In a trailblazing effort, ArtScroll set out to make Talmud Yerushalmi accessible to every Jew

Photos: Naftoli Goldgrab

IN December 2019, as the Siyum HaShas approached, we sat down in ArtScroll’s Brooklyn offices with three chief editors of its Talmud Bavli edition for a wide-ranging discussion on how that monumental project came to be. Now, three years later, with ArtScroll comfortably ensconced in spacious new corporate headquarters in Rahway, New Jersey, there’s a new milestone to speak of — its just-completed edition of Talmud Yerushalmi.

Spanning 15 years and 51 volumes, this trailblazing effort to create an English-language translation and elucidation of the Talmud of Eretz Yisrael has opened wide the doors of this seemingly impenetrable work to Jews around the globe, seasoned scholars and laymen alike. The ArtScroll edition of Yerushalmi was the brainchild of Rabbi Meir Zlotowitz a”h, ArtScroll/Mesorah’s unforgettable founder and president, and he often remarked that he considered it to be the crowning achievement of his career in Torah publishing.

To mark the release of the final volume of the Yerushalmi, we once again joined three of the project’s top editors — Rabbis Eli Herzka, Zev Meisels and Yosef Asher Weiss — to talk about their experiences working on this one-of-a-kind endeavor and the ways in which it has enriched the world of Torah learning. 

What were some of the unique challenges ArtScroll’s staff of writers and editors faced in their work on the Yerushalmi? What strategies and techniques did they use to address them?

Rabbi Zev Meisels: One of the great challenges was the terseness of the text. There were so many blank spaces with nothing filled in. It’s something like Mishnayos, where one statement follows the next with no in-depth discussion or elaboration, except that at least the Mishnayos are more clearly understandable at surface level. To make Yerushalmi comprehensible and accessible we needed to fill in those blanks to turn it into a cohesive, flowing text that people can understand and enjoy learning.

Rabbi Eli Herzka: People are used to learning the Bavli, where there’s a shakla v’tarya through which things unfold in the sugya — there’s a kashya and a teirutz and another kashya and teirutz. So when people come to the Yerushalmi they want to learn it in the way they’re accustomed to learning, yet due to these gaps, it doesn’t naturally unfold in the same way.  One of the accomplishments of this project was making people feel comfortable learning Yerushalmi by filling in those gaps.

Rabbi Yosef Asher Weiss: The truth is that daf yomi regulars have already been exposed to the Yerushalmi, because every seven years they learn Maseches Shekalim, which is Yerushalmi. And I think if you would poll them as to whether they’d want to spend all seven years learning a masechta like Shekalim, they’d probably say that would be very daunting.

When we got feedback such as, “I felt like I was learning Bavli, with a flowing shakla v’tarya,” it felt like the ultimate compliment. That’s exactly the experience we were trying to give people.

Rabbi Zev Meisels: A related challenge is that unlike the Bavli, which has Rashi, there is no comprehensive, authoritative peirush in Yerushalmi. And in any given line of any sugya, one mefareish might explain it as a kashya, another might see it as a teirutz, and yet a third will render it as the beginning of a new discussion completely unrelated to what came before. So we had to find some way to bring a sense of conformity and consistency to a text where no one mefareish is automatically preeminent.

Rabbi Yosef Asher Weiss: But that also raises the problem posed by the fact that over time, the Yerushalmi was published in six or seven different editions, each of them with a different text, so that sugyos end in different places. The various commentators we have on Yerushalmi based their peirushim on these divergent texts, making it untenable to use one mefareish to explain a certain passage but another one to explain the following lines. That’s why we had to make a decision at the outset of each masechta about which commentary would be our go-to mefareish.

Rabbi Eli Herzka: In Berachos, the first masechta in Seder Zera’im, we didn’t have this problem since we felt very secure in basing our explanation on the commentary of the Charedim. He was a very early Acharon, from the generation of the Beis Yosef, so it was almost like having a Rishon to rely on, and his commentary is long and very thorough, something like the Ran on Nedarim.

Seder Zera’im as a whole was a bit easier, since the Rash Sirilio, another early Acharon, has a commentary covering most of the tractates in Zera’im, although there are gaps in his peirush. There is also extensive commentary in Zera’im by the Gra, and of course, the sefer of the Chazon Ish, which brings everything down to the level of the practical halachah.

Rabbi Zev Meisels: Even though Zera’im involves concepts that are less familiar to most people learning Yerushalmi, the availability of these various mefarshim that we’ve named made our work easier in that Seder than in the others, where we had only commentaries like the Pnei Moshe and Korban Ha’edah to work with. But there was a group of mefarshim that we used at various points in the different masechtos to decipher the pshat, such as Naom Yerushalmi, Sefer Nir, the Ridvaz and Rav Chaim Kanievsky’s shiurim on Yerushalmi. In Seder Zera’im, his sefer Derech Emunah was particularly valuable.

Rabbi Eli Herzka: Another major challenge we faced was that the commentaries on Yerushalmi often cite varying girsa’os, textual variants, which can change very significantly the meaning of what is being studied. We dealt with this issue in the following way: In our primary explanation of the sugya we used the girsa appearing in the standard printed edition of the Yerushalmi. But where there was another important girsa in the sugya, meaning there was a problem in the sugya that a major mefareish, such as the Gra, had solved by using a different girsa, we created a box on the page featuring the variant girsa and how the explanation of the sugya changes based upon it. So, the two factors determining whether to cite another girsa were the extent of its impact on the pshat of the sugya and which mefareish had cited it.

Rabbi Yosef Asher Weiss:  Another salient difference between the two Talmuds is that Bavli will generally close out its discussion of a topic in some recognizable way. Even an inconclusive ending will at least be noted by the phrase “teiku.” In Yerushalmi, however, most often a discussion just ends abruptly. You’ll be learning a sugya and waiting for some indication of how things conclude, and all of a sudden, you’re in the next sugya. To address that issue, we tried where possible to make it easier for the learner by using a mefareish who explained the sugya in a way that it did have a definite conclusion.

Rabbi Zev Meisels: Especially when we first began, we had difficulty with the language of the Yerushalmi, with simply understanding many of the words it uses. It’s written in a dialect of Aramaic that was the spoken language in Eretz Yisrael during the period when the Yerushalmi was composed.

Rabbi Yosef Asher Weiss:  There are also various linguistic quirks that distinguish the Yerushalmi from the Bavli. For example, the names of the Amoraim appearing in Yerushalmi are generally truncated from the form in which those same names appear in the Bavli — Rabi Abba in Bavli becomes Rabi Ba in Yerushalmi, and Rabi Elazar becomes Rabi Luzer.

Additionally, in the original editions of the Yerushalmi, pesukim are never quoted accurately, with at least one word being misspelled. At first, we thought these were inadvertent printer’s errors and we’d fix them. But after some time, when we saw this phenomenon was pervasive, we realized this was intentional — perhaps due to a concern that those reading the pesukim as they learn would be violating the prohibition on reciting Torah shebichsav by heart — and instead of fixing these errors we would just note them.

Rabbi Eli Herzka: Such errors in pesukim occur in our editions of Bavli too, but not nearly as frequently as in Yerushalmi. There’s a famous story involving Rav Elazar Menachem Shach, who married Rav Isser Zalman Meltzer’s niece. When they got married, they lived for a time in Rav Isser Zalman’s apartment, and the two couples would eat together on Shabbos.

At one seudah, Rav Shach quoted a pasuk, and Rebbetzin Meltzer, who had great proficiency in Tanach, said the pasuk didn’t read as her nephew had quoted it. Each insisted they were right, until finally, she pulled out a Tanach to prove she was correct — and Rav Shach pulled out a Gemara to do the same….