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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.
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.
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