Mishnah Yoma Chapter 2 Mishnah 5 Pt. 1

*Trumpet Sounds!* It’s a new mishnah day! So far in the 2nd Chapter of Mishnah Yoma, we’ve been learning about the Temple lotteries, how priests were chosen for the multitude of roles in the Temple. Now, for the rest of the chapter, the sages will be enumerating and questioning how many priests were actually needed for which sacrificial tasks and when. I’m excited to learn from the layers of meaning we all discover in these mishnayot—but for now we just get these tantalizing potential numbers of Priests!

And the specific task we’re talking about is the Tamid / תָּמִיד . The first thing Jastrow, our go-to doorstopper of a Talmud dictionary, tells us about this word is that it’s a contraction—a shortening of תעמיד with an ayin after the tav, which has been lost over time in eliding vowel-sounds. The root, ayin-mem-dalet (on pg. 1086) means “to stand, rise, remain, endure, or be ready”. So, when the tav comes along and nounifies amad into tamid we get “constant, daily practice” especially the Daily Burnt Offering in the Temple. I needed a reminder on what the Tamid/Daily Offering actually is—turns out the Torah lays it out twice: one starting at Exodus 29:38, and then again at the start of Numbers 28. There are two year-old lambs, one sacrificed in the morning, and one in the evening—both of which are offered alongside a measure of flour mixed with oil, as well as a libation of wine. There’s a whole volume of Talmud called Tamid, which recounts the daily morning procedures of the Temple in far greater detail than we get in this Mishnah. It’s ready for your reading if you’re hungry for more Temple technicals.

Something I’m thinking about as we head into the rest of this chapter is that it actually takes far more than nine, ten, eleven, or even twelve priests to offer these sacrifices. Someone has to shepherd the sheep, folks are out there farming the flour, people have to press the wine, and then bring all of these to the temple. The whole community, directly or by extension, has offered something to make this possible. Whose labour is being forgotten, ignored, or devalued in the effort to so clearly say who’s there on the day? How often do we do this same devaluing to ourselves, neglecting the importance of our contribution to the great relay races of life, just because we weren’t the one to cross the finish line. Your work is important—you are important. Thank you for sharing yourself and your wisdom with this community.