Friday, October 28, 2011

Ramban, the perfect encoding of Torah, and hidden messages such as Torah codes

From the Ramban's hakdama to his commentary on Chumash:

עוד יש בידינו קבלה של אמת, כי כל התורה כולה שמותיו של הקב"ה, שהתיבות מתחלקות לשמות בענין אחד. כאילו תחשוב על דרך משל, כי פסוק בראשית יתחלק לתיבות אחרות, כגון: בראש יתברא אלהים. וכל התורה כן, מלבד צירופיהן וגימטריותיהן של שמות.
וכבר כתב רבינו שלמה בפירושיו בתלמוד, ענין השם הגדול של ע"ב, באיזה ענין הוא, בשלשה פסוקים: ויסע ויבא ויט. ומפני זה ספר תורה שטעה בו באות אחת, במלא או בחסר - פסול. כי זה הענין יחייב אותנו לפסול ס"ת שיחסר בו ו' אחד ממלות אותם שבאו מהם ל"ט מלאים בתורה, או שיכתוב הו' באחד משאר החסרים, וכן כיוצא בזה, אע"פ שאינו מעלה ולא מוריד כפי העולה במחשבה.
וזה הענין שהביאו גדולי המקרא למנות כל מלא וכל חסר, וכל התורה והמקרא, ולחבר ספרים במסורת עד עזרא הסופר הנביא, שנשתדל בזה, כמו שדרשו מפסוק ויקראו בספר בתורת האלהים מפורש ושום שכל ויבינו במקרא. ונראה שהתורה הכתובה באש שחורה על גבי אש לבנה, בענין הזה שהזכרנו היה, שהיתה הכתיבה רצופה בלי הפסק תיבות, והיה אפשר בקריאתה שתקרא על דרך השמות, ותקרא על דרך קריאתנו בענין התורה והמצוה, ונתנה למשה רבינו על דרך קריאת המצות, ונמסר לו על פה קריאתה בשמות.
וכן יכתבו השם הגדול שהזכרתי כולו רצוף, ויתחלק לתיבות של שלוש שלוש אותיות, ולחלוקים אחרים רבים, כפי השימוש לבעלי הקבלה. 


"There is also in our hands a true tradition that the entire Torah is composed entirely of Divine names. That the words are divided into Names in one matter. As if you would consider, by way of analogy, that the pasuk of Bereishit would be divided into other words. Such as [in place of בראשית ברא אלהים, "In the beginning of God's creation...], בראש יתברא אלהים. And all the Torah so, aside from the combinations and the gematriot of the names.


And Rabbeinu Shlomo {=Rashi} already wrote in his commentary to the Talmud [on Succah 45a] the matter of the great Name of 72 [letters], and in what manner it is, in three verses, ויסע ויבא ויט. [Meaning, there are three consecutive verses in a row of 72 letters each, which can be combined to form Divine Names.] And because of this, a Sefer Torah in which a single letter is in error, as a malei or a chaser, is invalid. For this matter requires us to invalidate a Sefer Torah which is missing a single vav from the word אותם, from which 39 are written malei in the Torah. Or if the vav were written in one of the other ones [about 180] which are supposed to be chaser, and so the like in this, even though as far as one might think, it neither helps nor harms.


And this matter is what brought the greats [experts] of Scripture to count every malei and chaser, and the entire Torah and Scriptures, and to compose books on the masoret until Ezra the Sofer and Navi, that we should endeavor in this, as they darshened from the verse  ויקראו בספר בתורת האלהים מפורש ושום שכל ויבינו במקרא. And it appears that the Torah, written with black fire upon white fire, in this manner that we have mentioned it was, that the writing was continuous, without a space between words, and it was possible in reading it that one could read it by way of the Names, and to read it by way of our reading it in the matter of Torah and Mitzvot. And it was given to Moshe Rabbenu by way of the reading of the mitzvos, and it was transmitted to him Orally the reading via the Names.


And so do they write the great name I have mentioned, entirely continuously, and it is divided into words of three letters each, and into many other divisions as well, according to the utilizations of the masters of kabbalah."


The Minchas Shai is aware of this Ramban, and cites this in his lengthy introduction to his work, as one of his motivations for working to establish the proper Masoretic text.

At the end of the day, with the many many divergences recorded, discussed, and analyzed in Minchas Shai, one comes to the conclusion that it is extremely unlikely that our current sifrei Torah are correct in every malei and chaser. There are too many disputes among masoretic notes, and diverges from the Torah text before various Rishonim and before Chazal.

Besides that, there is the statement in Masechet Soferim 6:4 indicating a compromise harmonization between various scrolls in the Azarah (or of Ezra). And Kiddushin daf 30 claims that gachon is the middle letter in the Torah. But it is NOT, in our counting of present-day sifrei Torah, nor was it before the Amoraim, which prompts Rav Yosef to say that we are not experts in malei and chaser. So all Sifrei Torah are in error, and would be pasul based on this insistence.

See, however (footnote 34), Rama on Orach Chaim 143:4 where an error in malei / chaser would invalidate only lechatchila, not bedieved, as understood by the Nodah Be-Yehuda on Yoreh Deah 2:178, and also the Minchas Chinuch who holds that this would not invalidate a sefer Torah at all.

Torah Codes are based, in part, on this kabbalistic concept. The text of the Torah in its present form is perfect and can be used to discover hidden meanings. But if one disagrees with this assertion -- and there is strong reason to do so -- then all Torah codes are thrown off.

18 comments:

YASW said...

You are so weird. The reason there are no ELS codes in the Torah is not because of something the Ramban did or didn't say, or because of malei and chaser issues. It's because the people that wrote the Torah didn't encode any such thing.

zach said...

I wonder if Ramban used the same MT as Rashi, especially in those couple of instances (like "pilagshim") where Rashi's comment makes it clear that his text is different from the one we use today.

Anonymous said...

http://www.torah-code.org/controversy/THE_ACCURACY_OF_OUR_WRITTEN_TORAH.pdf

see this article which demonstrates that our current torah is accurate within just a couple of letters. It also proves that as a result, torah codes that are based on short sections of the torah would not be affected by these couple of letters.

looking forward to your response.

Avigdor

joshwaxman said...

Avigdor:

Thanks. Maybe I will analyze it at greater length.

However, just consider this paragraph from the article linked:

A century or so later, in the times of the Amora'im, Rav Yosef commented that this
accuracy was already somewhat diluted. Such a lack of accuracy can only have been
made apparent by the existence of divergent texts. The Gemara makes it clear that even
this dilution of accuracy was only with regard to Malei and Chaser. (Malei and Chaser
refer to unpronounced letters, such as 'Vav' and 'Yud,' which lend added accent to vowels.
Their presence or absence does not affect the meaning of a word). Nor does the Gemara
state in how many instances doubts arose regarding orthography. It is possible that these
uncertainties were limited to a very few instances.

The 'problem' with this statement is that Rav Yosef said that we are not accurate in the context of Gachon being the middle letter of the Torah. "Gachon" appears in Vayikra 10:42. According to our present texts, the midpoint is almost 5000 places off, in Vayikra 8:28.

That means that these "uncertainties" were certainly more than "just a few instances".

Any agreement in preservation via diligent scribes would just be further preserving this already corrupted text.

(This aside from demonstrable cases of derashot of Chazal, Zohar, and Rishonim based on non-existent malei and chaser.)

As to the specifics of the experiment, perhaps I will consider it later.

kol tuv,
josh

joshwaxman said...

YASW:

yes, i am so weird. but let us take your position, for a moment. (or, even any in-between position, such as that it was because Moshe Rabbenu did not encode it.)

do you not see the value in arguing while assuming (some of) the axioms of one's opponents?

joshwaxman said...

The article mentions consistency up to the time of the Tannaim, neglecting Rabbi Meir's sefer Torah, with changes.

In terms of Rav Breuer's experiment, this was a comparison of the Aleppo Codex to representative texts from six other sources. And his purpose was "to demonstrate that a single Mesorah already existed in the years prior to the RaMaH, even though the RaMaH did not have such a Mesorah at his disposal."

But given the praise the Rambam had for the Aleppo Codex, people corrected their texts against it. As such, texts and individual masorot would slowly begin to conform to the Aleppo Codex. Perhaps before RaMaH, there were more divergences.

Indeed, there were competing Codexes, used to consult for the appropriate text, such as Hilleli, Yericho, Yerushalmi, etc. Minchas Shai records many divergences between these codices. Perhaps most of them are in trup and nikkud, and there are only 220 in malei or chaser. Or maybe he selected actual sifrei Torah, which would not represent each of these codices.

Indeed, what were Rav Breuer's four texts?

In terms of ruling like the majority and thus rejecting the minority as a mere scribal error in 220 of those cases, this is not necessarily the case. One might apply principles like "lectio difficilior", or consider whether a family tree can describe these texts, where a branching might have occurred earlier.

Also, this only considers four texts. Crack open a "Vetus Testamentum" and see malei and chaser variants on almost every other pasuk, within Hebrew masoretic texts.

And there are more than nine instances in which **Chazal** darshen differently from our texts and from the Aleppo / Leningrad Codex. (I've posted about a whole bunch of them on parshablog.) And this is a derasha, where they would take care to know if it is malei or chaser. So I don't "buy" the idea that there are only nine errors / divergences.

At any rate, without drastic reinterpretation (which admittedly some people have done) to the Gachon gemara, we still remain with at least 4822 letters difference. (At least, because that is just from adding a vav or yud to one side of "gachon" or removing it from the other. It is also possible that there were more than this on either side, which would need to be balanced by a change on the other side.)

joshwaxman said...

finally, from the article:

; its margin of error appears to be less than .00004, and to involve only insignificant letters at that

For a possible example of more significant letters (diverging from Chazal) than just malei chaser vav and yuds, see here, about an entire extra word. There are other examples I can point to and which I have discussed on parshablog.

joshwaxman said...

To give the new statistics, with a minimum of 4822 errors, that is about a 7.7% error rate among the malei and chaser vavs.

If we divide 4822 by the total # of letters in the Torah, 304,805, we end up with an error rate not of .00004, but of 0.0158199505. That is one and a half errors per 100 letters, or 3 errors per 200 letters. Almost every Torah Code I've seen has more than 200 letters in it, and thus, every Torah Code is invalidated.

Jr said...

Have you seen hakira vol 5 "symmerical designed SeferTorahs" regarding the vav in gachon and other related issues? If not, you might want to check it out.

Also, is there a satisfying explanation as to how we recite brachos on our sifrei Torah? Are we just relying on the minority opinions that it's ok to recite on pasul sifrei Torah or is there something else?

joshwaxman said...

Yes. Thanks. (That is where I pulled the 7.7% statistic from.)

One can read it here. I agree it is an interesting suggestion.

Anonymous said...

Hi Josh,
Thank you for your response. I have to study your response more before I can respond to it. If I can put it aside for a second, I spent a considerable amount of time reading the articles for and against the Torah Codes on the internet. Let's lay out the facts that we can all agree on. The academic peer reviewed journal (forgot the name) printed the original study. That implies that these people followed the rules of statistics in conducting their study. The journal then asked for help in solving the mystery - the flaw - in the study. How did they know it was flawed? Do you detect any bias here? They start off with the assumption that the Torah must be man made, and therefore it must follow that there can’t be a code telling us about future events. Ultimately the follow-up articles against the torah code correctly understood claimed subtly that those conducting the original torah code study were dishonest – i.e. hid their other attempts to find different words, other spellings of names, or alternative dates etc.) If you believe in the integrity and honesty of the original torah code researchers tehn the original experiment proves the validity of the codes. One final point, ironically you are being driven by a similar type of bias (but in the opposite direction) as the atheist opponents. The atheist opponents are saying that since the Torah is written by man so there must not be a torah code, and you are saying that since chazal said that our torah is not exact therefore there must not be a torah code in our version of the torah. Neither you nor the atheist are willing to look at the experiment as is – just by applying statistics and by analyzing the study’s method. From everything I have read it seems that ultimately the opponents are accusing the torah code researchers of dishonesty. I am not a mathematician and I therefore cannot judge the statistics - However, I am confident in my ability to judge character – I know a decent sincere person when I see one – I am as confident as I can be as a human that these are honest sincere people who conducted their experiment with integrity.
By the way, I realize that Rabbi Glazerson’s torah codes are meaningless as they are not done in a controlled way – i.e. he might have tried a hundred other words that he couldn’t find. However, I do believe that the evidence is on the side of real torah codes like those done by the original researchers in the famous Rabbi’s experiment.
Kol tuv,
Avigdor

joshwaxman said...

1. not just faith in Chazal that "we are not experts", but that Chazal (who were experts) gave a midpoint, so that we can calculate a minimum that we are off.

2. Not everything accepted by a peer-reviewed journal pans out, even if the scientists are entirely honest. There were scientists who recently discovered neutrinos moving faster than light. And that was then debunked.

I am not an expert in statistics, but I see things which make me rather suspicious about the (non-original experiment) Torah Codes, which make them not a priori, subject to wiggle room, etc. And I think that statistics are convoluted enough that there can be some non-obvious point that people are missing, which invalidates it. I would not toss out my whole religion on the basis of someone's calculations.

And there is back and forth on the original experiment.

Look, the beauty of scientific experiments are that they are repeatable. There should be no need for "trust" of the original experimenters. Let them conduct a new experiment, from scratch, of another 100 rabbis. Shlomo Carlebach, Rav Elyashiv, and so on and so forth, but in partnership with the nay-sayers.

In fact, I have proposed a straightforward experiment. It can be a blind experiment, where researchers do not know whether they are working on Torah text or monkey text. And search for the terms, with all the variants, and make claims of how accurate it is. Then reveal to them which text they were working on. Do this 100 times in a row.

Wouldn't that resolve it?

Anonymous said...

Yes, it would be good to have more experiments, but what bothers you about the original experiment?
If I remember correctly, I heard at a Discovery Seminar that they tried submitting an additonal experiment for review, however, it was not accepted by the journal.

Avigdor

joshwaxman said...

Yes, it would be good to have more experiments, but what bothers you about the original experiment?

While I believe I can point out a thing or two that bothers me about the original experiment, I won't offer a response at this time.

Why not? Because then we might miss this extremely important point.

It is not upon me to try to disprove an experiment, when I am not omniscient and therefore don't know every detail that went into the experiment and what could have caused it to go wrong. Whether by deliberate action, accident, miscalculation in programming, dumb luck in their choice of words, Divine Guidance, and so on. An experiment should be reproducible.

When Francesco Redi, in 1668, disproved spontaneous generation of flies with his famous cheesecloth experiment, those who doubted him did not have to point out precisely what he did wrong, which would generate his result. They could repeat the experiment for themselves.

This is reproducibility.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reproducibility
Reproducibility is the ability of an experiment or study to be accurately reproduced, or replicated, by someone else working independently. It is one of the main principles of the scientific method.
The results of an experiment performed by a particular researcher or group of researchers are generally evaluated by other independent researchers who repeat the same experiment themselves, based on the original experimental description (see independent review). Then they see if their experiment gives similar results to those reported by the original group. The result values are said to be commensurate if they are obtained (in distinct experimental trials) according to the same reproducible experimental description and procedure.
The basic idea can be seen in Aristotle's dictum that there is no scientific knowledge of the individual, where the word used for individual in Greek had the connotation of the idiosyncratic, or wholly isolated occurrence. Thus all knowledge, all science, necessarily involves the formation of general concepts and the invocation of their corresponding symbols in language (cf. Turner).


There was a frum Bible Codes proponent, Nobel Laureate Robert Aumann, who was in favor of Torah Codes. They place an ellipses to conceal his initial words, and cite him saying “…behold this is the greatest discovery of three hundred years of scientific research.” (The beginning of the statement is "If this research of the Torah Codes is born out", but this is dishonestly concealed.)

He was a proponent of the truth of Bible Codes, dismissing for quite a while the possibility of manipulation in the search terms and, when admitting it was possible, still didn't believe that it was done. But then he tried to confirm it, and was unable to. He writes:

"A priori, the thesis of the Codes research seems wildly improbable... Research conducted under my own supervision failed to confirm the existence of the codes - though it also did not establish their non-existence. So I must return to my a priori estimate, that the Codes phenomenon is improbable".

So focus, for now, on it not having been reproduced, despite an effort by a frum mathematician who was not "out to get" the original researchers.

I don't trust studies showing potatoes cause cancer, or lack of potatoes cause cancer, as arise every other week. I wait for it to be confirmed by other experimenters.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for your response!
I am sure we will have time to discuss this more on future posts!
Kol tuv,
Avigdor

joshwaxman said...

you're welcome!

indeed, i will likely post more on this topic. see you then,

josh

Jenny said...

Josh -

I am certainly not a proponent of the Torah codes, and I'm not sure if this has been proposed, but I think the problem can be solved by understanding that while the torah we have today is not the one given to Moshe at Sinai, one can certainly believe that such changes have developed with a certain amount of siyata d'shmaya, and the text we have now is the one God wants us to have (stop me if you disagree with that). I'm not sure why that text would be inappropriate to run codes on simply because it's not identical to the text God wanted us to have earlier.

joshwaxman said...

Jenny:
I'm not sure if this has been proposed

Thanks. It is a good point. Indeed, it has been proposed by at least two people I know of. The first is Rabbi Josh Waxman on parshablog, back in 2005. See here, but an excerpt from the lengthy post:

If God knew the disputes of Abaye and Rava all the way back at matan Torah, such that all such discussions were given over to Moshe (at least on a metaphorical level), then God would also know the eventual halachic configuration of his Written Torah. If the claim of those who propound the Torah Codes is that God is relating future events, would not such knowledge of the future include the eventual text of the Torah as it exists in the present day. For it would make no sense to encode messages in a text that would be munged by additions and deletions of matres lectiones, since the messages would then be lost. Rather, if God's Supreme Intellect could give over a plain text while also encoding messages in minimum skip patterns, he could also encode messages such that the eventual configuration of the Torah would contain said patterns. The logical text would be the standard one available when the Torah Code methodology became known.

The other is either Rabbi Glazerson or Dr. Haralick, writing on their website torahcode.net, in response to the Biblical Criticism argument. By calling it Bible Criticism, they take it out of the frum Jewish realm of Minchas Shai, Chasam Sofer, and so on, and imply that it is only so-called Biblical critics. But what is written there is:

It is interesting that the logic of these arguments makes unstated and unwarranted assumptions. Let us examine this argument in detail. First the argument, without stating it, assumes that the Torah text was given by Hashem on Mount Sinai. Then the argument asserts that there have been transmission errors and concludes that these transmission errors would make impossible any of the original encoding to have survived. The argument admits, without stating it, that there was a miracle, an un-natural event, not part of the natural cause and effect mechanism in which Hashem gave the Torah on Mount Sinai. The argument then assumes that it was this text in which the codes occur. There is no compelling reason for this assumption. We can make an alternative argument that the miracle that occurred on Mount Sinai was that Hashem, who is omniscient about all events past, present, and future, gave a text which when modified by the purported transmission errors has the encodings that Hashem intended for us to find in modern times.

In terms of a response to this, that will have to wait -- perhaps for another comment, or perhaps for another post.

But for now, yes, I am aware of that counter-argument, and have a counter-counter-argument.

kol tuv,
josh

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