(no subject)

Well, the past few days have been interesting. jimotron, tircha, listen up!

Early last week I posted about having a Bad Quill day. The next day, I cut a quill of consumnate awesomeness, so when it failed to write Torah well I realised that it was actually a Bad Klaf issue.

Bad Klaf makes writing very laborious. Have you ever tried writing on suede with a marker? Like that. The ink doesn't flow nicely, and it's awfully hard to make nice-looking letters, never mind get things like spacing right. But I have a quota, and if I'm to stay on schedule, I have to fill my quota.

As it happens, in order to keep the place livable, there's also rather a lot of housework which has to get done, and it's very difficult to do the housework, keep up to quota, fulfil my teaching obligations, and find time to eat and sleep. I was feeling awfully weary and weepy, and like I was struggling hopelessly against impossible odds. For days, you understand.

Then it struck me - I'm writing the bit where Pharoah says to the children of Israel that he's going to increase their workload quite horrendously without a corresponding reduction in their quotas. The children of Israel struggle hopelessly against impossible odds.

What'm I to make of this? Can what one is writing really have such a tremendous effect on one's circumstances? It was surely just coincidence that I picked a piece of Bad Klaf for this bit when I was labelling the sheets months ago, wasn't it? Surely. I mean, I didn't know what was going to be on that sheet vis-a-vis text, I was just writing numbers in the margins.

I mean, if my having a tricky week connects to my writing the bit of Torah where Israel are having the roughest time they've ever had, what does that say about a) me b) writing Torah? If I buy into that, does that make me some kind of Bible Codes fanatic? I mean, this is me we're talking about, you know, the practical one, the realist, the cynic. Does having that kind of resonance with the text make me a sissy? Does it make you Spiritual? But I am deeply suspicious of Spiritual; it seems to entail getting all drifty and woozy for an hour on Friday nights, which doesn't seem very useful. I don't think I want that kind of Spiritual.

This could segue into the broader question I hear a lot, which is "How does it feel to write the Torah?" and the answer to which is not "Like I'm channelling the Word of God through my pen," which seems to disappoint people. But we'll stick with this for the moment. Any useful ideas from you religious types? I think this idea could use developing, but heaven knows I haven't the tools to go it alone.