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From: Russell Hendel <rhendel@saber.towson.edu>
Date: Sun, 2 Jan 2000 20:24:50 -0500 (EST)
Subject: RE: Torah Misinai

Gilad Gevaryahu's posting (v30n48) suggesting that our current Torah is
NOT perfectly identical with the one that Moses gave us seems to have
gone unchallenged. Furthermore his posting to Torah Forum which he cites
was answered there. Since this is a doctrinal belief I would like to
reopen it and would encourage an extended conversation. Gilad makes 4
specific questions to the doctrine that the Torah we have is totally
identical to the one given by Moses. I shall try and keep myself brief
(but we can go into detail if the dialogue continues)

1) "Talmudic statements on where the 'middle of the Torah is'": A
russian emigree answered this in Torah forum--the word MIDDLE could mean
MIDDLE letter, or the MIDDLE of double words (DRSH DRSH) or the MIDDLE
of the big and small letters. Furthermore even Gilad must grant that
being off by several 1000 letters is inconsistent with the small number
of variants in modern sefer Torahs--hence we must posit a different
meaning to MIDDLE

2)"We are not expert in FULL and DEFICIENT": I recently gathered all
Rashis on FULL and DEFICIENT spellings. Following Rav Hirsch I showed
there are two ways that Chazal deal with these: a) the deficiency
creates a new word so the Biblical sentence is read in two ways (eg
'this is my name forever' & 'this is my ineffable name (Ex 3:15); b) the
deficiency of spelling indicates a deficiency in the object (eg In Lev
23 the deficiently spelled succah indicates permissability to be
deficient in a wall). Thus we have a grammatical rule here. All the
Talmud means when it says we are not expert is that we don't fully know
how to apply this rule in all cases..there is no doubt about the
spellings in the Torah (see http://www.shamash.org/v1-1-28.htm for
further details).

3) "Rav Moshes Teshuva". Rav Moshe was not asked a question about the
authenticity of the torah;he was asked about making extra aliyahs at eg
Bar Mitzvahs (so peoples feelings should not be hurt).Rav Moshe based
himself on the well known law that you can be lenient in Rabbinic
matters to avoid hurting people--hence he took a talmudic statement out
of context. There is no reason to believe he was commenting on the
authenticity of the Torah (Especially since it explicitly states that
any verse which Moses did not break up we cannot break up)

4) "Variant texts". Lets be precise here. There are about 100 or so
variants BUT only two of them deal with actual letters. The rest deal
with hyphens, cantillations and paragraph markings. eg the first
controversy of Ben Asher and Ben Naftali deal with whether the phrase
LET THERE BE LIGHT (Gen 1:3) is hyphenated--there is no controversy on
the text. There are only two words (DCA and VAYIHIYU) where there is a
variance of text. There is a sefer Torah in Europe which goes back to
Ezra which has DCA with an aleph. Furthermore I published an analysis in
HebLang showing the etymology of all Lamed Aleph verbs justifying this
grammatically.

I think there is something to talk about here and would encourage dialogue
Russell Hendel; Math; Towson; RHendel@Towson.Edu
Moderator Rashi Is Simple; http://www.shamash.org/rashi/