Rav Dovid Ebner zt”l was a monumental and transformative figure for the thousands of students he taught—at Yeshivat Hamivtar, Eretz HaTzvi, and elsewhere. We were privileged to have his leadership on the board of ATID (parent organization of WebYeshiva) from our founding, and to host many of his shiurim on our platform. Always available to his students, he maintained countless chavrutot—in the beit midrash, at home, and in later years online. Aside from his main vocation in teaching Gemara students to “learn how to learn,” his talmidim were exposed to the profundities of Rav Yitzchak Hutner’s Pachad Yitzchak, the Sfas Emes, Maharal, and other giants of Jewish thought, all mediated through Rav Ebner’s sensitive reading and guiding hand as he trained us to decipher these texts and apply them to our own lives. He did this with the insights he brought from his own mastery of the Jewish canon alongside Western literature and poetry. Himself a poet, Rav Ebner was always attuned to the language of the texts we studied and was skillful at drawing our attention to what was hidden between the lines.
With his untimely passing, his teaching and guidance are sorely missing. However, he left behind “breadcrumbs” for us to follow in some of his most beloved sefarim. Decorating the margins of many of those books we learned together are his meticulous annotations. Divrei Dovid: Marginalia seeks to make public those comments in his neat hand for us to follow in his footsteps. Learners will need a copy of the books themselves (respect for copyright does not allow us to scan entire volumes, but any page bearing an annotation is scanned in full). Some of these are “mere” cross-references to a Rambam or Gemara; others are lines from a sonnet or poem; in some cases he jots down initials, which we presume are the names of talmidim with whom he studied the section (perhaps you’ll find a hint to your own name there).
Rav Ebner’s handwriting was usually precise and legible, some jottings may require a bit of deciphering; some notes were clearly shorthand messages to himself and we invite you to offer your interpretation of these enigmatic marginalia. Each book features some quirks: Rav Ebner had a habit of placing his initials ד.י.א. in tiny print on the upper-right-hand corner of p. 14 in each book—a kind of fingerprint left inside (perhaps fearing the volume would wander away and lose its cover, he’d be able to identity it with this tiny bit of embedded “DNA,” or DYE). On the inside front cover of many books he used a system of recording chapter or section numbers, presumably a catalog of the ma’amarim he taught and the order in which he had done so (a dot under each number may indicate that he had returned to it a second or third time).
Below you can access the marginalia by R. Dovid Ebner zt”l on individual volumes from his library. Please email us comments to office@webyeshiva.org to offer your insights as we together “unpack” this gift he has left us, to offer new interpretations you develop on your own, or to help us decipher enigmatic notations. Comments may be shared here.
We hope to upload new scans as the project proceeds.
—R. Jeffrey Saks
Click on book cover to download the scans:
