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Bad writing day. My ink was all blobby and I don't know why. Watering it didn't help; heating it didn't help; chilling it didn't help; thickening it with more from the bottle didn't help (what else are you supposed to do? alcohol, maybe?). And I was stupid, and tried to keep writing, and it just got worse and worse. If I'd had any sense I would have gone down to YU and worked at papers in the library, but apparently I have no sense. BLAH.
Class was kind of fun - we were talking about those times when the gemara uses spelling games to derive halacha (you know? The sort of thing where some word in a passage about domestic relations is spelt without a vav and they use that to learn something random about alimony, those ones). The problem comes when the gemara talks about a spelling, and says that's how we get the halacha, and then you look at the sefer Torah and uh-oh, it isn't actually spelled like the gemara says it is. Oops. So the Rashba says that if the gemara is deriving halacha from a spelling, you should make sure your Torah has that spelling. We mostly don't do that, apparently, which is rather sad.
It raises questions - how on earth can we derive halacha from spellings when we don't know what the spelling ought to be? Perhaps, we say, they of old knew what the spelling ought to be - but there are instances of later generations admitting on the one hand that no-one really knows how to spell the Torah any more, and on the other hand playing spelling games for psak. The easiest thing to do is say that they're repeating a tradition from back when they did know the spelling - you just have to hope that the spelling-game tradition they're repeating didn't get as messed up as the spelling itself did.
A thoughtful and intelligent post discussing this concept and arriving at a plausible yet comforting and theologically sound conclusion would be nice here, wouldn't it, but that is left as an exercise for the reader.
Class was kind of fun - we were talking about those times when the gemara uses spelling games to derive halacha (you know? The sort of thing where some word in a passage about domestic relations is spelt without a vav and they use that to learn something random about alimony, those ones). The problem comes when the gemara talks about a spelling, and says that's how we get the halacha, and then you look at the sefer Torah and uh-oh, it isn't actually spelled like the gemara says it is. Oops. So the Rashba says that if the gemara is deriving halacha from a spelling, you should make sure your Torah has that spelling. We mostly don't do that, apparently, which is rather sad.
It raises questions - how on earth can we derive halacha from spellings when we don't know what the spelling ought to be? Perhaps, we say, they of old knew what the spelling ought to be - but there are instances of later generations admitting on the one hand that no-one really knows how to spell the Torah any more, and on the other hand playing spelling games for psak. The easiest thing to do is say that they're repeating a tradition from back when they did know the spelling - you just have to hope that the spelling-game tradition they're repeating didn't get as messed up as the spelling itself did.
A thoughtful and intelligent post discussing this concept and arriving at a plausible yet comforting and theologically sound conclusion would be nice here, wouldn't it, but that is left as an exercise for the reader.