Dear Avi,



I have no answer better than the testimony of the rabbis themselves.

Therefore I will quote their words without touching them.



Thus did the Ramah (R’ Meir the son of Tudrus HaLevi, 1170-1244, upon whom the Koren version is based), in the introduction to Mesoret Seyag LaTorah, write: “I felt the need to search after the most precise and proofread codices and the most reliable Masoretic traditions, to resolve the conflicts. The newly-produced scrolls should be abandoned in favor of older, more faithful ones and among these the majority of texts should be followed as commanded in the Torah to decide any controversy, as it is written: ‘After the multitude to do’.”

The Koren version is based on a decision between the majority of scrolls laid before the Ramah. This is explicit testimony by the Masoretic master himself that this is not an authentic version, but rather a decision by the rabbi using his own judgment.



The author of the Minchat Shai (Rabbi Shlomo Yechiel, one of the Masoretic masters and the one upon whose work the Koren edition was corrected) wrote in his introduction, “And because our days in exile were prolonged our knees have given out and our hands have weakened…Not only has the Torah become as two Torahs, it has become as innumerable Torahs…There are no Pentateuch, Prophets, or Writings into which confusions, mistakes in plene and defective spelling, cantillation errors, vowelization errors, and divergent reading and writing errors have not fallen…When I, in my lowliness, saw the thousands of impurities which have befallen all the scrolls in all the traditions, especially in defective and plene spelling…I thought to stand in the gap…and to see the important and significant scrolls upon which one may rely and to follow their majority…as our sages did with the three scrolls found in the Temple…I have also corrected some erroneous traditions, some from my own reasoning and some according to other traditions found in the manuscripts.”

The Koren text, then, is based on a decision among a majority of scrolls and the reasoning of the Minchat Shai.



In Responsa Sha’agat Aryeh (section 36) it is written: “I could have exempted people from the commandment of writing a Torah scroll in our days for one reason, that even in the days of the Amoraim (the sages of the Talmud in the first centuries CE) they were not expert in defective and plene spelling, as Rabbi Joseph said to Abaye (Kiddushin 30a), ‘They are expert in defective and plene; we [the Babylonian Sages] are not expert.”

This is testimony from a rabbi that we are exempt from the commandment to write a Torah scroll for we do not know the original text.



In conclusion we will bring the opinion of a Biblical researcher. Prof. Menachem Cohen wrote, “It therefore appears to me that the notion of a sanctified text in our era must be based on an halakhic interpretation alone, i.e., it must derive its power not from a determination that people managed to preserve the text exactly as it was throughout the entire transmission, but from the faith that man was given authority to determine, using halakhic methods of decision, the image of the sanctified consonantal text. The model which was decided upon would then be obligatory from a halakhic standpoint, even if it is found not to be historically ‘correct’ in every detail” [“The idea of the sanctity of the Biblical text and the science of textual criticism” (in the book HaMikrah V’anachnu, ed. Uriel Simon, HaMachon L’Yahadut U’Machshava Bat-Z’mananu

and Dvir, Tel-Aviv, 1979)].

This is the conclusion of the researchers; the Jews did not manage to preserve the original text.



Sincerely,



Daat Emet