The growing literature on reading the Tosefta independently of the mishnah tends to center on the diachronic issues or priority and influence and usually focuses on redaction of smaller units, such as an individual pericope, a collection of statements, or occasionally a chapter. As I have done a few times in the past, I seek to complement this work by comparing Mishnah and Tosefta synchronically, independent of diachronic priority, and by examining the macro-redaction of the Tosefta, such as redactorial strategies for structuring an entire tractate. Let me emphasize at the outset that I do not claim that there is uniformity in Toseftan redaction, and the type of macro-redaction we will encounter in this paper, while certainly found in other tractates as well, can not be applied across the board to all tractate. Having said that, I would like to examine with a critical eye the macro-redaction of Tosefta Berakhot, which has been analyzed in the past by a certain Avraham Walfish, as well as by Ishay Rosen-Zvi. Alongside my hopefully excusable desire to re-circulate my ideas, which I continue to maintain, I will argue that my previous discussion has not adequately addressed certain textual phenomena which I now believe will afford a clearer understanding of what the Toseftan redactor of the tractate has done, and why. As backdrop for understanding the Tosefta Berakhot, let us first review some key features of the overall redaction of the Mishnah tractate. The first eight chapters discuss fixed daily liturgical performances – keriyat shema, prayer, and blessings over food. The final chapter completes the discussion of blessings, listing benedictions recited over special experiences or events. These include benedictions of praise (שבח) over historical events and impressive natural phenomena, followed by benedictions of thanksgiving (הודיה) over good and evil. The blessings for good and evil conclude with an aggadic statement which links up surprisingly with the opening topic of the tractate (ppt. 2). The enormously demanding directive to invest one's blessing over evil with the same fervor with which one blesses over good is supported by the prooftext ואהבת את ה' אלקיך בכל מאדך, taken from the text of keriyat Shema. Moreover, the idea that no differentiation between blessing God for good or for evil appears at the exact midpoint of the tractate (m. 5:3) in the framework of the laws of prayer. Additionally, before and after this aggadic finale to the tractate the Mishnah redactor juxtaposes statements (pp. 3) whose language strikingly evokes other mishnayot scattered throughout the tractate (ppt. 4). Before turning to Toseftan redaction, I want to reiterate that for my purposes it is immaterial whether we are dealing with the final redactor who had the Mishnah of Rabbi Judah the Prince before him or with an earlier ur-Tosefta (or, in Judith Hauptman's characterization: ur-Mishnah) redactor. Like Berakhot Chapter 9, the Tosefta's concluding chapter, Chapter 6, discusses blessings over special occasions. Most of the text of this chapter is in the handouts (source 1) and on p. 2, source 2 you have a chart that shows the close adherence, typical for much of the Tosefta, of the penultimate section of Chapter 6 to the corresponding section of the Mishnah, the four statements appended to the aggadic finale to the blessings for good and evil. Following this supplement to the Mishnah material, the Tosefta concludes the tractate with a completely independent aggadic conclusion of its own (ppt. 5): ‎היה ר' מאיר או' אין לך אדם מישראל שאין עושה מאה מצות בכל יום קורא את שמע ומברך לפניה ולאחריה אוכל פתו ומברך לפניה ולאחריה ומתפלל שלשה פעמים של שמונה עשרה ועושה שאר כל מצות ומברך עליהן R. Meir's first statement strikingly characterizes the 100 daily blessings as mitzvot, to which we will return later. At this juncture the important point is the summary provided by this list of daily blessings of all the major topics covered in the tractate: Shema, prayer, eating – and mitzvot, an occasion for blessings absent from Mishnah Berakhot, and per Rosen-Zvi and David Henshke absent from the entire Mishnah corpus. The Tosefta, on the other hand, prominently features blessings over mitzvot both at the opening of the chapter and in the lengthy section of 6:9-15 (see handout). The surprising term mitzvot, employed by the Tosefta to denote blessings, signals in this aggadic coda to the tractate the Tosefta's conception of why and how blessings serve as the tractate's unifying theme: blessings are ubiquitous, enabling the Jew to fill his daily life with a continual progression of mitzvot; moreover blessings are mitzvot performed verbally, qualifying them to accompany other mitzvot and provide them with verbal expression. Whereas in R. Meir's first statement mitzvot as fill human time, his second statement – which appears with variations in Sifre Devarim – presents mitzvot as filling human space: ‎וכן היה ר' מאיר אומר: אין לך אדם מישראל שאין מצות מקיפות אותו תפלין בראשו תפלין בזרועו מזוזה בפתחו וארבע ציציות מקיפות אותו. ועליהן אמ' דוד שבע ביום הללתיך. ‎נכנס למרחץ מילה בבשרו, שנאמר: למנצח על השמינית. ואומר: חונה מלאך ה' סביב ליריאיו ויחלצם The first statement of R. Meir, which sums up the major themes of tractate Berakhot, seems to be the unit deployed by the redactor as a conclusion to the tractated. The citation of the second statement might be attributed diachronically to a pre-existing textual unit which possibly the redactor may have had before him or perhaps synchronically as a conceptual complement to the idea presented in the first statement. In support of reading the second statement as merely an adjunct to the first, I will note two connected passages from elsewhere in Tosefta Berakhot. Expanding upon M 1:4, which assigns different formal features to different blessings, the Tosefta (ppt. 6), from Chapter 1 lists which blessings have which of the appropriate formal features. Like the list of blessings in R. Meir's first statement, here the Tosefta at the beginning of the tractate surveys the topics treated throughout the tractate, thus forming an inclusio with T 6:24. Note the contrast between the two passages. In the formalistic halakhic discussion of Chapter 1 the blessings over food and mitzvot (marked in blue) are consistently contrasted with the blessings of Shema and of prayer (marked in red). However, in the aggadic statement at the tractate's conclusion, all these different forms of blessings are integrated into a unitary spiritual framework. The overall structure of the tractate mirrors the differentiation presented in the first chapter. Tosefta Berakhot divides into two equal halves – three chapters devoted to the blessings of Shema and prayer and three chapters to blessings over food and mitzvot. This will lead us to our second text in support of downgrading the redactional significance of R. Meir's second statement. Among the literary devices which indicate the division of the Toseftan tractate into two equal halves is an inclusio which frames the second half (ppt. 7). In the rationale for blessings before food which opens the second half of the tractate, the Tosefta first cites the well-known prooftext of לה' הארץ ומלואה. The second statement appears, at first glance, to be a conflation of two different statements (ppt. 8). However, Lieberman produces a cogent reading of this statement grounded in the use at the end of the tractate (ppt. 9) of מצוות to denote blessings, enabling us to construe our passage as follows: Whoever benefits from this world has committed sacrilege unless he has permitted the food for use by performing all preliminary mitzvot, culminating in the commandment which immediately precedes the act of eating – the blessing. The nexus of mitzvot and blessings thus appears both in T 4:1 and T 6:24, thus forming an inclusio which frames the "blessings" half of Tosefta Berakhot, chapters 4-6. Again we see that R. Meir's first statement is bearing the weight of structuring the larger units of the tractate, apparently leaving the second statement in its shadow as an appendage – conceptually stimulating, but an appendage nevertheless. I no longer believe this to be an accurate portrayal of the redactional role of T 6:25, and would like to suggest an upgrade the role of R. Meir's second statement – not quite to the role of the lead actor, but at least to the role of a supporting actor rather than an extra. To begin this re-examination, let us first look at the Tosefta section immediately preceding R. Meir's two statements (ppt. 10), halakhot 16-24a. This section displays a highly interesting quality that can be found in other Toseftan passages – it functions simultaneously as a satellite text to the Mishnah and as an independent text in its own right. The Toseftan passage's close adherence to the parallel section of the mishnah, may readily be seen in the synoptic chart in source #2 of the handout: halakhot 16-17 expand upon M. 9:4, and halakhot 18-24a closely correspond to three of the four parts of the appendix to M. 9:5. Note the apparent absence of a parallel to the first part of M. 9:5 – the part which closes the mishnaic circle with the first topic of the tractate – but in fact the Toseftan parallel to this central Mishnah exists, but has been transferred to the beginning of the chapter, for reasons I hope to explore on another occasion. While adhering closely to the corresponding Mishnah passage, this Toseftan passage also displays its own literary integrity (ppt. 11). Note the topical affinity between the two sub-sections in the middle, each comprising two related statements – the discussion in the first subsection of the concluding formulae for blessings stems from two issues related to anti-sectarian polemic; similarly the second subsection proposes strategies for coping with widespread disregard of rabbinic Torah in certain times and societies. For our purposes, however, the important point is the associative link between the first and last subsections: the linguistic correspondence of R. Meir's first aggadic statement about 100 daily blessings to R. Yehudah's halakhic requirement in halakhah 18 of 3 specific daily blessings is quite typical of aggadic passages in Mishnah and Tosefta. Interestingly, this correspondence was probably noticed by a scribal copyist of Bavli Menahot 43b, which Binni Katzoff has suggested is the likely background of the manuscript which ascribes these three blessings to R. Meir, rather than to R. Yehudah. What I find intriguing, however, is that the keyword כנס, whose two meanings of entering and gathering link halakhot 19 and 24a, recurs in R. Meir's second statement. To support my conviction that this linguistic link between statement 2 and the body of the passage is not happenstance, let us broaden our textual frame of reference and include the halakha immediately preceding R. Yehudah's three blessings (ppt. 12), which opens with the words הנכנס למרחץ, nearly identical to the words נכנס למרחץ towards the conclusion of statement 2. Moreover, if we broaden our perspective to include the rest of Tosefta chapter 6, we will discover (ppt. 13) that R. Meir's aggadic finale echoes several themes prominently featured elsewhere in the chapter, and these echoes appear in both his first and his second statements: The theme of mitzvot, developed in R. Meir's two statements, is highlighted not only by the blessings over mitzvot that link the lengthy section in the center of the chapter to its beginning and its end, but by resorting to mitzvot in presenting other topics. Thus, in halakhah 18 one of the "identity" blessings is correlated to obligation in mitzvot; and in halakha 7, following R. Meir's homily in which בכל נפשך mandates martyrdom for the love of God, the Tosefta cites Ben Azzai's reading of the verse as requiring absolute commitment and devotion to mitzvot. The language of R. Meir's first statement echoes not only R. Yehudah's 3 daily blessings, but also the beginning and the end of the section in the middle of the chapter that presents the blessings over commandments. R. Meir's second statement also refers to specific mitzvot, most of which have been prominently featured in the section of the chapter which lists mitzvah blessing. Most striking is circumcision, which has an elaborate discussion of a unique set of blessings, and with which R. Meir concludes his list of physical and tangible mitzvot, employing language evocative of that blessing which celebrates the covenant inscribed within the flesh. The multi-layered redaction we have just outlined – often termed "overdetermining" – is not at all uncommon in Tannaitic texts, or for that matter in Talmudic texts in general. It is certainly possible that the redactor's main motivation for citing R. Meir's second statement was to supplement the first statement, whose role at the tractate's conclusion is readily apparent. Be that as it may, the redactor certainly invested care and effort to ensure that this second statement be integrated both with the immediately preceding section and with the chapter as a whole. But I believe we can illustrate that the Toseftan redactor had yet bigger fish to fry. Here we have (ppt. 14) a synopsis comparing the last section of Tosefta Chapter 2, whose full text may be seen on source 3 of the handout, with the corresponding section of the Mishnah. Here again we can see the close correspondence, along with signficant differences, both in content and language, between the mishnaic and Toseftan treatements of the impact upon liturgy of nudity and of excretions. But my current concern is not to dissect the similarities and differences, but to examine the Tosefta's follow-up to this section which concludes the chapter (ppt. 15): ‎כ. הנכנס לבית המרחץ מקום שבני אדם עומדין לבושין יש שם מקרא ותפלה ואין צריך לומר שאילת שלום, נותן את תפיליו ואין צריך לומר שאינו חולץ ‎מקום שבני אדם (ערומים) עומדין ערומין אין שם שאילת שלום ואין צריך לומר מקרא ותפלה וחולץ תפליו ואין צריך לומר שאינו נותן ‎מקום שבני אדם עומדים ערומים ולבושין יש שם שאילת שלום ואין שם מקרא ותפלה ואין חולץ תפליו ואינו נותן לכתחלה ‎כא. הלל הזקן או' אל תראה ערום אל תראה לבוש אל תראה עומד ואל תראה יושב אל תראה צוחק ואל תראה בוכה משם שנ' עת לשחוק ועת לבכות עת לחבוק ועת לרחוק מחבק If the language and themes seem familiar to you, you are not mistaken (ppt. 16). Both the conclusion of Chapter 2 and the conclusion of chapter 6 discuss הנכנס למרחץ, and in both cases the discussion centers on the fact that inasmuch as entry into the bathhouse involves nudity, the one who has entered must divest himself of mitzvot that normally accompany him such as tefillin. Prayer and Torah study – referred to by the term מקרא – which chapter 2 prohibits in parts of the bathhouse correspond to prayer and Keriyat Shema, which chapter 6 includes among one's daily 100 mitzvot. שאלת שלום, which chapter 2 also restricts in a bathhouse, is not mentioned explicitly in Tosefta chapter 6, but one of the verses, regarding the dialogue between Boaz and his workers, from which the Mishnah in chapter 9 derives greeting one's fellow with the Name of God, is mentioned (albeit somewhat enigmatically) towards the end of chapter 6. And strikingly, the conclusions of both chapters 2 and 6 cite aggadic pronouncements of Hillel, both of which rely on verses sharing the keyword עת: at the end of chapter 2 Hillel declares that both nudity and attire have their appropriate times, and at the end of chapter 6 Hillel declares that both disseminating and closeting Torah have their appropriate times. Alongside these highly striking thematic and associative parallels, I would like to call attention as well to the conceptual parallel indicated in the last line of the chart: in both cases the appropriate time for a particular behavior is determined by the social context, a theme to which I will return further on. Interestingly both a reference to the bathhouse and the keyword נכנס appear at the end of an additional chapter of Tosefta Berakhot, chapter 5 (pp. 17), a phenomenon whose significance I don't understand but which I find hard to dismiss as happenstance. Once again, the parallels which link the end of chapter 6 to a Toseftan intratext involve both statements of R. Meir. The striking parallels between the end of chapter 2 and R. Meir's second statement provide compelling evidence for my earlier claim that this statement is included not as an afterthought, but as an important component of the overall redaction of Tosefta Berakhot. Before attempting to reconstruct what might have motivated the Toseftan redactor to conclude both the first and last topics of tractate Berakhot with pericopes that involve bathhouses and nudity, I'd like to draw a line between the two parts of my presentation. Until now we have been sifting through textual data, searching for patterns that reveal the working methods of the Toseftan redactor. If the echoes and repetitions I have found – or at least a significant portion of them – are sufficiently striking to demonstrate the high improbability of attributing them to random distribution, then we have gained insight into the way in which the Toseftan redactor has structured the tractate, interweaving units and themes in ways that highlight certain themes and indicate interconnections among them. I will now attempt the next stage, the conceptual interpretation of the interconnection of these themes, but the validity of our conclusions until now does not hinge on successfully negotiating this second challenge. The textual scaffolding of our interpretation may be sound even if we fail to convincingly reconstruct from it the redactor's goals and ideas. The first thing to note is that the common theme of bathhouse and nudity is presented in the two chapter endings in the framework of two opposed ideas. At the end of chapter two, despite Hillel's statement that in certain social surroundings nudity is proper, the basic attitude towards nudity is negative, as expressed halakhically in the restrictions upon liturgical activity. An earlier statement in this section expresses this idea dramatically with a remarkable aggadic idea (ppt. 18): every human is created clothed within the womb, because it is not praiseworthy for a human being to be naked. The end of chapter 6 presents nudity from a very different perspective. Despite the fact that nudity requires removal of the physical mitzvot that surround his person with Godliness, it reveals the most fundamental connection to the world of mitzvot inscribed in the most intimate part of his flesh. This revelation is dramatized in the version of T 6:25 in the Sifre Devarim (ppt. 19): ‎חביבים ישראל שסבבם הכתוב במצות, תפילין בראשיהם ותפילין בזרועותיהם, מזוזה בפתחיהם ציצית בבגדיהם, ועליהם אמר דוד שבע ביום הללתיך על משפטי צדקך, נכנס למרחץ ראה עצמו ערום אמר, אוי לי שאני ערום מן המצות, נסתכל במילה התחיל סודר עליה את השבח שנאמר +שם /תהלים/ יב א+ למנצח על השמינית מזמור לדוד. David fears that his nakedness denudes him of his connection to the world of mitzvot and is reassured only when he sees his exposed flesh. The end of the tractate thus expands the scope of divine service – even the bathhouse, which at the end of chapter 2 was excluded from the most basic forms of divine service, emerges at the end of chapter 6 as a venue where mitzvot are present. This idea embedded in the Tosefta redaction echoes an idea embedded in the Mishnah (ppt. 20). Whereas chapters 2 and 5 of the Mishnah present greeting one's fellow as a problematic interruption of divine service generally to be avoided during Keriyat Shema or prayer, the concluding statement in the tractate extends the liturgical use of the name of God even to such mundane frameworks as greeting one's fellow while working in the field. The Tosefta's concluding literary echo may thus be seen as amplifying the message to which the Mishnah alludes in its own concluding echo: the service of God is not confined to venues dedicated to worship; the Mishnah extends divine service into venues devoted to mundane pursuits and the Tosefta goes a step further in extending divine service even to those venues devoted to care of the naked body. To appreciate what the Toseftan redactor has communicated in this ending to the tractate, let us step for a moment outside of the confines of tractate Berakhot and view the Toseftan statement in a broader cultural and cross-cultural context. The ambivalence in some Talmudic sources to bathhouses and their culture is well-known, particularly in the well-known dialogue in bavli Avodah Zarah at the end of days between God and Roman society and the debate ascribed by Bavli Shabbat 33 to R. Shimon bar Yohai and R. Yehudah ben Ilai. Unlike R. Shimon's negative overall attitude towards the bathhouse, the Tosefta, even in chapter 2, presents a balanced approach: while nudity in general is an affront to human dignity, hence, proscribing liturgical services in the main area of the bathhouse, nevertheless it is an acceptable human activity, and its ambience of nudity may even be seen as culturally normative. However, the end of chapter 6 takes the cross-cultural conversation a challenging step further. Nudity in Roman baths was an occasion to celebrate the natural human body, leading many Jewish males who frequented these baths to hide or reverse their circumcision, inasmuch as Roman society viewed circumcision as mutilation of the glorious male physique. Our Toseftan passage meets the classic Roman attitude halfway – it too celebrates the nudity in the bathhouse of the male physique, but only because of the circumcision. In the background of this subversion of the culture of the Roman bathhouse one can hear clear reverberations of the well-known debate regarding circumcision ascribed by the Tanhuma to R. Akiva and Tinnaeus Rufus. However, as central as this polemic against Roman culture and circumcision-deniers was for second and third century rabbis, I don't believe that it explains the central role the bathhouse plays in the redaction of Tosefta Berakhot. To understand this let us refer to an additional passage from the Tosefta that does not refer to the bathhouse, but appears to be closely related to other texts that do (ppt 21). To the first two parts of this Toseftan introduction to blessings over food, which we have discussed earlier, the redactor appends a general directive: ‎לא ישתמש אדם בפניו בידיו וברגליו אלא לכבוד קונהו שנ' כל פעל ה' למענהו It is not immediately apparent how this statement connects with the first two, but my current objective is to examine what light it may shed on the macro-redaction of the tractate. Scholars from Lieberman to Yair Lorberbaum have heard in this statement echoes of the following well-known evaluation of the bathhouse (ppt. 22). Hillel roots his characterization of bathing as a mitzvah in the fact that man was created in the image of God, and hence proper care for and grooming of the body is an act done for the honor of God. The main reason for identifying our Toseftan statement with Hillel's declaration is rooted in the header, which presents the Hillel narrative as an illustration of the mishnaic statement by R. Yose in Avot 2:10 וכל מעשיך יהיו לשם שמים, which certainly sounds strikingly similar to לא ישתמש אדם בפניו בידיו וברגליו אלא לכבוד קונהו. Additionally Lieberman adduces the following variant of our Toseftan baraita, cited in Bavli Shabbat 50b (ppt. 23), which replaces ישתמש בפניו בידיו וברגליו with רוחץ אדם פניו ידיו ורגליו . I think there is room to reexamine the exact nature of the interrelationship among these three sources. Inasmuch as the version of the Hillel narrative in Vayikra Rabba 34 (ppt. 24) does not contain the header וכל מעשיך יהיו לשם שמים, it is possible that the Avot deRabbi Natan redactor and the author of the baraita in Bavli Shabbat have conflated sources in ways that diverge from the original meaning of the Toseftan statement. Nevertheless, even if we don't identify the Toseftan statement with the Hillel narrative, I think the redaction of the Tosefta itself supports the general line of thought, indicated clearly in Avot deRabbi Natan and Bavli Shabbat, that some correlation between the two is warranted. The Tosefta opens the second half of tractate Berakhot with the directive to to use one's bodily parts for the sake of the Creator and closes it with the seeing the value in a man's most intimate bodily part after it has been consecrated to the covenant with his Creator. This, of course, is in close proximity to a statement by Hillel, whose directive regarding bathhouse behavior was cited at the end of chapter 2. Hence I do believe that the Toseftan redactor is guiding us towards an attitude which attributes positive value to the human body, although I remain unconvinced that this value stems from Hillel's celebrated "image of God" argument. Rather the Tosefta grounds its positive attitude towards the body in the institution of mitzvot, and indeed this point can afford a new perspective on why mitzvot play such a central role in the Toseftan redaction of our tractate. Inasmuch as the second part of the tractate is devoted to blessings that shape and express our attitude towards the physical world, the Tosefta focuses our attention on the way in which our corporeality can be enlisted in the service of God, namely through mitzvot. After R. Meir's first statement has summed up the verbal mitzvot, to which the entire body of the tractate has been devoted, R. Meir's second statement presents the outlook on physical existence in which the centrality of mitzvot is grounded, concluding with his understanding of how the mitzvah embedded within the flesh enables us to invest the nudity of the bathhouse with spiritual meaning. Thus not only are the face, hands, and feet consecrated to the service of God, but one's entire physical being. In this light it is interesting to note that among the blessings that Tosefta Chapter 6 adds to the Mishnah's list of blessings in chapter 9 (ppt. 25) we find blessings over human beings with unusual bodily features and over large crowds of people, but this is a topic for another paper. 12