MARK WASHOFSKY

according to a ranking based on gender, lineage, and intellect. Yet beyond the specifics of the Horayot text lies an intriguing thought. The rabbis of the Mishnah were able to make qualitative judgments of this nature because they possessed and acted on a picture of an ideal society. Rabbinic culture, we might say, was united by a common story the rabbis told about themselves, their world, and the values out of which that world was constructed. That story made it possible for them to measure persons according to the degree to which their lives cohered with these fundamental values. Theirs was a community defined by the performance of mitzvot; thus, when we have two lives to save, the man precedes the woman because he has more mitzvot to perform. The community was also dedicated to the proposition that certain of its male members were divinely appointed to perform special religious duties. The kohen and the levi therefore outrank the rest of the people on the scale of kedushah, or priestly holiness. And since the entire community is a“kingdom of priests,” the mamzer, the natin, the convert, and the freed slave are ranked according to the degree to which they originated as Jews or to which their specific lineage deviates from the standards of permitted marriage. Finally, the supreme yardstick of value in this scholarly rabbinic world is that of Torah scholarship itself: the mamzer that is a scholar takes precedence over a High Priest that is ignorant of Torah . The authors of the passage in Horayot believed, in other words, that they could identify the purposes and goals of Jewish existence, and they could and did make the claim that each Jew should be ranked in accordance with his or her embodiment or attainment of those goals.

Are we so certain that we cannot perform similar evaluations

in the context of our contemporary world? True, we regard ourselves unable to distinguish those who are more deserving of life

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