March 2000, Hermes Atar Trismegistus wrote:

> -How old is the Kaddish material, when was it first written down? Oldest known copy? Who was Rabbai Hillel? At what time did he live?

-Wow. Uhm.. well, it is going to be old. It is the only prayer that I know of that is (traditionally) in Aramaic. This is a hard question to answer because, strictly speaking existence of the prayerbook does not imply existence of a given prayer. So I'll preface this as such: this is completely off the top of my head -- and I haven't studied the secular history of it all that strongly. I'm sure with some digging one could find better examples of material, dates, etc.

The oldest surviving written text that I know of is in the Siddur (prayerbook) of Rabbi Saadiah Gaon, which places it at around 900 C.E.

R. Gaon was one of the last sages serving the people during the Babylonian exile, such sages preserved the (chiefly) oral works that had been common knowledge while living in Israel, by writing them down and passing them on, so we expect the material to have been around as early as the 6th century C.E.

That is the best hard-line history that I can give.

Looking at the texts themselves, we see that the Mishnah and the Siddur go hand and in -- both are an outgrowth of the oral tradition that they preserve, the later containing quotes of men known to have lived as early as 200 B.C.E (indeed, even the earliest formulations of the Siddur contain Pirke Avot, a small portion of the Mishnah); so we can speculate that the Siddur, and many of the "core" codified prayers we in existence as far back as then.

R. Hillel was a rabbi that lived around 100 B.C.E. His teachings are written throughout the Mishnah. His most famous work is contained in Pirke Avot (Ethics of the Fathers) -- this is mostly due to the fact that Pirke Avot is the most read/repeated portion of the Mishnah, due to its placement in the Siddur.

The Mishnah basically contains religious law and procedure loosely based on Biblical sources, though much of the authority is simply implied (legend has it that the Mishnah was an oral code given at Sinai). It is an explicit manual for the ins and outs of observant Jewish life, set down in a fairly rigorous way to allow for exacting legal interpretation (the 'legal precedent' of which is recorded in the Talmud).

The Siddur is also tied up with the oral code, but being more of a layman's book needed for daily life: the prayers, portions of the Tanakh (Bible), and Pirke Avot.

As a short aside, Kabbalistically speaking, the man-made traditions (Talmudic interpretation, perhaps the Mishnah's legal code, depending on your view) is "binding" because man is a co-creator with God. God makes wheat, man makes bread. God gave the Tanakh, the rabbis gave the Talmud.

-Michael J. Graffam (mgraffam@idsi.net)

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