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 Kiruvtm 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 Kiruvtm 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.
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 Kiruvtm 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 Kiruvtm 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.
