Rabbi Yosaif Asher Weiss — Pele Yoeitz Haas Family Edition

[music] >> Welcome to Inside ArtScroll, [music] where the books that we read and the people that write them come to life. It's a pleasure to welcome Rabbi Yisroel Asher Weiss to ArtScroll Studios. Thank you. Now, Rabbi Weiss, I'm particularly excited to talk to you because 98% of the people on Inside ArtScroll are authors. And that kind of makes sense. But it's just a snapshot inside ArtScroll from the author's perspective. You bring a whole different world into the conversation. So so share with us briefly what do you do on your day-to-day and why you're such an integral part of production. >> Well, I have several jobs inside the very, very complex process that starts when an author writes or translates a safer and ends when we print the book that most people that read the books don't even know exist. But it's ArtScroll is known for being very careful about the quality of our work and the fidelity of the work to the translations that we do from the original to the translations that we do. And that takes a tremendous amount of hand-holding throughout the entire process. We need an author. After we have an author, we have an editor. After we have an editor, we have a reader. Then back from the reader to the editor again. And at that point, when we have a finalized edited manuscript, it's given to a whole bunch of people. And it has to be read for many different reasons. It has to be read to make sure that the text, the Hebrew text, is correct. It has to make sure that the Hebrew text that we have on the top of a volume and the Hebrew English text that we have in our elucidations match. Then the Nikud, which often is done in-house, has to be checked to make sure that it's correct. The English has to be checked. The sources have to be checked. The readability has to be checked. And the P'shat has to be checked. We have separate people who do all of those things. So, every manuscript, I'm talking mostly about the Hebrew English works like the Paleyaus, goes through four or five or six different people who read the entire manuscript and send back uh suggestions, corrections, ha'aros, and many times they don't match. There'll be three people who suggest that something has to be corrected three different ways. And you can't put in all the corrections because that'll just make the problem worse. There needs to be a clearinghouse where everything that is suggested and corrected has to come to one place and then it's what we call merged. So, I'm the merger for the all of the or virtually all of the Hebrew English projects that we work on. Paleyaus, most recently Rashi, Sefer HaShaylah u'Teshuvah, but every project pretty much that comes through the uh the mill, so to speak, eventually winds up on my desk and it keeps me very busy. Aside from that, I also edit certain projects, Pele Yoetz having been one of them, so. >> Who translated the Pele Yoetz? >> My son, Mosha, was the was the one who translated Pele Yoetz for us. Baruch Hashem, yes. I have several sons now working for us translating various works, so Baruch Hashem. >> So, on some level, you're the behind the scenes of the behind the scenes. >> In a way, yes, but uh it it keeps us very, very busy, and one of the literary editors on many of these projects is my rebbetzin, so I work with her as well. So, Baruch Hashem, it's a a family affair in a way, but we keep >> Just that your last name is not Zlotowitz. >> Can't have everything. >> Rabbi Was, when did your relationship with ArtScroll start? >> So, I started uh working for ArtScroll in 1990. It's uh it's been a busy 36 years. And originally ArtScroll was just on the cusp of expanding tremendously. It was right before the Mesorah Heritage Foundation actually came into existence, which it's now 35 years. And we had just done a couple of the volumes of the Shas at that point. Makkos was done, and Eruvin was done, and Rabbi Zlotowitz, zichrono livracha, was casting his net to try to find people to write masechtos in Shas going forward. And uh my my I am have a masechta sort of at that time was Bava Basra, and I had learned Bava Basra many, many times. >> You couldn't pick a shorter one? >> So, and as many people know Rabbi Sladowsky was very, very close to Rav Dovid Feinstein who was my uncle. And when he was looking for people to write the sechtas, Rav Dovid suggested that if he needed somebody to write Bava Basra, he should please reach out to me. I met him at a MTJ dinner, I remember, in 1990 and he asked me to write a sample. So, I I wrote Daf Beis. I came in that that summer and I got grilled by a very determined group of talmidei chachamim. >> Can we know who they are? Or that's >> Well, some of them are household names. Rabbi Sherman, Rabbi Danciger, Rabbi Chaskel Danciger. Uh Rav Rav Nossonel Kasnett, Rav Binyomin Davis and Rabbi Davis was were among them and Rosh Yeshiva Kollel, Rav Hershel Goldwurm, I still have the printout which came on the kind of printer that had holes on the side, if you remember I don't know if you're old enough to remember that is. And I got the printout of Daf Beis back from them with 57 hours on it. And I asked for a meeting. I said, "I agree with some of them. I don't agree with some others and can we sit and talk?" And I came that day and we schmoozed for a few hours. I won some, I lost some. But after that, they decided that they were willing to give me the job. So, that's how I started. I started as a >> 57 hours on every forthcoming um >> No. >> No. That was the trial by fire. That that's how it worked. We always get hours, but that's that's you know, that's what makes it so good because everybody asks and one of the hidden siyata dishmaya that ArtScroll has always had is that all of us nobody is uh stuck on doing it his way. If we discuss something and we come out, this is the chat that makes the most sense. Everyone is mevatel daas and that's a very, very big reason I think for our siyata dishmaya. But I I worked for ArtScroll for 3 years doing Bava Basra. And in the course of those 3 years it became apparent to Rabbi Eislandwitz that it was not going to be possible to give the mesechtas to single authors and keep the pace that we had committed to for klal Yisrael. We did all of Shas excuse me in 15 years. Two months a zman of Daf Yomi. We did we did all of Shas. And so we started breaking the volumes into multiple pieces and giving six or seven different people the job of finishing a whole volume. And it became very apparent that there was a danger in doing that because if one of your editors was a Brisker and one of your editors was a Telzer and both of them had a sugia that involved the breira you would get two notes explaining how breira worked and they would not be the same. So we lost a certain amount of consistency as we were preparing. So this came to light when when we had a a problem in one of the volumes and Rabbi Eislandwitz at that point came to me. I was still in kollel. I was working on Baba Basra only part time and he came to me and he asked me if I would be willing to take on the additional job of reading the Gemaras before they were printed and making sure that everything was consistent. And I was very happy to do it. That's was in 1993 and I've been doing that for the last 33 years for all of the for the for the all of the Shas and the Hebrew Shas and the Chinuch and the Kitzur and all of those Seforim that that people have Baruch Hashem on their bookshelves. That's the process that they have to go through. And if we do a good job, they can't tell. So how deep does the consistency or the congruency of of it go? That means let's say let's pick your Braira example. In Baba Basra, Kobi you edited the entire thing so you know that you had to give the same understanding of Braira in both Sugyas. But let's say the Gemara brings up Braira in Beiya. So once we've done it already, the idea in a perfect world is that the editor who's doing Beiya knows that we already printed a different volume and he looks there and he sees what we did and he copies from that, not copies, but adjusts it so it should match the Sugya. As we got further into the Shas, we got better at that. Obviously today because of computer technology that has improved, we're even better at that. It's not a perfect world because everybody we we don't want to be slavishly consistent. That's not a maila. Everything has to be a little bit different. Sometimes Rashi used two words that he didn't use in a different Sugiyem. And we want to reflect that. But we do have a good staff of people who work very hard to have a lexicon for each project. We're going to spell this word this way. We're going to spell Avraham, not Abraham. And again, over the years we've adjusted. If you look at the English Shas, we use Genesis. We used Abraham. It was a different daughter. Today, when we print our Shas, we use Avraham. We use Bereishis. That was the decision. I think it's already 15 years that we've been switched over from the more scriptural way of describing things because our audience has changed. The people are learning more. They're more familiar with the with the Mekorot. And because of that, we adjust with the times. But we always try, certainly within a project, to translate the same thing the same way. If you have a a note that you already wrote about a certain thing, you try to use what you have already. And it's a job. >> On a lighter note, >> Yes. >> you identified a big part of my trauma. I learned Talmud and Brisk. >> So you didn't even know where you were going [laughter] with that. But you understand exactly what I'm talking about. >> I didn't have a Brera. >> [laughter] >> It was totally B'di'eved in this case. >> Very good. Um So you personally learned every single daf of the ArtScroll Shas from the beginning until the end just to make sure that there was congruency in it? >> Starting I I I didn't have to do Eruvin. Eruvin was done before I I was on board. And Rabbi Reisman did a great job anyway. So it really wasn't that much of an issue with Eruvin because he did the whole thing. He knew what he wrote and he was looking at what he wrote. And there were a couple of volumes in between when I started the master when we got to I did them the second time around. But initially, yes, once once I started I read probably every volume that that Artscroll has published in Hebrew and English. The gave me the ability to read very quickly. >> Wow. I I can't even begin to think about how much information you have to absorb and retain. >> But then think about doing that with every work with six copies of every page because everybody sends in their hours >> You're the clearing house. >> Exactly. I call it the back stuff. But the beauty of it though is that although I have to go through everything it doesn't fall on me to solve all the problems. A lot of them, the simple ones, the ones that are straightforward I take care of myself. But we have amazing scholars Rabbi Rabbi Goldwurm obviously left us too soon, very early in the process. But one of the people that carried the load for many many many years who I was worked with hand in glove for decades was Rabbi Millerwitz of blessed memory of blessed memory. Who also was an amazing talent when it came to reading quickly, didn't have to sleep. And he could just answer you. Didn't matter what you asked him. You call him up, you would ask him and he would have an answer. So that was a very valuable resource. You battle him. Uh Rabbi Shore of blessed memory. Although I don't deal with him that much directly but when we have a question that needs an answer, he makes himself available. Reb Melinetzer Reb Elio has sort of stepped into his father's shoes to a certain extent, and he's always available when a consultation is needed. The rabbis Danziger, Apfel, and and and Reb Chezkal, Reb Eli Hertzka, nobody stints their time when I call because they know that I'm asking because we have to take a volume to print, and I actually need an answer. It's not something you can push off. So, it gets done. It's It's a busy job. I work late nights, but it gets done. >> I I I want to double-click on something you said before. I was trying to put myself into the shoes of an of an editor. I'm talking about not an editor that's editing a story book. An editor that's editing Pela Yutes, Yisroel Avrohom Avida, Yisroel >> Sure. >> And I give my RS I give my input, and it gets ignored. Or my input is not addressed. At some point, does that create a certain sense of rejection to the editor? Or because everything is the same shamayim, you let it slide, and you move on? >> Right. So, it's an interesting question because there's many levels to it. Editors are almost never ignored because the way we usually work here in ArtScroll is that the author's job is to provide the manuscript, the backbone. He understands that we're not printing when we're talking about a safer. He understands that we're not printing what he wrote. He's giving us the template to to make better and to fix. So, the author will give something to us and sign off on it. Right. The editor is responsible for the thing that gets printed. So, when the editor sends it to the reader, and the reader has his he's horas, the editor is the one that fixes it. So, his input is essentially his is the ultimate input. When it comes to pages, the horas that we get are on 5% of the work. It's not being redone at that point. And usually these are things that the editor either didn't think of, would not have been worried about because he didn't deal with the other Gemara that became a problem. So, most of the time the editors are very happy. They say, "Thank you for catching that." And usually the editors, by the time I'm doing my work, are already into the next volume, and frankly they're very happy if I don't bother them. So, the reader sometimes, I mean, it's an interesting story, but Rabbi Millerowitz, in the early years, when he he was a reader on everything, he said he used to play with his children a game. He used to have his sheet of horas that he sent in. They would take the printed volume, they would open the printed volume, and they would see, "Did they listen to me? Did they not listen to me?" He said, "And whenever they listened, they would clap. And whenever they didn't listen, they would say, 'Uh boo.'" He said, "After a while, he stopped doing it because he saw it with too many times that we didn't listen." But the truth the truth is that nobody takes anything personally because we're all here for the same reason. We want to put out the most accurate product that we can. And nobody should think that everything is perfectly accurate. Nothing is perfectly accurate. If you look at what the app people which is another one of my jobs, the the app people, when they put things on the app, one of the things they do is they look up every single source because they have to hyperlink it. >> Correct. >> And sometimes the note number is wrong, sometimes the sif number is wrong, sometimes a daf in your shul may be wrong. Whenever they make a change, before they make a change, they have to send me an email detailing the change and explaining why they did it so I can just say, "Okay, approved." Because we want to have a record of every change that we make and why we made it. In the course of the last 10 years, I've gotten thousands of such emails. There are always little things that can be made better because we're not AI, we're human. >> Good. But my wife what when you when you produce a very complex safer, let's say a more esoteric safer, like you say a Mishnah Berurah on Yevamos on some level, and it come the the buck stops at your desk, are you thinking about the highest common denominator or the lowest common denominator? Which I'm talking about the reader who could could learn Yevamos on his own no problem, but he's using the ArtScroll maybe for that insight that he couldn't get to. >> it it's a very interesting example that you pick. We have a I'm going to say a rule that we follow. Things that we don't understand, we don't try to explain. And a lot of Zohar's, parts of them fall into that category. We had this in Ramban, we had it in we had it in Chinuch to an extent. We're having it now in Kli Yakar to an extent. And it was negaya in Yisod HaShoresh HaAvodah, too. Rabbi Wenzelberg in Yisod HaShoresh HaAvodah together with Rabbi Morgenstern, shlita, did an amazing job of bringing down the esoteric to a level that we're comfortable giving it to people to read. To write, you know, this seat and this the different things up in shamayim that we haven't been zocheh to see yet, to pretend that we understand how that it would be that would be disingenuous of us. And we sort of have a disclaimer note that we use many times, which says, "A precise description of X is beyond the scope of this elucidation. We have endeavored to provide only a basic translation." And that's what we do. But we try hard to give enough so that the sense of what the Yisod HaShoresh HaAvodah wanted, which really is how much how important this is, how much a person has to care about what he's doing when he's saying what he's saying. That's what we try to do. And the Yisod HaShoresh HaAvodah was brilliant, makes it very clear in the sefer itself. He says, "You can't have the kavana that you need to have. You don't know how. But it doesn't matter because God doesn't expect you to do what you can't do. And therefore, if you have the kavana, Ribono shel Olam, please take the kavana that I'm having and fill in the blanks the way you know how." That's what you should do. So even the author of the Shulchan Aruch himself understood our limitations. We try to stay in our lane. We don't No, we don't go past what we can do. There have been certain things that we, especially in Ramban, it happened when they're very, very Kabbalistic, we didn't translate them. Because it would not help to give names to things that we can only guess at what they mean. Not everybody follows that when they translate, but that that's that's what we usually do in ArtScroll. >> Are you responsible for some of the translations that really don't have an accurate translation? I'm going to give you like one example. Do you know how ArtScroll translates the word tum'at met? >> Probably tum'at met. >> Corpse tum'ah. >> Corpse tum'ah, yeah. >> Who Who thought of the I I would I was looking at the recently cuz I'm starting to look at I was Who thought of that? >> Probably Yisroel Danciger. >> Okay. >> I'm I'm I'm I'm just guessing. I mean, if you wanted an example of one that I was responsible for, it goes all the way back to the beginning. Hezekiah. It was a question, how should we translate Hezekiah? >> Right. >> Damaged by seeing. >> line is it's >> Right, that's when it came up. We started damaged by seeing. It It we thought it was too clunky. We wanted something that sounded a little more elegant. So, we decided we were going to call it visual trespass. Right? Which is an elegant turn of phrase. You would be surprised how much blood, sweat, and tears goes into how to translate one word in a Mishnah. I still remember a meeting which lasted 3 and 1/2 hours. Six of us back and forth, up and down, how to translate Mishnan Ben Naim. Which is it's a Mishnah in Bava Basra, it's an odd meaning. The Gemara debates exactly what it means, and we were trying to find a translation that would work in the Havamina and also in the Maskana, because one of our big rules in the Shas was try not to give away the show before the Talmud learns. >> Like Rashi always says, the Gemara will fire away. >> Right. Exactly. Don't don't give away the show. Even though today's day and age the the Magidei Shiur that that say shiur they don't do it that way. They give away the show before they start. But we were trying to train people to read, to learn, how to learn. We didn't want them to know everything until we fed it to them a little bit at a time. Literally took us hours, and I remember we we ended the meeting, and we weren't happy. And late late that night I got a phone call from Reb Ely Hershkowitz, and he said, "Yes, Sefas I got it." And he told me, and he was right. And that's what we went with. But these things happen all the time. There's a there's a healthy dose of caring a lot, but there's also a healthy dose of Siyata Dishmaya. And and I could tell you a hundred stories of somebody called me up a day before something was supposed to go to print. He said, "I was looking at this note because I had to look at it for something else, and there's something wrong there you have to look at it." And I would pull out the file, open up the file, look at the page. It was perfect. There was a stupid mistake in the note before, which passed everybody. Nobody would have looked at it. It would have gotten printed. The only reason I saw it was because he called me to look at something which was correct. And once it was opened, I noticed that wait, that that can't be right. And it got fixed because watches over us. >> Your job literally reminds me of the Khunya ben Akiva. >> Yeah? >> 100% it's a awesome responsibility. >> Baruch Hashem. >> But it seems Baruch Hashem like you have this after the Shmaya. >> We we try we try very hard and and everybody is very very focused on making sure that we do the best we can. We're not perfect, but it's a lot of work. I'm working now. We just finished uh you know, everybody knows we we finished we just finished Rashi at least at least project and and and Robert project you say the they all came to a head at the same time. So you'd say, "Oh, so there must not be much doing." Titus in the beginning of Sukkah and turn it by Leo and the Katanas and Kli Yakar and the second volume of Sukkah and >> And the Mishnah Berurah and and the and the Rashi's in Hebrew. >> Rashi's in Hebrew the Hebrew Hebrew Hebrew projects I don't have to work on. Baruch Hashem. When the Hebrew Shas started on the way so the same work that I was doing on the English Shas I was working on the Hebrew Shas as well. >> Wow. >> And it wasn't good for two reasons. First of all, my Hebrew is fine when it comes to finding problems. But if I had to rewrite a note, my Hebrew is not on the level that I would be able to write the note and get it ready to print. English I can fix a note and you can print it. In Hebrew I can't do that. And when a Hebrew volume and an English volume came down the pike at the same time, which happened a lot during those years, I had to choose which one to do first, and it was a problem because nobody wanted to hear that the other one had to wait. So, I spent a few years working with Rabbi Cohn. >> Sure. >> And he took over the Hebrew. So, Hebrew only volumes Rabbi Rabinowitz took over. Rabbi Cohn and and Rabbi Cohn now in Eretz Yisrael, so I don't have to work with those volumes. Baruch Hashem, I I'm I'm busy enough with the with the Hebrew-English stuff, but on a regular basis, I'm working on five different projects at a time. That's That's That's just a regular Tuesday for me. >> Amazing. Um this has been a super fascinating conversation. I feel like we just started learning and understanding. And Hashem should just give you the siyata d'Shmaya, the strength, the koach, the stamina that for many, many more years you should be assisting ArtScroll in putting out the near-to-perfect products that they produce. Amen. I Thank you so much for your Thank you so much for your time. It was a zchus. You're very welcome. >> [music]