THE SYNAGOGUE: ORIGINS AND DIFFUSION 237Maimonides, and surely deserves serious consideration, but it is hard to avoid
the feeling that it does excessive violence to the text.^63
Yet the continuation of the Tosefta reveals tensions of its own. Whatever
reservations the corpus may manifest about the sanctity of the synagogue, it
is striking that it repeatedly uses language associated with the Jerusale mte m-
pleinitsdiscussionofsynagoguededications.^64 Thus,in2:13,itstates:“Ifone
makes an ark or scroll wrappings, as long asgavoahhas not yet used them, a
hedyotispermittedtousethem.”Gavoah,“theexalted,”isthetermtherabbis
normally use to refer to the temple establishment, in contrast to thehedyot,
borrowedfromtheGreekidiotes,alayprivatecitizen.Inlightofthis,halakhah
16 is particularly odd, at least rhetorically:
Ifagentilededicatedabeamtoasynagogue,onwhichwasinscribed“[dedicated]
to God” (that is, the tetragrammaton was inscribed on the beam), they examine
him; ifhe says, “I donatedthis beam toheqdesh(the templetreasury),” they hide
it(i.e.,inagenizah,anddonotuseit);ifhesays,“Idonatedittothesynagogue,”
they scrape offthe name, hide theshavings, and may use theremainder. Objects
belonging togavoahmay be used by ahedyotas long asgavoahhas not yet used
them, etc.Whatis strikinghere isthetension betweenthe anxietythattemple andsyna-
gogue not be confused, manifest in the law of the beam inscribed with the
name ofGod,^65 and precisely thesame confusion in thelaw that immediately
follows.
Though the various tensions that characterize the rabbinic discussions of the
synagogue—theoccasionalslippagebetweentheformalismofrabbinictheory
and the presumably popular, nonrabbinic sense that synagogues are rather
like temples, in sum, the messiness of rabbinic discourse—need to be taken
seriously, it still may be possible to accept some of the generalizations about
rabbinic conceptions of “sacred space” described by the late Baruch Bokser.
In his view, the rabbis’ conception was founded on two principles, the first of
which is that God is present everywhere and therefore every place ispoten-
tiallysacred; the second principle is that the oneactualholy place, the site
of the Jerusale mte mple, is still in fact holy but no longer functioning. The
rabbisthus“overcamethelossofthesacredcenter.. .(byfinding)alternative
centering objects, in particular the Torah....They made the center mobile,
enabling individuals to enter it by reading or studying the laws of the cult.”
(^63) See Lieberman,Tosefta Kifshutah, Moed, 1151–53, upon which my discussion is based.
(^64) This issue is discussed at length by Fine,This Holy Place, pp. 41–59.
(^65) Also interesting is the rabbis’ assumption that a pagan might not know the difference be-
tween a temple and a synagogue.