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Rav Avi: You know, we did an episode recently about whether or not we could have like a translator in the middle of the Torah service translating as we go along. This question that we're going to tackle today is another question relating to the Torah service.
They write: As a Gabbai, I am often reluctant to correct the person reading Torah so as not to add to their anxiety. If readers are corrected frequently, it becomes an embarrassing experience for them and an awkward experience for the congregation. I know that lowering the bar is not ideal. I am wondering if we are entering a moment where technology might be helpful.
Could we consider writing the vowels and trope onto the Torah itself or, less radically, making a see-through overlay? Would any of those options be acceptable or are they all invalid? So this leaves me with two questions. One is their question, are any of these technical fixes good? And the second is just, do you have broad recommendations or advice on the role of the Gabbai and that experience being described here of the Torah reader feeling anxiety when they're corrected?
Rav Eitan: Okay, those are two great questions. Let's start with the questioner's more technical, specific ritual question and then maybe we can circle back to what are the strategies or how to think about this. You know, I want to start somewhere where we often try to start, which is taking a question, people are like, oh, this must be a modern problem! This is from a time where Jews don't know Hebrew as well. So I want to just revisit before we even get to the question. The question of accessibility and Torah reading is old, and one of the things that's interesting is to see which strategies for remediating that problem have caught on and which haven't. The Mishnah actually says that a Torah scroll can be written in any language. And that's clearly intended to broaden the circle of access. Rabban Shimon ben Gamliel in that Mishnah rejects that, but even he thinks you can write a Sefer Torah in Greek, and that's the accepted halakha in the Talmud. That's something to do with bringing it to a Greek speaking audience, including a Jewish Greek speaking audience. Interestingly, that position dies.
Rambam says, yeah, that's halakhah, but we no longer have access to the ancient Greek that would have been fitting for the Torah. We can't write it as fluently. The real reason, though, seems to have been there was a desire to keep the Torah as it was. There was this push towards some degree of accessibility, but enough of a counter push that ultimately won, of, the Torah wasn't given in Greek! So that's not what we're going to do with it.
Rav Avi: Yeah. Do you think that that is keep the Torah as it was or keep the Torah in Hebrew? Is it about the Hebrew or is it about a lack of change?
Rav Eitan: Yeah, good point. In that case, probably a mix of both, but you're right to call attention that those are not the same. That's right. So that's one example. Another vignette of this, you know, in the Middle Ages, the way you read Torah was you got an aliyah and you read your aliyah. Like you would go into shul and they would say, would you like shlishi? And you would get up and have to read it.
In the Middle Ages, European communities find that very few people can read Torah anymore on a spot like that when they receive their aliyah or the number of people that can do that is smaller than the number of people they want to honor with coming up to the Torah. So they institute something we take for granted, a fixed Torah reader, like someone who's the reader of that parasha, who is separate from the person coming up and getting the aliyah. In a lot of communities, that person becomes a hired gun, like they have a particular skill and they're a professional. And that did catch on. And that's true in many communities until today that you have a paid Torah reader, but almost all communities except a couple of Yemenite ones take it for granted that someone's been assigned, someone with skill has been assigned to read the parasha.
Rav Avi: So it sounds like the idea that generally in the community, like, oh, yeah, we imagine a community where most people or all people know how to read from the Torah and know well, that's the more ancient picture. And then already still old, but less old than that, we already move to a world in which there are experts. Oh, are you a leyner? Is this a thing you do? Yes.
Rav Eitan: Great. Yeah. And I would sharpen it further. You move to a world where most people can't read the Torah. Like there's some there's some who can and there might be one person who is assigned and even paid to do it. Now, the next step on this is some communities haven't easily had access to someone like that, unpaid or paid. And already in the 15th century, the Trumat Ha-Deshen, Rav Yisrael Isserlein suggests that, well, a community like that just has to have the people who are there read with tons of mistakes. But he gives us a testimony to the fact that no one really knows how to do it.
Rav Avi: Meaning you do the best you can.
Rav Eitan: You do the best you can. And, you know, you don't cancel the Torah reading, nor do you somehow say, well, we have to read out of a book with vowels. We'll get to that in a minute.
But, you know, you may have to do that. This is just to substantiate other people have had this problem. And the Levush, who's in 16th, 17th century Poland, he says, yeah, if you're in a community like that, one of those Gabaim on the side just has to stand with a humash, with a printed version of the Bible, and has to basically feed the lines to the Torah reader. So they stand up there formally reading from the scroll, but it's like I'm saying to you, vayehi mikeitz shnatayim yamim, and then the person says, vayehi mikeitz shnatayim yamim, and that's what you're supposed to do. Someone stands there and they quietly prompt the reader to go through almost like the charade of a reading that they don't know how to do on their own.
Rav Avi: Yeah. I'm curious if there is a value of having more people and more different people, leyn, meaning if I am in what you're describing is I'm in a community where nobody can do it. But if I'm in a community where only one person can do it, is there a value in having more people do it with more mistakes versus like, yeah, that guy knows how to leyn. So he does all the leyning.
Rav Eitan: Right. So you've put your finger on where I think the question comes from sociologically here, which is the real assumption here is, well, we'd really like a range of people to participate. I don't know, the questioner might actually have no one in the community that they could pay, but I suspect that they probably do. Or you could hire someone or have them come in for Shabbat and they might not be thrilled about that option because on some level, part of the experience of Torah reading is they want to see different people participate. And there's a participatory ethos in a lot of I'd say, in particular, American Jewish settings where that's a factor. My honest answer to you is, for earlier sources, I don't think that's that much of a value.
Rav Avi: Ok, so the story about the person sort of feeding the lines, you know, off stage. Do you understand that as sort of a precedent for, yeah, we're allowed to help them and maybe these modern technology, let's put a plastic overlay would be just a different version of that? Or do you feel like that's just the technology that they had? Or is that meaningfully different than what the questioner is asking?
Rav Eitan: Good. So let's delve into that. That, I think, is exactly the question. There is no question in anyone's mind who addresses questions like this that you can definitely prompt them with the humash. The question is,, how analogous is that to, let's say, something like the transparency where you would take a photographic image of your specific Sefer Torah, make a transparency out of that, and then on top of that, put notes and vowels, etc. And then when you impose the final thing on the scroll, you would see through the transparency to the letters written on the Torah, but magically arranged around it would be the images of the cancellation marks on the notes. I want to acknowledge Rabbi Matthew Anisfeld, a colleague, ordained by Hadar, who actually did some important work to research this question. And I want to refer here to a bunch of things he found when looking into this. It helps give a framework for some of what we want to explore here. So the questioner talks about putting notes in the Sefer Torah itself, or the vowels. Interestingly, that also is an old question with a resolute answer.
So there's a text called Massekhet Sofrim. It sounds like a tractate from the Mishnah, but it's kind of post-Talmudic, has a lot of earlier interpretation. So let's say it's early medieval. It says very simply, you cannot read from a Torah scroll that has vowels in it. And the Shulchan Aruch codifies that, and the Nodah BiYehuda in the 18th century says, and the same problem with trop. Can't write that stuff in the scroll. Why?
Rav Avi: Yeah. Why not?
Rav Eitan: Why are we making it so hard for ourselves? Isn't the point to get people to read the Torah and for people to hear, like, why are we making this more difficult? So the Rashba in the Middle Ages comes across this Massekhet Sofrim, and he asks the question why, and he interestingly gives two reasons.
Reason number one, we need the Torah to be just like when it was given at Sinai. Not clear how that squares with a Greek Sefer Torah, all of that, but there's some notion just taking broadly here of, if I'm copying from a Sefer Torah that didn't have vowels, I'm not now going to have one that when you put it side by side is going to glaringly be like, oh, this is not the same as that. Like the scribe copying wants to do something that kind of looks like a copy of what they received.
Rav Avi: So it's about change here.
Rav Eitan: That seems like this reason is about change.
Rav Avi: There's something very moving about that, that I would say, like, I want the Torah to look the same and the chanting to feel the same, even though it's a lot of work.
Rav Eitan: Yeah. And look, anyone who's historically aware knows, oh, yeah, but before the printing press, things look this way. And before Tosfot were written, a Talmud page looked different. And before that, it was oral, etc. But the instinct, I agree with you.
Rav Avi: Or also, Torahs don't even look exactly the same, there’s some guidelines,
Rav Eitan: Or a Yemenite Torah is not going to look the same, etc. But I think your instinct is right, that there's still a notion of, yeah, but when I'm copying it, I'm not going to add a whole apparatus that wasn't there, namely the vowels and the trop.
So that's his reason one. Reason two, im ata minakdo ein kan masoret. If you put in vowels, you will lose the masoret. Now, masoret literally means tradition, but it's being used more technically here. There are actually two ways of, if you will, scanning the text of the Torah with your eyes and reading it to process it. One is what's called the mikra, which is the way you read it. And one is what's called the masoret, which is the way it was transmitted and appears. So, for instance, a famous verse, lo tevashel g’di bakhaleiv imo, you do not cook a kid in its mother's milk. That's the mikra. That's how we read it. That's how it's pronounced. And the formulation of bakhaleiv imo with the milk of its mother renders that translation.
But if you're just looking at the letters without the vowels, it could read, lo tevasheil g’di b'khelev imo, don't cook a kid in the fat of its mother.
Rav Avi: Such a confusing language.
Rav Eitan: Yeah, right? There's no difference in the appearance of the letters. And says the Rashba, and anyone who spends any time with Midrash knows this, the rabbis play with and kind of go back and forth. Well, how is this pronounced? How is this written? Is there an extra vav? Is there maybe a meaning that's not the core meaning, but it's a secondary meaning that appears in the masoret? The second you put in the vowels, you have flattened that multidimensionality of the text. So the Rashba says there's not just a not changing in the sense of I don't want to tamper. There's a not losing something, which actually the ambiguity, this is what I think is sort of beautiful about this: The very thing that makes it hard to learn how to read Torah is inextricably bound up with its multivocality and fullness of possibility.
Rav Avi: Yeah, I really like that. And it's so interesting, right, to say we don't want to lose the tradition, which might sound like there are things we know that we don't want to become ambiguous. And in fact, means the opposite. It means there are things we don't know and we need to preserve the not knowing, like we need to preserve the ambiguity in our text and in the meaning and in the pronunciation, because otherwise it will flatten.
Rav Eitan: Yeah, and on some level, all the places where there's a kri and ktiv, where the word is written in a certain way, but you read it differently, which there are a whole set of places like that in the Torah, you couldn't vocalize a Sefer Torah without trampling on that.
Rav Avi: Right, without sort of crossing it out and writing a different word.
Rav Eitan: Yeah. So now the question is, how would that translate to transparency? Like on the one hand, the added symbols here are not in the scroll itself. You're talking about putting a sheet on top, Sefer Torah is left untouched. On the other hand, it is altering your experience of seeing it. You're taking away that double exposure, as it were.
Let's just see a couple other precedents here that might help us. The Rivash, who's a medieval authority, says that if a scribe adds in extra spaces to clarify the ends of verses, that's fine. Meaning what? There's big gaps in the Sefer Torah. You can only put those in where they belong.
Rav Avi: Kind of scribe the double spaces at the end of every period.
Rav Eitan: Exactly. That's exactly right, which I am one of those people.
Rav Avi: You are?!
Rav Eitan: I am. I am a double spacer after a period. I know it's a typewriter holdover, whatever. I can't stop myself.
Rav Avi: Well, it's apparently a scribe holdover.
Rav Eitan: Apparently. I'm going to call it the Rivash style of writing. Yeah, just by leaving that little extra bit, you give a little more of a visual cue to the reader. Oh, that's going to be the end of the sentence, which can actually help you with the cantillation in terms of the timing. So he says, that's fine. And that gets codified by the Ramah.
Rav Avi: Is that common?
Rav Eitan: It is not common in Sifrei Torah. And it's clearly here dealt with as if this happened, does it invalidate the Sefer Torah? But it's like, that's fine. So that might be a precedent of, oh, as long as you don't alter the ink on the page, like all he did was some space here, even in the scroll was certainly like an overlay should be fine. Interestingly, and I didn't know this until Rabbi Anisfeld had looked into it. There are many Yemenite Sefer Torah that have impressions in the parchment to show where the midpoints and ends of verses and some notes are. So meaning they're not using ink or even a pencil, but like, there’d basically be like a tool that would make like, imagine a little dot or something or a circle in the parchment, which you would see as the reader, even though the ink has not been.
Rav Avi: Yeah. What a cool example of technology. Right. It's actually not so different than the overlay. It's just it's the opposite.
Rav Eitan: It’s an inlay! Yeah, right. And they get defended. There's Yemenite poskim, like the Ravid Hazahav who defends it. And non-Yemenite poskim like Rav Moshe Feinstein says, yeah, here's why this is fine. But he, as an Ashkenazi says, yeah, but you should not spread this to other communities. Like, I'm going to tell you why that's valid. And if you're in a Yemenite synagogue, you can read, you can say a blessing. Don't worry about it. But he doesn't want it to spread. Which we can again ask, like, well, what's that about?
Rav Avi: Yeah, isn’t that brilliant? We should all adopt it.
Rav Eitan: No, the opposite.
Rav Avi: Do you have any sense of whether those markings are coming from a place of the people needed more help?
Rav Eitan: It seems unmistakably that that's the case. And I should add this important feature. The Yemenite communities never adopted the Torah reader. They always had the people getting the aliyah reading. So it makes perfect sense, I mean, it's essentially obvious that that community in particular with, is it a bias towards inclusion? Is it just, you know, retention of the way things were done, is going to be particularly driven to have some kind of strategy for keeping all those people in the game.
Rav Avi: Yeah. Got it. Yeah.
Rav Eitan: So last precedent, what if you're reading a Sefer Torah and there's some wax that has fallen on some of the letters, but you can see through the wax, like it's translucent. So you're looking at wax and it's not the scroll you're looking at, but you can see the letters. Or another case, can you read with eyeglasses on?
Rav Avi: Yeah. Oh, such a good example.
Rav Eitan: You're not looking directly. You're looking through, as it were, a transparency.
Rav Avi: So somebody brought that question.
Rav Eitan: So the Halakhot Ktanot, Rabbi Yaakov Hagiz, who's from Morocco in the 17th century, he addresses both of those cases and he says, yes, they're both fine. And he brings some precedents in the Talmud from other areas of Halakhah that talk about seeing through glass as counting for seeing the object itself. Okay. To get to the end of this, Rav Menashe Klein of the Mishneh Halakhot, who's a contemporary haredi Posek, gets exactly the question about a transparency on a Sefer Torah with the notes and the vowels perfectly positioned to leave the letters of the scroll fully visible and unobstructed. The Mishneh Halakhot says, look, a transparency is not really different than reading through wax or reading through eyeglasses, and it should theoretically be fine, but then he will not pull the trigger. It's amazing. At the end of the teshuvah, he says, yeah, but you can't do that, and reverts to saying that old solution from Poland in the 16th, 17th century, just have the person next to the Torah reader prompt them, read the words, and that's it.
So I always, when I come across a text like this, I always want to know, why? Why does someone who has laid out the full argument for justifying something pull back? Here you have the argument. I'm sympathetic to his conclusion as well, which we'll get to, but just for the purposes of understanding it, there's an argument here. I haven't altered the Sefer Torah. I'm not doing anything in terms of looking at the letters that's any different than looking through wax or eyeglasses. There have been other systems, as you said at the beginning, for giving people some added information that wasn't on the page by whispering something to them, whatever it is.
Why not, right? Why doesn't this work out? I'll speak for myself why my instinct is also to pull back, even as I think this is a super interesting set of sources. So the first is going back to that second reason in the Rashba, which we talked about a little, which I agree with you is very powerful. The idea that the experience of looking at the Sefer Torah should be one of peering into a bit of mystery. And I just don't know exactly what all the vowels are, or there's some ambiguity here, there's some multivocality. And even though, sure, you haven't invalidated the Sefer Torah here with the transparency, because it's been left pristine, as it were, your experience as a reader coming up there is altered, right? That layer of depth and possibility has been removed in a way that the reader whispering from the side does not take that away from you. Your field of vision is still that sort of ambiguity. So my sense is that that is a piece here, and I think that matters.
It's saying actually the religious experience of reading the Torah has been altered here. We don't have a problem with helping you. We're happy to help you, but we can't help you in a way that changes reading Torah into the experience of reading Haftarah, right? When you read Haftarah the way we do it today, which most communities don't do it with a scroll anymore. They do it just with the vowels and the trop and all of that. It's a different experience. It's an experience of, I know what those signs mean, now I will read them. But you're not learning it in the same way. You're not overcoming the ambiguity to figure out the right way to read it. That's one piece.
Second piece, and maybe this will draw us into a little bit of conversation on the second question you asked of like, what's the right way to sort of manage this? I think there's also a sense of, are you just going to run up the white flag entirely on people advancing their skills, investing the time, really honing this as a craft? Sure. You can always say, well, people who need the transparency will get it and people who don't, don't.
Rav Avi: It’s like, some people bowl with bumpers and some people don't.
Rav Eitan: I think that the way we read Haftarah now is instructive on this, which is even people who would know and be perfectly capable of learning Haftarah from a scroll, they don't, because that's not what we do anymore. So why put in the effort? I think, I don't know. I'm always ambitious and a little bit resistant on that front to lowering our standards in terms of what we demand, even as, I understand where the questioner is coming from, which is you need to actually find what's the strategy to bring the right people in to be able to participate in this.
Rav Avi: Do you think of it as like there is a value in and of itself on preparing? Like, well, why do we have a system like this? We have the system because reading from the Torah is something that you should have to prepare for. That's different than saying you have to prepare for it because it should be done well, in which case you would say that prep is in and of itself its own value. Do you think that there's an element of that here?
Rav Eitan: Look, I feel that personally, as someone who's done a lot of Torah reading in my life and has been a paid and an unpaid Baal Kore…
Rav Avi: I imagine you've probably also read when you've prepared and read when someone pulled you in and you hadn't prepared.
Rav Eitan: That's right, both of those. And in that sense, if you ask me, is the act of preparing to read the Parashah feel religiously meaningful to me? Yes. The answer is yes. Beyond just, oh, I got to get this right. If I'm preparing a chart for a meeting, that's not religiously meaningful to me. That's just, OK, I had to do that. I'm glad I got that done. But I also have to acknowledge it's not like the Torah reader has any more obligation to engage with the Torah than any other Jew or any other Jew present in the room.
So on some level, sure, we have a, "mitzvah" for that. The idea that every Jew every week is supposed to read through the parashah two times and go through whether it's Rashi or some other explanation on it. That's the sort of universal articulation of you should prepare the parashah. So I'm reluctant to say that, like, well, that's an obligation that exists at this level of preparing it without vowels. But it is meaningful to me. And I do feel like actually depriving our communities of anyone who's going through that process in any given week is a loss.
Rav Avi: So it sounds like the answer is no. Which leads me back to what would you have to say as advice for the person who's writing here who is struggling to try to offer something to their community to increase the sort of quality or accuracy of the Torah reading without badgering the leyners too much? Yeah. Do you have anything to offer?
Rav Eitan: Look, I'll say, yes, I agree with your assessment that my answer is basically, no. I will say there's enough material here that if a community were doing this, right, I don't think I would feel like, oh, my God, that's not a valid Torah reader. They shouldn't be saying a blessing or anything like that. So, yeah, if you're asking for guidance, my answer would be no.
And then the question is, OK, well, what can we do? Well, I will say this. I do think the pendulum has swung a little bit far, maybe more than a little bit far in the direction of the importance of participation in a lot of North American Jewish communities. I, too, really believe in participation and think it's important. But I also think it's appropriate to have a paid Torah reader as your backup, maybe as your anchor.
I think there's actually amazing ways of getting teens involved in that activity for whom actually small amounts of money feel like sacks of golden coins. And it also motivates them to actually have a professionalism and seriousness around this in a way that I think is amazing. And I think a good Gabbai can then, in a more measured way, figure out a way to have participation, which doesn't have to be every aliyah of every parashah every week. Gabbaim who are skilled at assigning Torah reading, they know that like the second, third and fourth aliyot of Shoftim are really short. All of Nitzavim or even Nitzavim-Vayelech is really short. There's a lot of weeks throughout the year that have some scattered, shorter aliyot. There's actually tons of opportunities to bring people in and to say, hey, eight weeks from now, there's a seven verse aliyah. I would love for you to read it. Do you think you could start preparing? We also live in an age where there are tons of recordings online and there's an incredible number of resources. So my overall guidance here is less of an all or nothing approach of either we allow transparency on the Torah or, no one's going to read the Torah or it will be completely exclusive and non-participatory. I think with the right kind of planning and philosophy and yeah, investment, I do think the Torah is worth spending some money if need be on a reader to deliver it to the community in a powerful way. And I've also always believed, you know, one of the reasons I like the minhag, it's a little cumbersome, but I like the practice overall of synagogues on Simchat Torah where everyone gets an aliyah. And the idea that, and I always try to encourage as many people as possible, read your own aliyah.
Rav Avi: Right. They're nice and short.
Rav Eitan: Yeah. And even, you know what, fine, if you're going to trip up a little or you won't do a perfect job, it doesn't matter. This is your moment at the Torah. Take it. God's going to love you and whatever mistakes you make. That feels super important. I just think it can be integrated with a certain kind of professional ethos that says, well, this is actually one of the most important public rituals that we do as Jews. We're going to invest in it.
Rav Avi: Yeah. Maybe I want to close my sort of personal take on that role of gabai and the way the questioner writes to say, it's almost like it embarrasses people when you correct them too often. And I think about this a lot, the image of the gabaim and the leyner in terms of like, how do we relate to our religion and in particular leaders in our religion, right, that I always feel like there's a way to be a gabai that makes the Torah reader feel like you're there to catch them if they made a mistake, you know, like I'm testing you. You use that language up like, oh, I'm testing you to see if you know it, and I'm going to see how many mistakes I can catch. And there is a different kind of ethos around being a gabai, which can make you feel like they are there to catch you if you trip and fall, you know, which is I think sometimes how it feels when like there is a bar mitzvah child reading and their parent is up there is like, you don't have to do this alone. I'm going to be there as the gabai. And if you make a mistake, I'll help you through that moment, you know, where it can feel like, actually, this is important work.
And you don't, you're not in it alone. There's someone up there to help you along, in which case a person might finish an aliyah that they really stumbled through and made a lot of mistakes and turn to the gabai and say, like, thank God you were here to help me and whisper all the all the right answers to me. And I thank God you were here to feed me the correct words because we both know it's important that I say them right. And that would create a totally different kind of ethos.
So the thing that I would offer also in terms of a gabai or maybe even a rabbi who's setting up a community, once you get to the point that you're willing to make a big change, like we're going to use overlays on the Torah to consider saying to the community, like we're going to make a cultural shift in how we think about the person correcting. We're going to be here for each other. We're going to support each other. And we're not going to judge each other. And I wonder if that could also be helpful.
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