This week's Torah content has been sponsored by Naomi Mann in honor of Rabbi Moskowitz zt"l, whose shloshim is this week.
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| close-up of the Oxford 577 Huntington 80 manuscript "checked against my book - I, Moshe, son of Maimon zt"l" |
On Reading the Rambam’s Mishneh Torah Like a Love Letter
This article is part PSA and part rant. For the past two years I’ve given a Rambam shiur in yeshiva four days a week. Time and again I’ve stressed the importance of using a critical edition of the Mishneh Torah based on accurate manuscripts, rather than relying on the standard Warsaw-Vilna printed editions owned by most Jews. Here’s an excerpt from R’ Yosef Qafih’s [1] introduction to his edition of the Mishneh Torah in which he explains why the standard editions are so unreliable:
The errors and deficiencies of the printed texts were well known, so much so that the printed books were used to characterize a mistaken person: when someone said something incorrect on some subject, they would respond "you are like a defoos (printed text)," and point out the correction. These matters were inscribed on my heart, and I grew up with the assumption that there were two types of Maimonides texts in the world: that of the Yemenite manuscripts and that of the printed book.
Qafih goes on to write about how the Rambam updated the Mishneh Torah throughout his lifetime and how the Yemenite scholars made every effort to incorporate these emendations into their copies. With the printed texts, this did not happen.
… in the printed texts, only a few of the changes which Maimonides himself inserted in his book appear, since only a few reached the early printers. Some of the emendations which Maimonides added he wrote in the margins on the side, and the copyists did not pay attention to the correct placement and inserted them in the wrong place, causing much trouble and difficult questions in the understanding of Maimonides’ words … The "editors" tried to deduce changes. The Mishneh Torah was subjected to severe editing by the printers, and various editors who made emendations of style, language, the structure of sentences and the division of halachot … to the extent that there is hardly any halacha that has not been emended. I know of no other book that was so severely emended … every third or fourth rate scholar who thought himself capable of doing so would presume to try his hand at making emendations and corrections according to his own understanding.
Mark Twain once quipped: “Be careful about reading health books. You may die of a misprint.” Kal va’chomer for a book which contains not only transcription errors, but willful emendations made recklessly by unqualified individuals. And the Twain quotation doesn’t do it for you, consider this analogy given by Mortimer J. Adler in How to Read a Book (1940):
If we consider men and women generally, and apart from their professions or occupations, there is only one situation I can think of in which they almost pull themselves up by their bootstraps, making an effort to read better than they usually do. When they are in love and are reading a love letter, they read for all they are worth. They read every word three ways; they read between the lines and in the margins; they read the whole in terms of the parts, and each part in terms of the whole; they grow sensitive to context and ambiguity, to insinuation and implication; they perceive the color of words, the odor of phrases, and the weight of sentences. They may even take the punctuation into account. Then, if never before or after, they read.
The Rambam most certainly wrote the Mishneh Torah with love: love for Hashem, love for His Torah, and love for all Jews, “small and great,” for whom it was written. His book should be read like a love letter. And if you wouldn’t trust a transcription of a love letter knowing that its text was mangled, manipulated, and revised by scores of strangers, then don’t even touch the standard editions of the Rambam. I cannot, for the life of me, understand those talmidei chachamim who continue to use the bad versions of the Mishneh Torah. I’m tempted to chalk this up to ignorance or laziness, but I can’t tell whether doing so counts as being dan l’chaf zechus (giving them the benefit of the doubt) or its the opposite.
Do you know what is not an excuse? Accessibility. The most accurate version of the Mishneh Torah is the new edition published by R’ Yitzchak Sheilat, available in its entirety for free on AlHaTorah.org. A close runner-up is R’ Yohai Makbili’s edition, which has a free app for iPhone and Android. Use these. Use them in good health. And don’t die of a misprint.
[1] Rabbi Yosef Qafih (1917 – 2000) was a Yemenite scholar who translated and published critical editions of the Rambam’s works. The 20-page introduction to his critical edition of the Mishneh Torah can be found here, translated into English by Michael J. Bohnen.
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