Introduction
Background
Diagrams
Discuss
moving forward
How would a Digital Mishnah be organized today? This is the guiding principle of the first unit of Creating a Digital Mishnah. The traditional divisions or “orders” of the Mishnah reflect an agrarian and cloistered community reinventing its ritual practices in the wake of the destruction of the Second Temple. If the Mishnah is in essence a “how-to-guide” to Jewish living, then its organization of knowledge should reflect the values and spirit of our time.
As the American Jewish community thinks about its own future in the aftermath of the Shoah and the recreation of a Jewish national home in Israel, what can we learn from the activities of earlier rabbis that sought to preserve and reinvent Jewish practice following catastrophic moments? How do their endeavors change depending on our reconstruction of their historical moment? Can their texts speak for themselves? Do they stand the test of time in terms of addressing the Jewish people where they actually are? As we turn to the Mishnah we ask: why does the Mishnah look so different from earlier Jewish books? Where do its categories come from? What would the categories look like were we to create a new Mishnah for our moment? Would we build around Jewish practice (Holidays, synagogue, the rituals of our homes and families); around the categories of Theology (God, torah, Israel); around categories suggested by Feminism (Fluids, cycles of the Moon) or Queer Theory (Passing and Outing, Preserving and Piercing Boundaries)? How important are our categories in determining the limits of our thoughts?
