The Poetics of Mishnah: Themes and Structures

The Poetics of Mishnah: Themes and Structures

Rabbi Avraham Walfish

2 Lectures

A retired teacher of Talmudic Literature and Rabbinic Thought, Avraham (Avie) Walfish was recently appointed as head of the Halakhic Beit Midrash of the Beit Hillel Rabbinical Organization. At Yeshiva University he completed his B.A. in philosophy, while studying Talmud with Rav Aharon Lichtenstein and Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveichik. After making aliyah, he received his rabbinic ordination from R. Zalman Nehemiah Goldberg and completed his M.A. and Ph.D. at Hebrew University, writing his dissertation on literary features of Mishnah. He has taught and lectured in many frameworks in Israel and abroad, including Herzog College, Michlala, Pardes Institute, Bar Ilan University, and Drisha. His extensive publications in different areas of Jewish studies include the Iyun Mishnah website and a commentary on Mishnah Berakhot, Mishnaic Tapestries. In 2005 he was awarded the Prize of the Israeli Minister of Education for creative work in Jewish culture.

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This course, while designed as a continuation of last semester’s course on the methodology of Mishnah study, stands on its own, and will be accessible to those who did not participate in the previous course. The premise of the course is that close reading techniques, such as keywords and literary structures, enable the student of Mishnah to discern the ways in which apparently disparate units are woven together to produce a coherent text. In this course, we will focus on larger Mishnah units, examining how chapters are woven together to produce “divisions” (groups of chapters) and tractates, and develop the “big ideas” which the halakhic and aggadic materials seek to express. In accordance with the theme of this semester, we will focus on texts that address the issue of piety and its interactions with other Jewish values.