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

[Zev Sero]

On 15/02/2012 11:09 AM, kennethgmiller at juno.com wrote:
> Regarding the construction of the Masoretic Text, I wrote:
>
>> 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.
>
> R' Zev Sero asked:
>
>> 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 ...
>
> First of all, I tried to be respectful, and wrote merely that it *borders* on absurd, not that it actually *is* absurd.

Yes, but I don't see anything even slightly absurd about it; on the
contrary, it seems to me perfectly logical and muchrach.


> But that doesn't really answer your question. I hope this will:
>
> What you described was an explanation of how the legal process works,
> and why it does make sense to agree. And I support it, and I hope that
> my first post didn't suggest that I have a better idea. My only point
> was that it strikes me as odd and a contradiction-in-terms, because
> the authority and kashrus of the newly-reconstructed Sefer Torah is
> based totally upon three other seforim which have now been declared
> to be passul.

I don't see the contradiction.  My point is that this is not merely a
formal system that produces results that are correct only because we
define anything that the system produces as correct.  Rather it is a
perfectly logical way to reconstruct the Truth.  I'm saying that there
is One Correct Text, and any sefer that doesn't match it is passul,
even if that means that there are no kosher sefarim in the entire world.
The problem is knowing what that One Correct Text is, and this system
is a logical attempt to arrive at it.  Either it succeeded or it failed.
If it failed, then we have have had no kosher sifrei torah for millennia.
And without nevuah we have no 100% guarantee that it did succeed.  But
the reconstructed text is more likely than any alternative text to be
the correct one, so it's the best we can do.  Lo nitna torah lemal'achei
hasharet, so if it's incorrect then we rely on Rachamei Shamayim.

The oddity that you seem to see in the result comes from assuming that
we're relying on the three original sefarim as our source.  That isn't
so.  Rather, we're using them as *witnesses* to the original text, and
like all witnesses they're not 100% reliable.  It's no different from
a beis din interviewing three witnesses to an event, in order to
reconstruct what actually happened.  If all three remember a detail
differently, then we have no idea which is correct, and the truth might
even be a fourth way.  If all three remember something the same way,
they might all have independently made the same mistake, but it's unlikely.
And if two remember it one way and the third remembers it a different way,
it's still more likely that the two are remembering correctly, than that
they each independently made the same mistake.

On a different level, of course, we can have confidence that Hashem would
not have allowed such a fundamental mistake to have been made; surely He
guided the reconstructers to hit upon the correct text.  But that's not
a halachic way of looking at things.  No matter how much we believe that
Hashem runs the world, we have to *act* as if it's all in our fallible
hands, and that we might not get things right no matter how hard we try,
but we play the odds.


  

-- 
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