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Torah
Scrolls, Holy Scriptures, Written Law
by
Rabbi Michael Unger
"Rav Yehuda
says in the name of Shmuel: [The book of] Ester
does not impurify hands. Does that mean that Shmuel holds that [the book of] Ester was not given to
us as prophecy? Shmuel himself said that [the
book of] Ester was given to us as prophecy! Prophecy to be read, but not
prophecy to be written."
This passage is very difficult. First of
all we don't know what pure and impure hands have to do with prophecy.
Second how can Shmuel hold that the book of Ester
is not to be written. Just look at page 17 in the gemmorah and you will see a mishnah
that it must be written exactly as a Torah scroll and if one recites it by
heart he has not finished his obligation and must read it again from the
written scroll (This is the question of TOSEFOS on our page).
So let's start from Aleph:
There is a set of books called the Holy
Scriptures (Tanach).
There are 24 books in this set which includes the five chumashim
of Torah, Psalms, Ester, Job, Isaiah, etc. These 24 books are known to be
part of the Holy Scriptures after they received confirmation from Chazal. Now if these books are written with ink on
parchment, and the pages stitched together like a Torah scroll, they are
called SEFORIM (books). There are several laws about SEFORIM:
1. The Torah was given to Moshe in two
parts: The Written Law and The Oral Law. If one learns from one of the
SEFORIM written like a Torah scroll, it is considered that he has learned
from the Written Law.
2. If there is a fire on shabbos in a home which contains SEFORIM (in a case
where there is no danger to life so there is no reason to violate shabbos and put out the fire), even if the eruv is not 100% good, one must save the SEFORIM from
the burning house.
3. If one of the SEFORIM touches TRUMAH (vegetables which
must be ritually pure), the TRUMAH becomes unpure
and must be burned.
Let us talk about number 3. The reason
that SEFORIM make TRUMAH unfit to eat is a Rabbinical decree. The Rabbis
saw fit to make a rule which would force people to keep their holy books
away from food. Before the rule was made, people would put their TRUMAH in
the same place as their SEFORIM and they thought this was logical because
both of them are called "holy". When the Rabbis saw that rats
coming to get the food caused damage to the scrolls, they made a rule that
scrolls make TRUMAH unfit to eat. After making the rule nobody put their
food near scrolls for fear that the food would go to waste.
Another ruling of the Rabbis is that
something that causes TRUMAH to be impure, also impurifies the hand that touches it. (In order to
"repurify" the hands one must rinse
them in a certain way [NETILAS YADAIM] or dunk them in a mikve.)
Of course if any other book which is not
one of the Holy Scriptures is written on parchment like a Torah scroll,
none of the rules mentioned above apply to it and it is not called a SEFER
and is not even considered to be "written" since the WRITTEN
TORAH is limited to those 24 books.
Now, back to the gemmorah:
If Shmuel says
that Ester does not make hands impure he is simply saying that even when it
is written like a Torah scroll it is not one of the SEFORIM, meaning that
the book of Ester is not among the Holy Scriptures. The gemmorah
asks how can Shmuel hold
this way if he holds that Ester was given over as prophecy. The answer
given is that the book of Ester was given to us to be read and not to be
written. [Of course this is not the final ruling about the book of Ester,
which IS considered one of the 24 books of the Holy Scripture to be written
on parchment like a Torah scroll]
Rashi and Tosefos
understood this to mean that Shmuel holds that
Ester should be read on Purim by heart and not from a scroll. This is
difficult to understand since the mishnah on page
17 says the opposite.
One way out of this problem appears in
the book "Kedushas Levi" written by
Levi Yitzchak of Berdichev (page 113):
Of course any Jew that is saved by a miracle
is obligated to give thanks to G-d that saved him in this way. And in the
SHULCHAN ARUCH there is a ruling that when someone returns to the place
where he or his forefathers were saved by a miracle he must make a specific
blessing. It follows that when we take hold of the Megillah
scroll on Purim and read from it that we fulfil
the obligation of thanking G-d for the miracles of Purim, but that does not
mean that the scroll that we read from is one of the Holy Scriptures. Shmuel holds that the book of Ester was received as
prophecy to be read from parchment in order to publicize the miracles of
Purim. And there is logic behind this possibility: A normal miracle that
happens to an individual makes it obligatory to make a blessing when he
returns to the place it happened. But the obligation of Purim is not
satisfied until the story is written down on parchment and read in public.
In other words Shmuel
holds that the fact that we must write the book of Ester on parchment like
a Torah scroll has no connection to the rules concerning SEFORIM, according
to Kedushas Levi.
[The halachah
is not like Shmuel in this passage, and the
explanation of Kedushas Levi goes against the pshat of Rashi and Tosefos.]
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