#3- Rabbi YY Keller: Rambam expert, Reb Moshe, son of Alter Rebbe, Authentic Research - RC Dalfin

welcome to uh meaningful interviews part three with could say the going the genius Rabbi Keller who a of the re and I knew his father was a very very special man now we've spoken about your knowledge and writing about Al is my we spoke about uh your insights into the interesting things in the tal that you don't hear in the Yeshiva Halls of Lakewood Amir and pich now I want to turn to your writing especially you take manuscripts and uh you've published several of them one's called Peter shirashi it's one of the tractates in the talmud and one is this you can see this dark page here reab Keller found the I guess had access to the uh manuscript of rabal askanazi you said and he put this out but what I what what I'm I want to also talk about um people come to you right from all over and they know that you're an expert in this Fe in in this field and other fields um how do you tell us a little bit about that your work and you've been writing probably about 30 years I assume okay so obviously there are uh works that are I initiate their their production yes and then there are people who want to assemble books or do research and they turn to me to either do the research or or or edit the books sometimes it it involves also typing so uh one example is the a from the famous and his sons mayor and and and his son and also from yeah who was from and then in right yeah so he was from Russia but he moved there he was from Russia he was a in Alexandria in in Russia and then he was he was became ofz in and then he became of in for his last 16 years um and he was also one of the editors of the encyclopedia tudis the so all these the man his name is Blazer lane blaz lane what happened was had quite a few sons and when at that time there was XA there was a decree that if uh that conistan that that all the Jewish uh children should be recruited a certain percentage of them 10% should should be recruited to the Z's Army and apparently um so there was always a threat that the son of of should be one of those children now there was a rule that if you're an only son then they won't recruit you to the Army right so when his second son I believe his oldest son was R the second son was ofon and Aon they took now the way you write the the is an X so when you clip the X it comes out to the uh uh it's the shape of of a Russian l so it became lame so one of the branches of of of of this Aron Lane was a person by the name shom Lane who lived in kabad he left Russia and married some woman who came from Poland and he was actually one who saved his father had sent him I believe his father's name was Aon LA and his father had sent him that he should go there were people coming refugees coming from Poland into Russia and he sent them that he should go and and do things with them he brought them yamas and okay and and some of them left with him why you telling me all this I'm saying anyways he he decided to publish these chuvas of of of rat Lane all the lanes right and when he did he approached me and he asked me if I can both type it and edit it and add add when I told I'll add footnotes also he was very happy because what the footnotes do is usually you so you publish you read a Chua you want to read a Chua but you're not you didn't just learn thata is a respon a respons it's a respons from in different queries but you're not in you didn't just study that subject so if somebody who is well better versed in the subject study that subject and he brings it in the footnotes and then then you can follow what's going on right so that that was that was your work on that on that book and that sa and what's interesting is that in he had another book a which is the history of the and fascinating which is a fascinating you did that too no no so that book was primarily done by him his research and written by uh schneer Berger yeah but however he since the uh KS they come they go all the way back to those who were the heads of the Exile during the Babylonian Exile and so he wanted me to do that research and he he made some of that research himself but he gave me to finish writing it and then doing the the final so I that occupies about 120 pages in that book and it's phenomenal yes yes i' I've looked at parts of so your work is um research oriented um now are you uh an expert in in Reading manuscript manuscript writing in in other words it it's I I I have a hard time deciphering and reading a lot of those what a lot of it is experience and the rest is say it's it's a help from help from hem so experience I when I was a young boy I started how old were you when you started I would say when uh when I was 11 and 3/4 is when I went to Israel and within a short time my father had an A whole discussion with r Greenberg on the pages of the and he wanteded to look up about what the the mechanism that Ben ctin made for the cure for the wash basin in the B mikash and there's a whole discussion what thei and what the ra and and there was a discussion about who was Kiran is in Tunis and was a big huge City in the times of the and a little afterwards that's why and wrote the first commentary that covers practically almost all of the tal besides from Kum and he there was a reference in's commentary on Yuma and he wanted me to look up the manuscript so that was the first time that I really so you went to Hebrew University yeah I I went to the Hebrew University 11 and a half years old or so uh that was when he sent me and then sometime later I I went I had some spare time and I went on my own and I did research on over there in the walls of the I was able to look up microfilms as a matter of fact one of the books that you saw the Rashi on yes so that was a book that was first published from manuscript because in our gas what's written in there's the internal uh commentary is rashis the external is places but on on way on some other M it's not Rashi now on some M it's not Rashi because Rashi didn't write or Rashi wrote but we don't have it but on not only does Rashi write it but it was around in the times of the and for some reason which we'll soon explain if we have the time um it it was when they first printed in Italy when they when they first printed in Italy the the gamar I I held the gamar in my hand yeah so 1492 1494 is the first is the first print print of a gar bras and when they first I hel it my hand yeah when they first printed the gamar they used to spend years they didn't just go okay let's go print and let's let's let's print a set and no they they gave it some time they would take a big uh somebody who really well versed in in in in the talm andar Rashi and to and he would look at a few manuscripts of the talmud and Rashi and and to or as many as he can get his hands on and he would do diligent research it would take him a year or two to produce such a they didn't just and so 33 years passed I'm not sure if 33 or 31 years passed from from the printing of which I think is one of the later and they only printed from the 36 M that have talmud they probably printed 23 or 24 there were still others but bomber he was a Christian he wanted to make money fast money he liked to print sets set he wanted to print a set of gar so when it came toas and other he just took one manuscript and printed it as it oh here's my question yeah good when you find these new manuscripts yes have you has it supported what you learned in the talmud and its commentaries or sometimes there's contradictions okay so we find that even Rashi would sometimes say this is the way we we study it we study it this the way text right so obviously if Rashi has to tell you it usually tells you that the text that he had had otherwise now it could be one of two ways it could be that there were two texts two basic texts and rash rash is selecting one or maybe in certain instances Rashi is just selecting one even opposed to uh text which which is a thorough research that a lot of researches the the the research on it what's interesting is about shama fredman who did a lot of research on these subjects uh he's a professor that was once in the jts Jewish Theological Seminary now he's probably sham somewhere he did extensive research for instance on and he found that a lot of the differences what tractate is that okay and as interesting B usually we talk about that we said there are 60 tractates but if you count them there are 63 right so each mean one gate they one gate of a big which is known Asik which deals with all monitary Affairs and it was divided like this so and you go back to your pointway do he say there a peric so he says he did diligent research on that particular peric and he found that a lot of the disagreements already in the Gonic era there are already two versions uh that we have and one became prevalent in ashkenas and Saras and Germany and France another one became prevalent in Spain but usually we do not have the sometimes there's one which precedes that split so somebody claims that in we actually have a manuscript that pred that split but it's not if both were around it means they're both valid we know sh there 70 so they're both when it was given in s was given so here's my question what about Yemen isn't Yemen the oldest Jewish Community yes so what's interesting is Yemen is one of the older Jewish communities 2,000 years old and and and we have letters from the Go written to the people of Yemen and of the land of Yemen and Yama so we know that Yemen is the original format of the name not ton ton is based obviously on the fact that in tanak we have tamon but in any case Yemen and what's interesting is we spoke about the earliest dated manuscript of a gamar yes so the first record in's letter about a written gamar you see in B we had this expert system we said we had 60 people everybody knew one m and they taught it so we didn't need a written t but the first time we needed a written tal is when one person for some reason left B he came to to Spain and he was going to teach the talwood over there now over there the only way you can learn the talmood is if you had a written text so he wrote down the text and we have the year when he came which is approximately the year 9 I mean 760 and what's interesting is there's one place in the gamorra where in some of the old man manuscripts it says which year it's either it's recorded or the from which from which year it's recorded there is a discussion tells you there's 6,000 the says the world exists for 6,000 years two first 2,000 years is chaos the next 2,000 years is Tyra and the last 2,000 years is and it says it says and there it came out of it came what came out but in the garas it used to say years actual amount of years and ra tells us in a cha that he discusses this gar he tells us that every year you add where usually the gamor is meant to be static there's one part one particular there's a few words that are meant to be fluid that word that's telling you which year how many years we are into the fifth millennium or six blending once that time comes that's supposed to change every year it's supposed to add because you're supposed to tell it's supposed to be telling you how many years have passed since 4,000 but at some point when they just copied one from copy from another they stopped changing so in any case the oldest date recorded in that is in aite man manuscript and the record is around that time it's it it used to Google it says 520 something or 535 something like that which is not a long time after was actually recorded in Spain uhhuh so that's that's interesting okay now um what about your uh recent uh writings I know you wrote a safer a book on uh theim the students in La Yesa which I've used uh myself it's fascinating um I know that you've recently uh helped produce two volumes on all the of or as many as you could find um so what type of uh work and research do you do for those things okay so uh I just want to add two more interesting stuff one has to do with Manas the mention you mentioned raazi when in Vila they printed the the comments of razi on GAR who was asazi briefly brief briefly R askanazi was the was a student of of of the of DAV Wasim and he was one of the teachers of the and he wrote an assemblage of which we used in yes which we used in Yesa of course andu and he wrote also and was was part of the group of those students that that worked with raazi okay goad so what do you want to say about it so we uh when they printed it they believed that they were printing it from the actual manuscript of R they printed what the comments of razi some some corrections in and it turned out somebody wrote a guy Al shman wrote a whole article pointing out that it's not the actual manuscript but when I did the research I found out that there are seven pages in Manas that there are two copies of it and one of them is actual handwriting of Bal askanazi and what I found out when I was looking at it was something interesting we always ask the question how come the gamar shouldn't have commas and periods and we would think it's holy the rabis decided at some point that that's the way it should be but I found I found when I looked at it that the rabbi Bazi writes between every place where it should be a comma or a period he makes a dot in the middle between the two letters you see and you'll see so what I did is I had actually a few pages retype set from the gor Rashi and to where I inserted the commas and the dots so you should know that it doesn't have to be that way not only that but the corrections I inserted inside instead of having the mistake the way the original printer printed it and then the correction I just corrected inside right anyways to get to another Point yes well so when it comes to history um somebody shalomar Shapiro who's also uh puts out videos about the Reb and he has extensive archive he's the he's the sonw RAB M he's also he was also assistant at some point he was appointed to be the assistant principal Ocean Parkway yes and he had given me uh the archive of the Yeshiva that was given to him by Rabbi Tenon Bal and he actually asked me to make uh to write this book and initially he funded it so uh he started this project and at some point he ran out of fund so I took over the project and but what's interesting is so I interviewed I what are we talking talking about the your book on the book is about the students of that in 1940 the established here in America yeah 1940 1950 1940 and and there's a little interesting uh uh introduction to it which is recorded in rabie Jacobson's book yes how he was the first to teach a lot of these students Casas and they sent some of them to americ boys yeah they were American boys and there was a couple who went his daughter and son-in-law went to atat for a whole year RAB Rabbi he and another two boys Rabbi berety and Rabbi Le went there and then there were another six boys that went there just for a few weeks yeah because the war broke out with them the the Yeshiva in Ocean Park in in in seven in Crown Heights actually in Brooklyn the in Brooklyn was established when it was established was actually established in east Flat Bush which later became rabi B book it came from Shai yes yeah so what do you at the time I believe rabi Castell was the of oh really yeah uh what was the name of that sh sh o shabas o shabas yes so um I believe on Stone Avenue uh one Church Avenue 53rd 53rd yeah 53rd over there yeah I remember so what's your future plans as far as uh writing researching anything that's so that's really some people actually said that it would be interesting to translate into English there's a lot of interesting one of the things that I did over there uh we have the picture when in I it believe I believe it would be in March tuin Bas 1942 when they took pictures of the 50 students that studied in in uh in 50 plus in 770 and that was all the students from from the big boys all the way down to second grade whatever what we call now second grade there weren't that many classes then right um and there are also in addition to to the general picture which all 50 students plus students are are together there's also individual pictures of RAB G's classes which was Thea of of Rabbi there should be somewhere what's your point the point I'm saying transl when when when I'm saying so one project is to translate that into yeah but we don't that's but you're talking about new project you need to be used for more compc one one thing that would be interesting to do is the talmud the Rashi on talmud English there is by now books on tus in English yes but nobody has translated Rashi on the talmud in English that's interesting so this well may has help that we find a Sporter at doter and it's going to go online so we're calling the people RAB Keller would like to do this project and I think he's the right man for it as you've heard this is uh been a phenomenal three-part series and uh I want to wish you at much success and you should see the Shas from your children your family and we should see mashia with our own eyes and only have thank you very much amen thank you thank you very