The prophet Isaiah once warned Jerusalem and Judah that the Lord of hosts was about to take away the stay and the staff, the whole stay of bread and the whole stay of water, the mighty man and the man of war, the judge and the prophet (Isaiah 3:1-2).
The sages read this list twice. Once literally — bread, water, warriors, judges. But once again, spiritually. Every item in the verse described a form of wisdom the people could lose.
"The stay," the Rabbis said, meant men mighty in Scripture — the masters of the written Torah who sustained the nation like bread.
"The staff" meant men learned in the Mishnah — the teachers of the oral Torah who propped the community up like a walking staff. They named Rabbi Yehudah ben Teima and his associates as examples of this second kind of staff: sages whose reasoning held the people upright.
How vast was that Mishnaic tradition? Rav Pappa disagreed with his colleagues here. The other Rabbis said there were many orders of Mishnah. Rav Pappa claimed there were six hundred. The sheer scale of the teaching they feared losing is the measure of what a community built over centuries can forget in a single generation.
When Isaiah spoke of Jerusalem's stay and staff being removed, the sages understood: bread runs out, but so does the living transmission of learning. One kind of hunger looks like famine. The other looks like silence in the study hall.