Mishnah Yoma Chapter 3 Mishnah 11 Pt. 3

Yeah, today’s text continued with a bit of rabbinic trash-talking about several Kohanim who are considered irreputable because they’re not willing to teach their “special talent”, whether it’s making the show bread, the incense, or in today’s text, a chapter of song! 

A number of questions arose in our session today about the role of power and positionality in teaching. Passing on information and withholding information demonstrate two very different relationships to power—one vision might be that power is to be shared by many, the other might be that power is to be contained by only a select few. In our day, we’ve become ever more keenly aware that we can’t always trust the information that we have access to because disseminating information can easily be a tool of wielding power. So what’s going on with Hugras ben Levi here? (PS- his first name, הגרס, has the root גרס, which can mean “to scrape together, to divide into versions/traditions, to commit traditions to memory”. Which gets me wondering—is this person a real person, or have the queer rabbinic ancestors invented a personality with a name that somehow means both “divisive” and “gathering together” at the same time?)

In the end I ultimately find this repetitive theme of “one who is not willing to teach” to be the most salient, well, teaching of this Mishnah. For the rabbis, teaching was an act of intimate connection across generations with their students. Not being willing to teach, for the rabbis, may have also be an expression of separation from the community, or from the bigger project. It may have also been (sneaky rabbis!) an inherent critique about why the Temple couldn’t work—because folx were getting possessive over their knowledge and not being willing to share. But more deeply, maybe the rabbis were also trying to shine a mirror on their own times—perhaps they were worried about leaders in their own batei midrash becoming gate keepers of learning as opposed to facilitators and mentors for others. Truth be told—it may have been easier for the rabbis to come down hard on the priests than to do so among their peers, but as the inheritors of this rich tradition, we can be truth-tellers with each other: let’s be people who share their gifts, their learning, with each other. That way, every space we make can be a lot more holy <3