- Uriel Shkolnik: [to a student] I will tell you something that my father told me once: Your work has many things correct and many things innovative. Unfortunately, the innovative things are not correct and the correct things are not innovative.
- Narrator: Eliezer Shkolnik came up with a revolutionary argument. A version of the Jerusalem Talmud circulated in Europe in the Middle Ages, different from the version we have today. He proposed this after discovering small differences between the version we have and the text quoted by the Sages of the time. Understand, this means hundreds, thousands of books, each having several versions of manuscripts. Eliezer Shkolnik analyzed all of them, for almost 30 years. A huge undertaking! With a lot of audacity. Then, a month before he was about to publish this monumental work, his life's project, another scholar, Professor Yehuda Grossman, by chance, found inside the bindings of books at an Italian monastery, the manuscript of that version of the Jerusalem Talmud. The original that was used by the European Sages. And so made all of Shkolnik's work unnecessary. It actually proved Shkolnik's thesis, but Grossman published it before him.
- Josh: We can learn from this that hospitality is more important than the Sabbath?
- Eliezer Shkolnik: This is a very nice idea. Very nice. But wrong.
- Josh: My father says that this is what Lévinas says.
- Eliezer Shkolnik: Yes. One cannot draw evidence from fools.
- Eliezer Shkolnik: To quote the Babylonian Talmud, "A man can be jealous of anyone except his son and pupil."
- Eliezer Shkolnik: I'll illustrate it for you. Say we both deal with potsherds. Yes? Broken pottery? One of us examines these potsherds, cleans them meticulously, catalogs them, measures them scientifically and precisely, tries to decipher which period they're from, and who made them. And if he succeeds, he has done his work properly, and it has scientific value for generations. The other looks at the potsherds for a few seconds, sees they're more or less the same color, and immediately makes a pot out of them. The potsherds may be from different periods, they may not exactly match, main thing is, he has a pot! The pot is very nice, very attractive, but it has nothing to do with scientific truth. It is an empty vessel. An illusion. A tower with no foundation. There is no pot! That's the point! It's fiction.
- Eliezer Shkolnik: A momentary lapse of concentration of the copyist, whose eye skips from one word to another, is called "homoeoteleuton."
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