[Avodah] History of Havarah

[Micha Berger]

On Thu, 28 Dec 2006 07:04:51 -0800 (PST), afolger at aishdas.org wrote:
> Eh, that is one tradition. Sefer Yetzirah reportedly has reish as part of
> beged kefet, giving us beged rakefet as the rule to apply. Suddenly, reish
> refuya will prop up allover the place.

Bege"d Kapore"t is the better acronym, IMHO. Sticks to listing them in
alphabetical order, and has a more auspicious meaning.

I don't know what you mean by that. Currently nearly every reish is refuyah,
there are only 14 degushot in Tanakh. How can they suddenly pop up all over
the place if they're already all over?

Perhaps you meant we would suddenly realize how many reish-es deserve to be
degushot, and /they/ would be the ones popping up?

I think the reish degushah fell between the cracks because it never had the
same rules as the bege"d kefe"t letters did. The rules constructed for geroniot
means that whatever rules reish had, it at best was a crompromise - a letter
that can take a dageish qal, but not chazaq? Aleph and reish are even treated
more this way than other geroniot; they even take on a new vowel in pi'el and
hitpa'el (hei and ayin do not, and ches never changes vowel) to represent the
dageish. Those missing degeishot would mean a lot of wrong niqud, too.

It also doesn't have an unvoiced sibling, the way b has p, g has k, and d has t.
It may have had two forms in the days of the Seifer haYetzirah (obviously), but
there is enough reason to believe it wasn't a full member of the set for me not
to assume the mesorah simply lost that many degeishim (even if before the
baalei mesorah came up with the idea of denoting one form with a dot). Nor that
it mis-vowelized that many words to compensate for those degeishim.

Tir'u baTov!
-mi

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--
Micha Berger             "And you shall love H' your G-d with your whole
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