Hatam Soferet

Me in the Forward :)

Just in time for the new year, several notable firsts have taken place in the world of Jewish women...

Full story (but there's a picture in the print version!)

Isn't that a lovely big number? At this rate I'll be finished before Shabbat. Hurrah!

, people!

The Torah is at...



When the book of Deuteronomy's served up in portions week by week, one doesn't realise just how repetitive it is, but when you write it day in, day out, my goodness. The beginning sections basically go: "This is the land, these are the mitzvot. The mitzvot God told me and I told you. And this is the lovely land. To which God brought you from Egypt. Do the mitzvot. Don't screw up. If you screw up God's going to make the land be nasty to you. This lovely land. And all these lovely mitzvot." Over and over again.

This makes sense in a strictly human perspective, because this book is Moses' final words to the Israelites. He's had a rotten time bringing them through the desert, and he's not even going to get to go into the land after forty years wandering about taking flak from the Israelites. He's old, he's worn-out, he's grumpy, so it's fair enough that he rambles on and repeats himself really, is it? I wouldn't be surprised if Joshua the son of Nun stopped him on his way out of the tent that morning and was all: Moses, you need to change out of your slippers before you go out on the mountain, and have you had your pills?

Then Moses would crack him one with his staff and mumble something about cheeky youngsters.

Note: I have edited this post to remove references to a specific organisation. This is because I had a nice conversation with them. I am going to leave the meat of the post up here, because the substance of it is still out there and still relevant.

More and more, recently, I run into things like this:

A Sefer Torah, by definition, is a Torah scribed by someone who has been certified to do this work. Certification is not unlike an ordination of a rabbi or designation of a doctoral degree; the authority is confirmed by one who also has the authority. Generally, certification allows the individual to scribe, within the context of Jewish law or halachah, Sifrei Torah, tefillin and mezuzot (the three ritual objects that contain Torah texts).

This makes me cross, because it is not true, and it is deceiving people. Scribal certification is not like rabbinic ordination. It is much more like kashrut certification. Rabbinic ordination is what makes a rabbi, undoubtedly. But scribal certification is not what makes a scribe. R' Askotzky in his book Tefillin and Mezuzos says quite clearly that one does not have to be certified to be a scribe,* and he probably ought to know, given his list of qualifications.

Kashrut certification indicates that you can trust that the chef's work is kosher. Scribal certification indicates that you can trust that the scribe's work is kosher. That is all.

The other reason it makes me cross is because some people are using this falsehood to discredit UHC's Torah Project, written by me. So, if you hear that: think twice, for my sake.



* And that if someone is not certified you should ask why, which is a jolly good idea.

Now my apartment has a Holy Ark of the Covenant.

From OfficeMax.

This amuses me immensely.

Someone asked me: isn't it hard to write the parts of the Torah that are mean about women?

Like the ritual for the suspected wife, in Numbers 5?

Basically, if a chap thinks his wife's been screwing the milkman - or the spirit of jealousy come upon him, and he be jealous of his wife, as the Torah puts it - he takes her to the priest and they do a lie-detector test: they write some nasty curses on a paper and dissolve the ink in some water along with some ick off the floor and make her drink it, and if she's guilty she bloats up hideously.*

Often ruffles people's feminist feathers because it seems so jolly unfair. It always reminds me of that bit in Chicago:

I'm standin' in the kitchen, carving up a chicken for dinner, minding my own business, in storms my husband Wilbur in a jealous rage. "You've been screwing the milkman," he said. He was crazy, and he kept on screaming, "You've been screwing the milkman!"

The sotah ritual sounds as though it's intended for that kind of situation - Wilbur drags June out to the temple that very second, screaming all the way, insisting on having the lie-detector test at once - which, granted, does seem to pander rather too much to jealous rages, and doesn't seem to respect women particularly.

'Cept I don't find it particularly distressing, because first Wilbur has to find two witnesses (kosher ones - not relations, and not of dubious moral character), and solemnly inform June that she is to stay away from the milkman. Then, if he wants to accuse her, he needs to find two witnesses to testify that June and the milkman were alone together long enough to hem-hem-you-know. Then he has to cart her all the way to the temple in Jerusalem, which is a bit of a pain for your average Judean peasant, and he has to stop sleeping with her until after they've done the ritual to prove whether she was in fact screwing the milkman since he can't have it both ways. The rabbinic message says, no making accusations in a jealous rage, if you think she's screwing the milkman you go about it within the parameters of the law.

This is an example of a case where Torah provides for something and rabbinic tradition interprets the provision to suit its ideas of how things ought to be.** It's not so much that I'm greatly enamoured of the restructuring the rabbis did here; more that writing the sotah ritual is a reminder of the power rabbinic tradition has to do whatever it jolly well wants, and when I see myself as part of such a tradition, I am reminded that religion is a tool for making life more meaningful rather than an encumbrance for making it more difficult.

Course, I might feel differently if there were still a Temple and it was still actually a possibility ;-)



* There's a bit more to it than that, but that's basically it.
** Possibly simply in order to stop the temple being overrun with jealous husbands? One could posit various motivations; the point is not what they were but that they were.

This post is a sort-of continuation to this post.

The arch-traditional view holds that the entire text of the Torah was dictated to Moses on Mount Sinai in 1313 BCE by God; Moses copied it out a few times whilst on Sinai, and all subsequent copies have been made from those masters, the text remaining marvellously unaltered through several thousand years. You don't have to look very far to see that the text has rather suffered a few minor mutations since then, mostly yuds and vavs popping in and out. Yuds and vavs don't alter the meaning of the word per se, but in a theology which holds that every single letter of the Torah contains oodles of meaning, such that a law may be decided on the existence or lack thereof of a single yud or vav, that's a bit problematic. Nonetheless, the text is more or less intact.

Then you look a bit more closely, and just sometimes there are bits which look an awful lot like scribal errors. The homophones "lo" meaning "to him" or "to it" and "lo" meaning "not" get confused a few times; in Leviticus 25, for instance, the difference between a city which has unto it walls and a city which has not walls is considerable. It's exceedingly easy to make that kind of error in copying; on the other hand one might say that it is not an error but a deliberate message from the Holy One.

Then you look closely on a large scale, and sometimes there are Really Weird Things Going On. You get stories which contradict each other, different linguistic styles, that sort of thing. Higher biblical criticism posits that such Really Weird Things happen when you have several sets of canonical legends from different cultures which get combined into a single canon when the cultures merge, and tries to deduce which bits are from which sources. Higher biblical criticism is, obviously, Massively Problematic if you believe that God dictated the Torah to Moses complete on Mount Sinai.

When writing, I don't pick up so much on the large-scale oddities, nor really so much on the minor spelling things, but more on the tone of the parts I'm wriitng. My relationship with text is fairly experiential; if I'm reading fiction, I read not so much for the details of the story, more for the atmosphere one experiences whilst reading the story. If I'm writing Torah, I don't remember the precise words of the text necessarily, but whatever it was that that particular combination of words evoked in me. While I was writing Exodus, I was struck by the disproportionate amount of space given over to the minutae of the sanctuary tent, and how the holy shopping list at that point doesn't fit into the narrative very smoothly, and it made me think; if I wanted people to think that something was really important and they ought to donate lots of money to it, a lengthy description of how God commanded said thing and how our ancestors willingly donated to it would really be rather useful.

Earlier in Bemidbar, in chapter 3, there's a chunk detailing the division of the ritual duties amongst the sons of Aaron. By the way, I've theoretically read all this before a number of times, but it's very easy to skim-read this stuff and not pay detailed attention to every word. When you're writing, you have to pay attention to every word, so you see it in a different way, so this is actually the first time I've noticed some of this even though I've read it umpteen times. Anyway, this division of duties reminded me of a Mishnah which talks about the fierce competition amongst the priests for the temple duties. In particular, a certain part of the service could be performed by whoever got there first, and the duty priests would all gallop round the sanctuary and up the altar, pushing and shoving to get to the front. The altar being rather high and not having handrails, people quite often sustained injury (the point of the mishnah there is that eventually they instituted a safer way of allocating the work, as I recall). This image stayed with me, too; being willing to risk falling off the altar and breaking one's leg suggests a pretty high prestige on getting to do the parts of the service. The sort of thing, in fact, that would be hotly contested unless it was utterly inarguable. A legend suggesting divine origin for allocating different families to different jobs would, again, be rather useful.

And then shortly afterwards is the temple honours list - "The following donations are gratefully acknowledged: Millie Cohen, twenty siddurim, in memory of Irving Cohen; Phil Stein, twenty siddurim, in memory of Sadie Leib; Valerie and Max Miller, twenty siddurim, in memory of Irving Miller" - only it's actually "On the first day, the leader of the tribe of Yehudah, Nahshon ben Aminadav. His offering was one silver dish, of a hundred and thirty shekels' weight; one silver bowl, seventy shekels by the shekel of the sanctuary..." I can totally see that someone polishing up the canonical texts would be inclined to emphasise this sort of thing.

In historical context, the sacrificial cult which became rabbinic Judaism had been scattered over the land. At some point, the cult centralised in the Jerusalem temple, not without a lot of resistance; the Jerusalem priests I think claimed authenticity through lineage to Aaron. Also, the Temple required a good deal of taxation to fund its construction. King Solomon had pretty good statescraft, and when he built the temple was able to persuade people to cough up, but there's only so much coughing up a society can do, and a sacrificial cult is pretty expensive to maintain. Given this, the similarity of some of the priestly bits to some of the materials put out by shuls makes quite a lot of sense, in my head. Certainly makes it a bit less boring. This is a paragraph which could be expanded to a whole book, or several books. Of course it's a bit sketchy on the details.

Of course, then the question is: if this whole thing was written by people like me, why on earth do any of it? The answer to that could take a whole book, too, but basically: people need a sense of the awesomeness of the big picture, people need communal identity and social structure, and people need lifecycle structure. Rabbinic Judaism gives me that. And actually, rabbinic Judaism can do pretty much anything it damn well likes; it can contradict the Torah if it wants to, and sometimes it jolly well does. It's not really motivated by What God Said so much as by What People Do. Unless you're a hermit, you have to deal with What People Do no matter what standards you choose to live by; Judaism gives me a structure for dealing with that, one which enables me to work towards being a good person in a good society. If I can do that, it doesn't matter a great deal whether the inspiration for it came from a God on a Mountain or a Priest in a Temple.

Rain's stopped, and so I am in a position to say: ain't nothing like a nice quill on nice parchment. Mmmmmmmmm :)

Sand tempering works pretty well for me these days. You heat up sand in the oven (I've got mine in an old tomato tin*), and when it's good and hot, park your quills** in it. The idea is for the heat to harden the feather, and then it stays sharp longer and is nicer to write with. The problem is that if you don't do it enough, nothing happens, but if you do it too much, you melt the quill. If you melt it, tiny air bubbles form and are trapped in it when it hardens so you can't cut it to a smooth edge, plus it's far too brittle to be useful.

One thing which works is stirring it around in the sand and hooking it out every ten seconds or so to see how it's doing. Another thing is using a spoon to pour sand over it and into it, as far up the barrel as possible, and then pouring it out and repeating. You know it's good just after it starts going opaque. I find that if you leave it until it's totally opaque, it's too brittle already, but it's hard to describe exactly, and it's one of the things you learn from experience.

* Sand isn't so common in New York City. I couldn't find any building sites that weren't sectioned off, and I don't know any small children with sandpits. I delayed learning this technique until the summer and its associated beach trip. Now I have a big jar of sand. Heh.
** which you have already divested of their various membranes and other extraneous bits

What happens if you make a mistake? part 1 talked about some of the situations in which mistakes in Torahs and other holy books can and can't be fixed. This post is Part 2 - fixing mistakes by erasing.