By redacting the Mishna, Reb Yehuda HaNasi is one of a handful of figures who forcefully responded to the needs of his time and shaped the way Jews study Torah. Very few realize just how radical – and yet critical – a move this was. (An exception was Rambam, who modeled his own Mishneh Torah on the Mishna.)
Most focus on the writing of the corpus of the oral Torah (which may actually not have happened until later). Yet much more significant was how he organized its contents, something one might easily dismiss as merely technical. Nothing could be further from the truth. Until then, Torah study was largely structured around the Torah’s verses (and, to a lesser extent, those of Nach). In turn, those verses are intentionally structured by a stream of consciousness, man’s natural way of thinking – as the Sages note, the Torah is written in the language of men, meaning how people normally think. However, Reb Yehuda saw that such a style was making it increasingly difficult to retain the burgeoning amount of information that the oral Torah was becoming.
Moreover, as Greco-Roman culture had become so pervasive, scholarship became associated with the categorization so prevalent in that culture. Hence his decision to tightly structure the Mishna by topic. Reb Yehuda understood that such a move was needed to survive in the new civilization being created all around the Jews. Of course, this came with the price of the Torah’s contents becoming more abstract and less humanly intuitive, but it was a price that he understood was required in order for the Torah to survive.
