Rabbi says: which is an upright path for which a person should opt? – One which is honourable for those who do it and which [also] brings honour from mankind. Be as careful with a simple mitzvah as with a serious one, since you do not know the reward for each mitzvah. Calculate the loss of a mitzvah against its reward, and the reward of a sin against its loss. Watch for three things and you will not come to sin: know what is above you – a seeing eye, a listening ear and all your deeds written in the book.
26:
The first stage in Rabbi Akiva's revolution was relatively simple: as we have seen, it just involved attaching the halakhic midrashim to their appropriate verses in the Torah so that they could be more easily remembered. But the second stage was much more momentous, because it involved the complete uprooting of the system that had been in use until that time and its gradual replacement with a more logical system.
27:
There are hints, here and there in our classical sources, that the momentous change that Rabbi Akiva set in motion was not the brain-child of one man, but that Rabbi Akiva was the respected agent through which the general consensus of the sages was achieved. For example, in the Tosefta [Eduyot 1:1] we read:
When the sages assembled in the vineyard at Yavneh they said, "A time will come when a person will seek something from the Torah and not [be able to] find it; [or] something from the sages and not [be able to] find it…" So they said, "Let us begin from Hillel and Shammai."
It is possible that this passage reflects a general feeling of unease among the sages that 'something must be done'. (The sages first assembled in Yavneh in the years following the destruction of the Bet Mikdash in the year 70 CE, but the passage quoted above must belong to a later time – two or three decades later – because in the initial stages the sages would have been concerned with preserving the nation and the very existence of Judaism. We shall visit this period in detail when we reach Mishnah 8 of Chapter 2.) It seems to me that Rabbi Akiva was the person who 'invented' the new system and that the seed fell on fertile ground because the sages recognized that 'something must be done', as I have already said.
28:
What was this new system introduced by Rabbi Akiva? And in what way was it superior to the system of Halakhic Midrash that he had already organized? Rabbi Natan [18:1] says the following:
This is a beautifully picturesque description of what Rabbi Akiva did to the Oral Tradition. When he is likened to a scrounger dropping into his bag whatever he finds he is pictured as collecting the halakhic midrashim, as we have explained at large. The novelty here is what the scrounger does when he gets home: he separates all the goodies that are jumbled up in his bag into separate piles, each pile having its own special contents.
29:
This new system was called "Mishnah" (to distinguish it from the "Midrash" of Mekhilta, Sifra and Sifré). It differed from the earlier system in that the halakhot were not arranged according to the verses of the Torah, but were arranged in a logical, thematic manner. Halakhot connected with the liturgy were grouped together; halakhot connected with jurisprudence were grouped together; halakhot connected with matrimonial matters were grouped together, and so forth. Furthermore, the halakhot were 'edited' into a more concise format: the arguments and discussions were removed (for the most part) and the law was stated in as pithy a manner as possible.
30:
No doubt Rabbi Akiva's students and successors continued this work, and possibly even improved on it. It is probable that each sage worked out his own Mishnah – his own organization of the halakhic material – basing himself on the original idea of Rabbi Akiva. It is important to remember that this 'revolution' in the arrangement of the Unwritten Torah still maintained one facet completely unchanged: this material was never written down but taught and discussed from memory. Most of the sages must have had prodigious memories; but each Bet Midrash also had in attendance people who had committed to memory various elements of the whole – people who could be relied on not to adulterate the contents of their memory. But it was inevitable that the next development would have to be one that created a more permanent manner of maintaining the vast collection of halakhic material – as we shall see.
