[Avodah] Classical Academia, Deconstruction, and Mesorah

[kennethgmiller at juno.com]

R' Michael Makovi wrote:

> According to Professor Shnayer Z. Leiman [...very specific
> source supplied there...], if we found Moshe Rabbenu's
> Torah scroll, we WOULD change our Torah scrolls to match
> it. Professor Leiman notes that Rambam himself altered his
> Torah scroll to match the Aleppo Codex, so why wouldn't we
> change our Torah scrolls similarly if we found Moshe's
> scroll?

When I first saw this I was very surprised at first, but then I realized it makes perfect sense. The procedure by which the Baalei Mesorah produced our current text was Al Pi Rov, by a majority "vote" from among the reliable texts which they had available. And if it turned out that the authoritative text thus produced had he effect of invalidating all the ones that they started with, that is of no consequence. They used a halachic procedure, and the halachic results are what matters.

Yet... The very procedure which they used -- Rov -- is only for use in B'dieved situations. It is a procedure for finding a Truth which is lost in a mixture of Sfeikos. It would seem to me that by its very nature, this procedure is a tentative one: We can rely on its results, but only until and unless a better procedure comes along to provide us with a more reliable Truth.

So, depending on our confidence level that the newfound scroll really was Moshe Rabenu's, it may very well outweigh the chazakah of the Masoretic Text.

Akiva Miller

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