Question: Why isn’t a beracha (blessing) done before writing a sefer torah (Torah scroll)?
Answer: Due to the uncertainty of being able to perform the mitzvah (commandment) without error, since we do not know the correct spelling or spelling notation.

Driving home from my office one day, I realized I was humming a tune I learned decades ago, probably in kindergarten or first grade. It is the melody set to “Yigdal”. It’s a grandiose, catchy tune, probably one of the most popular poems in our literary history, written and composed by Rabbi Daniel Bar Yehudah of Rome in the early fourteenth century, about a hundred years after Maimonides’ death. It is a poem that affirms the thirteen articles of faith articulated by Maimonides. Yigdal never enriched its composer financially, but it enriched the Jewish people and continues to do so six hundred years after its composition. It is a prayer sung by millions upon thousands of Jews every morning, included in all prayer books, and is an integral part of the morning tefillah (prayer).

However, it created in the hearts and minds of millions of Jews throughout the centuries facts that cannot really be proven. He brought into the consciousness of millions of people a dogmatic belief system that is questionable. It was ingenious, because nothing stated in the Yigdal can ever be corroborated, nor does it have deep roots in any of our primary texts. On the contrary, there were many great scholars throughout the centuries who objected to the dogma articulated by the Rambam (Maimonides) and artistically expressed in the Yigdal. Their voices, however, never received the exposure, popularity, and acceptance that Yigdal did.

Yigdal’s popularity reminds me a bit of the psychology that says “if you say something long enough, you start to believe it”. If you say the Yigdal long enough, you start to believe it. But not everything in the Yigdal is as clear cut as the poem makes it out to be, as Menachem Kellner commented on the Rambam’s thirteen tenets of faith in his book Must A Jew Believe Anything. An example of this is the eighth of the thirteen principles of faith that the Rambam insisted was fundamental basing this and the other 12 principles on the first Mishneh of the tenth chapter of the Sanhedrin.

But before I get into the details, let me point out that the Thirteen Principles of the Faith are universally accepted by the traditional Jewish community. Even early maskilim like Judah Leib Ben Ze’ev accepted the thirteen principles. The early reform movement and even some of its rabbis today accept these principles. But to paraphrase Gershom Scholem, how could something so universally accepted be so wrong? Undoubtedly there were traditionalists who questioned the thirteen principles, such as R. Luzzatto (1800-1865), R. Reuven Amar and R. Bezalel Naor. By the way, even the Artscroll, the final word for today’s orthodox community, refers to the thirteen principles as “practically universally accepted.”

The eighth principle of faith says: “I believe with perfect faith that all the Torah that we now have is that which was given to Moses.” The Yigdal, reflecting these sentiments, says: “God gave a true Torah to his people, through his trusted prophet in all his household.” Essentially, all this principle does is authenticate the Masoretic text edited and brought to light by Aaron ben Moses ben Asher that was in the 10th century. Before that, there were a number of edited texts, many of which are called texts masoréticos or tikun soferim. One is led to believe that according to the Rambam the text we have today of the Pentateuch is the same as that given to Moses on Sinai three thousand years ago, despite our knowledge of the Masoretic text and tikun soferim. Ask any child with a day school education, or your typical yeshiva bachur and they will tell you that the torah we have today is the one given to Moses on Mount Sinai. How does he know? He will answer because he is one of the thirteen Ikarim. Not believing it is tantamount to being a heretic.

As for the tikun soferim, as Marc Shapiro points out in his book The Limits of Orthodox Theology, there were significant textual changes in the Pentateuch. In many cases, the sopherim made changes if they felt the existing text was inappropriate. For example, Genesis 18:22 should read that God stood before Abraham, since it was God who initially came to Abraham. However, the tikkun sopherim reversed it to say that Abraham was standing before God, because in his opinion it was not appropriate for God to be depicted as standing before Abraham. In this sense, there is academic evidence that supports the thesis that Ezra, although he did not change the expected mitzvot, took the liberty of embellishing the text. Incidentally, Ibn Ezra believes that the significant verses of the text were written after Moses had left the scene. He does not dispute the fact that it was written with divine intervention, only that it was written by someone other than Moses.

The picture becomes more complex when one takes into account the fact that there was not one Masoretic text, but many. In addition, as early as the Babylonian period, when the Talmud was edited, serious errors in the Torah text with regard to spelling and spelling notation were known. As Shapiro suggests, there were halachic discussions about what happens if the Torah text differs from that quoted in the Talmud, or if there is a discrepancy between the texts quoted in the Talmud and the Masoretic text. An example of this is found in the Ten Commandments. In the Talmud Yerushalmi, the first commandment spells the word “hotzesicha” without “yud”, but the Masoretic text in Exodus and Deuteronomy spell it with “yud”.

These are not minor bugs. The sages of the Talmudic period were aware of and concerned about the many discrepancies in the text of the Torah. Midrash Rabbah comments that R. Meir’s Torah texts differed from those of R. Akiva. In Genesis 1:31, the words Tov M’od appeared as the wording in R. Meir’s text, but in R. Akiva’s Tov Mavet it appears instead of “Tov Me’od”. In Genesis 3:21, the word “O” appeared with “ayin” meaning clothing, but in R. Meir’s text it appeared with “aleph” meaning the word means light. Later in TB Makot 11:a the view is expressed that Joshua and not Moses was the author of the last eight verses of Deuteronomy. This is just an abbreviated list of inconsistencies in the text. The point is, given that we have these inconsistencies, how could the Rambam compose the eighth principle, in effect turning the sages into heretics?

Obviously, the Rambam was aware of all this. How can he still postulate this eighth principle of faith as one of the thirteen ikkarim (principles)? Arthur Hyman, a Maimonides scholar and author of several texts on medieval Jewish philosophy (mentioned by Marc Shapiro) suggests that the Rambam worked with two systems: “true beliefs” and “necessary beliefs”. According to Hyman, when the Rambam formulated this principle, he knew that Moses did not write the entire Torah. His main concern was the welfare of Am Yisrael at a particularly difficult time in Muslim Spain and he felt the need to perpetuate this idea for the good of the “amcha”. By perpetuating this and other notions, he would prevent the Jewish community from straying and help keep their faith abiding. Note that at the time the Muslims were accusing the Jews of intentionally altering the text of the Pentateuch. So it was of paramount importance for the Rambam to underline the divinity and pristine nature of the total text.

Having said all this, I will conclude with another question that unfortunately does not have a simple answer.

Question: Whether it is true that the Torah, written with Divine inspiration, but not dictated verbatim by God and therefore not immutable (as evidenced by the various versions of Masoretic and Tikunei Soferim texts, along with variant texts) even during the Talmudic period) that our halakhic system is flawed, since its foundations do not rest on rock?
Answer: To be approached.