Daily Talk
A man reading the Megillah while he keeps dozing off has fulfilled his obligation. A man wide awake, reading aloud with full intention from a scroll he is at that moment writing, has not. Sleep is not the disqualification and alertness is not the qualification, so the Rambam is plainly not measuring the reader. What is he measuring?
The One Thing That Has to Be Whole
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About This Talk
Chapter 2 opens on sequence, ruling that a single verse read out of place voids a reading while a pause long enough to have read the whole scroll costs nothing, and then works through the reader, holding that recitation from memory fulfills nothing, that a listener who understands no Hebrew is discharged by a Hebrew or Greek scroll he cannot follow, and that a man who renders a Hebrew scroll aloud into Aramaic discharges neither himself nor the wife who understood every word. It sets the requirement of intent very low, discharging a scribe or a proofreader who simply decided that this reading would count and even a man who read while dozing, and then draws the one hard line, that a scribe is discharged only by the finished scroll he copies from and never by the sheet under his pen, since a man is discharged only by a scroll completely written at the time of the reading. The chapter then specifies the scroll itself, ink on ruled parchment sewn with sinew, three stitches sufficing because the Megillah is called an epistle, before turning to the days, forbidding eulogy and fasting on the fourteenth and fifteenth, ruling that villagers who read early carry their gifts to the poor with them and may not carry the feast, fixing the feast and the wine and the two portions and the two gifts, instructing that whoever stretches out a hand is given without any examination, and closing on the one book that will not be nullified when every trouble has been forgotten.