[Avodah] Halacha is about sources. Lo BaShamayim hi.

[Zev Sero]

On 14/02/2012 1:02 PM, kennethgmiller at juno.com wrote:
> I'd like to cite a story in support of the above, namely, how the Baalei Masora took their three most reliable Sifrei Torah and compared them. Where any differences were found, they followed whatever was found in the majority of the three. When they were done, their newly reconstructed kosher Sefer Torah automatically invalidated all three of the others.
>
> The story (assuming I remember it correctly) is not only illogical, but with all due respect, it borders on absurd. But because it was the valid result of a legal process, it has more authority, and is followed even today.

What's absurd about it?  They were trying to reconstruct the original
text, from three independent sources, *each* of which was subject to
the usual problem of sofrim making mistakes.  So wherever one of the
three differed from the other two, it was more logical to assume that
the one sofer had made a mistake, rather than that the two other sofrim
had each independently made the same mistake.  Thus all three originals
were indeed determined to have contained mistakes and to have been passul.
Why do you have a problem with that?  It's not as if any of those three
were attributed to Moshe or anything like that.  They were simply sfarim
that had been found in the BHMK, and thus as reliable as one could get.

-- 
Zev Sero        "Natural resources are not finite in any meaningful
zev at sero.name    economic sense, mind-boggling though this assertion
                  may be. The stocks of them are not fixed but rather
		 are expanding through human ingenuity."
		                            - Julian Simon