Hatam Soferet’s inbox today twinkled with forwards of this Washington Post article.

Basically, there’s a guy, R’ Youlus, whose shtick is rescuing sifrei Torah from Nazi-stricken Europe – removing them, restoring them to usable condition, and rehousing them in America. (As someone with a personal interest in resurgent European Jewry I have my reservations regarding the idea that the appropriate way to “rescue” a sefer Torah is to remove it to America, mind you.) Jolly good. He’s been doing this for some years.

This article suggests that perhaps all is not quite as it should be in the realm of R’ Youlus’ sifrei Torah, that these are no more genuine Holocaust-surviving sifrei Torah than they are splinters of the True Cross.

In particular, certain highly-coloured, heartwrenching tales of dramatic Torah-scroll rescues don’t appear to stand up so well to close examination.

There was a legend of a Torah scroll that had been hidden under the floorboards at Bergen-Belsen…[R' Youlus] came to Bergen-Belsen on a tour and literally fell into a hole in the corner of the floorboards, felt something strange, suspected that this might be where it was. It was dug up. Indeed it was the Torah, fully there. After some negotiations, Rabbi Youlus was able to purchase the Torah…

But Youlus’s discovery at Bergen-Belsen comes as news to the historian at the camp museum. “I can definitely exclude that there could have been a find of the Torah scroll on the grounds of the Bergen-Belsen Memorial” in recent years, writes Thomas Rahe.

That sort of thing. Well, you can read the article yourselves and see what you think. Wouldn’t be the first time a pious-looking person has fleeced people by selling fake relics.

But.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

Generally I like when people share stuff with me. “Have you seen this?” they say, and usually I haven’t and it’s interesting. Thanks, sharers – keep it coming, I much appreciate your thoughtfulness.

Sometimes, though, people share jokes, and I’m observing a trend – when total strangers share jokes (sometimes by internet, sometimes by phone), it’s always men, and the jokes are always about sex.

It’s not that I mind rude jokes per se, but this is getting a bit creepy. I’m famous for having a vagina; that doesn’t mean I want to share it.

So, if you’re a man and you’re thinking about sharing a rude joke with me, please remember that so doing will make you look like a creep, and think again. If you absolutely must share your rude joke with me, get your mom to send it. Thanks.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

Two friends at Yeshivat Hadar are learning about tzitzit, specifically the extent to which women are permitted* to engage in the mitzvah. One of them comes over to me:

“We’re learning about women and tzitzit, and whether women are allowed to make tzitzit, and there’s a famous Tosafot, maybe in Gittin, that talks about that, do you know where…?”

And I admit to being rather pleased at myself being able to go “Right, Gittin 45b, Rabeinu Tam has a whole thing about it…”

I only wish I knew the entire body of Tosafot so well that I could do that for any subject!

Of course, the reason I know that particular reference is because Gittin 45b is where the Talmud stashes the main bit about why women (and children and non-Jews etc) can’t write Torahs.

Here’s the text:

כל שישנו בקשירה ישנו בכתיבה – מכאן אומר ר”ת דאין אשה אוגדת לולב ועושה ציצית כיון דלא מיפקדה ואין נראה דהא מדפסלינן בריש התכלת (מנחות דף מב.) ציצית בעובד כוכבים דדריש בני ישראל ועשו ולא בעובדי כוכבים מכלל דאשה כשרה ואמרינן נמי סוכת גנב”ך כשרה בפ”ק דסוכה (דף ח:) ודוקא בס”ת ותפילין ומזוזות דכתיב וקשרתם וכתבתם דרשינן הכי.*

And here’s me pontificating:

Rabeinu Tam (Gittin 45b, s.v.”Kol”) applied ruthless logic to the ruling that women may not write tefillin since they are not obligated to lay tefillin, and ruled that since women are not obligated in the mitzvah of tzitzit, they may not tie tzitzit for men; since women are not obligated to take up a lulav, they may not bind together lulavin for men. This was rejected by the anonymous Tosafist, who cited baraitot in Menaḥot 42a and Succah 8b which permit women to tie tzitzit and build succot, despite being exempt from both. The general position is that one who is not obligated in a mitzvah may create the objects associated with the performance of that mitzvah, and Tosafot conclude that the case of tefillin (and its associates sifrei Torah and mezuzot) is anomalous in that those not obligated in this particular mitzvah may not create the objects required for its fulfilment.

So, good news for a piecemeal approach to egalitarianism re tzitzit, not so good re sifrei kodesh; and it’s really really cool to know your stuff well enough that you can point other people to references when they want them. Now if I could only do that for a couple hundred pages of gemara instead of just a couple pages, I’d be doing well.

Back to work.

* Permitted is a term hovering in an egalitarian no-mans’-land. Must get round to talking about that sometime or other. Someone remind me plz.
** fair use copied and pasted from the Bar-Ilan text database at Spertus’ Feinberg E-collection; access to many resources only $35/year, recommended as very much worth it

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

The very observant will note that this series has talked a lot about letters, but really not about layout at all. The reason for this is that while letter forms are relatively inflexible and easy to get wrong, layout is relatively very flexible and (these days) pretty hard to screw up, so it’s not part of the proofreading process.

If you were making a chair, you wouldn’t need to check that it had four legs; you’d know darn well if it didn’t have four legs. These days, layout errors for scribes like me are of that order of magnitude.

It was not always so. More about that in a week or two.

In the meantime, I will just note that I generally proofread a little faster than I correct, so the proofreading gets ahead of the correcting, and thus it was a couple of weeks ago that I was learning leyning in Bereshit, correcting in Shemot, proofreading in Vayikra, and writing in Bemidbar. Heh.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

Most readers here, I imagine, live in countries where rights and responsibilities in the social plane are officially not apportioned with reference to gender. Broadly, this is because it is a matter of principle that women and men function as equal members of society. How well this actually plays out in practice is another matter, but in principle, that’s how it is.

It is then implausible to expect the religious plane to stand orthogonal to the social plane. To function as a full citizen in one plane and an adjunct citizen in another plane requires either a superhuman suspension of disbelief or an impaired existence in one or both planes.

This isn’t good for religion’s chances – if you’re used to functioning fully in a social plane, you’re not going to take kindly to being told you have lesser status in a religious plane. But further, it encourages the idea that the religious and social planes are and must be distinct. As someone who sees religion as an enhancement to, not a removal from, the social plane, this doesn’t work for me.

Like it or not, social climate filters into Jewish life, and in social climates which foster egalitarianism, there will exist egalitarian Jewish life, in which the idea of women as an adjunct class is in principle both redundant and repugnant. Given such a change in the makeup of society, it is not implausible for its women to write Torahs. Naturally there are communities in which women are, and are content with being, adjuncts, and certainly these communities shouldn’t have women writing their Torahs, but these are not communities I choose to live in.

The halakhic aspect to follow.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

I also have to deal with a certain amount of, let’s say, cognitive dissonance. In my travels, I’ve given scrolls (usually megillot) I’ve written to various traditional-Orthodox types, and the response is, quite often, “Goodness me, this is very nice, very nice indeed…” until they discover that I wrote it. Then their opinion abruptly changes; suddenly it is not aesthetically pleasing, the writing is not nice, and so forth. This is a) obvious and b) tiresome.

A story by way of example. One of my proofreading go-betweens also sells Torahs, and once I collected a scroll from him – it’d been written in Israel and I was to take it to its new home after sewing on some rollers and other details.

Well, some colleagues and I opened up that scroll and we were horrified. The writing was appalling. By no stretch of the imagination could it have been described as kosher.

So back it went to Mr Go-Between, who insisted that it was completely fine. No problems at all, he said. 100% kosher, he said. He sent it back to us. We sent it back to him. Repeat a couple of times; he was adamant that this scroll was absolutely kosher with no problems at all.

Eventually he was persuaded to examine it in daylight, and he conceded that there were more than one hundred critical errors per column. Completely fine, hm? 100% kosher? No problems at all? Right.

Subsequent investigation revealed that the sofer had taken the commission despite his failing sight. He had written the scroll practically blind, and while that’s quite an achievement, it doesn’t make for a kosher scroll.

But we digress. This was Mr Go-Between insisting that a really dreadful Torah was totally fine. Later, I took him my scroll for scanning, and he insisted that the writing was deeply deeply problematic in assorted ways.

Clearly I’m not unbiased, but at least mine didn’t have a hundred critical errors per column.

I certainly have scope for improvement, but that seemed like some pretty intense cognitive dissonance to me. I just have to bite down and count myself lucky that he’ll deal with me at all. Oh, and watch out for my own biases making me behave similarly in other areas of my life – nasty experience, good lesson, anyway.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

The misplaced expectation that a computer can infallibly check a Torah also touches on a deeper concept, that of the experience of writing.

What does it mean to write? is a question that has always been part of the Torah-writing rules. Could you, for instance, embroider the Torah? Is that writing? What about carving letters into plaster-covered monoliths? Embossing them onto metal headbands? What about printing? Jewish communal narrative recognises these processes as producing letters, more or less, but also recognises that this is not how people normally write: you wouldn’t embroider your account book, and if you were embroidering accounts you wouldn’t say you were writing. Experientially, producing letters is not necessarily the same as writing.

By axiom, the Written Torah has to be written, and if it’s going to be a proper written document, it needs to be properly written. It’s got to be produced by someone having the experience of writing, not someone simply having the experience of doing embroidery or whatever.

But for your average North American Jew,* the experience of writing involves a keyboard. It makes absolute intuitive sense that computers would feature in any act of writing, not excluding that of writing a Torah. Computers are how we write things. Handwritten material is positively extraordinary; the skill of penmanship is practically unknown. No-one would expect to see an embroidered book; similarly, people frequently assume Torah scrolls are printed – no-one expects to see a handwritten book. Intuitively, it makes a twisted sort of sense that the Torah should be typed.

Fortunately, we don’t take it that far; even though typing is the more common writing experience these days, pen-and-ink is still, culturally, the more authentic writing experience. Pen-and-ink is associated with real writing in a way that typing is not.**

Indeed, way way back in the days of the first Torahs when literacy was limited to an elite few, a Torah scroll – a written document – probably had an air of mystique about it simply because so few people could write, so few people could conceive of producing one. Nowadays also, a Torah has mystique by virtue of being written, because again so few people can write in this way.

An interesting example of history coming full circle, there. Writing the Torah starts as a skill limited to a small group of people; as literacy spreads but before printing is invented, writing sifrei Torah becomes less remote, such that some authorities even equate sifrei Torah with printed books containing Torah material. Then, once printing is ubiquitous, writing again becomes a rare skill and Torahs are elevated back into the inaccessible.

* By way of example, not by way of exclusion

** Which is one reason I’m not keen on silk-screening Torahs. Halakhically it’s justifiable – ink in the forms of letters is, technically, laid down onto the klaf by hand – but intuitively it isn’t right, because any fool knows that silk-screening isn’t really writing.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.