It is well known that Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi and his students edited the Mishnah. However, they did not begin their work from scratch. In his introduction to his commentary on Mishnah, Maimonides writes that until Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi, no scholar edited one code of halachah that everyone learned together. Each academy taught Oral Tradition in its own way, in many various styles. These various styles and versions were memorized and passed down word for word, generation to generation. As time went on, the same traditions were being taught in many different forms, and ongoing persecutions and destructions in the Land of Israel raised doubts about how Oral Tradition could survive. Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi, basing himself on the version of Mishnah he learned from Rabbi Meir, decided to edit Oral Tradition into a standardized text that all of Israel could learn in a unified way. The problem facing Rabbi Yehudah was: how does he edit all existing forms of Mishnah into one, standardized version? On the one hand, he must respect all earlier traditions. On the other hand, the earlier segments of Oral Tradition were very disparate: some were arranged by topic, others by the name of the Rabbi mentioned in all the mishnayot of the segment, others by key words shared by all mishnayot of the segment, others by the place in which all the laws in the segment were enacted! What to do?

Rabbi Yehudah decided on the following course: he would organize all earlier traditions into a topical organization of six orders and sixty-three tractates, putting overall order into the system. Then, he would “file” exisiting pre-edited segments into the topical sheme according to their beginning statement. The resulting Mishnah has an overall topical order, but contains hundreds of pre-edited pieces that cause small digressions of form or secondary topic from the overall topical order. Although this is disturbing to the modern reader, it is perfectly natural in a society that wishes to preserve ancient sacred literature. Since Mishnah was meant to be learned by heart and recited with chants, the well-known earlier segments made students feel at home in the new, all-encompassing Mishnah, and provided anchors of familiar material in a new literary form. Today, we learn Mishnah from a printed text, so we need to be especially aware of these digressions and their explanation so we do not “get lost” by the by-ways of pre-edited segments.

An excellent example of this editing process, called the use of “k’vatzim” (= “codices”), can be found in the first chapter of Mishnah Kiddushin. Of ten mishnayot in the chapter, only the first discusses engagement, the topic of the tractate! Why is this? The first six mishnayot are a pre-edited segment about different types of acquisitions, the first on the list being the acquisition of engagement with a woman. For this reason, Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi chose the segment to open the tractate. Mishnayot 7-10 are another pre-edited segment of mishnayot that are not connected by topic, but because they all begin with the word "ëì". How are these two pre-edited segments joined? Mishnah 6, which is part of the first segment which deals with acquisitions, also starts with the word "ëì" and was part of the second segment. Therefore, Mishnah 6 became a bridge, and having been mentioned as part of the first segment, it now brought with it all other members of the other segment. The result is a chapter of ten mishnayot which connects to the tractate only by the first mishnah.

Mishnah contains hundreds of “kvatzim” of all shapes, types and sizes. It is much easier to learn Mishnah if we scan a chapter of Mishnah for its form before studying it for content. We can then “map” the “kvatzim” and keep track of the overall topical organization of Rabbi Yehudah HaNasi.

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