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Hi chevra,
Part One below actually came out last week, but was accidentally mislabeled as "Perek 8". So I'm including here again, with Part Two just below it.
Thanks
PART ONE
The first part of perek 9 also begins with the thread of "things that needed to be recited in Hebrew", and then proceeds into a full exposition of the somewhat unfamiliar "Egla Arufa" ritual described in D'varim 21: 1 - 9. (I'd definitely recommend looking at the text in D'varim before studying these Mishnayot.) It seems that the two main objectives of the Egla Arufa ritual are:
(1) to raise awareness about the mysterious murder in the hope that the culprit might be identified
(2) to "make some noise" about the murder, in the hope of preventing violence from becoming something banal, something simply accepted by the populace as "bad stuff that happens".
Mishna 2 features the rabbis' strong inclination to limit the frequency with which the ceremony takes place, presumably because a ceremony intended to gain public attention and to arouse passion through an act of unusual violence (against the heifer) will lose its efficacy with too much regularity and repetition. Mishna 9 makes this point in a post-facto way.
It's important to note that the debates in Mishnayot 3 and 4 are taking place a generation after the Egla Arufa ceremony stopped being performed. This contributes to the sense that these debates are also about larger questions, such as "What makes a person, a person"? or 'Where in the body is life centered?"
Mishna 6 has always left me wondering whether the elders are implicitly admitting that they ought to have known about this traveler, and ought to have taken measures to ensure his safety. What do you think?
Mishnayot 7 and 8 are about how we define the Torah's condition for the ceremony, i.e. that "it is now known [who killed him]". The Mishna probes what level of knowledge - or at least assertions of knowledge - would remove the case from the Torah's parameters.
PART TWO
Mishna 9 mentions that the proliferation of murders during or just after the period of the Great Revolt against Rome, led to the suspension of the "eglah arufa" ritual, just as the proliferation of adulterers led to the suspension of the Sotah ordeal. The underlying rationale in both cases is that rituals are only effective when they have a chance at reducing the incidence of the bad behavior that they are addressing. When things have gotten so bad that bad behavior is simply shrugged off and accepted, no ritual will help. Only society-transforming soul-searching and collective action can reverse such trends.
The rest of the perek is loosely bound together by the theme of "things that sadly ended at a particular point in history". These things fall into three categories:
(1) Religious rituals that ended. Mishna 10 mentions (among many other examples) the end of the "ma'aser declaration", the Biblically-mandated declaration made by every farmer that he has distributed all of his tithes as commanded. This needed to be suspended because the tithes that the Torah commands we give to Levites were transferred instead to Kohanim only during the Second Temple period, as Levites generally remained in Babylonia rather than returning to the land of Israel.
(2) Miracles and mirth that ended, most of them the result of the destruction of the Beit HaMikdash / suspension of the Sanhedrin. In a fascinating and unsettling detail, Mishna 12 mentions that faith itself (or at least "people of faith") was upended by the destruction.
(3) Sublime personal character traits that ended (i.e. disappeared) with the death of particular righteous people who embodied these traits. One might imagine that these statements were originally made as eulogies for these departed people, and then were collected all in one place here in our Mishna.
The final Mishna of the perek and of Tractate Sotah altogether, is unusually long and textured. It includes, toward the end, a terribly pessimistic view of the state to which the world will descend prior to God proffering Redemption. But to not end on so dour a note, the Mishna concludes with the teaching of R. Pinchas ben Yair, who instead describes an upward spiritual trajectory that will culminate in the coming of Eliyahu, extending to us a means of digging out of the dreary picture that the Mishna's penultimate comment had painted.
Thank you R. Pinchas ben Yair!
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