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I've spent the last week at United Hebrew in St Louis, MO, writing Torah in the library there. A lot of interesting things happened during the week, and while they were happening I made mental notes to write about them here, but now I come to do it, I'm at a bit of a loss.

Well, I shall start with the trivial, and we'll see where it takes us. First up: hotel beds. Will you look at this? We're lucky I didn't get lost in there. Honestly, that kind of excess makes me a bit nervous - what do I need with all that? I know that's just how hotels are, but still. That's my stuffed piggie in the middle there, by the way.

Next up: the cartoon band-aids. Sharp knives are an essential scribal tool, for sharpening quills and the like. I generally have mine handy on the windowsill next to my desk, except when I'm on location, as it were, and don't have a windowsill. Ooh, I was so smart, I blu-tacked the scalpel to the desk to have it nice and handy. Except I put it right by the inkwell, didn't I, pointing upwards, and I managed to slice my finger open on it, didn't I, and there was an awful lot of blood, but none of it got on the Torah, yay me.

The cantor was having a conversion class right nearby, and I rather bust that up - sorry, guys - having your scribe-in-residence stagger dizzily around the place bleeding and retching really makes it hard to study. Oops, my bad. And so the nice UH people and me spent the whole afternoon finding a place that would a) stitch it up b) take my insurance c) not take all day about it. Now I have stitches. I've never had stitches before. I can't go swimming until they come out, poop.

But I was back in time to learn with the fourth-graders, who were quite quite super. Let's have a separate post about the fourth-graders.

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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!

A post about skin

One of the questions I heard most often this week was "What kind of paper are you writing on?"

( Cos I spent last week being scribe-in-residence. Cut for length. )

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Two news links:

BBC - Snake dies after gobbling gator - ick! It exploded!

And Fox News in St Louis - me on the telly! And other people involved in our Torah project, including a lovely bit with a Hebrew school student. Some nice guys came and took pictures on Tuesday morning (very efficiently), and then I went to the studio on Sunday morning to have a live interview. Which was a new experience, I'll tell you - and I saw on the autocue that they had me down as "Torah Lady," which is amusing. I got to see the man doing the weather forecast, as well - that was pretty cool! He stands against a green wall and gestures at nothing. I mean, in theory I knew that was how they did it, but I'd never really thought about how one would have to gesture meaningfully at blank space.

Oh, and I guess they liked the live bit, because then they came back to the shul later on Sunday to do some more interviewing. Hence, me on telly.

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Q: What happens if you make a mistake?

The answer divides into parts. First, mistakes are fixable. Second, a Torah works differently to mezuzot and tefillin. Third, God's names work differently to ordinary words.

Mistakes can be fixed

Many people are under the impression that if you make a mistake, you have to toss out the whole sefer and start over. This isn't true. A mistake, even one tiny wee one, does invalidate the whole Torah - but not permanently. If there's a mistake in a Torah, you can't use it until it's fixed - but you can almost always fix it.

Torahs and mezuzot work differently

There's a rule that mezuzot and tefillin have to have each and every letter written in strict order. So, if you make a mistake when writing a mezuzah, let's say you leave out a letter, you can't go back and add that letter unless you erase all the way back - if it was typing, it would be like saying you can't move the cursor back and insert the letter, you have to backspace all the way to the place where you need the insertion. And sometimes, doing this would entail erasing God's name, which we absolutely do not do, so sometimes there really is nothing you can do about it and you do have to go back and start over.

But with a mezuzah, this isn't a disaster, because there are only 713 letters in a mezuzah, and it'll only take you a few hours to rewrite them. A Torah has 304,805 letters and takes more than a thousand hours to write; having to start over would be so impractical that we would never manage to get any Torahs written at all. So we don't have this writing-everything-strictly-in-order rule for Torahs.

This means that if you make a mistake in a Torah, you can go back and fix it later and it's okay. When I make a mistake, I make a mark with pencil in the margin, so that I don't forget about it. Then later, when the ink is dry, I come back and deal with it.

God's names work differently

So, most of the time you can go back and fix mistakes.

Sometimes, fixing means you have to erase a word or part of a word - maybe you wrote a word twice, maybe you misspelled, maybe you smeared it. BUT - you can't erase God's names. The Torah says that we should blot out the names of idolatrous gods and destroy them, and then it says that we mustn't do that to our God. Erasing God's name is tantamount to erasing God - it's really not a good thing to do - so we don't do it, ever.* So, if you have a mistake that you can't fix without erasing God's name, that's that - you can't fix it. You take the sheet away, and bury it respectfully. Throwing it in the garbage would be like throwing God in the garbage - again, bad plan - so one buries it, like one would a dead person.

This, by the way, is why we try to refrain from writing God's names down - because it's likely to get thrown away, and we don't want that to happen. Better to make sure it can't happen by not writing God's names in the first place.

* In real life. Electronically is different. The main issue with electronic God's-Names is that someone might print them and later throw them out, which does present issues.