מעשה רב

I posted this in a comment thread on Hirhurim a few months ago. (Ah, those were the days! DiqduqGeeks had just started, and Steg, Lipman, and I were spending about 20 hours a day pouring diqduq into the comment-threads on the big-time blogs.)

Lipman hath encouraged me to re-post this comment as a post here, so I am doing so:

Gil wrote:

>ma'aseh rav

This reminds me of two things:

1. We usually understand this phrase to mean "the action of a rav". If this is the correct understanding of the phrase, then it should be vocalized מַעֲשֵׂה רַב, with a tseire under the shin semŏlith (a letter that is more popularly known as sin, but we try to avoid sin in Judaism.) And indeed, that is how I pronounced the phrase for many years. However, I recently came across a passage of Tosofos (on `Avodha Zara 66b) where this phrase is used as an independent sentence: בלאַ בלאַ בלאַ בלאַ בלַא ומעשה רב: blah blah blah blah blah and מעשה רב. I realized at once that the phrase was to be vocalized as וּמַעֲשֶׂה רַב, with a seghol under the shin semŏlith/sin, and an ever-so-slight pause between the words. (If the Tosafistic passage had טעמי המקרא, there would be a tifhā on the word ומעשה.) The meaning of this two-word phrase, when used as a sentence, is: and an incident is great, or an incident is significant [in determining pesaq].

2. On Shabbos (July 30th), I was having a conversation with my good friend TK. At one point, TK mentioned that he had heard stories of rabbis in 19th-century Europe who could not determine the proper blessing for sugar, and therefore refrained from eating it. TK did not like this attitude; he said: "In halakha, we have an answer to the question of what you don't when you don't know the proper berakha for a certain food. The answer is NOT don't eat the food; rather, the answer is say She-hakkol. I said: "Well, I'm not so sure that their action was so bad, after all. Haven't you ever seen pictures of some of these rabbis? It would probably do them good to avoid sugar."