on the one hand, and the conclusions of critical analysis of literary traditions on the other, will advance our understanding of early rabbinic prayer and other related phenomena of nascent rabbinic Judaism.⁽⁶⁹⁾

The two primary sets of data: literary traditions of prayer-texts and archeological remains of late antique synagogues must be combined with a sensitive study of other literary traditions relevant to the study of early rabbinic liturgy and the synagogue. These include, in particular, legal and narrative traditions about prayer and blessings in Mishnah, Tosefta, the Talmudim and Midrashim.⁽⁷⁰⁾

Past scholars have viewed the rabbinic legal dicta in mainly one dimension. They assumed that the most dominant purpose and function of these statements was to regulate the liturgical practice of late antique Jews. The study of these materials was of interest because it showed the practical range of actions that Jews performed or were supposed to perform. Those who took this basically positivist view frequently sought to compare the laws of prayer with the evidences of prayer-texts⁽⁷¹⁾ (most of which derive from that self-same literary source of rabbinic traditions) or with material evidences of the period.

Y. Yadin's brief monograph, Tefillin from Qumran (XQ phyl 1-4), represents a sophisticated example of an attempt to correlate legal literary traditions with material remains and exemplifies the limits of such studies.⁽⁷²⁾ He examines the remains of the capsule of a head tefillin⁽⁷³⁾ containing four folded slips. His conclusions show how, in many aspects, the construction of the capsule and the scribal techniques of the slips of biblical citations reflect "rabbinic traditions" while, in some respects, the technology of this head tefillin diverges from the "Halakhah." Without justification, Yadin assumes in this work that rabbinic law served as the sole normative basis for Pan-Judean piety.⁽⁷⁴⁾ Yet his study nonetheless shows how the combined mastery of literary and material evidence may lead to fructifying hypotheses and, possibly, open new avenues for further exploration of significant religious phenomena.⁽⁷⁵⁾

To reiterate, material evidences may be relevant to the context of early Jewish prayer, but must be subjected to scholarly analysis first by specialists in the methods of archeological and art historical study. I suggest that the general conclusions of such research at least about the regionalism of the decor and design of the synagogues in Roman Palestine may be extended plausibly to other aspects of liturgical activity.

Also it has been shown that the material evidence of synagogue remains may provide general but direct information concerning some social functions associated with the structure. Finally, by way of one illustration, I have suggested that one employ caution in any attempt to link material relics of ancient Judean prayer with rabbinic legal traditions.

The subject of the synagogue provides a good illustration of the difficulty of correlating material and textual evidence.

The Synagogue and the Rabbis in Late Antique Israel:

the Evidence of Mishnah, Tosefta and Yerushalmi

There is little doubt that in the first through third centuries, the rabbis in Israel participated in collective prayer and dealt with aspects of synagogue ritual and maintenance. I have shown yet in the preceding chapter that the synagogue was not a dominant concern of the literature of the rabbis in this formative period of Judaism. The primary evidence from this age in Mishnah and Tosefta, especially in its agendum in Tractate Berakhot, pays no serious attention to the complex subject of the synagogue. Even the few direct references to the synagogue in these corpora, for the most part, address the subject in a cursory fashion, with indifference for the important aspects of synagogue construction, upkeep and governance. The data presuppose moreover that the rabbis in the early period of th