Hatam Soferet

Text and image from this article at the Contemporary Jewish Museum site:

Starting this October, the Contemporary Jewish Museum will present As It Is Written: Project 304,805, an exhibition centered around a Soferet (a professionally trained female scribe) who, for one year, will meticulously write out the entire text of the Torah, also referred to as the Five Books of Moses, on public view. As she works within the gallery, the Soferet will actively engage in dialogue, answer questions, and share the mysteries and tools of her trade [but not while she's working -jtf]. The Museum will be the first public institution to reveal this process, offering visitors an opportunity to learn about its spiritual and ritual essence while framing it as a profoundly contemporary act.

that's my student whee!

and do you recognise the HAT?

Onion win excerpt:

...Mouse-killing isn't solely the province of organic and medical scientists. Many other scientists kill mice, as well.

"As a physicist, I don't really have much cause to use mice in my regular research, which mostly requires the use of theoretical math," said Dr. Thomas Huber, author of the 1996 study Mouse Elasticity And Kinetic Rebound In High-Acceleration Collisions...

In other news, I've just put together a worksheet for those who would like to begin learning to write Torah-style, but don't want to get into quills and suchlike just yet. This is a worksheet that gets you going on motor skills and eye skills, and you can do it with a two-dollar calligraphy marker. I'm going to keep it off the internets for the moment, so if you would like a copy, bung me an email.

Picture a room with a couple of soferim in it, writing Torah. A proto-sofer is practising letter samekh. The sound of a lecture on the weekly Torah portion floats in from down the hallway. Another proto-sofer takes a deep breath; she's about to start writing her first mezuzah. Her teacher is there, keeping an eye on her as she turns months of hard study into a real scroll.

A rabbinical student drops in with a megillah; he can't quite work out what he's doing wrong, but someone with more experience can get him back on track. Bolstered with good advice, he goes on his way, passing on his way out another proto-soferet who is coming from her Talmud class. Letter samekh is set aside and the two pull out books and tackle halakha. Mezuzah girl, taking a lunch break, helps them out when they get stuck.

They leave - they have Bible class now - and another student arrives. She's an expert on the Ancient Near East, a university professor and rabbi. She lives in the next state and studies on her own, and comes in every few weeks for an hour's lesson, after which someone is bound to get her into a discussion about texts from antiquity, and everyone will get very excited. After she's gone, work resumes, perhaps punctuated by occasional exchanges of advice or the sharing of a thought on the text. Someone will fetch some tea, someone will take a minute to look up a halakhic ruling. Letter by letter, their scrolls grow.

In the late afternoon, a round-eyed eleven-year-old comes in with her bat mitzvah teacher. They're taking a break from a Torah reading lesson, and coming to see the Torah being written. A Torah scholar spends an hour working on her own calligraphy; she doesn't want to be a sofer, but she likes practising here with the scribes. Her Seeing Eye dog sleeps under the table; she's practically blind, but she finds calligraphy inspiring. Everyone else finds her inspiring.

Around suppertime, a sofer and a proto-sofer arrive from their day jobs. Over supper, they catch up, talk shop a bit, and then set to reviewing some of the basics. They'll almost certainly end up chasing a tangent through the rabbinic literature. Someone will bring an academic perspective, someone will share a midrash; they may finish the evening discussing practical concerns, or philosophy, or awed speechless by some particularly astounding idea.

Sounds nice, doesn't it? And the great thing is, it's not just a pretty dream. It happened last week, and the week before, and the week before, and God willing it will happen next week and the week after and the week after. Baby scribes and proto-scribes and getting-better scribes, people sharing what they know and what they've learned, writing and studying and listening together, and all the while the Torah grows and grows. It's very beautiful.

(I can be emailed for more info.)

I visited a Hebrew school today, to talk to the children about how a Torah scroll is made. We unrolled a Torah and looked at it carefully, I passed out materials so they could have something to touch, and we talked about what, and about why.

Children in Hebrew schools often have excellent questions about the Torah. Sometimes they make me think pretty hard. Often the answers are on several levels,* and I have to think fast and decide which level of answer is most appropriate for the age group, the level of Jewish literacy, and the denominational setting. I don't know how formative an experience it is to meet the Torah scribe, but there's always the chance something I say is going to colour some kid's religious experience, so I'd better get the right colour. It means working with Hebrew schools is always different, always a challenge, and always interesting.

This group had some unusually intense thinkers. In addition to some particularly sharp Torah questions, I was particularly charmed by one child who nobbled me afterwards while I was packing up my bag of toys. I'd mentioned (tangentially) how kosher slaughter is effected with a very sharp knife, and this kid wanted to know why sharp was important, and what would happen if you used a blunt one. So we talked about helping in the kitchen, and how it's easier to use a sharp knife on a tomato than e.g. a plastic knife, and went from there to how the same would apply for a goat, and what effect that might be supposed to have on the goat's experience of it. Kids don't usually stay focused enough to ask me stuff afterwards, and particularly not about things like that. That was a nice experience.


* Anything starting with "why," for starters.

Fourth-graders, yay!

I like starting sessions with a visual, just to make sure we all know what we're talking about. So we unrolled a Torah down a long table, and everybody looked, and then the session went with the children's questions. You never can tell what they're going to be interested in, but with the fourth grade it's a pretty fair bet they're going to enjoy the gross bits. So that was a fun session; some of them had really interesting questions, and they were all tremendously well-behaved, no grabbing at the Torah or any of that.

I met with about a zillion other groups, three-year-olds from the preschool going up in age more or less indefinitely. One of the functions of this week was to introduce the congregation to their new Torah while it was in the genesis state, as it were, and I certainly got to introduce the Torah to a lot of people. It's pretty cool when you think about it - these tiny people are going to be bar mitzvah in ten years, and they'll be reading from this Torah, and they might still remember that they saw it being written. And they might be able to tell their children, when they have bar mitzvah age children, that the Torah they're reading from was the one Mom saw being written when she was in preschool.

And on the subject of pretty cool, this came from the day school:

We saw the Torah scribe my favrit paet was seeying all her writing.

Is that not the cutest thing ever? I'm the one in the middle with the Artistic Beret. And look at the sheet of Torah with the wee crowns on the letters. I remember writing similar compositions when we met the doctor and the nurse and the fishmonger - now I'm the Torah Scribe! I mean gosh - me! In kiddies' notebooks!

Sofrut I met in New Jersey this week, for a change. We've been plugging through the letter forms according to the Keset ha-Sofer.

Laws about letter forms are the ideal example of why you need an Oral Torah. The idea behind rabbinic Judaism is that there's a Written Torah, and then there's an Oral Torah which helps you understand it - so if you look at the Torah and it says "an eye for an eye," the Oral Torah helpfully explains that that's metaphorical. Then you read that passage of the Torah in the light of metaphor, and bingo, you have a system of legal damages.

Letter form laws explain that this bit of a letter must be just so, and this bit of a letter must be just so, but they do it in Hebrew, so in order to understand them at all you must already have a pretty good idea of what the letters look like. The extra-textual tradition tells us what the letters look like, and then the textual tradition tells us more about what exactly makes an aleph into an aleph.

Does that make sense? I think it's a rather fun philosophical theme, myself.

Hung out this evening with Proto-Soferet LC. Proto-Sofer DMV was sick, so he wasn't there. LC and I talked technique for a bit, and read through the Mishnah Berurah's definitions of some of the letters.

I thought I had an English translation of them somewhere, and thought I'd post it here, but I seem to've mislaid it, and there's not a great deal of point putting only the Hebrew up (since if you're able to comprehend it, chances are you have access to the Mishnah Berurah already; this bit's at the end of siman 36). Bleah. margavriel, you haven't perchance made a translation, have you?

I got up at 5am today to catch a bus to Philadelphia. The 5am part wasn't so great, but the Philadelphia part was fun. I was assessing the Torahs in a shul, which means taking a whole lot of notes regarding the conditions of the sefer with an eye to estimating how much it'll cost to restore them.

They had six Torahs - three bad, three good.

One was in basically good condition but for the seams, which someone had stuck together with duct tape. People, please - if your sefer's seam breaks, either use artist's or archivist's tape, or don't tape it. The duct tape had not only dried up but had left hideous, hideous stains, which probably contain elements of non-kosher animals as well as being a ghastly orange-yellow - and the seams still need to be fixed. Overall gain negative.

Two were hugely satisfying, because the text and klaf were in lovely condition, really fine quality, and nicely written - but very, very, very dirty. So dirty that they looked to be in awful condition and perhaps beyond restoration, but hurrah! the dirt will almost all come off, and they'll look like new Torahs by the time I'm done with them. I was very happy about this, because it was such a nice surprise for the shul! Instead of two Torahs headed for retirement, two high-quality sefarim which won't cost too much to repair...nice!

One was in a terrible condition, but it was a Czech Memorial Scroll, so you'd sort of expect that. It would be fiendishly expensive to repair - it had extensive flaking, which I'd guess came from being stored in a damp warehouse by the Nazis - but those scrolls are terrific educational tools, there's all kinds of history/geneaology/shul-twinning things that can go on. Sometimes they have enough sentimental/historical value that repairing them is worth the expense. After all, these were scrolls that the Nazis collected up to put in their museum of Jewish stuff - they were supposed to be the last things that were left after the Jews had all been killed. So restoring them to use carries a pretty powerful message.

Two were in truly terrible condition, really beyond repair from a financial perspective. They had been designated Junior Scrolls, which meant they were hanging out in the Hebrew school area. It's not clear what they're used for; they can't be being read from since they're largely illegible. One of them had crumbs and sesame seeds in it. I'm a little bit concerned by this; it seems to me that these scrolls ought to be retired, because it doesn't seem to me that the educational benefit outweighs the indignity. What do you think - am I over-reacting?

There was a collection of Russian cantors visiting the shul - mostly Russians who got here and became cantors (some of them had been opera singers in Russia) - they were doing choral stuff for fun. I listened to them for a bit; they were very nice to listen to indeed. Unusually for a choir of cantors, they had excellent blend. Every other cantorial chorus I've heard has had simply awful blend - prima donnas all trying to out-prima-donna the rest. So to hear a choir of cantors singing like a choir was a treat and a half!

Philadelphia seemed very pleasant, the bits of it I saw. Another nice city to add to the list of Nice Places I've Seen. My favourite bit was the statue of Mr Penn on top of the city hall, because it used to be against planning laws to build higher than his hat (this was revoked twenty years ago to encourage business growth). I found this charming.

Journey back marred by the movie - the screens were not showing anything, but the soundtrack was playing: a mixture of very loud music, indistinct speech, screams, and gunshots. At 5pm! It doesn't seem appropriate to be showing people getting killed for fun on public transport, especially during the day. This is basically why I prefer taking the Chinatown buses when I can - no nasty movies.

But when I got home, my W had made supper and it was ready and yummy. A good day.