In today's lecture I want to begin to deepen our understanding of Rabbinic Judaism by looking at two related issues concerning the prayerbook, the way in which is perhaps the most intertextual of all the Rabbinic texts and how it is perhaps the most portable of the very portable library that the Rabbis produced.

We turn to Boyarin once more and cite his definition of an intertext and intertextuality:

"The sovereign notion informing the present reading of midrash is 'intertextuality.' This concept has several different accepted senses, three of which are important in my account of midrash. The first is that the text is always made up of a mosaic of conscious and unconscious citation of earlier discourse. The second is that texts may be dialogical in nature--contesting their own assertions as an essential part of the structure of their discourse--and that the Bible is a preeminent example of such a text. The third is that there are cultural codes, again either conscious or unconscious, which both constrain and allow the production (not creation) of new texts within the culture; these codes may be identified with the ideology of the culture, which is made up of the assumptions that people in the culture automatically make about what may or may not be true and possible, about what is natural in nature and in history."

The prayerbook is very deliberately organized as conversation among different parts of itself, indeed between some very different Judaism: Biblical, Rabbinic, and even later Judaism that emerged. We will below be noting not only its different parts, but the ways that there is also a "contesting [of]…assertions" going on within the text of the prayerbook. We shall also be noting how this book emerges out of "assumptions that people in the culture automatically make about what may or may not be true." Indeed our understanding of the prayerbook will be based on it as an intertextual conversation with other Rabbinic works--Mishnah, Gemmarah, Midrash--all of them "codes…identified with the ideology of the culture."

This sense of its intertextuality can be grasped by one of the many interpolated pieces of Rabbinic material which have found their way into the prayer service. In the introductory gestures of the morning service a Mishnah is recited, a case in which a study text becomes a prayed text. The Mishnah reads as follows:

"These are the commandments which have no fixed measure: [that is, there is no limit to the extent that one can do carry out these acts]: the corners of the field, the first fruits, the offerings brought on appearing before the Lord at the three festivals, the practice of charity and the study of the Torah.

These are the things, of which a man enjoys the fruits in this world, while the stock remains for him for the world to come: [that is, they have their very reward in their doing and they are rewarded in the rabbinically imagined life-after-death]:,honouring father and mother, deeds of lovingkindness, timely attendance at the house of study morning and evening, hospitality to wayfarers, visiting the sick, dowering the bride, attending the dead to the grave, devotion in prayer, and making peace between man and his fellow; but the study of the Torah is equivalent to them all. (Mishnah Peah 1).

Notice that except for the three first activities which are cult and land specific, all the rest can be done anywhere, inside as well as outside the land of Israel. The remaining activities mentioned in the Mishnah can fit into three categories: relational/community ethics and social responsibilities (dowering the bride, burying the dead, etc,) study, and prayer. These three fundamental categories are at the heart of the Rabbinic ideology, and in the prayerbook and in all the other codes they constitute the deepest level of the discourse that they are establishing. In the terms that we are using from Boyarin and others, we might say that the success of Rabbinic Judaism was in the "naturalizing" of their ideology for the majority of Jews from the sixth century down to the eighteenth century. That is, this set of categories--and the many ways in which these three spheres were regulated by Rabbinic halakhah--became the normative Judaism for almost all communities of the Diaspora as well as for the small numbers of Jews who remained in the homeland.

The Mishnah, strategically locate very early in the prayerbook and the morning prayer service, can be regarded as an icon of the values expressed in this cultural discourse. It commends prayer and study, two activities that we have which themselves ritually produce community, and which we will be analyzing sociologically and anthropologically in the next Unit. The Mishnah also enumerates a number of specific acts of social welfare, activities that sustain the community and establish the kinds of interdependence necessary to survive the dangers of the Diaspora, both the dangers of a surrounding hostile host societies as well as the dangers through acculturation of the more friendly host culture .

In Mishnah Avodah Zarah we saw how the liminal community, so betwixt and between, organizes itself around an ethics of separation from the external Other which can pollute and render Israel unholy. Here in Mishnah Peah we see an religious ethics of social responsibility--a sacramentalizing of social justice and collective responsibility in which each Jew must take responsibility for one another. Separation and boundedness from the Other as a means of acquiring purity/holiness is here matched by social bonding with "kin" as a means of enacting holiness. The Mishnah resonates with--is in conversation with-- another passage in the prayerbook (the monthly Sabbath blessing of the New Moon) announces: "All Israel is bound one to another," (haverim kol Yisrael).

The activities of social bonding articulated here soon gave rise in Jewish communities throughout the world to actual institutions: charitable organizations; burial societies; groups that would raise money for the dowry of the poor bride; others for the support of students who devote themselves to talmudic study; "a holy bonding" (the hevra kedisha) to ritually clean and prepare the corpse for burial.

We must be careful not to sentimentalize the unity and harmony of such communities. Within these communities there was hierarchy, class, social division, conflict and religious tension . Utopian texts do not produce utopian societies. But these idealized values of the Mishnah were realized in quite remarkable ways. The portable and textualized Judaism of the rabbis did successfully forge communities which adapted to the liminal circumstance of the Jews in their Diaspora, and the texts and their enactments allowed Jews to sustain a distinct social identity for centuries without a homeland.

These portable texts became Jewish Torah, Jewish wisdom which was studied, prayed, and otherwise actualized in exile. They preserved memories of and attachments to the homeland, but more importantly they made of the exile itself an occasion for an intensified Judaism based on the first Judaism, but in so many ways in opposition to it.

Eisen formulation is astute: " Had the rabbis not preserved the memory of the real, physical Land and insisted upon its centrality, they would have been unable to orient Jews in the unbounded time and space of their many dispersions. But by doing so, by identifying homecoming with the sacred order of Torah, they acted to mitigate the Land's centrality; for all intents and purposes they rendered it dispensable. For God could be encountered anywhere; His commandments, or the greater part of them, could be observed everywhere. Exile, therefore, was not only the "cemetery" to which one Rabbinic parable compared it: a place of sin and corruption and death. It was a wilderness marked by the way of life: Torah."

All of the actions of Rabbinic Judaism, including prayer which substituted for the cultic rituals of the Temple, were not dependent on living in the holy land. The rabbis ritualized those daily practices which are apart of every persons life and life cycle wherever he or she may dwell. Holiness was sought in proper eating, regulated by intensified dietary rules and marked by prayers before and after the meal. So too was sexual activity religiously classified and organized through codes which dictated who one could marry, how one married, (and divorced), when one could properly engage in sex, and much more. Death and dying likewise were ordered by religious law and ceremony: the cleaning of the corpse, the burial, the customs of mourning were all spelled out in detail by the rabbis Indeed, there were hardly any actions in any realm of ordinary life-- business, farming, civil damages, criminal acts--that the Rabbinic codes did not supervise, and this turn into a sacred action.

The institutions that became the sites for enacting these activities were likewise portable, most notably the synagogue (a house of prayer as well as a house of study), the home, but also the other commercial/religious fixtures of a typical Jewish community: the slaughter/butcher shop, the bakery, the ritual bath, and the cemetery.

The officials of the community were not bound to any specific place as were the priests of ancient Jerusalem who maintained the rituals of the Temple cult. The ritual the ritual slaughterer (the shokhet), the ritual circumciser (the mohel) the teacher/ rabbi/ judge ( the rav) could move with the community, bearing their books and other ritual instruments with them, performing their activities of holiness in the midst of an exile that felt so often like the very depths of the unholy . Holy and profane time could be distinguished wherever the Jew could light candles and sanctify wine. And the Jewish identities of husband, wife, bastard, Jew, child, and so forth could be minted anywhere and everywhere in an exile in which a holy Israel itself was portable.

Of all the portable texts none was as portable and as used as the prayerbook, none of the volumes of the Rabbinic library as intertextual, none as available to daily enactment. This will be the subject of the next lecture.