Yay tefillin donations!

Yay tefillin donations! Someone went to look at Barbie, and had a sniff round my site, and offered to donate his old tefillin to my women's tefillin gemach. Isn't that nice?

A gemach is a charity which lends things to people in need. Sometimes it's basic stuff like plates, sometimes it's wedding dresses, sometimes it's furniture, and sometimes it's tefillin. Men who can't afford tefillin can borrow some from a tefillin gemach for as long as they need them. But women can't, because gemachen don't exist in the liberal Jewish movements (so far as I know) and the liberal movements are the only places where they're interested in women laying tefillin. Bit of a bind, as it were. So I'm working on doing something about it. Slowly, as yet, but working on it. And lovely people who donate tefillin completely out of the blue are a vital component.

Thank you, tefillin donator!

(no subject)

Torah ink is made from oak galls, which are little hard brown oojits secreted by gall wasp larvae, also known as oakapples cos they look like little apples. The larva lives in the gall, and when it's good and ready it eats its way out and tootles off.

Do you remember the silk post? In brief, silk comes from worms, and worms aren't kosher, so one shouldn't use silk to sew a Torah, because it's not good karma. Similarly, ink needs a liquid component. We aren't allowed to drink wine handled by idolaters, but technically speaking we could use it in Torah ink. But we shouldn't, because it's not good karma - or "we should sanctify ourselves with things which are permitted to us," to use Jewish language.

I read that the best ink is made from galls which have the larvae still inside them (these are called blue galls). Once the larva's gone, the gall is much less potent. I'm guessing that we don't use blue galls for making Torah ink, based on the two examples above - the principle that we don't make holy objects from non-kosher sources. But perhaps we might use the blue galls in this case, since in both the above examples there's a readily-available viable alternative (flax and ordinary wine, respectively), and here there really isn't. Such a consideration might be enough to push the balance over the other way - the gain in quality would outweigh the loss of karma. I haven't seen any literature on this. I would like to. Any thoughts?

This isn't a practical question, incidentally. I buy my ink from Israel; it's kosher as kosher can be. I just wonder what's in it.