A (sometimes-serious) Glossary to Bava Basra

I haven't been writing this week so here is something from the holy walls of the Yeshiva.

There are plenty of Yeshivish dictionaries out there. There is even a New Testament translated into Yeshivish, but all of the dictionaries focus on making fun of the way people talk, or in one case teach others how to talk funny too. This glossary is more technical, and focuses more on what people are saying than how they say it. It isn't a Yeshivish lexicon per se but another Talmudic one presented with most sincere apologies to Rabbeinu Marcus Jastrow.

Agud: See גוד-אגוד
bas-habas-haben: A great-grand-daughter. She inherits before a daughter because as far as inheritance is concerned, she might as well be a son.
Beit Rova: n. pl batei rova. A quarter.
Ben: The son. He is first in line to inherit
Bor: n. Any one of several varieties of hole. More specific definitions are forbidden, especially in the form of context clues
Bur: n. A major ignoramus (spelled the same way in Hebrew)
Chazaka: n. (maybe) v. (could be one of these too) an assumption of fact; an assumption of ownership; an act of taking possession; the process of acquiring squatter's rights; a tenous claim of some sort of entitlement to use someone else's property (v. Reuven v. Din Torah)
Chenvini: n. v. gavra esp. one who only plays bit parts; a storekeeper; is known to keep meticulous records of everything, but cannot be trusted to send a kid out with a delivery.
Cur: A unit of area equal to 10 Lessekh which equals an unspecified number of  Batei Rova. No one knows or cares how many. The important thing is that there are more than 4 of them. Computing the number of batei rova requires algebra(v. סתרי תורה)
Din: n. a fortiori reasoning (because it's one of those latin words we learn in Yeshiva); Law/legal battle; a loud cacaphonous noise (v. definition 2)
Eishes Ish: A woman whose chief role in this mesechta is to be told she can't sue her ex-husband because she isn't actually divorced
Gavra: n. A man who makes his living acting out some of the most improbable legal battles in Jewish history. He is usually dishonest but wins anyway
Get: n. document, bill of divorce; exists primarily to get lost so we can talk about Chazaka
Get Mekushar: n. The direct opposite of a Get Pashut
Get Pashut: n. A document written entirely on one side of a piece of paper, not post-dated, and signed by two witnesses with a minimum of funny business
גוד-אגוד: Good fences make agood neighbor
HaHu: lit. "There was this..." Usually serves as a cue for a Gavra.
Iyov: n. Protagonist of the book of Job. He may or may not have existed, may or may not have been a blasphemer, and may or may not have encountered the various Gavras of Bava Basra during his troubles
Kilayim: n. Something that doesn't belong in Bava Basra but is mixed in to force Yeshiva guys to learn Zeraim.
Levi: n. An understudy Gavra
L'Mafreya: adj. wibbly wobbly, retrospective, retroactive timey-wimey...
Magla: n. axe; saw; shovel; some other tool that if you wanted one you would not request it in Aramaic, so who cares
Mara: n. shovel; see magla
Mara Kama: n. Original owner (but only of real estate)
Metalt'lin: n. Movable merchandise, the opposite of real estate. Under talmudic property laws, Metalt'lin can pretty much be accurately termed "fake-estate" as you suspected it should be all along
Reuven: n. The penultimate Gavra
Shimon: n. The ultimate gavra

The "People of The Book" are an Oral People

בעזרת הגדול והנורא

אכתוב מסורת התורה

With these lines begin the Mesorah Magna, literally "The Great Tradition," a comprehensive collection of practically every statistic imaginable on the Hebrew bible. It includes everything from the page layout to the number of times each letter occurs. For unusual characters it even tells us where. The introduction to the JPS study bible (more on them later) defines it as "everything in the Hebrew Bible other than the consonants." The Mesorah is the spec to which all Hebrew Bible texts are written and is treated as being of almost divine origin (Jewish tradition holds the consonants of the Masoretic Chumash to be given to Moses at Sinai. The punctuation came later) as it is our device for ensuring our own Torah's fidelity to that of Moses. The theory is that every scribe creates a letter-perfect copy of the Mesorah for a particular text from another copy before, which was in turn copied from one before that all the way back to Ezra. That's my job, to create letter-perfect copies.

Last week I posted about finding a mistake in my tikkun. (If you're one of the tiny handful of people who read this blog, you probably also appreciate the  kind of humor that leads me to call this edition a תיקון שורפים). How did I know it was a mistake? Somebody told me, and then I confirmed it by checking agaist the Mesorah, i.e. a well-edited tanach. Last week's error was the Written Tradition at work: sloppy scribe makes mistake, lazy scribe copies mistake, senior scribe points out mistake, lazy scribe checks Mesorah and makes correction. This system has served the Jewish people well for millenia to the point that Kiruv^tm bills it as conclusive proof that our text is perfectly faithful to the original.

All of this would be great if there was one definitive Mesorah, which there isn't. I've always known vaguely about some discrepancies here and there but since they are all in the sixth decimal place so-to-speak they never really impinged on my view of any given copy of the text as basically perfect. The reality is that "letter-perfect" is very difficult to achieve, especially without computers. Here is this week's issue: There are 3 זעירות in Eicha as per Koren and the Breuer Aleppo Codex. One of them exists in Tikkun Sorfim. None of them exist in Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensis. Which Mesorah do I follow? For some, this is more than a simple technical issue. For the followers of Kiruv^tm I alluded to earlier, it has very disturbing theological implications as well.

The thing is, Judaism does not rely solely on a written text. Our traditions are first and foremost oral ones, which are learned from people, not books. As the Talmud puts it, מפי ספרים ולא מפי ספרים. You see what I did there. One of those is pronounced sofrim -- scribes, while the other is sefarim -- books. You need to hear the words from a living person to know the difference. Jews are called the People of the Book, but not by other Jews. Everything follows the chain from teacher to student, even the unalterable septuple-checked-changing-one-letter-is-blasphemy written text. That being said, when encountered with my problem   all I had to do is email my teacher, who knows what text to use because someone taught him. Of course it's fair to ask how his teacher knew. The answer is that someone taught him. And so on and so forth back to Ezra. That being said, you can guess what answer I expect. He will probably tell me to follow the Koren because it reflects the Mesorah as practiced over the BHS which is older and therefore ostensibly more but. It may very well be, but it reflects a tradition preserved, as opposed to a tradition alive.

Modern day applications of an old story

Every scribe is familiar with, and sometimes over-fond of telling the following story from the Talmud Bavli, Sotah 20a (my translation):

Rabbi Yehuda related the following in the name of Shmuel about Rabbi Meir (more on him next week). Once I was mixing ink and Rabbi Akiva asked me my trade. I replied that I am a scribe to which Rabbi Akiva responded "My son, be very careful for your work is Divine and you may come to leave out a letter or add an extra one and destroy the entire world.

Sofrim, in particular authors of books on safrus, like this story because it illustrates the responsibility of the position. The sofer, especially in our story before the advent of printing, was responsible for faithfully transmitting scripture (and tradition as well) to the next generation with absolute fidelity. Today, of course, most of our books are printed and the sofer's work is almost entirely for ritual use but textual accuracy is still paramount. A couple days ago I was, as halacha requires, copying letter-for-letter out of a Tikkun Sofrim or official copyist's guide.

Here is the text of Eicha 3:33:

כי לא ענה מלבו, ויגה בני-איש.

Here is a picture of my copyist's guide:

Note the missing vav

 Trusting the sofer who made this copy, I copied letter for letter without checking and did not even suspect a mistake until I showed it to someone much more familiar with the text who picked up on it right away. This is the kind of error that can go undetected for years and even -- as I found out the hard way -- make its way into "official" texts. Fortunately there was no harm done as I was able to add the missing vav without much trouble but I learned a lesson about picking up just any old Tikkun and got a good scare about the responsibility to triple check everything. Somebody might copy from it one day.

Some thoughts on Megillat Eicha

 I'm currently copying Megillat Eicha (technical post with pictures to follow) and I keep coming across quotes that seem very out of place in the “Book of Lamentations”. Some of them are taken as the words to very happy and upbeat jewish songs. The second-to-last verse of the book is the well-known השיבנו ה אליך ונשובה. In Chapter 3 (which I am writing now) there is actually a good sized passage that sounds nothing like mourning: “This I recall and my soul is calm. I remind myself of this, therefore I have hope: That the kindness of God is infinite – that his mercy never ends...” and it goes on in this vein for a while. Megillat Eicha is composed of four elegies followed by a prayer for redemption. Each of the elegies contains verses like this, mostly towards the end. These are not lamentations. They are ecstatic praises that belong in one of the Hallelujah sections of Psalms.

I think these interjections can tell us something about the way Jeremiah viewed Jewish mourning. Eicha is the essential textbook on Jewish mourning much more so than Job. Job was a good man (or character, see Bava Basra 15) to whom bad things happened. Jeremiah is a prophet of Israel teaching us how to mourn. Job suffered in silence until he could no longer bear it and he broke down and challenged God angrily, who answered him in kind. Jeremiah cries immediately. The book begin with an expression of shock and loss – “how could this have happened”. That is the central theme from which Megillat Eicha takes it's name, literally The Scroll of “How?!”

Because Jeremiah begins with a human response to loss instead of trying to be superhuman and failing, his faith does not break like Job's does. At the end of each chapter he can still declare (1:18) צדיק הוא ה כי פיהו מריתי or pray for relief in 2:20 from the same God he calls an enemy in 1:4. Eicha, like a lot of things in Judaism is a paradox.

Next post will be less depressing, I promise.