Whole Torah
Overview
This is the home site of a new
edition of the Mishnah, Hamishnah C'Darchah. All six orders of
the Mishnah are now freely available here in Hebrew (iso-8859-8-i) HTML.
They are best viewed with Microsoft Internet Explorer 5. There is also a
collection of articles, both in Hebrew and in English, which deal with
"woven texts" in general, and specifically, the Mishnah.
All of the research reported on
this site has been carried out, over the course of twenty-five years, for its own
sake, torah l'shmah. The site has been created for two reasons: to make
available the results of this research and to encourage others to continue the
work I have begun.
There is material on the site for
students of traditional Jewish texts as well as students of Bible and
literature. The full Hebrew text of Hamishnah
C'Darchah is here for students of Jewish tradition. A collection of
articles on woven-texts in the Torah and the Mishnah should be of
interest both to students of the Bible and of ancient literature.
Let me introduce myself. My name
is Moshe Kline. I live in Jerusalem and spend most of my time on this project.
My BA is from St. John's College in Annapolis Md., the Great Books school,
where I had the privilege to study under Jacob Klein. I was also influenced by
the writings of Mr. Klein's friend, Leo Strauss. Although I did graduate work
at The Jewish Theological Seminary of America and Yeshiva University, I am
neither a Rabbi nor a professional scholar.
After settling in Israel in 1969,
I was a farmer for fifteen years. In 1979 I met the late Rabbi Leon Ashkenazi,
who was known in France as Manitou. He was one of the spiritual leaders of the
post-war French Jewish community. After I studied works of the Maharal with
him, he encouraged me to work on the Mishnah in the light of the
Maharal's methodology. The outcome of my research on the Mishnah is
Hamishnah C'Darchah.
Some parts of the Bible appear to
be lists lacking clear rules of organization. Some of these lists are much more
coherent when they are arranged as tables. I refer to the genre of sources that
should be read as tables as woven texts. The archetypal woven text is
the Decalogue. The list of laws spoken by the Lord from Mount Sinai in Exodus
should be seen as a two-dimensional text composed of two columns (thus two
tablets!) and five rows. Each row contains two laws, which taken together, like
two points defining a line, define a conceptual category. The two columns have
a fixed relationship to each other that is expressed in each of the pairs. The
five categories combine with the two aspects of the columns to create a
super-text. This super-text is virtually invisible until the primary text, the
Decalogue, is laid out in the appropriate tabular format. The additional information
available in the super-text may be a form of what Leo Strauss referred to as
"writing between the lines". The knowledge and skills required to
read and write woven texts continued at least until the third century CE, when
they were applied to the writing of the Mishnah. This could point to a
hitherto unknown literary tradition that existed from the time of the earliest
Biblical texts until the publication of the Mishnah, well over one
thousand years.
Analysis of the woven texts
uncovers clear conceptual lines that are totally invisible when reading the
text as a linear document: the author's hidden agenda. I first reported the
phenomenon in The Literary Structure of the Mishnah,
Aley Sefer 14, Bar Ilan University, 1987. In The
Art of Writing the Oral Tradition I explore the implications of reading The
Ethics of the Fathers, a part of the Mishnah, as a woven text.
So far, I have identified woven
texts in two separate but related sources: the Torah and the Mishnah. In
both of these texts the tables are used for organizing legal codes. The
paradigm, of course, is the Decalogue. (See my article: The
Decalogue as Wisdom Literature) Additional woven texts in the Torah include
all of Leviticus and extensive legal codes in Exodus and
Deuteronomy. The second source is the Mishnah, the legal compendium
written in the third century by Rabbi Judah the Prince, known simply as Rabbi,
or in transliteration, Rebbi. The Mishnah includes over five hundred
chapters. With few exceptions, all should be read as woven texts.
The most intriguing aspect of the
woven texts that I have encountered is their conceptual integrity. Certain
principles of organization can be found in all of the sections of the Torah
which have been identified, as well as in the Mishnah. This fact in
itself is not so surprising, considering that the Mishnah is, in part, a
codification of Biblical laws. What is surprising is the conceptual framework
indicated by the rules of organization. They are entirely consistent with
elements of Kabbalah which do not appear explicitly until nearly a thousand
years after the writing of the Mishnah. A clear example of the
compatibility between certain Kabbalistic principals and the structure of the Mishnah,
as described by the Maharal of Prague, can be found in The
Art of Writing the Oral Tradition. The following is a partial synopsis of
that article.
When the five pairs found in the
first chapter of Avot are arranged in a table with two columns and five rows,
the columns have the Kabbalistic values of "right' and "left", chesed
and din. (The order of appearance reflects the direction of Hebrew,
right to left.) As the Maharal explains at great length in his ground breaking Derech
Chaim, the first speaker in each pair, the Nasi, or President, consistently
takes a position that the Maharal identifies with "love" while the
second, the Chief Justice, takes a position consistent with "fear".
Thus the right hand column can be associated with the Kabbalistic value of
"right", chesed, and the left hand column with "left, din."
This is consistent in all the woven texts in the Torah and Mishnah. The
"right" is on the right and the "left" is on the left. The
differentiation between chesed and din helps the reader achieve a
clear overview of the text.
The primary purpose of this site
to make available the full Hebrew text of Hamishna C'Darchah. In this
edition of the Mishnah I have arranged the text in tabular form. Each
chapter is presented on a single page as a table. I have not altered the text
in any way nor changed the order in which its parts appear. In the past, I
distributed hard copy to teachers and students in the Jerusalem area.
Their hands on experience convinced me that Hamishna C'Darchah is a
useful study aid to students on all levels. First of all, it is simply very
convenient to have the full text of a chapter available on a single page with
no commentary. Just by looking at the arrangement of the page, one can
immediately get an overview of the chapter.
Rather than incur the high costs
of printing a hard-bound edition, with all the limitations of distribution, I
decided to make the text freely available on the WWW. In order to view the text
I strongly recommend downloading IE from Microsoft. It allows the surfer to
read all forms of Hebrew on the web automatically. I grant all students and
teachers the right to freely distribute the text as it appears on these pages.
In order to print individual chapters, highlight the chapter with the mouse.
Then choose "print" from the "file" window. In the print
window choose "selection".
The text I have chosen is unpointed
Kaufman. This may create difficulties for beginning students. The word shel
appears as a prefix rather than a separate word. I assume that Hamishnah
C'Darcah will not be read alone without a conventional text. That should
eliminate most of the problems. On the positive side, this exposes students to
the differences between manuscripts. Letters in parenthesis indicate Albeck's
divisions into mishniot.
All of seder zrayim and
half of sedr nzikin are color coded. The Color
Code is accessed through the index page of the Mishnah text. It is
possible to use these chapters as a first introduction to
Hamishnah C'Darchah, by examining the
divisions I have made in the chapters, together with the linguistic parallels
indicated by the colors.