with instituting the morning service on the basis of a verse in Genesis,
“Abraham arose early in the morning.” Elsewhere, the terms “arose early”
referred explicitly to prayer; thus, the Midrash concluded that Abraham
arose early to pray. Similar reasoning credited Isaac with instituting the
afternoon, since he was “meditating in the field at twilight;” and Jacob
with the evening service, since he “halted at that place” before retiring for
the night.
Akiva’s understanding of scripture was extremely expansive. He believed
in an almost infinite possibility of interpretation, epitomized by his mantra
Kozo Shel Yud(Tip of the Yud), which meant that, in addition to inferring
meaning from verses and individual words, one could read meaning into the
juxtaposition of words and letters, and that even the tip of the yud, the
smallest Hebrew letter, could yield meaning. Akiva was thus the father of
the mystical tradition. In a key rabbinic legend, Akiva is the only one of
four rabbis to emerge unscathed from Pardes, the heavenly orchard and the
mystical gateway to the heavenly chariot and throne described in Ezekiel 1.
Akiva’s disciple Simon Bar Yochai is credited (ahistorically) by rabbinic tra-
dition as the author of the Zohar, the central text of the Kabala. The term
“Pardes” was given a second meaning as an acronym for Akiva’s broader
interpretive method. PaRDeS stood for peshat(literal meaning), remez(the
implied meaning), drash(the derived meaning, akin to Midrash), and sod
(the hidden meaning).
After the defeat of the Bar Kochba revolt and the ensuing decrees of
Hadrian, the impulse to codify the hitherto oral tradition of laws and teach-
ings intensified. The execution of ten leading scholars, coupled with the
proliferation of interpretation and the dislocating shift of the center of Jewish
life from Judea to Galilee, prompted Rabbi Judah the Patriarch to redact
many of the extant legal dicta into a single collection: the Mishneh. He
divided this legal corpus into six orders, each of which was made up of multi-
ple tractates that were themselves divided into chapters and individual
statements. Other contemporary legal dicta known as Baraita and Tosefta,
though not incorporated into the Mishneh, nonetheless retained the same
degree of authority.
The codification of Mishneh reflected the triumph of the patriarchate
over Jewish society. In addition, the emergence of the Mishneh reflected
the impulse among rabbinic leaders to present Judaism to non-Jewish soci-
ety as uniform and united. To this end, the rabbis equated the act of
informing on fellow Jews to the Romans with outright apostasy. What is
more, there was no serious attempt to dislodge the Hillelite patriarchy.
Direct challenges to the authority of the patriarch were deemed intolera-
ble. Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus – the patriarch’s brother-in-law – was
expelled from the Sanhedrin for not accepting the rule of the majority.
More dramatically, when Rabbi Joshua disagreed with the Patriarch
54 The rise of Rabbinic Judaism