232 CHAPTER EIGHTIf the commentators were right to read this Mishnah as alocus classicusof
the legal principlema’alin baqodesh ve’eyn moridin(one raises up in sanctity,
and one does not lower), as they see mto have been, then the Mishnah is
proposingthatthereligiouspropertyofthecommunityfallsintoaneathierar-
chyofsanctity.^53 TheessentialprincipleisthattheTorahscrollaloneisinher-
ently and immutably sacred—a point elaborated on not only in the continua-
tion of the Mishnah but also in the Tosefta’s expansion of this Mishnah. For
the Tosefta recognizes that a synagogue is in fact merely a building, an ark a
cabinet, and Torah wrappings pieces of fabric, which acquire sanctity (if at
all; see below) only by an act of dedication or through the intention of the
maker. The Torah scroll alone is sacred in itself and cannot be desacralized.
The Talmud debates elsewhere whether scrolls written without the proper
intentions (e.g., by Christians or magicians) are considered holy for halakhic
purposes (do they, for example, “render the hands impure”? May they be
rescued fro ma fire on the Sabbath?), but no one could deny their potency.^54
But a cloth, according to the Tosefta, becomes sacred only when its owner
donates it for use as a Torah wrapping; and if he has merely lent it to the
synagogue, its return to his possession desacralizes it.
Though intention and dedication are the formal mechanisms by which an
ite menters the state of sanctity, the source of sanctity, the Mishnah strongly
implies, is proximity, physical or conceptual, to the Torah scroll.^55 This is
obviouslywhyinexpensiveandeasilyproduceditemslikewrappingsandcabi-
nets are holier than the synagogue structure itself. It is of some interest that
the Mishnah seems to ascribe a minimal level of sanctity to the town square.
This could conceivably be understood to imply that the Mishnah regards
communal ownership, not just proximity to the Torah scroll, as conferring
sanctity,therebyacknowledgingtheclaimsofcommunitiestobeholysocieties
whose possessions are all holy. Such a conception is reflected not only in the
language of later Palestinian synagogue inscriptions, in which the townspeo-
plecallthemselves“holycommunities,”butalsoininscriptionsfromtheDias-
pora, some of them roughly contemporary with the Mishnah, in which com-
munal treasuries, for instance, are often designated “most holy” (see below).
It would be rather surprising to encounter the traces of such a conception in
the Mishnah, despite its acknowledgment (3:1) that the communally owned
(^53) For an alternative Mishnaic hierarchy of sanctity, centered on the Temple rather than the
Torah, see M. Keli m1:6–9. On Tannaitic views of “sacred space,” see B. Bokser, “Approaching
Sacred Space,”HTR78 (1985): 279–99.
(^54) A point made repeatedly in Y. Shabbat 16:1, 15c. Though one may not save amulets con-
taining quotations of biblical verses fro ma fire on the Sabbath, a magician who destroyed his
amulets because he feared being caught by a rabbi, was regarded as a worse sinner for having
destroyed his work than for having produced it in the first place; also, T. Shabbat 13:4.
(^55) See Fine,Sacred Realm, pp. 24–25.