Tamid V

7:
After they had recited the three sections of the Shema they added three more Berakhot. Firstly they added 'Emet ve-Yatziv' which to this day in our liturgy immediately follows on the last section of the Shema. It contains two sections: the first part is an affirmation of our loyalty to the theological implications of the Shema; in the second part the topic moves on to celebrate God as Redeemer, with the Exodus from Egypt cited as the supreme example of God's redemptive power. This Berakhah was followed by two Berakhot from the Amidah. Firstly the Berakhah we now call 'Retzeh' (whose proper name is 'Avodah'). The text of this Berakhah now is a plea for the restoration of the ritual of the Bet Mikdash, but in the Bet Mikdash itself the text was as follows:

8:
At the very start of our study of this tractate we described how the whole House of Israel was divided into twenty-four 'Watches', each watch serving for one week at a time. The 'changing of the guard' took place every Saturday after the offering of the Musaf [Additional] sacrifice for Shabbat. Actually, in this context the word Berakhah would perhaps be better understood as 'greeting'. The outgoing Watch would greet the incoming Watch with the words:

May He who caused His Name to dwell in this house cause love, brotherhood, peace and friendship to dwell among you.

You write, It is now clear from our mishnah that the liturgical part of the ritual of the Bet Mikdash was severely curtailed in order that the sacrifice might be offered at the correct time.

Is it so clear? The sages in the Gemara whom you cite apparently assume that the Shaĥarit service was the same then as it is now, but that the Kohanim in the Temple truncated it while in the course of the sacrificial ritual. I would propose an alternative explanation: Perhaps the ritual in the Gazit room is the central core of what was later expanded and changed to turn into what we now know as the Shacharit service.

I'd suggest that the initial b'rakhah may have been the precursor to 'Yotzer Or.' The recitation of the Ten Commandments was later dropped and may have been replaced by 'Ahavah Rabbah'. The Shema's three paragraphs and 'Emet v'Yatziv' were as we know them today, and what we now know as the Amidah at that time consisted of only the last two b'rakhot, the 'Avodah' and 'Birkat Kohanim' (with the addition of something like 'M'kadesh HaShabbat' on Shabbat). The other 17 b'rakhot of the weekday Amidah might have been added later.

Is there any support for this hypothesis?

I respond:

I think not. Your prime assumption is that 'The sages … assume that the Shaĥarit service was the same then as it is now'. This is not the case. They know that these priests are reciting the Shema at an hour which is too early for the optimal fulfillment of the mitzvah. Also, since ideally the earliest time for the Amidah is after the Shema at sunrise exactly it is still too early for reading the Amidah. The Gemara [Yoma 37b] relates that Queen Helene donated to the Bet Mikdash a chandelier of gold: 'when the first rays of the sun hit this chandelier it would sparkle and everyone would know that the time had arrived to recite the Shema'. This observation prompts another one: 'One who reads the Shema in the morning with the priestly watch and the people of the Ma'amad has not fulfilled his duty. This is because the priestly watch read it too early and the people of the Ma'amad read it too late.' See also what I respond to the next question.

Zackary Berger writes:

Presumably 'Barkhu brakha akhat' could also mean 'Recite [any] one blessing,' i.e., Ahavah Rabah or Yotser, depending on what the priests felt like. Otherwise, why not simply say 'Recite Ahavah Rabah [or Yotser]'?

Is there an obvious problem with this interpretation?

I respond:

The only problem with this interpretation is that it does not accord with the discussion of the Talmuds on this point. (This, of course, does not disqualify it, per se.) The Yerushalmi I quoted earlier denies the possibility that the Berakhah referred to is 'Yotzer Or': 'How can they say the blessing over the light of day when the sun has not yet risen?' The conclusion of both Talmuds is that the Berakhah is Ahavah Rabba, serving in its capacity as Birkat ha-Torah, a Berakhah to be recited before reading Torah texts. Your observation 'Why not simply say…' is a very valid one, truly Talmudic in its very nature. I have no answer, I'm afraid. As the great Poskim would write: 'Ta'un Iyyun' – "This needs looking into".

2:
The superintendent first invited priests who had never had the opportunity to offer the incense to participate in the third lottery of the morning, to the exclusion of anyone present who had previously enjoyed this privilege. It would seem that this task was a very popular privilege and therefore the lottery was open only to those who had never enjoyed it. I hope my cynicism will be excused if I suggest that the reason why this task was so popular was that it was one of the few associated with the daily ritual that did not involve blood and stench. It was possible that there were present elderly priests who had performed this task years before; and, of course, we must not forget that since this ritual was performed every day of the week, later in the week there would be a few priests from the present contingent who had already gained the privilege.

3:
A fourth and last lottery was then held to select priests to carry the limbs up the ramp. Our mishnah presents a 'Ma&@293;loket' between Tanna Kamma and Rabbi Eli'ezer ben-Ya'akov. While such a divergence of views is very common in other tractates there are only two such instances in this tractate – and this is one of them. (You will recall that 'Tanna Kamma', 'the first Tanna, sage' is the technical term used to indicate the unnamed sage whose view Rabbi Eli'ezer ben-Ya'akov is disputing. Rabbi Eli'ezer ben-Ya'akov has a tradition that those priests who had originally carried the limbs from the slaughtering area to the ramp now resumed their task and carried them to the top of the ramp to the altar. (They had been left half-way up the ramp.) Tanna Kamma holds that a new set of priests was selected by lottery for this purpose, and that this lottery was open to all priests not just to those who had never had the privilege before. According to the rules of mishnah interpretation halakhah (almost) always follows Tanna Kamma, and in this case too the view of Rabbi Eli'ezer ben-Ya'akov is not accepted. At first glance his view seems perfectly logical: those who had previously been selected for the task should now complete it. But further thought will justify the view of Tanna Kamma. Nine priests had been accorded the privilege of carrying the limbs of the lamb (and a couple of other accoutrements in procession. But by selecting now another nine it was possible to create more 'jobs for the boys' and to spread the privileges further.

While reading Yitro in shul I noticed Shemot 20:21. It says: 'An altar of earth thou shalt make to me, and thou shalt sacrifice on it thy burnt offerings, and thy peace offerings, thy sheep and thy oxen; in all places where I cause my name to be pronounced, I will come to thee, and I will bless thee.' On the face of it, I would say the text tells us to make a simple temple of common materials. The place is not really an issue. There is no sense of an unique place. It seems that Torah tells us (at least in this parasha) that the mishkan is the most ideal kind of temple, the richly decorated, fixed temple in Jerusalem is second choice. Is this an interpretation that can be maintained?

I respond:

It is well-known that the various elements that comprise the written Torah according to the documentary hypothesis have different views on this matter, hence the confusion. The simplicity assumed by the earlier elements was usurped by the later elements which concentrated the ritual in one legitimate shrine in which officiated one legitimate priesthood: the Temple in Jerusalem and the Zadokite priesthood. More to the point is the question of how the sages 'understood' the verse quoted by Albert. The Gemara [Zevachim 58a] quotes a Baraita: "'An altar of earth thou shalt make to me' – that it shall be connected to the ground; it should not be erected on rocks or crannies".

Jim Feldman has sent the following:

Being one of the mitnagdim on appreciation of the Sacrificial Cult (I skip all of the descriptions), I appreciated Juan Carlos' quote of that famous section of Isaiah but there was some unwarranted time compression in his juxtaposition of Essenes and Isaiah. Isaiah-I was written approximately at the time between the destruction of the Northern Kingdom and the First Babylonian Exile. The development of Essene cult was hundreds of years after the return from Babylon. They were anything but contemporary events. In modern terms, it would be compressing Elizabethan England and current American hegemony. The Essene withdrawal was, rather, a reaction to the evils of the Hasmonean period and its Roman successors. The times were awful and got progressively worse. Cults were a dime a dozen and wild beliefs in the end of days and the direct intervention of heaven led to Christianity as well as the two utterly disastrous Jewish revolts. The rabbis were right in the middle of the revolts, planning them, supporting them and then being butchered when they lost. A lot of lamentations came out of the period but not a great deal of wisdom. I think that the contrast between how awful this section on the Sacrificial Cult reads in this day and age and how wonderful the words of the three Isaiahs and Jeremiah still remain, either in Hebrew or English, should inform us. It is a mistake to honor something just because it is old but a wonder when men can speak with such power across two and half millenia. There is a lot of good stuff in Talmud, but what we are doing now isn't part of it. Mitnagiding Done Cheap PS. No, I do not eat meat.

Alfred Sporer writes:

In the last shiur you give the reason stated in the Talmud that because of the criticism of the heretics the Ten commandments are no longer part of the ritual. I had often wondered about that question. An Orthodox person once told me that the reason why the ten commandments are not stressed in the liturgy is for fear that they would be given greater weight than the other 601 mitzvot. I wonder whether what is meant by 'heretics' in the talmud are those people (Karaites) who challenged the Rabbis by asserting that the ten commandments are the only laws that need be followed.

I respond:

What your informant told you is correct, and we already mentioned it in the shiur: The Talmud of Eretz-Israel contains the following statement: Both Rav Mattanah and Rabbi Shemu'el bar-Naĥman say that logically we should recite the Ten Commandments [liturgically] every day; why do we not do so? – [to refute] the claims of heretics that these alone were given to Moses at Sinai [Berakhot 9b].

On the other hand, the heretics could not possibly be the Karaites, for several reasons: the Karaite sect did not come into being until more than 600 years after the destruction of the Bet Mikdash, not did they claim that only the Ten Commandments were binding. For this latter reason we can also exclude Sadducees. The only contemporary schismatics who claimed that the Torah legislation was now defunct belonged to the Pauline branch of emergent Christianity.

On the same issue Richley Crapo writes:

Could you please expand on your explanation of the [quotation from the Talmud mentioned above]: Specifically, what might have been meant regarding the claim 'that these alone were given to Moses at Sinai'? These alone as opposed to what else?

I respond:

These alone, excluding all the rest of the six hundred and thirteen commandments which Judaism identifies in the Torah. (It is the expansion of the Mitzvot that is the task of the Oral Torah which we are studying.)

2:
I do not know how many men were in each day's duty roster, but we can calculate how many priests actually go to play an active part in the ceremonies:-

In the first lottery one man was chosen:

   1. The priest who removed the ashes from the main altar;

In the second lottery thirteen priests were selected:

2. the priest who removed the ashes from the inner (golden) altar;
3. the priest who tended to the candelabrum;
4. the priest who slaughtered the sacrifice;
5. the priest who received the blood at the moment of sacrifice and who would eventually splash it on the side of the outer altar;

   6 – 11. the six priests who carried the limbs as far as the ramp;

12. the priest who carried the flour;
13. the priest who carried the pancakes;
14. the priest who carried the libation wine;

In the third lottery two priests were selected:

   15 – 16. the priest who would offer the incense and one other who happened to be standing next to him (this will be explained in a later mishnah);

In the fourth lottery six priests were selected:

   17 – 22. the six priests who carried the limbs up the ramp to the altar.

There are here two imponderables for me:

  Were the priests who carried the flour, pancakes and wine also replaced in the fourth lottery? I have not found this mentioned anywhere.
  Are we to count the priests who had prepared the pancakes?

Thus there were at least twenty-two priests actually involved in the ceremonies, and possibly another five or more.

3:
All the rest of the priests were now redundant. They were handed into the care of overseers or organizers. They now had to return their uniforms. They removed their hats and threw them into a cubbyhole marked 'hats'. Then they removed their belts and threw them into a cubbyhole marked 'belts'. Then they removed their coats and threw them into a cubbyhole marked 'coats'. Then they covered themselves with their own private coats and having done so they removed the breeches and threw them into a cubbyhole marked 'breeches'. I should point out that what I have called a 'belt' was a wide piece of material that was wound around the waist, more like a cummerbund. The 'coat' was more like a robe with sleeves. The common dress at the time was such a robe called a 'Gulta' which covered most of the body. I believe that having the priests wear underwear was a novelty.

4:
One last word before we leave this mishnah. The Hebrew word 'Ĥazzan' I have translated 'overseer'. Perhaps 'organizer' would be more appropriate. The term 'Ĥazzan' derives from the Aramaic verb 'to see' – the person who 'sees to things' and makes sure that they get done. Thus originally the term 'Ĥazzan ha-Knesset' meant the person who organized the activities of the synagogue. During the first century of this era the Hebrew term was also taken over by the fledgling church to indicate the 'person who sees to things' or 'oversees'. In Greek the term 'overseer' was translated literally as 'epi-skopos', from which eventually developed the task of the bishop.

Aryeh Abramovitz writes:

I had the privelige of hearing of another possible reason for the popularity of the incense offering from my teachers Drs. Shlomo Naeh and Yisrael Knohl: there are hints of a mystical tradition of divine revelation and prophesy connected with the incense cult. Though the priests probably found the temple cult in general to be meaningful in their world view, there is no doubt in my mind that the opportunity to actually achieve revelation/prophesy must have seemed more meaningful by orders of magnitude. If my memory serves, they also speculated that the once-in-a-lifetime aspect heightened the mystical tension.

The hints of this tradition that I can remember offhand: Genesis Rabba 6: R. Yishmael ben Elisha said: 'one time I went to offer incense on the inner altar (lifnai velifnim), and I saw Acatriel Yah Adonai Tzvaot sitting on a great throne …. '

Another source, several hundred years older (though some may find it's use in this context distateful, it reflects the Jewish traditions of its time) – Luke 1:5-22: There was in the days of Herod king of Judea a certain priest named Zacharia of the watch of Avia … and on the day of his watch his lot was to offer incense … and there appeared unto him an angel of the Lord standing on the right side of the altar of incense.. .

I respond:

This is very interesting. I cannot accept the first quotation because Rabbi Yishma'el ben-Elisha was a High Priest and he had his vision on Yom Kippur when he went to place the incense inside the Holy of Holies – which is the meaning of Lifnai ve-Lifnim (and not as Aryeh translated). However, I can find no fault with the second quotation. Luke himself, of course, being a non-Jewish physician from the Aegean, would have known nothing about this: I wonder what his source was?