hatam_soferet (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
hatam_soferet) wrote2007-01-16 12:54 pm
hatam_soferet) wrote2007-01-16 12:54 pm
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This is a post about Mordechai Pinchas, because you probably wouldn't be reading about me if it weren't for him.*
MP is a scribe, who lives and works in the UK. This is his website. You should all go and visit his site, because it is really, really interesting, and is packed with fascinating and useful and exciting stuff about the scribal arts.
MP's site was what got me excited about sofrut in the first place. Here was someone describing how Hebrew ritual calligraphy has been an integral part of Judaism through the ages, how the physical interfaces with the spiritual in the plane of the abstract, how a scribe turns pretty letters into the sacred focus of religion. That's pretty awesome, don't you think? I wanted to be just like that.
As well as oodles of interesting facts, he not only talks about how to form the letters, but it was he who made me realise just how wide the gulf is between pretty calligraphy and real sofrut. So I learned letters from him and his site, and I learned that there were rulebooks, and I learned that I needed to learn a great deal more before I could understand the rulebooks like MP did. I wanted to know about the world of scribing, and MP's site was my window into that world and my motivation to, as it were, climb through the window.
And not only does he do traditional scribal work, but he works on the cutting edge of tradition, where sofrut meets the modern world. We adorn our festivals with the reading of various Megillot - Esther on Purim, of course, and others at other times. The Conservative Movement introduced a new megillah to commemorate the Holocaust, for reading on Yom ha-Shoah (Holocaust Memorial Day) and MP designed the scroll.
You can read about it in his own words here. He applies different traditions of orthography and typography to fill the scroll with meaning and visual commentary. He does it with masses of scholarship, intelligent consideration, inspired artistry, and tenderness for his subject matter, and the result is quite extraordinary - really something which brings a modern innovation into the scribal tradition with the utmost respect for both. I hope you'll all go and ask your rabbis to read from MP's Megillat ha-Shoah, because he deserves it.
Three cheers for MP, for being truly inspirational, and because without him I'd probably be working in accounting now.
* Unless you're my mum, or something like that.
MP is a scribe, who lives and works in the UK. This is his website. You should all go and visit his site, because it is really, really interesting, and is packed with fascinating and useful and exciting stuff about the scribal arts.
MP's site was what got me excited about sofrut in the first place. Here was someone describing how Hebrew ritual calligraphy has been an integral part of Judaism through the ages, how the physical interfaces with the spiritual in the plane of the abstract, how a scribe turns pretty letters into the sacred focus of religion. That's pretty awesome, don't you think? I wanted to be just like that.
As well as oodles of interesting facts, he not only talks about how to form the letters, but it was he who made me realise just how wide the gulf is between pretty calligraphy and real sofrut. So I learned letters from him and his site, and I learned that there were rulebooks, and I learned that I needed to learn a great deal more before I could understand the rulebooks like MP did. I wanted to know about the world of scribing, and MP's site was my window into that world and my motivation to, as it were, climb through the window.
And not only does he do traditional scribal work, but he works on the cutting edge of tradition, where sofrut meets the modern world. We adorn our festivals with the reading of various Megillot - Esther on Purim, of course, and others at other times. The Conservative Movement introduced a new megillah to commemorate the Holocaust, for reading on Yom ha-Shoah (Holocaust Memorial Day) and MP designed the scroll.
You can read about it in his own words here. He applies different traditions of orthography and typography to fill the scroll with meaning and visual commentary. He does it with masses of scholarship, intelligent consideration, inspired artistry, and tenderness for his subject matter, and the result is quite extraordinary - really something which brings a modern innovation into the scribal tradition with the utmost respect for both. I hope you'll all go and ask your rabbis to read from MP's Megillat ha-Shoah, because he deserves it.
Three cheers for MP, for being truly inspirational, and because without him I'd probably be working in accounting now.
* Unless you're my mum, or something like that.