Mishnah Yoma Chapter 3 Mishnah 1 Pt. 1

And today we got to start a brand new Mishnah—we began with a single “appointed” / “מְמֻנֶה” priest telling a group of others (presumably priests, though the possibility of these other folx being, well, just other folx, was brought up) to go out and see if the time for the ritual slaughtering had arrived. Seemingly straightforward, yes? Though interestingly enough, I found myself noting how precise the timing in these rituals seems to be. Whatever happened to Jewish-Standard-Time, right? Maybe that was our innovation upon the queer ancestors lol

But one of the words that really caught our attention was ראו , which is the command form of the root ראה/ראי meaning to look, see or observe. In our large-group hevruta, we noted that the tone of this telling was unclear—is this a command from within a hierarchical structure? Is the “appointed” priest “the boss”? Or could we look at this telling as a kind of invitation. “Go out and see” is a phrase we also see in the Zohar, the 13th century foundational text of Kabbalah קבלה, or Jewish mysticism. In Aramaic the phrase is תא חזי and it really means “go out and perceive, ponder, contemplate.” While it could literally just be “go out and see”, there’s really more depth and intimacy to it.

Something I’m struck by in all of these Mishnayot is the surprising intimacy we get by being in the behind-the-scenes world of the priests and the Temple. It feels very easy within our Option 3 queer Rabbinic Jewish world to relegate all things Temple to a blanket assumption of Option 1 backwards-thinking-irrelevant-non-progressive-mush. But in the lives of the priests, they too were figuring out how to make meaning of the rituals they had inherited, how to understand their present and that potent holiness when the time for sacred magic and transformation had arrived. And as many of you asked, “well, how do they know when the time for the sacrifice has arrived?” Guess you’ll have to come back to Mishnah Collective tomorrow to find out!