Halakhah Study Group 043

נושא: HSG

BET MIDRASH VIRTUALI

כיון שהתחיל הקורא לקרות בספר תורה אסור לספר אפילו בדברי תורה אפילו בין גברא לגברא ואפילו אם השלים הוא הפרשה; ויש מתירים לגרוס בלחש ויש אומרים שאם יש עשרה דצייתי לספר תורה מותר לספר. ויש מתירים למי שתורתו אומנתו ויש מתירים למי שקודם שנפתח ספר תורה מחזיר פניו ומראה עצמו שאינו רוצה לשמוע ספר תורה אלא לקרות ומתחיל לקרות. ולקרות שנים מקרא ואחד תרגום בשעת קריאת התורה שרי: וכל זה אינו ענין לפרשת זכור ופרשת פרה שהם בעשרה מדאורייתא שצריך לכוין ולשומעם מפי הקורא והנכון שבכל הפרשיות ראוי למדקדק בדבריו לכוין דעתו ולשומעם מפי הקורא:

אסור לספר כשהמפטיר קורא בנביא עד שישלים כמו בספר תורה:

אין צורך לעמוד מעומד בעת שקורין בתורה (ויש מחמירין ועומדין וכן עשה מהר"ם):

Once the reader has started to read from the Torah scroll it is forbidden to chat even about Torah matters, even between honorees, and even if you have completed [your review of] the whole parashah. But there are some [authorities] who permit [one] to study silently. And there are some [authorities] who hold that if there are ten [other people] who are following [what is being read from] the Torah scroll it is permissible to chat. And there are some [authorities] who permit [this] to someone for whom Torah [study] is his [sole] occupation. And there are some [authorities] who permit [this] to those who have turned away [from the Torah reading] before the Torah scroll was opened, thus indicating that he does not want to listen to [what is being read from] the Torah scroll, but [would rather] read – and starts reading. It is permitted to read "twice scripture and once translation". None of this applies to parashat Zakhor and parashat Parah which must be read in [a quorum of] ten by Torah law: one must pay attention and hear them read by the reader. Actually, a conscientious person should concentrate on hearing all of these parashot from the reader.

It is forbidden to chat while the maftir is reading from the prophets until he has finished, just like a Torah scroll.

There is no need to stand while the Torah is being read. (There are some who take a stricter view for themselves and do stand, and this was the custom of Rabbi Me'ir of Rothemburg.

12:
Before the Pesaĥ break we were discussing the four special shabbatot that occur annually in the month of Adar. In the previous shiur we covered the first three of these shabbatot and we must now turn our attention to the fouth. As we have already mentioned, on the Shabbat before or on Rosh Ĥodesh Nisan we read Parashat ha-Ĥodesh. The special reading from the Torah on this Shabbat serves three main purposes: it serves as a reminder of the events of what our sages call Pesaĥ Mitzrayyim, what the Israelites did on the last night in Egypt before the Exodus; it also serves as a reminder of the major laws concerning Pesaĥ and especially of what was later to develop into the Seder service; but most especially this reading serves to teach the most crucial of verses for the regulation of the Jewish calendar.

13:
In several places the Torah gives the date of the festival of Pesaĥ as being on the fifteenth day of the month of Nisan. For instance, in Leviticus 23:4-8 we read as follows:

In the first month [Nisan], on the fourteenth day of the month, at twilight, there shall be a passover offering to God, and on the fifteenth day of that month God's Feast of Unleavened Bread. You shall eat unleavened bread for seven days. On the first day you shall celebrate a sacred occasion: you shall not work at your occupations. Seven days you shall make offerings by fire to God. The seventh day shall be a sacred occasion: you shall not work at your occupations.

However, in other places we find a more specific requirement, that the festival of Pesaĥ fall in the month of spring – i.e. of the spring equinox. (It may possibly be that the original intention of the Torah was to indicate the month in which the barley ripens, because the Hebrew word for 'spring' comes from the Hebrew word describing ripening cereal crops, aviv. In Exodus 9:31 we find the phrase Now the flax and barley were ruined, for the barley was in the ear [aviv] and the flax was in bud. Be this as it may, it makes no difference because barley ripens in the spring month in any case. To this day Karaites go out into the fields of Eretz-Israel to check whether the barley is ripening in order to determine that the Passover month has arrived.)

14:
The Torah stipulates that the festival of Pesaĥ must be celebrated in the spring month in more than one place. For instance, in Exodus 43:18 we read:

You shall observe the Feast of Unleavened Bread – eating unleavened bread for seven days, as I have commanded you – at the set time of the month of aviv, for in the month of aviv you went forth from Egypt.

And in Deuteronomy 16:1 we read:

Observe the month of aviv and offer a passover sacrifice to God, for it was in the month of aviv, at night, that God freed you from Egypt.

15:
When we studied Tractate Rosh ha-Shanah we noted that the Jewish calendar is a lunar calendar. Here is an explanation that I gave there:

The Hebrew word for month is "Ĥodesh" or "Yeraĥ". Both terms are connected with the moon (as is also the English word 'month'): ĥodesh refers to the beginning of the monthly cycle of the moon from new to quarter to full to three-quarters and back to new – a cycle which takes approximately 29 and one half days. Yeraĥ is quite simply the Hebrew word for moon… The moon is considered to be new when it is invisible. It has no light of its own and when it "shines" it is merely reflecting the light of the sun. When the conjunction of the moon and the sun is such that the Earth is placed exactly between them the Earth prevents the light of the sun from reaching the moon which thus becomes completely dark. As the moon moves away from thus conjunction an arc of light becomes visible, which grows as the shadow of the Earth on the moon decreases. The moment when the moon is completely invisible is called in Hebrew the "Molad" (birth). The interval between one molad and the next is one Jewish month and is defined by the time it takes the moon to make one revolution on the Earth's axis. This interval is approximately 29 and one half days. However, if we multiply 29.5 by twelve, to get a year, we fall short of the solar year. The solar year is defined as the time it takes the Earth to make one revolution on the sun's axis – approximately 365.25 days. There is thus a difference of some eleven days between the lunar year and the solar year. If this difference is not accounted for the anniversaries will gradually recede. This is the actual case in the Moslem calendar, where the great festivals "wander" back in the year, the fast of Ramadan falling first in the summer, then in the spring, then in winter and so forth. Such a state of affairs cannot be tolerated by the Jewish calendar which requires the months to be regulated by the lunar cycle but the festivals to be regulated by the solar cycle. This requires an "adjusted" lunar year. The adjustment is called "intercalation".

16:
This is what lies at the rabbinic interpretation of Exodus 12:2, which is the reading for the last of the four special sabbaths in Adar. The Torah reads:

This month shall mark for you the beginning of the months; it shall be the first of the months of the year for you.

Midrash [Mekhilta, Bo, 1] imagines God, as it were, pointing to the moon and explaining to Moses in this verse that "when the moon looks like this it means that it is Rosh Ĥodesh.

17:
However, more important to our present discussion is the manner in which this lunar calendar is adjusted in order to permit the month of Nisan to occur in the month of the spring equinox. As noted above, there is a discrepancy of approximately 11 days between the lunar year and the solar year. It was discovered (by the Greek mathematician Meton, who was a contemporary of Ezra and Nehemiah) that a cycle of 19 solar years is almost the exact equivalent of 235 lunar months, but this is seven months more than the number of months in 19 unadjusted lunar years. Therefore, in every cycle of 19 years we add one month, just before the month of Nisan, in order to co-ordinate the lunar and solar years so that the festival of Passover will always fall in the month of the spring equinox. The years in the cycle in which this month is added are 3rd, 6th, 8th, 11th, 14th, 17th and 19th; however, when the Sanhedrin was still functioning the decision whether to add a month to the year was made by observation of the "situation on the ground" as it were. It is to commemorate this decision of the Sanhedrin, made towards the end of the month of Adar, whether or not to add a month before Nisan, that we read to this day Parashat ha-Ĥodesh on the Shabbat on or preceding Rosh Ĥodesh Nisan.

18:
After this very long excursus describing the origin and purpose of the special readings from the Torah mention in Section 145:2 we can return to our discussion of the Shulĥan Arukh. Rabbi Karo says that two of the four parashot have the force of Torah law &@8211; parashat Zakhor and parashat Parah. These parashot must be read in a quorum of ten [minyan] and one must pay attention and hear them read by the reader in order to fufill the mitzvah. He adds that a conscientious person should concentrate on hearing all of these parashot from the reader.

19:
Almost all the poskim [decisors] agree that there is no need to stand while the Torah is being read. Rabbi Moshe Isserles adds that "there are some who take a stricter view for themselves and do stand, and this was the custom of Rabbi Me'ir of Rothemburg", but nowadays, in our Conservative congregations, I think that if a person were to stand for the reading of the Torah when everyone else remains seated this would be considered yuharah, an undesirable affectation of feined super piety. There are certain passages where it is customary for everyone to stand – when we read the Ten Commandments, when we read the Song at the Sea and when we conclude one of the five ĥumashim – and on these occasions it would be wrong to remain seated.

Arnold Schneider asks about the following situation:

The Torah is being read, all seven honors have been called, and the Kaddish is said. Just before the Maftir is called, it is realized that there was to be an aharon honor. The question is, do you go back and call the aharon or do you just go on with Maftir?

I respond:

Once kaddish has been recited the Torah reading is effectively completed. I know of no way in which halakhah would condone the first resolution of the dilemma proposed by Arnold. After kaddish has been recited anything read from the scroll would be tantamount to maftir, since even the maftir only reads from the scroll something that has already been read in any case. (In Section 282:4 Rabbi Karo admits that on an ordinary Shabbat the fact that the maftir reads anything from the Torah is only custom.)

My guess is that the problem raised by Arnold is not a halakhic one so much as a social one. If great distress will be caused by the oversight the only suggestion that I can make is to call the person who was overlooked as maftir and have him or her recite the berakhot of the haftarah while the person whose was originally intended to be maftir reads the haftarah for him. This, of course, would depend very much on the good will and understanding of the original maftir.

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