Mishnah Yoma Chapter 2 Mishnah 6 Pt. 1

I only mean to be slightly facetious here (you know, sarcasm is an ancient Jewish-queer art form lol). With that said—yes, we began a whole new Mishanh about…wait for it…sacrifices. Again. So what makes this one so unique?

The SVARA method is so special because it always opens up for us a way to go deeper, to discover something anew. Today was no different—we took a deep dive into the word סלת / solet, meaning “fine flour”. The root of the word, סלסל, means “to grind.” In English a “fine flour” tells us about the state of the object as we have come to receive it. In Hebrew, the word itself has the labor that it took to create the object embedded within it. This brought up some interesting questions for us, among them—what is the value our ancestors meant to impart to us in reminding us about the sacred state of labor within ritual objects? The word for the priestly service, עבודה / avodah, which broadly comes to mean “service” has at its root the idea of “labor”. This then led us to investigate the idiomatic language of “two by two” / בשנים שנים / b’shnayim shnayim, which described the two-priests-each that would carry out the intestines, fine flour, and wine. This language evoked the language of the animals on the Ark in the Noah-and-the-Flood narratives. Why evoke this language here?

Reading these mishnayot, which to me personally often feel repetitive (or sleep-inducing in their amount of detail), has become a spiritual practice for many of us at team SVARA through the Mishnah Collective. The practice has been centered on heightened mindfulness and awareness of the web of connection and communal labor that was integral to the priestly system. While we often talk about The Crash of the Temple and the emergence of Option 3 Rabbinic Judaism (and the queer rabbinic project of Talmud as we know it), one of the things that our ancestors really took from the world of the Temple was this sense of communal responsibility and participation in sacred ritual. They revolutionized it by spreading out the tent of participants but the heart of it came from texts like these. Can’t wait to keep heart-exploring with y’all in the world of Mishnah Yoma soon!