I thought it would be interesting to discuss this monumental work that is still not finished. This is an encyclopedia in Hebrew that aims to summarize the halachic topics of the Talmud in alphabetical order. Each entry includes the opinions of the Geonim, Rishonim and Acharonim as well. The work on the project began in 1942; they are now only up to the letter “mem.” In December 2021, the 48th volume was published.

I am largely basing part of this column on an article in the Jerusalem Post from June 2022, by Alan Rosenbaum. A main goal of his article was to explain why the project has taken so long and what has changed.

In 1942, Rabbi Meir Bar-Ilan, the son of the Netziv (Rabbi Naftali Zvi Yehuda Berlin), realized that work must begin on such a project. Due to the Holocaust, there was a fear of not only losing the Jewish people — but of losing its rich history of halacha as well.

At the earliest stage of the project, Rabbi Shlomo Yosef Zevin, one of the great rabbinical figures of that generation, was enlisted to prepare a list of the entries to be included. He prepared a list of 2500 entries. The first volume was published in 1947 and included 219 entries. The original goal was to finish the project in 16 years.

Bar-Ilan wanted to keep the entries concise and to include only major references. The first two volumes were written in that style. But after his death in 1949, Rabbi Zevin became the editor and his approach was to expand the length of each article. After Zevin’s death in 1978, another figure became the editor. He decided that the entries needed to be even longer, including more details. This slowed down the process even further.

Rabbi Avraham Steinberg became the editor of the project in 2006. He chose to return to the style of Rabbi Zevin. But still the writing and editorial process was taking a long time. (There used to be a joke that by the time the work reached the entry for “Mashiach,” his name would be known!)

Rosenbaum explains what changed a few years ago: “Well-known Toronto philanthropists, Dr. Dov Friedberg, and his wife, Nancy, approached Steinberg, offering to provide financial assistance to complete the project. Friedberg had assumed that the entries had already been written and offered to provide the money for the printing of the remaining volumes. Steinberg explained to Friedberg that of the original 2500 entries prepared by Zevin in the 1940s, 900 entries were still remaining that had not been completed. The writing process that editors and writers were using … was taking far too much time.”

A few important changes were then made in the writing process. For example, a decision was made to get the editor of each article involved as each article was being written — instead of only reviewing the article afterwards. Now the articles are being written much faster, with the same level of quality.

The Friedberg family agreed to donate a substantial amount of money to Yad Harav Herzog for the project, but a condition was that the writing of the entries had to be completed within 10 years. That was in 2014; therefore, the project has to be finished by 2024.

The project is now meeting its goals; when it is finished, it will have close to 80 volumes.

The issuance of the 48th volume in 2021 was marked by a special celebration, as it was approximately 75 years since that first volume of 1947. The celebration was at the official residence of President Herzog —, the grandson of Rabbi Yitzhak Halevi Herzog —, who was the first chief rabbi of the State of Israel and one of the early supporters of the project.

Although Rabbi Bar-Ilan was the one who initiated the project in 1942, the concept of an encyclopedia of Torah principles was first suggested in a 1921 lecture by Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (who died in 1935).

(The Daat Mikra edition of Tanach, which combines rabbinic sources with the best of modern scholarship, was also part of the vision of Rabbi Kook. See Rabbi H. Angel’s, “Peshat Isn’t So Simple,” page 119. In 1956, a group of scholars formulated the principles that would underlie the edition, and in 1963, the first assignments were given out. Its final volume was published in 2003.)

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The Friedberg family also funded another critically important Jewish research project: The Friedberg Genizah project. This project digitized the entire corpus of manuscripts discovered in the Cairo Genizah: over 200,000 fragments. The fragments have been photographed and can be viewed online.

I would like to write about my own use of this project in my research on Aleinu. In 2009, Yehiel Levy — who was sitting near me in Congregation Beth Aaron — showed me his Yemenite siddur which had the “ ”לתכן reading and I realized that this reading made much more sense in that context. The phrase means: “to establish a world under God’s sovereignty.” I remembered that the siddur of Rabbi Saadiah (who died in 942) had this reading. As to the Rambam, in the standard printed Mishneh Torah in his text of the yearly prayers (end of Sefer Ahavah, Rosh Hashanah section), only the first ten words of “al kein nekaveh,” were included, followed by a ‘וכו. i.e., the printers abbreviated here and did not print everything Rambam wrote. So no one knew what reading the Rambam had, but everyone assumed he had the widespread “לתקן ” reading. The European manuscripts of “Aleinu” (the earliest being a manuscript of Machzor Vitry, which dated back to the early 12th century) all have “לתקן.”

But, I researched the more recent editions of the Rambam which included his full text and I learned that Rambam had the “לתכן ” reading.

Now, for the next step … I had seen some references in scholarly articles to a few genizah texts that had the לתכן reading, but I needed to look at all the genizah texts of Aleinu. (These texts generally date to the 10th-13th centuries.)

I was advised to write to Professor Uri Ehrlich in Israel. He provided me with a list of all the Aleinu fragments in the genizah, with their fragment numbers. There were about 50 fragments.

I then went to the site funded by the Friedbergs: genizah.org. By inserting each fragment number, I was able to view each fragment. Only about half of them had the relevant line in Aleinu, as these were all fragmentary texts. But of the ones that did have the line, almost all of them had “לתכן.” (See my “Esther Unmasked,” page 21, number 13 for the details. There was one fragment where only the top horizontal line of our crucial letter remained and I could not determine if it was the top of a “ק ” or the top of a “כ!”)

I did all the above research from the comfort of my own home! Solomon Schechter would have had to wear a dust mask when he examined the genizah fragments from the boxes that he had brought back to England in 1897. (The famous photo of him in a room in Cambridge, surrounded by boxes of fragments, unmasked and dressed in a suit, is a staged one!) Schechter once described the fragments as being enclosed in “medieval dust,” which “settles in one’s throat and threatens suffocation.” I will write more about Schechter and his trip to Cairo in a future column.

Mitchell First can be reached at [email protected]. He recalls a comment by a scholar who worked in the field of the Dead Sea scrolls. He enjoyed his work so much that “the odor of the desiccated bat dung became a pleasant association.”