[Avodah] Modern Day Sifrei Torahs

[hankman]

CM: It has always been my understanding of the 8th ikkar as a guarantee of siyata dishmaya throughout the generations that will insure that rov of our seforim will be halachically valid copies of Toras Moshe, thus if we follow the rov of our extant seforim we should not in general go wrong. So this certainly allows for incorrect copies in our midst, but guarantees the MESORAH long term. Thus even if in some circumstances of safek a sofer will follow the "local" rov seforim available to him, he could still come up with a resulting "incorrect" sefer (even though he did the best he could), but the guarantee for the MESORAH is that in rov of these cases of doubt, the "correct" sefer will result. This is my own understanding, I have no specific source, so I am willing to back down if confronted with direct authoritative contradiction, but I think this comports well in general. The machlokes that RJA refers to, wrt molei and choser (see below), will thus result in two variations of the above guarantee: 1) to the exact letter, 2) to within the allowable variations for molei and choser, each according to his opinion of a valid sefer within halacha.

KT
Chaim Manaster

RJA wrote: I think there may be a fundemental misunderstanding of the Rambam here,
which needs to be clarified.  However you understand the 8th ikkar broadly,
as being about general concepts, meaning,"semantics," in RMB's words.  It is
also explicitly about syntax (and not just syntax, but morphology as well,)
The Rambam's formulation of the ikkarim is in his first comment on the 10th
chapter of Sanhedrin in his Mishnah after the introduction.  (The ani
ma'amin which RTK so carefully parsed is a later reformulation, not the
Rambam's language at all.)  In it he says explictly (this is my translation
of R. Kapach's translation of the original Arabic, the emphasis), "EACH
LETTER which is in it has wisdom and wonders beyond words to whomsoever God
gives understanding..."  It is clear that he means this to include spelling
in the recieved Torah text, because he also paskins this way in Mishnah
Torah.  In hilkhot Sefer Torah chapter 7 halakha 11 he specifically says
that plene and defective spellings (Maleh and Chaser) pasul a Sefer Torah.
For the Rambam, the Torah text of the Ben Asher Sefer Torah IS the EXACT
Torah Moshe brought down from sinai, including spellings, and all other
versions are simply wrong, and are pasul for that reason.

The truth is, this is a makhlokes Rishonim, which made it into the Shulchan
Arukh.  The Rema mentioned earlier in the conversation follows the standard
Ashkenazi view that we don't know plene and defective spellings, and so we
do the best we can.  The Mechaber, in the same siman, follows the Rambam.
I'm not really sure how to reconcile the Rambam with the empirical evidence
that mistakes have crept into the transmission of the Torah text since
Sinai, but I think it is clear that he believes that they have not, or
rather, that Ben Asher reflects an unmistaken text, even if other texts do
have mistakes.
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