Hatam Soferet

The Edible Omer Counter returns. Updated for 2010!

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 16:56:17 GMT

Back by popular demand, the Edible Omer Counter. Notable for being the only omer counter that gives you motivation to see the Omer right the way through, this one’s got chocolate.

You will need: kosher-for-Pesach choccies, tissue paper, yarn, scissors, pen.*

Cut squares of tissue paper. I used purple over white here (these pictures are from a couple years ago, I haven’t taken pictures since then). Of course you could also use wrapping paper, fabric, foil, whatever takes your fancy.

Scrunch the paper up around the choccy and tie it with yarn. You can’t really see the colours so well in the photo – sorry; I’ve got a nice layered purple-and-white look going, by having the inside square, the purple one, be slightly bigger than the white outside one.</p>

Write the numbers 1-49 on the bottoms of the choccy packages, and use the yarn ties to attach them to one long piece of yarn. You could make it more fun (for kids, naturally – right?) by doing them out of order, and/or by having different sorts of choccies in the packages. Or little toys.

Then hang it on the wall. It ends up being pretty long, so you might have to loop it festively over something.

Starting at the second seder, after dark each night, count the Omer (helpful chart) and eat your choccy.

2010 expansion…now with kabbalah!

In Kabbalah, each of the Omer weeks is associated with one of the seven lower sefirot: Chesed, Gevurah, Tiferet, Netzach, Hod, Yesod, and Malchut. The days of the week are also associated with the sefirot, in the same order, and then you get each day of the Omer having a different combination – so day 1 is chesed in chesed, day 2 is gevurah in chesed, and so on. See wikipedia for more, if you care to.

The interesting bit here is that the sefirot also have associated colours. Swiping from a random internet source, we have Chesed – silver with a bluish tinge; Gevurah – red; Tiferes – light green, like a ripening etrog (citron); Netzach – light pink; Hod – dark pink; Yesod – rainbow of hues including blue, red, yellow; Malchut – dark blue with purple tinge. Almost black.

Now.

The book Kabbalah: an introduction to Jewish mysticism (another random internet source; kabbalah isn’t my thing, particularly) talks about how one form of kabbalistic practice is to meditate on the colours of two different sefirot and then combine the two into a coalescent colour.

So here’s your challenge this year – go and design your own Omer counter which responds to this idea. Share your pictures. There may even be a small prize (a real one, not internet cookies) for the one that makes me go “squee” loudest.

* Strictly speaking, I suppose only the first seven choccies need to be kosher for Pesach, as long as the rest don’t contain actual chametz. But if you’ve bought a whole package of Pesach candies, what are you going to do with the rest of them?

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 13:18:43 GMT

I find myself (and the BFoC) in need of Shabbat meals on the UWS. On this kind of notice, I won't be surprised if I end up improvising, but if any of you friendy-types are around and hosting, um, can we come plz?

JOFA conference – on writing. Part 2

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 00:25:37 GMT

Session blurb: If one writes a sefer Torah, say the Sages, it is as if he had himself received it on Mount Sinai. How can the simple act of writing take someone to such heights? By transcribing small amounts of text, we will explore how writing Torah can be experientially very different from reading or learning or leyning; how the pace of transcription can give one fascinatingly different perspectives on the text, and how the act of transcription can cause one to process it differently.

I started with a bit of me-background – what I do, how I learned to do it, where I’m holding professionally, that sort of thing. Why, in an orthodox framework, what I do is a problem. The session blurb said “This session will not include halakhic discussion,” because that wasn’t what I was interested in talking about. There’s only so much time you can spend on sources that basically say “No…uh, no” and I’m not into spending time that way, at present.

So I asked the group (fifteen or so people, counting one who left halfway because she’d got the Quills workshop mixed up with the Quilting workshop) who’d read Torah the previous day. Sure enough, someone had, so I passed over a tikkun sheet and had her read a few verses, to make the point: this is what these verses sound like when we read them in shul.

Then I asked if anyone had heard a dvar Torah this week, with the idea of getting people to focus on another way of interacting with the text, that of using it as a starting-point for an idea or a halakha.

I talked a bit about how the Sages mandate writing, rather than inheriting or buying, a sefer Torah, and about how they say of one who writes an entire Torah that it is as if he’d himself received it at Sinai. I asked people to think about how writing a text is different than reading or, say, printing – handwritten envelopes and thank-you cards featured, and I brought up writing as a learning technique also, in its role as a way of getting information into your brain.

Then we did a spot of practical calligraphy. I most particularly didn’t want this to be a calligraphy workshop; I wanted people to experience writing at the Torah-scribe pace of three or four words per minute and to focus themselves within that. So I gave a quick demonstration of how one might write words in ordinary handwriting and then adorn them with colour, or alternatively how one can trace letters from a tracing sheet. Both of these don’t require much in the way of calligraphic expertise, but they entail about as much engaging with the letters and words as more practiced calligraphy does. I thought this would be the best way of simulating the experience I was after.

I gave out tikkun sheets from the parsha the Jews had read the previous day – most people there, if they hadn’t heard it the previous day, had heard it or read it at some time or another, I figured, and I wanted the contrast fresh in people’s minds as far as possible. Then I just had everyone write what was in front of them for a good twenty minutes.

This is the bit where you can tell if it’s working or not. If people are engaged, you can tell, and if they’re bored, that infects the others and everything falls apart. Happily, people seemed engaged, and got into it.

I picked everyone up, when I judged we’d had time enough, and asked people to compare their experiences of writing to their experiences of reading or otherwise engaging with the text. Which they did, most satisfactorily – it was very interesting.

I could do another post on what people said, but this’d be more interesting if you went away and did it yourselves, and came back and commented. Don’t you think?

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

JOFA conference – on writing. Part 1

Tue, 16 Mar 2010 00:22:02 GMT

Fun times at JOFA yesterday.

That’s the intermittently-annual conference of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance, for those not au fait with Modern Orthodox slang. I admit I was rather surprised when they asked me to present, given that I don’t identify as Orthodox, but I said as much and they were still interested, so I guess whatever I am, it’s closely-related enough that they figured the conference attendees would be interested.

I very much like opportunities to talk about my work that aren’t the standard Look At The Torah Scroll or My Life Story that constitutes 90% of the public presentation I do. Last month I was in Boston, at Tufts University, talking to undergraduates, and that was great fun – undergrads tend to be deliciously interested in thorny issues, and they’ve often just discovered the joy of tussling with a problem, puppy-like, so undergrads are one of my favourite groups to work with.

Then, as now, I was using presenting as a forum to tackle the following question: classical halakha says there’s basically no way to argue that what I do is okay. My present justification is based on emunat hakhamim – community leaders whose learning and integrity I respect seem to think it’s okay, and since egalitarian practice is in large part a matter of communal acceptance, that’s something upon which to rely.

However. When I contract to write a sefer Torah, and we specify that the sefer is to be written in full accordance with normative Ashkenazi halakha with the exception of the gender of the scribe, it’s kind of analogous to someone who provides meat, which has been selected and slaughtered in full accordance with normative Ashkenazi halakha with the exception of the species of animal. That is to say, sometimes I feel rather like unto one who performs ritual slaughter on pigs.

All this leaves me wide open to the question “So why write sifrei kodesh?”

The workshop I was presenting at JOFA attempted to give an experiential perspective on that question. I wanted to convey the manner in which writing out verses of the Torah gives you a very particular and close relationship to them.

I’ll continue in Part 2 shortly.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

Further to the conversation we’re having about Jewish education, rabbis, etc

Sun, 14 Mar 2010 03:12:20 GMT

(This conversation. The one about Rabbi Barbie.)

A question about tzitzit

I get a question in my inbox.

Hi, Jen. I have a question and I have been told that you might know the answer. I am wondering if there are any rules about what to do with old tzitzit (arbah canfot). I want to get some new ones but I don’t know what to do with the old ones. Do they have special significance requiring some special treatment, or can they be discarded like any other fabric?

“Ask around and find someone who knows” is a perfectly valid way of getting a question answered, naturally, modulo the risk of misinformation (especially when asking Auntie Google).

The Text Model of finding the answer

Still…the way endorsed by the communities I hang out with, particularly the yeshiva ones (I would say “yeshivish,” but that’s got other connotations), goes like this.

1) There are rules about everything. So where do I find the rules about tzitzit?

2i) Orach Hayim deals with everyday sorts of things. Let’s try there.
OR 2ii) You just know that hilkhot tzitzit are in Orach Hayim.
OR 2iii) Ask Wikipedia, which will tell you “Orach Chaim 8-25″.

3) Fish out your Mishnah Berurah. Find the bit of the contents page which says HILKHOT TZITZIT.

4) Skim down the chapter heads until you find something that looks promising. You don’t have to be able to translate all the words, you can do it by deduction, when you know a little bit about how the contents are arranged. For instance, it’s probably not going to be near the beginning, because the question “what do I do with an old tallit” presupposes a lot of “tallit” concepts which have to be defined first. It’s also probably not going to be in a section called “Zman…” (”Time…”) or a section with a root meaning “sell.” Keep skimming. The section with the words “Talitot yeshanim” – that looks promising, since “yeshanim” means “old.”

Yes, it’s freaking intimidating to skim a table of contents in a halakha sefer. I know. But once you have a bit of vocabulary, a bit of navigational skill, and a dollop of confidence, you can do it.

5) Read the section.

6) Now you know the answer.

The Cheese Model of finding the answer

It’s like shopping in a foreign supermarket, kind of. You want to buy cheese. Okay, you can ask someone “where’s the cheese?” and that’s fine. But if you want to find it yourself, what do you do?

You know it’s not going to be in the vegetable section or the peanut butter section. You know it’s going to be in a fridgy sort of place, so you find the fridgy places and look through them till you find cheese.

So far, you’ve not really needed any language skills at all; maybe you read the aisle labels. You needed cultural skills – knowing that this is the sort of shop that contains cheese, knowing that cheese lives in fridges, knowing what cheese tends to look like.

Then you’re going to need some language skills to make sure you aren’t buying goat cheese, yes. But the point is, you don’t need to know how to read every single word on every single package in the store, and you don’t need to know where every single item in the store is, and you don’t need to know where all those items came from – you found the cheese, and if you have a dictionary you can probably figure out what you need to know.

Of course it’s not always that simple, and of course there are lots of ways you can get off track, and we could explore that in the cheese metaphor or in the context of halakha, but let’s save that for another post, because that’s not the point right now.

Point is, with some really basic vocabulary and navigational skills, we found our way to the rules about “What to do with broken-off tzitzit and old tallitot.”

Now, this is where we get to start questioning the educational model.

Why halakha isn’t cheese

I have enough vocabulary now that I can read through that section, pretty much (with dictionary) and work out that it’s telling me, I can get rid of an old tallit katan by putting it in the garbage, but I can’t use it for something gross like a snot-rag, and a good person detatches the tzitzit and puts them in geniza.

But. There are plenty of instances – communal prayer is a better example – where we don’t, in fact, do precisely what’s written in the book, since a good many years have passed since then and ritual evolves – and adhering to the book won’t help you or anyone.

The book will keep you from completely screwing up – if you put your old tallit in a plastic bag in the garbage you won’t have done anything hideously wrong. But you need some input from the community to find out, what do we do? For which one needs conversation, tradition, mimetics – all sorts of things.

Which, by the way, is why it’s okay to ask me, even though I’m not a rabbi. Because here the question, fundamentally, is “What do we do,” and I’m as much “we” as the next person.

And when it’s a vast, complicated issue like marriage or death or something, one needs someone who knows the bigger picture – the book, and the other book, and the commentaries, and the conversations, and the tradition, and the other tradition. Learning the bigger picture takes time, and helping people work out which bits of the bigger picture pertain to their situation takes time, and that’s what we have scholars and rabbis for.

That is to say. The model where anyone vaguely interested in referring to the Mishnah Berurah for answers becomes a rabbi is deeply unsatisfactory. But likewise, the model where we don’t need rabbis and everyone can use the Mishnah Berurah – is also deeply unsatisfactory.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

Soferet at play

Fri, 12 Mar 2010 22:00:07 GMT

Why, what would you do if you found a mangled laptop in the garbage room?

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

Guestblogging at JWA – crosspost

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 23:37:25 GMT

“You know Barbie’s getting a new job,” says my friend Mimi to me. “People can vote for her new career.”

I put tefillin on a Mattel Barbie doll in 2006, unwittingly creating the Jewish icon now known as Tefillin Barbie. Tefillin Barbie has a frum-girl denim skirt, a T-shirt, the tallit and tefillin more generally worn by Orthodox men during morning prayer, and a volume of Talmud; a whimsical activity for a vacation morning, she generated a vast and wholly unanticipated amount of reaction, positive and negative.

“Hurrah,” people say. “Now we can have Rabbi Barbie!”

But why, people? Why? Barbie put on tefillin and picked up a gemara, so now she has to be a rabbi? Why can’t she be an IT engineer who prays with tefillin and learns gemara in her lunch break?

Read the rest of this post at http://jwablog.jwa.org/tefillin-barbie%27s-new-career.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

when is the megillah read?

Fri, 26 Feb 2010 02:27:55 GMT

We seem to have started Purim early.

That is. There was the Fast of Esther, and some resultant light-headedness and silliness. Then there was Purim Kiddush, and then Megillah reading while I was finishing up work. There were also silly songs and minor quantities of rugelach. A splendid chazan's robe also featured, actually because of the snow causing wet trousers, but it certainly added to the festivities.

Why? Well, the Mishnah says the Megillah is read on the 11th, the 12th, the 13th...

Mon, 08 Feb 2010 03:49:27 GMT

Dropped computer. Power socket tragically bent. Limited battery life. Expect reduced posting, correspondence, and birthday presents, until such time as it is fixed.

In other news, McCormick's tome on the origins of the European economy is really really interesting and making me bounce a lot.

WOE, WOE

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 21:49:43 GMT

OKAY THIS IS COMPLETELY RIDICULOUS

I GET THAT THE BUILDING IS FALLING TO BITS AND THEY NEED TO PATCH IT UP WITH LOUD MACHINERY. REALLY, I GET IT.

AND I MEAN IT'LL BE NICE WHEN THE WINDOW DOESN'T LEAK BUT DAMMIT THIS IS LOUD.

I CANNOT WORK IN A BUILDING THAT SOUNDS AS THOUGH IT HAS GRUMBLING INDIGESTION FROM EIGHT AM TO FIVE PM.

ALTERNATIVE VENUES WILL BE UTILISED. THE ORACLE HAS SPOKEN. THUS IN STONE IS IT WRITTEN. THIS IS RIDICULOUS.

ah. yes.

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 00:03:58 GMT

First cup of tea of the day at Hadar: did usual foolish trick of attempting to remove teabag with fingers. Ouch. Drop teabag hastily. Tea splashes onto white shirt.

Declare emergency state of National Do Your Laundry Whilst Wearing Your Clothes Day, in (vain) hope of not being the only person walking around in a wet shirt.

Shirt still dampish by work-time. Turns out that dry ink crumbs brush off clothes just fine, but only when the clothes aren't dampish. Shirt now has attractive speckles of ink across the front.

Decide that Bleach Your Shirt Whilst Wearing It Day has no hope whatsoever of catching on, and leave that task for later.

This is why traditional scribes wear black and white, you know. If it's black, it doesn't show the inkstains, and if it's white, you can bleach them out.

false fire, black on white

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 12:06:23 GMT

Youtube link

I built upon a rock,
But ere Destruction's hand
Dealt equal lot
To Court and cot,
My rock had turn'd to sand!

I leant upon an oak,
But in the hour of need,
Alack-a-day,
My trusted stay
Was but a bruis-ed reed!

Ah faithless rock,
My simple faith to mock!
Ah trait'rous oak,
Thy worthlessness to cloak,

I drew a sword of steel
But when to home and hearth
The battle's breath
Bore fire and death,
My sword was but a lath!

I lit a beacon fire,
But on a stormy day
Of frost and rime,
In wintertime,
My fire had died away!

Ah, coward steel,
That fear can un-anneal!
False fire indeed,
To fail me in my need!

Come and play with me...

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 17:38:21 GMT

I intend attending this, for an afternoon of general scribal squee, and would love such company as fancies coming along.

Please join JTS Library staff on Tuesday, February 23rd from 4:30-6:00pm on the 5th floor of the Library, for our Library Open House.

You will have an opportunity to view a broad selection of rare and unique materials from the Library’s magnificent Special Collections relating to the holiday of Purim.

Curators will present items spanning the 10th-21st centuries -- manuscripts, rare books, broadsides and archival material, as well as our digital collections. The Open House will showcase our extensive collection of megillot (scrolls), many of them elaborately decorated. A well-known Judaica artist will be on hand to discuss the Purim megillah he created, influenced by his engagement with traditional Jewish texts and commentaries.

For educators, there will be a panel discussion and question and answer session from 6:00-7:00pm, led by a prominent educator from the Davidson School of Education, a practicing artist and the JTS Librarian, on how the primary materials of Jewish study can transform both the teaching and the learning experiences of students.

We look forward to seeing you on February 23rd. If you would like to attend this event, please sign up. For questions, please contact Hector Guzman at heguzman@jtsa.edu.

Please share the attached flyer with friends, students and colleagues who would be interested in joining us.

Holocaust Torah scrolls, and judging favourably

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 05:45:40 GMT

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.

( Read the rest of this entry » )

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

ringbritain.com: cookies

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 15:04:42 GMT

I use ringbritain.com to call home. This is a cheer for them, following fantastically efficient customer service experience this morning. Really remarkably efficient. And it's a pretty decent service, on the whole - sensible user-friendly setup, low rates. Sometimes the calls drop or fail to connect, but for low rates I'm willing to put up with that now and again.

Recommended.

A bit of boundary-setting

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 04:05:27 GMT

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.

Atheists daven too…

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 04:59:09 GMT

The Forward’s got an article this week about an atheist siddur.

My knee-jerk reaction to that is “eww, what?!” but I know myself for a liturgical conservative, so when the nice Forward people asked for an illustration, I got out my special Mental Crowbar I use for inducing open-mindedness, and came up with the piece you see here.

See how it works? It’s a well-known phrase from the liturgy, both expressing the idea that every living thing has the urge to commune with the divine, and leaving the viewer to contemplate just what that means.

Note, by the way, that we say “every living being,” not “every living person,” or similar. This surely consciously includes living beings who don’t have theology, like fish, say, or deer, and why not atheists? The idea of non-theistic beings seeking spiritual communion is hard-coded into theistic liturgy, so really an atheist siddur is not such a bizarre idea as all that.

You can’t really see from the picture, but the pen-flourished decoration is an old manuscript adornment done in a très modern ice-blue metallic ink, a visual echo of what the siddur is attempting.

It’s for sale, make me an offer :)

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

the pleasingness of knowing sources

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 04:01:55 GMT

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.

Stretchy letters in print

Sat, 16 Jan 2010 04:01:07 GMT

We talk about stretchy letters in sifrei Torah, now and again (post about said stretchy letters). Here's a post about stretchy letters in print.

You know this icon. In the universal language of word processors it means "right-aligned text." Lines run level down the right side of the page; if a line doesn't fit perfectly, there'll be a little bit of white space at the end of the line, and the left edge of the page will be ragged. This paragraph is left-aligned (and made narrower than the rest of the page, so the justifying will show up better), so the right edge is ragged.

If you don't want a ragged edge, you use this one, the icon for justified text. The word processor does its clever tweaking so that the lines come out nice and straight down each side of the page. This paragraph is justified, so both edges are straight. And made narrow and provided with otherwise superfluous verbiage so that it'll cover more than two lines.

This is accomplished by averaging out the amount of space between each word, so that the words are evenly spaced along the lines. We don't usually notice that the spaces between words are different sizes on each line, unless the variation is noticeably huge. The variation is rather pronounced in the couple of lines to the left, for instance.

This is actually a rather involved process. Computers can do it because they are rather good at sustaining hundreds of calculations per second, and it is easy for them to add or remove bits of space here and there. It is not so easy when you are a compositor using movable type.

So there are tricks printers, and manuscript scribes, use to keep their lines manageable. Abbreviating is one. Too many letters in a line? Knock a few letters off common words, the sort peo. will be able to rea. anywa.

Or initialising - turning common phrases into acronyms. P. G. Wodehouse does this, although probably not for the same reasons - Mix me a b.-and-s., Jeeves - perhaps he had learned rabbinic texts and knew the despair of sentences which end with i.o.u.a.* (And perhaps not.)

Or sometimes they stretch letters. Here's some stretchy letters in movable type - compare the two sizes of hey, especially.

Printers like symmetry in their stretchy letters. You don't see stretched reish in print much, but you see it all the time in sifrei Torah; you don't see stretched final-mem in sifrei Torah much, but you see it in print.

More symmetry - when they stretch lamed, they bring its foot faaar forward and bend its neck right back, so that it's more or less balanced. Scribes don't do this. I think this liking for symmetry has to do with where your eye is drawn - in Ashkenazi Torah scripts the horizontal carries far more weight than the vertical,** so your stretch is mostly concerned with its horizontals; but in print both dimensions are roughly equal, and you want to stretch letters that are going to stay balanced despite that.

Not a definitive list of Letters Stretched In Print by any means - just I went to a shiur (Yeshivat Hadar plug), and the handout was a photocopy from a page typeset in this way, and it caught my eye.

* Brandy-and-soda, and "impossibly obscure unguessable acronyms," of course!

** Bit more about that here.

Proofreading, part 30

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 03:59:17 GMT

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.

Proofreading, part 29

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 03:41:21 GMT

I summarised my attitude towards women writing Torahs by saying that the full citizen, the adult male in good standing, may participate in the transmission of the community’s symbolic centre, and the adjunct classes of women, children, and slaves, may not; today, it is a matter of principle that women not be an adjunct class and therefore may participate on the same basis as men.

This is not how the language of halakha expresses itself, naturally. Halakhically, the issue is framed in terms of the mitzvah of tefillin – those who are Biblically-commanded and socially-accepted as tefillin-wearers may write the sacred scrolls; others may not. Women are not Biblically commanded to wear tefillin, therefore they may not write the scrolls.

It seems simplistic to say that in communities where halakhic validity and gender equality are equally indispensable, women do wear tefillin, and that said wearing is held by said communities to be equivalent to men’s. Simplistic, but when an immutable principle meets an overwhelming imperative, on some level the answer is simple. The community says in its actions “this is what we do, this is what we expect of people, this is how it’s going to stay” – and once that sentiment is in the heart of a community, we don’t wrench it out, so the halakha must perforce adjust to accept it.

You can’t run a religion like that, changing the rules of the society every time you sniff hurt feelings. This is a halakhic sledgehammer, and swinging it too freely will destroy the halakhic structure. But societies where gender equality is well-grounded and gaining demonstrate that gender equality does not render a society inherently unstable (on a century of evidence; give it another five centuries and we’ll be better placed to tell), and thus one may say with a fair amount of certainty that applying the halakhic sledgehammer to the principle of gender equality will not render the halakhic structure inherently unstable either.

We’ve got off the topic of proofreading rather, but there again, proofreading is the process that ensures the stability of the Torah text, which itself is symbolically the stability of the Jewish people, so it’s vaguely associated. Anyway, that’s about all I’ve got to say concerning proofreading at the moment.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

Proofreading, part 28

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 05:11:28 GMT

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.

Proofreading, part 27

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 04:16:31 GMT

Of course, people say “um, no actually” to me, being female. It wasn’t the handless guy’s fault he had no hands, it’s not my fault I’m female. He just didn’t have the physical makeup to write a valid Torah and that was too bad; I don’t have the physical makeup to write a valid Torah and that’s too bad also.

Really, I do know a lot of decent people who have to say “um, no actually” to me, and they do act like yesterday’s posited rabbi – feeling really sorry that he’s got to say “um, no actually” to this person who’s put in so much effort and so badly wants to be part of the community and it isn’t their fault they can’t participate through this activity.

So why’s it different? why am I expecting the handless guy and the Braille-writer to suck it up, while I go right ahead and write Torahs?

You could say I’m just a hypocrite, a case of “one rule for us, one rule for them.” Some people do say that. I see where they’re coming from.

Way I see it, women doing men’s things isn’t exactly a physical makeup thing, it’s about how gender affects one’s communal status. Women are barred from Torah writing in the context of societal strata; some classes of people may participate, some may not. In particular, the full citizen, the adult male in good standing, may participate in the transmission of the community’s symbolic centre, and the adjunct classes of women, children, and slaves, may not.

This is perfectly sensible as far as it goes, except that in our days it is a matter of principle that women not be an adjunct class.

Such a statement requires some unpacking. More on that tomorrow.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

names of awesome

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 17:30:39 GMT

Writing Shelach Lecha, the bit where the spies are about to go check out the land of Canaan.

They list the names of the people who are going on the trip.

I like playing with the names.

Best of all I like גדי בן סוסי, Goaty-baby ben Horsie. Of course, then you run into problems with גדיאל, Goaty-god, but hey. We make up for it with מכיאל, SMITEY-GOD, and his friend גאיאל בן מכי, Gooey-el ben Mucky. And ופסי, Vaffsy, who seems to have wandered in here from a Wagner epic, gets culturally bemused in company with Amiel ben Gimli, visiting from a Tolkien epic. What're they doing here? Who knows, but it brightens up the morning.

Proofreading, part 26

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 03:42:55 GMT

Backtracking a bit to the experience of writing.

I talked about producing letters as not necessarily being writing. Specifically, embossing (the process of creating a shape by pressing up from the other side) isn’t really writing.

We might say: ah, but Braille is created by embossing, and today there are lots of people for whom writing in Braille is experientially the same as writing. So why couldn’t you emboss letters and make a Torah for the blind? At any rate, a Braille Torah?

Leaving the technical difficulties aside (rolling an embossed document into a scroll is asking for trouble), it’s an interesting proposal.

There’s a case recorded – I forget the reference, I’ll look it up if anyone cares deeply – where a guy with no hands wrote a Torah with the pen held in his teeth, and the Torah was ruled invalid, because holding the pen in one’s teeth is not what most people perceive experientially as writing.

The guy had written a whole Torah, remember. That’s a hell of a lot of work – I mean, it takes me a whole year, and I’ve got two perfectly good hands. He’s written a whole Torah with the pen in his teeth, and he’s got no hands – I would speculate that the rabbi who ruled his Torah invalid felt like a real heel. You couldn’t be any kind of decent person and feel really sorry that you’ve got to say “um, no actually” to this person who’s put in so much effort and so badly wants to be part of the community and it isn’t their fault they can’t participate through this activity.

But you’ve got to, and I think that’s also the case for Braille Torahs. Holding the pen in one’s teeth, or writing Braille, is definitely some people’s experience of writing, but that doesn’t mean it’s the cultural experience of writing, and it seems that that’s what matters here.

Ramifications of this attitude tomorrow.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.