1. Rebillard, Éric and Rüpke, Jörg, eds., Group Identity and Religious Individuality in Late Antiquity (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press of America, 2015), 6Google Scholar. One of the concerns of the studies in the volume is to nuance the supposed trend toward “individualization” in late antiquity; according to the editors, the authors in the volume add this nuance by highlighting an interplay between “institutions, and collective values on the one hand and, on the other hand, the individual's behavior, experiences, expressions, reflections, and actions” (4). To take one example of this interplay, the editors point to Kim Bowes's study on the building of private chapels in the sixth century, which she reads as a form of mimicry of public, institutional worship.  While the studies in the volume are primarily on a slightly later period, my analysis shows just how appropriate their comment is for the slightly earlier Mishnah as well. This may imply that these forces were already at play in the second century. On individuality in the Mishnah, see also Fonrobert, Charlotte, “‘Humanity Was Created as an Individual’: Synechdocal Individuality in the Mishnah as a Jewish Response to Romanization,” in The Individual in the Ancient Religions of the Mediterranean, ed. Rüpke, Jörg (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 489–521Google Scholar. Fonrobert does not primarily frame her argument in terms of the complex coexistence and interplay between individual and group, but I believe that the multiple pulls she illustrates in the text show precisely this. For analysis of the nature of individuality in the Mishnah, see Balberg, Mira, “Pricing Persons: Consecration, Compensation, and Individuality in the Mishnah,” Jewish Quarterly Review 103 (2013): 169–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Balberg's shift in emphasis to subjectivity and selfhood in Balberg, Mira, Purity, Body, and the Self in Early Rabbinic Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. These nuances in the construction of individuality are distinct from (though related to) the concept of an individual as both part of and distinct from the social group, on which I focus here.

2. I would like to thank Marjorie Lehman, not only for coconvening the panel at the AJS conference in 2015 at which this paper was originally presented, but also for encouraging me during the revision process and commenting on a draft of the revision.

3. Cohn, Naftali S., The Memory of the Temple and the Making of the Rabbis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012)Google Scholar; Cohn, , “Ritual Failure, Ritual Success, and What Makes Ritual Meaningful in the Mishnah,” in Religions Studies and Rabbinics: A Conversation, ed. Alexander, Elizabeth Shanks and Berkowitz, Beth A. (New York: Routledge, 2017), 158–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar. And see earlier, Cohn, “The Ritual Narrative Genre in the Mishnah: The Invention of the Past in the Representation of Temple Ritual” (PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2008). See also the earlier work of Rosen-Zvi, Ishay, The Rite That Was Not: Temple, Midrash, and Gender in Tracate Sotah [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2008)Google Scholar; Rosen-Zvi, , “Orality, Narrative, Rhetoric: New Directions in Mishnah Research,” AJS Review 32, no. 2 (2008): 235–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and that of Berkowitz, Beth A., Execution and Invention: Death Penalty Discourse in Early Rabbinic and Christian Cultures (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also more recently, Balberg, Mira, Blood for Thought: The Reinvention of Sacrifice in Early Rabbinic Literature (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, who takes up this approach in a slightly different way.

4. One of the central arguments of Cohn, Memory of the Temple, where a definition of this genre can be found (cf. the definition in Rosen-Zvi, Rite That Was Not).

5. Swartz, Michael D., “Judaism and the Idea of Ritual Theory,” in Jewish Studies at the Crossroads of Anthropology and History, ed. Boustan, Raʿanan, Kosansky, Oren, and Rustow, Marina (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 295–96Google Scholar. See also the important work of Rosen-Zvi, Ishay in this domain, The Mishnaic Sotah Ritual: Temple, Gender, and Midrash, trans. Scharf, Orr (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 239–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Also in this path, but focusing specifically on sacrifice (and not limited to the Mishnah), see Balberg, Blood for Thought. Cf. the very different approach of Gruenwald, Ithamar in Rituals and Ritual Theory in Ancient Israel (Leiden: Brill, 2001)Google Scholar. Additional important relevant works that read the rabbinic construction of particular rituals or aspects of ritual (in addition to those on Temple ritual noted above) include: Bokser, Baruch M., The Origins of the Seder: The Passover Rite and Early Rabbinic Judaism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984; repr. New York: Jewish Theological Seminary, 2002)Google Scholar; Levine, David, Communal Fasts and Rabbinic Sermons: Theory and Practice in the Talmudic Period [in Hebrew] (n.p.: Ha-kibbutz Ha-me'uḥad, 2001)Google Scholar; Ehrlich, Uri, The Nonverbal Language of Prayer: A New Approach to Jewish Liturgy, trans. Ordan, Dina (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2004)Google Scholar. Neusner, Jacob has taken up theoretical paradigms from the study of ritual in a very general way in Judaism: The Evidence of the Mishnah, 2nd ed. (Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1988; repr. Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock, 2003)Google Scholar, but the approaches he takes are somewhat dated.

6. Grimes, Ronald L., The Craft of Ritual Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014)Google Scholar. This book synthesizes Grimes's earlier foundational work. On the use of ritual as a heuristic second-order category, and for more on my approach to ritual, see Cohn, “Ritual Failure, Ritual Success.” My approach to the rabbis has been influenced not only by the general and synthetic theorizing by Grimes, but also by that of Bell, Catherine, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), esp. 138–69Google Scholar, and by the work of Michael Swartz, which can be seen especially in “Judaism and the Idea of Ritual Theory,” 294–317. For my earlier work on ritual theory and the Mishnah, see also Cohn, “Ritual Narrative Genre,” 118–204; Cohn, Memory of the Temple, 47–50, 73–89.

7. I draw especially on the language in Grimes, Craft of Ritual Studies, 7 and 35, and on his approach to ritual summarized in the book as a whole.

8. Grimes, Craft of Ritual Studies, 185–210, 231–93, a synthesis of his earlier work.

9. Grimes, Ronald L., Ritual Criticism (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990), 13–14Google Scholar, and see the incredibly nuanced overlay of interpretive grids he establishes in Craft of Ritual Studies. Catherine Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, 138–69, takes up Grimes's approach, and demonstrates (though does not state explicitly) that interpretation through elements of ritual helps bring out the consequences of particular elements and thus what rituals accomplish. Note that both Bell and Grimes seem to draw on Rappaport, Roy, “The Obvious Aspects of Ritual,” in Ecology, Meaning, and Religion (Richmond, CA: North Atlantic Books, 1979), 173–221Google Scholar (and see Rappaport, , Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999], 23 ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar) and perhaps Douglas, Mary, Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 1996), 58 ff.Google Scholar, who consider multiple characteristics in connection with ritual (in very different ways). See my earlier analysis in Cohn, “Ritual Narrative Genre,” 118–22. Note that the family characteristics approach to definition derives from Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed., trans. Anscombe, G. E. M. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 1:65–71, 27–29Google Scholar.

10. Smith, Jonathan Z., To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 103–4Google Scholar.

11. Grimes, Ronald L., “Jonathan Z. Smith's Theory of Ritual Space,” Religion 29, no. 3 (1999): 261–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12. This is his most recent formulation, in Grimes, Craft of Ritual Studies, 236–40. See his earlier list in “Jonathan Z. Smith's Theory.” And see the somewhat similar move in Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, 138–72.

13. These are not the only factors important in the Mishnah. The issue of kivun ha-lev, or intent, which can be placed into Grimes's category of “attitude,” is quite important in the Mishnah, but lies beyond the scope of this particular investigation. I merely note here Rosen-Zvi, Ishay, “The Mishnaic Mental Revolution: A Reassessment,” Journal of Jewish Studies 66, no. 1 (2015): 36–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar, who considers the Mishnah's intent as an aspect of ritual action. Time and language are also important features in the Mishnah, but beyond the scope of the present study.

14. On Temple ritual having a social function in the Mishnah, see Cohn, “Ritual Failure, Ritual Success,” 164–67, and earlier, Cohn, “Ritual Narrative Genre,” 197–204 and 147–54. And see Feldman, Jackie, “‘A City That Makes All Israel Friends’: Normative Communitas and the Struggle for Religious Legitimacy in Pilgrimages to the Second Temple,” in A Holy People: Jewish and Christian Perspectives on Religious Communal Identity, ed. Schwartz, Joshua and Poorthuis, Marcel (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 109–26Google Scholar.

15. My interpretation differs from that of Mira Balberg (in Blood for Thought), who argues that the Mishnah rejects individuality in sacrifice in favor of collectivization. While she may be correct with respect to the emphasis of the general nature of the sacrifice, this is not the case for the performance of the rituals and the wider range of rituals associated with the Temple, as described in the Temple-ritual narratives, where the two levels of participation coexist. See further below.

16. Mishnah translations are all my own, based on MS Parma (de Rossi 138), in consultation with MS Kaufmann (A 50). Hebrew wording taken from MS Parma.

17. Reminiscent of the language in M. Yoma 1:8; see below.

18. This is somewhat similar to a different peculiar feature that has long been noted, the shifting between tenses; here, however, the change occurs both in verb and subject and has a significant impact on how the nature of the ritual actors is being constructed. See Breuer, Yochanan, “The Perfect and the Participle in Descriptions of Ceremony in the Mishnah” [in Hebrew], Tarbiz 56 (1987): 299–316Google Scholar, and cf. the very different explanation for the tense shifts in Cohn, Memory of the Temple, 4–8, and much more extensively, Cohn, “Ritual Narrative Genre,” 51–73.

19. Cohn, “Ritual Narrative Genre,” 97–99.

20. In the recitation itself (’arami ‘oved ’avi), the ritual actor, however, makes use of the plural.

21. Not all other Temple-ritual narratives employ this shifting between singular and plural, but it does appear elsewhere, often quite subtly. Thus, in the narrative of the festival of the place of water drawing (Simḥat Bet Ha-sho’evah; M. Sukkah 5:1–4), the priests and Israelites present are primarily plural and the verbs are almost all plural. However, at the very start of the narrative, the spectator is considered an individual: “They said: Whoever did not see [sing., כל מי שלא ראה] the festival of the place of water drawing never saw true joy in all his days” (5:1). As in M. Sukkah, in M. Yoma 7:1–2, the point of view shifts subtly to that of the individual spectator: “The one who watches [הרואה] the bull and goat being burned does not watch the high priest reading [the Torah], not because he is not permitted, but because there was a great distance, and the two were done at the same time.”

22. Important studies of these categories in relation to Temple sacrifice include Balberg, Blood for Thought, and Steinfeld, Zvi-Arie, “Toward a Definition of Individual Sacrifice and Community Sacrifice” [in Hebrew], in Shoshannat Yaakov: Jewish and Iranian Studies in Honor of Yaakov Elman, ed. Secunda, Shai and Fine, Steven (Leiden: Brill, 2012), Hebrew section, 29–54Google Scholar. See also the brief treatment in Henshke, David, Festival Joy in Tannaitic Discourse [in Hebrew] (Jerusalem: Magnes, 2007), 125–48Google Scholar.

23. See Balberg's analysis in Blood for Thought. Balberg extends this insight to suggest that the Mishnah deemphasizes the individual as performer. While this may be true in some cases of sacrifice, I disagree that this applies more widely to Temple-ritual performance.

24. I thank Moshe Bar-Asher for pointing out the possible interpretation of yeh ̣idim, perhaps based on one interpretation in the Babylonian Talmud, as “important people.” Even if this is a correct interpretation, this term nevertheless refers to such people specifically as individuals and invokes the prevalent binary category.

25. See esp. M. Berakhot 1–5 and M. Megillah 1:1–4, 2:1–3, and 4:1.

26. Swartz, Michael D., “The Topography of Blood in Mishnah Yoma,” in Jewish Blood: Metaphor and Reality in Jewish History, Culture, and Religion, ed. Hart, Mitchell (London: Routledge, 2009)Google Scholar, has taken a similar methodological step to my own, noting the “complex dialectic of person, place, object, and substance” in M. Yoma.

27. Smith, To Take Place.

28. Cohn, Memory of the Temple, 73–84. See a much more developed analysis of sacred space in the Mishnah in Cohn, Naftali S., “Sacred Space in the Mishnah: From Temple to Synagogue and … City,” in La question de la «sacerdotalisation» dans le judaïsme synagogal le christianisme et le rabbinisme, ed. Mimouni, Simone C. and Painchaud, Louis (Turnhout: Brepols, 2018), 85–121Google Scholar.

29. The M. Bikkurim narrative moving from the Land of Israel (the individual field) to city/town to Jerusalem to Temple Mount to the Temple courtyard to beside the altar creates a very similar map of sacred space to the eleven stages of holiness (mislabeled “ten”) in M. Kelim 1:6–9, and suggest that these ritual procedures are also about bringing about—or maintaining—the holiness of the spaces.

30. The correlated shifts are not as strong but still present in other narratives, for instance, throughout M. Yoma 1–7 and in M. Menaḥot 10:3–5.

31. Cohn, “Ritual Failure, Ritual Success,” 164–67.

32. See Cohn, “Ritual Failure, Ritual Success,” 164, where I also suggest that descriptions of interactions between ritual participants, especially greetings (M. Bikkurim 3:2 and M. Middot 2:2) and performing ritual in tandem (M. Bikkurim 3:6 and M. Pesaḥim 5:6 and 5:9) lead to social connections. In the firstfruits narrative, multiple merisms—“those who live near … those who live far” (3:3), “Those who know how to recite … those who do not know how to recite” (3:7), and “the rich … the poor” (3:8)—further highlight the notion that this is an inclusive collectivity.

33. Balberg, Blood for Thought.

34. Rebillard and Rüpke, Group Identity and Religious Individuality.

35. Fonrobert, “‘Humanity,’” 512–13.

36. Bell, Catherine, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 20Google Scholar. That ritual facilitates social life is a more obvious aspect of Durkheim's theory.

37. Ibid., 23, 35, respectively.

38. Following the critique of Brubaker, Rogers and Cooper, Frederick, “Beyond ‘Identity,’” Theory and Society 29, no. 1 (2000): 1–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar, I attempt to use more specific words to convey the particular aspects of being a group and a people—thus “groupness” (the nature of the group as a collective entity), “group identification” (individuals specifically identifying with the group), and “peoplehood” (being an ethnic-geographic group among others) are different unique aspects of what is often reified as identity. Temple ritual was a crucial part of what Cynthia M. Baker terms the rabbinic “discourse of peoplehood.” See Rebuilding the House of Israel: Architectures of Gender in Jewish Antiquity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), 12Google Scholar (and see 7–11). Baker does not elaborate any explicit examples of this discourse, but situates her analysis of space within this context. Important discussions of what peoplehood might mean in the ancient Jewish context appear in Cohen, Shaye J. D., Beginnings of Jewishness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999)Google Scholar, and Goodblatt, David, Elements of Jewish Nationalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, who demonstrates the long history of this concept in Jewish sources. Following Goodblatt, I use the terms “people” and “nation” interchangeably, noting that the notion of nation in ancient times must not be conflated with its meaning in modern times. See also Baker's important cautions.

39. This section builds on the earlier briefer iterations of the same analysis in Cohn, “Ritual Narrative Genre,” 147–55; Cohn, “Ritual Failure, Ritual Success”; Cohn, “Sacred Space in the Mishnah”; and in other unpublished work. My interpretations of the M. Yoma passages are taken up by Mira Balberg in Blood for Thought, who develops her own analysis. See also Ezra, Daniel Stökl Ben, The Impact of Yom Kippur on Early Christianity: The Day of Atonement from Second Temple Judaism to the Fifth Century (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003), 18–37Google Scholar. On the difference between the biblical and mishnaic accounts, but with a different emphasis, see also Michael D. Swartz, “Ancient Ritual Theory,” 303. Swartz makes the important observation that in fact there is a diversity of actors involved in the Day of Atonement ritual in the Temple. In the biblical account in Leviticus 16, Aaron does perform the sacrificial ritual on behalf of the entire people, named with different terms (16:16, 17, 19, 21, and 24), but they are not present and do not participate in any way. Similarly, after the ritual itself, in 16:29, the people at large are instructed to engage in “self-denial,” however, there is no indication that this is directly related to the sacrificial rituals. Perhaps the mention of the people and the fact that the ritual is done on their behalf are the inspiration for reading them into the procedure, detailed below. Note that the rabbis may not have originated the notion that the people are present and participate, as in the book of Ben Sira, chapter 50, which may refer to the daily offering (see discussion and references in Cohn, “Ritual Narrative Genre,” 167–69).

40. The same utterance presumably falls in the continuations of 4:2 and 6:2, omitted in MSS Parma and Kaufmann with an “etc.” (but appearing in the standard printed editions).

41. An anecdote in T. Kippurim 2:13 about a certain priest one year “who lengthened” this prayer imagines the priest getting into a conversation with the people, who are very much present: “They said to him, ‘What were you thinking that you lengthened?’” Despite his good intentions, they instruct him in the correct practice. The manner of instructing him might, however, indicate that the story's author sees this crowd more as rabbis than as the hoi polloi.

42. Note that the key phrase is absent in the standard printed edition of the Mishnah, but appears in the manuscripts and is quoted as such in the Bavli. The “entire people” in the Temple for the use of the lulav is quite significantly parallel to the “entire people” using the lulav outside the Temple (including presumably in the rabbis’ own time) in M. Sukkah 3:9 and 3:13.

43. Perhaps the very same crowd is implied in the narrative in M. Sukkah 5:1–4, which mentions only obliquely that the spectacle of fire, music, and dance was done “before them,” without specifying who “them” is. T. Sukkah 4:1 specifies that the crowd of spectators included men and women (enough women to fill three entire special seating sections), adding a gender component that is beyond the scope of the present article.

44. The relationship between the Temple-ritual narratives and court-centered ritual narratives is subtle. Jaffee, Martin S., Torah in the Mouth: Writing and Oral Tradition in Palestinian Judaism 200 BCE–400 CE (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 133CrossRefGoogle Scholar, suggests the two seemingly disparate topics are joined in the single narrative genre because they are about “the most important institutions in ancient Palestinian Jewish society.” In Memory of the Temple (esp. 55–56), I argue that it is because the role the rabbis claim for themselves joins the ritual, grounded in Temple ritual, and the judicial, grounded in the memory of the Second Temple–era Great Court. On these two court-centered examples and the significance of the people in these rituals, see Berkowitz, Execution and Invention, 107–19. Additional outlying examples of the people or the entire people include: the retold biblical prewar ritual (M. Sotah 7:2, 8:1–5), the biblical blessing and cursing ritual (M. Sotah 7:5), and additional examples of the priestly blessing, both inside the Temple (M. Sotah 7:5) and outside (M. Megillah 4:7).

45. The rather similar set of back-and-forth utterances in the red heifer offering narrative in M. Parah 3:10 does not specify the exact nature of the crowd, merely using the pronoun “they,” but may have in mind a local crowd, or, because it takes place in Jerusalem, perhaps the nationwide “entire people.”

46. In 2:1–5 the group is obviously present but plays no clear active role. Note that there are different ways of framing the literary relationship between the firstfruits narrative and the passages in M. Ta‘anit; I have arbitrarily settled on one of the possibilities (that the latter evoke the former).

47. In M. Sukkah 5:1–4, the Israelites are not named specifically; in M. Pesaḥim 5:5–10, the Levites are not named, however, they do appear in the parallel Tosefta Pisḥa 4:11; in M. Sukkah 5:1–4, the Israelites are also not named (see above on this example).

48. Passages throughout the Mishnah that imply these three groups form a complete set: M. Pe'ah 8:6; M. Demai 6:3–5; M. Kiddushin 3:12; M. Sanhedrin 4:2; and M. Horayot 3:8; examples in which additional categories (converts, slaves) are added: M. Shekalim 1:6; M. Kiddushin 3:12, 4:1; and M. Arakhin 1:1.

49. Baker, Rebuilding the House of Israel, 12 (and see 7–11); see note above.

50. In addition to the examples cited above, M. Berakhot 4:7 and 5:5 refer to the individual and the representative of the community in the context of prayer.

51. In context kol ha-‘am must mean “the entire congregation” rather than the whole people of Israel, yet the language is suggestive of how the rabbis are constructing this congregation as standing for the entire people. Mishnah 3:13 also engages in the oscillation noted above: the language shifts very quickly from “the entire people” to “each and every single person” (כל אחד ואחד), highlighting the oscillation and interplay. This passage is extremely similar in language to M. Sukkah 4:4, about the ritual performed in the Temple, highlighting a relationship to the prayer-centered performance in the synagogue and ritual activity in the Temple.

52. See also M. Megillah 4:5 on the role of the priest. And see Levine, Lee I., The Ancient Synagogue: The First Thousand Years, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 526Google Scholar, and Cohn, Memory of the Temple, 157n78.

53. This draws on the notion that the synagogue was made meaningful through association with the destroyed Temple. See Branham, Joan R., “Vicarious Sacrality: Temple Space in Ancient Synagogues,” in Ancient Synagogues: Historical Analysis and Archaeological Discovery, ed. Urman, Dan, Flesher, Paul, and McKracken, Virgil (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 319–45Google Scholar; Fine, Steven, This Holy Place: On the Sanctity of the Synagogue during the Greco-Roman Period (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997), 41–43Google Scholar. And see Cohn, “Sacred Space in the Mishnah.”

54. Naftali S. Cohn, “Heresiology in the Third-Century Mishnah: Arguments for Rabbinic Legal Authority and the Complications of a Simple Concept,” Harvard Theological Review (2015): 508–29; Cohn, , “Sectarianism in the Mishnah: Memory, Modelling Society, and Rabbinic Identity,” in History, Memory, and Jewish Identity, ed. Robinson, Ira, Cohn, Naftali S., and DiTommaso, Lorenzo (Boston, MA: Academic Studies, 2016), 31–54Google Scholar.