Mishnah as the Model for a New Overlapping Consensus
- Mishnah as the Model for a New Overlapping Consensus
The Conservative movement has focused intensely in recent years on the issue of the foundation for our halakhah, and whether particular practices can be seen as properly legitimate in view of, or as properly authorized by, our foundational principles concerning, e.g., the nature of revelation.1
Such a focus on foundations is of course not something new in Jewish thought; to the contrary, it has been, with perhaps one significant exception—which will, however, be the focus of our discussion herein—the norm in Jewish thought for over two thousand years.
That possible exception is the Mishnah. While (as noted further below) some have argued that the Mishnah was built on the foundations of midrash, but then omitted the “derivations” only in the interest of brevity, others have argued that the Mishnah was intended to be a stand-alone statement.
Our suggestion here is that such a stand-alone statement offers a useful model for how we might now articulate our collective vision of the practical components of meaningful Jewish lives. This must take into account, however, that the conception of the “self” assumed in the Mishnah—i.e., a conception that assumed that there is but a single right pathway that would lead to an alignment of our souls with the single objective truth and reality of God’s holiness—needs to be adjusted, in order to reflect our modern understanding of our selves as creations (at least in part) of our choices, within a framework where there are multiple valuable pathways to be pursued. [End Page 49]
The first section of this article argues that the virtual absence of discussions of “foundations” in the Mishnah represented a deliberate strategy, corresponding to the strategy recommended in certain strains of recent political philosophy for developing a stable consensus with respect to various key principles (e.g., the constitutional principle of separation of church and state) by encouraging, but yet declining to endorse any of, multiple—and, indeed, mutually inconsistent—justifications for that principle. Second, we will suggest that the Mishnah employed this strategy in pursuit of a self-consciously new conception of what constitutes a holy life—albeit a vision that assumed an understanding of the self (or of human psychology) that drew upon the common contemporaneous “scientific” understanding seen also in, for example the Stoic teachings of that time (e.g., Epictetus, who died in 135 c.e., the same year as Rabbi Akiva). We will conclude by suggesting that the Mishnah, as thus understood, provides a precedent for us to articulate our own conception of how to live holy lives within the framework of a modern understanding of our selves.
I. Mishnah and Foundations
One standard picture of the evolution of rabbinic thought stresses its foundations within an evolving history of understandings of Scripture and revelation. This picture begins by observing that, in the centuries preceding the publication of the Mishnah, many different groups in the late Second Temple period put forward mutually exclusive theories regarding the possibility of knowing God’s will in the post-biblical world, with some groups arguing for the exclusive reliance on sacred documents, others on oral traditions that had been preserved for many generations, and still others focusing on the ability of specific personalities, like the so-called Teacher of Righteousness mentioned in the Qumran documents, to speak in God’s name.2 In a later period, the Bavli repeatedly asks, concerning the Mishnah’s various dicta: “Whence [or how] do we know this?” Moreover, the Bavli proposes to tie even statements identified in the Mishnah as takkanot (i.e., innovations) to prooftexts from the Tanakh.3 Among others, Jay Harris4 has shown that the question of “foundation” then offers a key to understanding the development of Jewish thinking subsequent to the Talmuds—from Saadia Gaon into the modern period. [End Page 50]
The Mishnah, in contrast, certainly looks different. It is generally agreed that the Mishnah, taken by itself, shows remarkably little concern for the question of the authority of the tanna·im to propound the multitude of their statements that have no easily apparent basis in...
