Translator’s Preface
The following is the story of how I came to translate Ayelet Hashachar, by the Malbim: At the end of the Hebrew year 5757, I began learning Torah at Yeshivas Orchos Chaim, in Jerusalem Israel, my first time learning in a yeshiva. We began learning Talmud Sukkah 29b. On that very page, I learned that the Talmud uses the fact that the seemingly superfluous word לכם (for you) appears in the sentence ולקחתם לכם ביום הראשון (And you shall take you on the first day)[1] to infer that the four species (the citron, the date palm, the myrtle, and the willow) must be taken from one’s own property on the first day of the holiday of Sukkot. And I also learned about similar inferences on the pages that follow, which used the text of the Scripture to infer new information that was not explicitly mentioned there; this peeked my curiosity. So I asked the Rosh Yeshiva Rabbi Yitzchak Schwartz, “How were the sages of the Talmud able to read into the text of the Torah and infer new information that was not mentioned explicitly there? They had to have been using some sort of system to do this. Is there any way I can learn about this system?” Rabbi Schwartz then told me that we do not know exactly the system that the sages used to infer new information from the Written Torah nor are we today even permitted to infer new information from the Written Torah; however, in the 1800’s a rabbi known as the Malbim studied the inferences made by the sages of blessed memory and he reverse-engineered the system. And he found 613 rules which summarize his conclusions and wrote these rules in a book called Ayelet Hashachar.
At that time, I was not proficient in Hebrew, so I noted to myself that when I learn Hebrew, I will read that book. Years later, after I was proficient enough in Hebrew and had a deeper understanding of Torah, I decided to read Ayelet Hashachar. But then I had quickly learned that this was not the type of book that one can read at one’s leisure; the language is in 19th century Hebrew, which is different than the Hebrew of the Torah or the Mishnah (or even modern Hebrew). Furthermore, it became clear to me that in order to understand much of Ayelet Hashachar, it would be necessary for me to read parts of his larger work HaTorah v’HaMitzvah, which the Malbim cites throughout Ayelet HaShachar.
And this was what led me to write this book, which translates each of the 613 rules of Ayelet Hashachar into English and also explains these 613 rules whenever explanations are necessary.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Rabbi Zvi Weiss of Bais Haknesses Ohr HaChaim in Baltimore for explaining difficult parts of Ayelet Hashachar to me. And I would also like to thank my chavrusa Reb Nachum Berl of Lakewood for his support in this project and his help in explaining difficult parts of Ayelet HaShachar too. And I would like to thank Moishe Cohen of Ramot, Jerusalem for his great suggestions as to how to improve this book, which I followed. Of course, none of this would have been possible without my wonderful teachers at Yeshivas Orchos Chaim in Jerusalem, Rabbi Yitzchak Schwartz, Rabbi Yisroel Fabian, Rabbi Avraham Brussel, Rabbi Shalom Gould, and Rabbi Yaakov Fried z”l, and also Rabbi Shlomo Porter of Etz Chaim in Baltimore and Rabbi Zvi Teitelbaum of the Yeshiva of Greater Washington. And I also thank my parents, Jay and Joyce Feinstein and my wife Aliza Feinstein for their support too. And finally, I thank God for getting me to this point.
I dedicate this book to my cousin, Ayelet HaShachar Schlaffer, daughter of Jay Schlaffer, son of Harold Schlaffer z”l, son of Israel Schlaffer z”l, son of Rabbi Avraham Zvi Schlaffer z”l, son of Shmuel Schlaffer z”l. My grandfather, Israel Schlaffer, was born in Ukraine in 1896 and immigrated to Baltimore as a young adult. He loved the Hebrew language and taught Hebrew throughout his life in America.
Caveat Emptor
While it is likely that I have read through the Malbim’s Ayelet Hashachar more than anyone in the world, I am still not an expert on the Malbim’s writings, and it is possible that I have made some errors in my translation. If anyone finds any errors in this book, I ask that you please email me at [email protected].
Translator’s Introduction to Ayelet Hashachar
Rabbi Meir Leibush ben Yechiel Michel Wisser, מלבי"ם (the Malbim) (1809-1879 C.E.) was born in Volochysk, Volhynia in the Russian Empire during a period in European Jewish history commonly known as the Haskalah (השכלה - Jewish Enlightenment). Before the Haskalah, Jewish communities in Europe were led by rabbis and contact between Jews and their Gentile neighbors was limited. This changed during the late 18th century as new secular ideas spread throughout Europe and began finding their ways into Jewish communities. While today we see that secular ideas have ultimately led to good things for humanity like science, medicine, and technology, the new secular ideas of the Haskalah presented many problems for European Jewry, one of them being that it broke the monopoly that the rabbis had as the intellectual and communal leaders of the Jewish people. Jews who were intellectually inclined took to heart the new secular ideas and began questioning their faith and tradition. Many of them decided to abandon the old ways and assimilate into the Gentile society around them. Others joined a new movement started by Jews affected by the Haskalah called the Reform movement, which considered the Torah as nonbinding and antiquated. Before the Haskalah, there was no such thing as a secular Jew, an Orthodox Jew, or a Reform Jew. One was either Jewish, which meant that one belonged to a Jewish community in which everyone was expected to observe the Torah via the rabbis leading the community, or one was a Gentile. But today as of 2021 C.E., after the Haskalah, it is estimated that only two million Jews observe the Torah, out of an estimated 15 million Jews in the world today; furthermore, most Jews today only have a superficial understanding of Torah, even though they have instant access to much of the Torah via the internet. So the Haskalah has had a profound effect on world Jewry to this day.
The Malbim, who in 1858 became the chief rabbi of Romania, was forced to deal with the challenges of the Haskalah. According to Encyclopaedia Judaica, “In Bucharest, Malbim set new kashrut standards, imposed restrictions on the kosher butchers, constructed a new eruv, personally supervised the educational institutions in town and began to attract large crowds to his sermons. All of these activities, combined with his insistence that his congregants become more observant, resulted in friction between Malbim and the enlightened intellectuals in the Jewish community, who were actually wealthy, foreign nationals. When Malbim objected to the building of a new modern synagogue, the Choral Temple, because it would include an organ and choir like the Reform synagogues in Western Europe, his oppponents complained to the authorities, claiming falsely that Malbim was preaching against Christianity. In 1860, he published the first volume of his commentary on the Pentateuch – on Leviticus. In the introduction he wrote a scathing attack against Reform Judaism. His son, Aaron, passed away in 1862. This personal tragedy had a severe effect on Malbim. At the same time, his rapidly deteriorating relations with the enlightened members of his community made his position precarious. Because of Malbim’s uncompromising stand against Reform, disputes broke out between him and the communal leaders of the town, leading to his imprisonment. On Friday, March 18, 1864, Malbim was arrested and jailed. He was freed only on the intervention of Sir Moses Montefiore and on condition that he leave Romania and not return.”
In the following years, the Malbim wandered around Europe, suffering persecution by the assimilationists, who accused him of being a rebel and an extremist against the enlightenment, and also persecution by Hasidim. Finally, on his way to Kremenchug, Poltava oblast to accept a position as rabbi, the Malbim died in Kiev in 1879. In spite of the persecutions that the Malbim faced from his own people, the Malbim wrote Torah commentaries that have lived on while the names of his persecutors have long been forgotten. His first published commentary was on the Book of Esther in 1845, followed by one on Isaiah in 1849. In 1860, his commentary HaTorah v’HaMitzvah on Leviticus and Sifra was published, which included as its introduction Ayelet HaShachar. (Sifra is a commentary on Leviticus that is frequently quoted in the Talmud.) Up until 1876, his remaining commentaries on the Hebrew Bible were published, all books of the Hebrew Bible except for Lamentations and Ecclesiastes. The Malbim’s commentaries were motivated by his opposition to the Reform movement. He started with Leviticus and Sifra, because the Reform movement considered the concept of sacrifice, a theme in Leviticus, as lacking any merit in the modern era. The Malbim’s goal was to prove “that the Oral Law is the law given from heaven, and that all of its words are necessary and implicit in the plain meaning of the verse and in the profundity of the language, and that the interpretation is only the plain meaning based upon accurate, linguistic rules.”[2]
In order to understand Ayelet HaShachar, it is necessary to understand the following facts about the Torah:
The Torah is composed of both the Written Law and the Oral Law. The Written Law includes:
What is the relationship between the Written Law and the Oral Law? Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808-1888), who was the Malbim’s contemporary and had also published a Torah commentary of his own in order to respond to the Reform movement’s attacks on traditional Judaism, had one answer:
The following is the story of how I came to translate Ayelet Hashachar, by the Malbim: At the end of the Hebrew year 5757, I began learning Torah at Yeshivas Orchos Chaim, in Jerusalem Israel, my first time learning in a yeshiva. We began learning Talmud Sukkah 29b. On that very page, I learned that the Talmud uses the fact that the seemingly superfluous word לכם (for you) appears in the sentence ולקחתם לכם ביום הראשון (And you shall take you on the first day)[1] to infer that the four species (the citron, the date palm, the myrtle, and the willow) must be taken from one’s own property on the first day of the holiday of Sukkot. And I also learned about similar inferences on the pages that follow, which used the text of the Scripture to infer new information that was not explicitly mentioned there; this peeked my curiosity. So I asked the Rosh Yeshiva Rabbi Yitzchak Schwartz, “How were the sages of the Talmud able to read into the text of the Torah and infer new information that was not mentioned explicitly there? They had to have been using some sort of system to do this. Is there any way I can learn about this system?” Rabbi Schwartz then told me that we do not know exactly the system that the sages used to infer new information from the Written Torah nor are we today even permitted to infer new information from the Written Torah; however, in the 1800’s a rabbi known as the Malbim studied the inferences made by the sages of blessed memory and he reverse-engineered the system. And he found 613 rules which summarize his conclusions and wrote these rules in a book called Ayelet Hashachar.
At that time, I was not proficient in Hebrew, so I noted to myself that when I learn Hebrew, I will read that book. Years later, after I was proficient enough in Hebrew and had a deeper understanding of Torah, I decided to read Ayelet Hashachar. But then I had quickly learned that this was not the type of book that one can read at one’s leisure; the language is in 19th century Hebrew, which is different than the Hebrew of the Torah or the Mishnah (or even modern Hebrew). Furthermore, it became clear to me that in order to understand much of Ayelet Hashachar, it would be necessary for me to read parts of his larger work HaTorah v’HaMitzvah, which the Malbim cites throughout Ayelet HaShachar.
And this was what led me to write this book, which translates each of the 613 rules of Ayelet Hashachar into English and also explains these 613 rules whenever explanations are necessary.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Rabbi Zvi Weiss of Bais Haknesses Ohr HaChaim in Baltimore for explaining difficult parts of Ayelet Hashachar to me. And I would also like to thank my chavrusa Reb Nachum Berl of Lakewood for his support in this project and his help in explaining difficult parts of Ayelet HaShachar too. And I would like to thank Moishe Cohen of Ramot, Jerusalem for his great suggestions as to how to improve this book, which I followed. Of course, none of this would have been possible without my wonderful teachers at Yeshivas Orchos Chaim in Jerusalem, Rabbi Yitzchak Schwartz, Rabbi Yisroel Fabian, Rabbi Avraham Brussel, Rabbi Shalom Gould, and Rabbi Yaakov Fried z”l, and also Rabbi Shlomo Porter of Etz Chaim in Baltimore and Rabbi Zvi Teitelbaum of the Yeshiva of Greater Washington. And I also thank my parents, Jay and Joyce Feinstein and my wife Aliza Feinstein for their support too. And finally, I thank God for getting me to this point.
I dedicate this book to my cousin, Ayelet HaShachar Schlaffer, daughter of Jay Schlaffer, son of Harold Schlaffer z”l, son of Israel Schlaffer z”l, son of Rabbi Avraham Zvi Schlaffer z”l, son of Shmuel Schlaffer z”l. My grandfather, Israel Schlaffer, was born in Ukraine in 1896 and immigrated to Baltimore as a young adult. He loved the Hebrew language and taught Hebrew throughout his life in America.
Caveat Emptor
While it is likely that I have read through the Malbim’s Ayelet Hashachar more than anyone in the world, I am still not an expert on the Malbim’s writings, and it is possible that I have made some errors in my translation. If anyone finds any errors in this book, I ask that you please email me at [email protected].
Translator’s Introduction to Ayelet Hashachar
Rabbi Meir Leibush ben Yechiel Michel Wisser, מלבי"ם (the Malbim) (1809-1879 C.E.) was born in Volochysk, Volhynia in the Russian Empire during a period in European Jewish history commonly known as the Haskalah (השכלה - Jewish Enlightenment). Before the Haskalah, Jewish communities in Europe were led by rabbis and contact between Jews and their Gentile neighbors was limited. This changed during the late 18th century as new secular ideas spread throughout Europe and began finding their ways into Jewish communities. While today we see that secular ideas have ultimately led to good things for humanity like science, medicine, and technology, the new secular ideas of the Haskalah presented many problems for European Jewry, one of them being that it broke the monopoly that the rabbis had as the intellectual and communal leaders of the Jewish people. Jews who were intellectually inclined took to heart the new secular ideas and began questioning their faith and tradition. Many of them decided to abandon the old ways and assimilate into the Gentile society around them. Others joined a new movement started by Jews affected by the Haskalah called the Reform movement, which considered the Torah as nonbinding and antiquated. Before the Haskalah, there was no such thing as a secular Jew, an Orthodox Jew, or a Reform Jew. One was either Jewish, which meant that one belonged to a Jewish community in which everyone was expected to observe the Torah via the rabbis leading the community, or one was a Gentile. But today as of 2021 C.E., after the Haskalah, it is estimated that only two million Jews observe the Torah, out of an estimated 15 million Jews in the world today; furthermore, most Jews today only have a superficial understanding of Torah, even though they have instant access to much of the Torah via the internet. So the Haskalah has had a profound effect on world Jewry to this day.
The Malbim, who in 1858 became the chief rabbi of Romania, was forced to deal with the challenges of the Haskalah. According to Encyclopaedia Judaica, “In Bucharest, Malbim set new kashrut standards, imposed restrictions on the kosher butchers, constructed a new eruv, personally supervised the educational institutions in town and began to attract large crowds to his sermons. All of these activities, combined with his insistence that his congregants become more observant, resulted in friction between Malbim and the enlightened intellectuals in the Jewish community, who were actually wealthy, foreign nationals. When Malbim objected to the building of a new modern synagogue, the Choral Temple, because it would include an organ and choir like the Reform synagogues in Western Europe, his oppponents complained to the authorities, claiming falsely that Malbim was preaching against Christianity. In 1860, he published the first volume of his commentary on the Pentateuch – on Leviticus. In the introduction he wrote a scathing attack against Reform Judaism. His son, Aaron, passed away in 1862. This personal tragedy had a severe effect on Malbim. At the same time, his rapidly deteriorating relations with the enlightened members of his community made his position precarious. Because of Malbim’s uncompromising stand against Reform, disputes broke out between him and the communal leaders of the town, leading to his imprisonment. On Friday, March 18, 1864, Malbim was arrested and jailed. He was freed only on the intervention of Sir Moses Montefiore and on condition that he leave Romania and not return.”
In the following years, the Malbim wandered around Europe, suffering persecution by the assimilationists, who accused him of being a rebel and an extremist against the enlightenment, and also persecution by Hasidim. Finally, on his way to Kremenchug, Poltava oblast to accept a position as rabbi, the Malbim died in Kiev in 1879. In spite of the persecutions that the Malbim faced from his own people, the Malbim wrote Torah commentaries that have lived on while the names of his persecutors have long been forgotten. His first published commentary was on the Book of Esther in 1845, followed by one on Isaiah in 1849. In 1860, his commentary HaTorah v’HaMitzvah on Leviticus and Sifra was published, which included as its introduction Ayelet HaShachar. (Sifra is a commentary on Leviticus that is frequently quoted in the Talmud.) Up until 1876, his remaining commentaries on the Hebrew Bible were published, all books of the Hebrew Bible except for Lamentations and Ecclesiastes. The Malbim’s commentaries were motivated by his opposition to the Reform movement. He started with Leviticus and Sifra, because the Reform movement considered the concept of sacrifice, a theme in Leviticus, as lacking any merit in the modern era. The Malbim’s goal was to prove “that the Oral Law is the law given from heaven, and that all of its words are necessary and implicit in the plain meaning of the verse and in the profundity of the language, and that the interpretation is only the plain meaning based upon accurate, linguistic rules.”[2]
In order to understand Ayelet HaShachar, it is necessary to understand the following facts about the Torah:
The Torah is composed of both the Written Law and the Oral Law. The Written Law includes:
- The Pentateuch – Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.
- The Prophets – Joshua, Judges, Samuel, Kings, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea, Joel, Amos, Obadiah, Jonah, Micah, Nahum, Habakkuk, Zephaniah, Haggai, Zechariah, Malachi.
- The Writings – Chronicles, Psalms, Job, Proverbs, Ruth, Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, Lamentations, Esther, Daniel, Ezra/Nehemia.
What is the relationship between the Written Law and the Oral Law? Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch (1808-1888), who was the Malbim’s contemporary and had also published a Torah commentary of his own in order to respond to the Reform movement’s attacks on traditional Judaism, had one answer:
“The Written law is to be to the Oral law in the relation of short notes on a full and extensive lecture on any scientific subject. For a student who has heard the whole lecture, short notes are quite sufficient to bring back afresh to his mind at any time the whole subject of the lecture. For him, a word, an added mark of interrogation, or exclamation, a dot, the underlining etc. etc., is often quite sufficient to recall to his mind a whole series of thoughts, a remark etc. For those who have not heard the lecture from the Master, such notes would be completely useless. if they were to try to reconstruct the scientific contents of the lecture literally from such notes they would of necessity make many errors. Words, marks, etc. which serve those scholars who had heard the lecture as instructive guiding stars to the wisdom that had been taught and learnt, stare at the uninitiated as unmeaning sphinxes. The wisdom, the truths, which the initiated reproduce from them (but do not produce out of them) are sneered at by the uninitiated as being merely a clever or witty play of words and empty dreams without any real foundation.”[3]
So according to Rabbi Hirsch, the Written Law comes from the Oral Law, and the Written Law was written down to be a mnemonic device for the Oral Law. Opposite this view is the Malbim’s view that the Oral Law comes from the Written Law. Specifically, the Malbim’s view is that the Oral Law is information which can be derived from the Written Law through a finite set of rules, much as a mathematician proves theorems from a finite set of axioms. And that finite set of rules, which number 613, are given in Ayelet HaShachar. (Just as the 613 commandments in the Torah are composed of 248 positive commandments and 365 negative commandments, the Malbim’s 613 hermeneutical rules are composed of 248 rules about the grammar of the Torah and 365 rules about synonyms in the Torah.)
But while the Malbim’s view of the relationship between the Written Law and the Oral Law is similar to how a mathematician proves theorems from a finite set of axioms, it is also different than this: A mathematical proof can be translated from one language to another language and the proof will still be valid in the other language. However, the finite set of rules which are applied to the Written Law only work with the Hebrew language, specifically the ancient Hebrew language. For instance, it is impossible to apply the rules given in Ayelet HaShachar correctly to the Torah when it is translated into Latin; the translated text becomes just a sterile legal and historical document.
In the Malbim’s introduction to his commentary on Isaiah, he wrote three themes upon which his commenataries are based:
The explanations of the 613 rules written by the translator in this book are always italicized and come primarily from Sifra and the Malbim’s commentary on the Torah, HaTorah v’HaMitzvah. Also, this book uses the Jewish Publication Society of America’s 1917 edition of the Hebrew Bible in English for translations of passages of the Hebrew Bible that the Malbim quotes; however, early modern English words like hath, ye, thy, thou, mayest, sitteth, etc., were replaced with their current English counterparts like has, you, your, you, may, sits, etc., to make the Bible passages easier to read. And the English translations of parts of the Talmud quoted in Ayelet HaShachar come directly from the website www.sefaria.org.
But while the Malbim’s view of the relationship between the Written Law and the Oral Law is similar to how a mathematician proves theorems from a finite set of axioms, it is also different than this: A mathematical proof can be translated from one language to another language and the proof will still be valid in the other language. However, the finite set of rules which are applied to the Written Law only work with the Hebrew language, specifically the ancient Hebrew language. For instance, it is impossible to apply the rules given in Ayelet HaShachar correctly to the Torah when it is translated into Latin; the translated text becomes just a sterile legal and historical document.
In the Malbim’s introduction to his commentary on Isaiah, he wrote three themes upon which his commenataries are based:
- In prophetic discourse there is no such thing as repetition of the same idea in different words, no repetitions of speech, no rhetorical repetitions, no two passages with the same meaning, no two parables with the same interpretation, and not even any synonyms.
- Prophetic discourse and sayings, simple or double, contain no words or actions which are set down by accident, without a particular intention, [so much so] that all words and nouns and verbs of which each passage is composed are not only necessary for that passage, but it was not possible for the divine poet to substitute any other word for [for the word used], for all the words of the divine poetry are weighed in the scales of wisdom and knowledge, carefully arranged, counted and numbered according to the measure of supernal wisdom, which only it has the power to achieve.
- Prophetic discourse has no husk without content, body without soul, no garment without a wearer, no utterance devoid of an elevated concept, no speech in which discernment does not dwell, for the prophetic words of the Living God all have the Living God within them[4].
The explanations of the 613 rules written by the translator in this book are always italicized and come primarily from Sifra and the Malbim’s commentary on the Torah, HaTorah v’HaMitzvah. Also, this book uses the Jewish Publication Society of America’s 1917 edition of the Hebrew Bible in English for translations of passages of the Hebrew Bible that the Malbim quotes; however, early modern English words like hath, ye, thy, thou, mayest, sitteth, etc., were replaced with their current English counterparts like has, you, your, you, may, sits, etc., to make the Bible passages easier to read. And the English translations of parts of the Talmud quoted in Ayelet HaShachar come directly from the website www.sefaria.org.
[1] Leviticus 23:40.
[2] Encyclopaedia Judaica, Second Edition, Volume 13.
[3] From Sinai to the Talmud: A History of the Torah Part I, by David Wolkenfeld www.sefaria.org
[4] Elman, Yaakov, “The Rebirth of Omnisignificant Biblical Exegesis in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries”, JSIJ 2 (2003) 199-249.
[5] Malbim, Beur HaMilot on Isaiah 22:13.