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I promised you a post on what parashat Behukotai has to do with chopsticks, and here it is.

But first, I'm going to quote you a bit from Eric Ray's book Sofer: The Story of a Torah Scroll.

...no "base metals" may be used in making or repairing these texts. Base metals are the metals used in everyday tools. That means that no iron, no steel, no brass, no copper, and no bronze can be used. Base metals are the kinds used to make weapons. Nothing that is used for killing can be used in making a Sefer Torah, a Mezuzah, or a pair of Tefillin.

Strictly speaking, this is something of an overstatement, but let's explore the sentiment. Our aversion to metal implements starts in the Torah, in Exodus 20:22:

If you build an altar of stones to me, you shall not use dressed stone; if you lift your sword to it you pollute it.

And in 1 Kings 6:7:

In building the House, stones ready-dressed were brought, so that neither hammer nor axe nor any iron tool was heard in the House during its construction.

Rashi, the most widely-accepted biblical commentator, explains:

The altar was made to lengthen man's days, and iron was made to shorten man's days; it isn't appropriate to lift something which shortens against something which lengthens. Also, the altar brings peace between Israel and their heavenly father, so one should not use upon it anything which cuts and destroys.

That's some pretty powerful anti-iron associations.

Now, from ChinaDaily.com:

Chinese people, under the cultivation of Confucianism, consider the knife and fork bearing sort of violence, like cold weapons. However, chopsticks reflect gentleness and benevolence, the main moral teaching of Confucianism. Therefore, instruments used for killing must be banned from the dining table, and that is why Chinese food is always chopped into bite size before it reaches the table.

I couldn't find an authoritative-looking reference, so this may be an urban legend. But it's evidently sufficiently compelling that it gets printed in major national newspapers, and e.g. on chopstick wrappers. This fascinates me because it suggests that it's not just Jews who are made uneasy by iron tools. I have no idea how much cross-cultural exchange there may have been, but it's fascinating that such a concept should take hold in such different places.

The haftarah to parashat Behukotai contains a line from Jeremiah 17:

Judah's guilt is written with an iron pen...

Judah here means the Jews; Jeremiah is talking about how the Jews have messed up again. It seems likely that Jeremiah didn't choose an iron pen just because of its material properties. Iron has nasty overtones. A set of sinister connotations, if you will.

Looking forward, to today's sofer. It's not actually per se forbidden to use base metals, according to various authoritative halakhic sources, but many soferim hold that it's utterly inappropriate, for their associations with violence and the incompatibility of this with the ideals of Torah; Torah, like the altar, is supposed to lengthen man's days and promote peace between Israel and God. Hence the widespread use of alternative tools - gold, silver, glass.

In particular, the iron pen, associated by Jeremiah with the numerous times the Jews have failed to play straight by God. The iron pen carries not only associations of violence but also of disregarding the Torah. It's not necessarily the best tool for the process of creating that selfsame Torah. We are encouraged to use quills, so that we can create Torah without these overtones.

Or we could use chopsticks.

Gittin - the other text a sofer does - part 1

Torah says that if a man gets fed up with his wife, he can write her a severance document and they can be divorced.

By the time of the Mishnah, we've started calling it a get, גט (plural gittin). It's an interesting word because it's the only time those two letters appear together. In the whole Tanakh, gimel and tet never happen together. I think it's the only word in the dictionary where they do. Appropriate for a word which is the essence of separation.

If you don't have a get, you are still married even if you separate, so if you get involved with another man you are in trouble because that is technically adultery and okay we don't stone people today but it's a fair bet that God's going to be pretty annoyed. And if you go and have children by this other man, those children are in trouble; they are called mamzerim and they have an extremely limited and stigmatised ritual status.

So a get is important.

Since the Torah says "write," many many laws of writing apply, as they do for the sifrei kodesh, Torah scrolls and so on, and since a get is so important, it's important to get them right. Happily, the man is allowed to appoint an agent to do the writing for him, and he generally appoints a sofer.

The writing is interesting; it's quite a lot like Torah writing, but not exactly. There are a lot of issues with the text layout that you don't get with a Torah, and a lot of rules connected with its being a legal document. The picture shows the sort of script. It's not difficult if you're accustomed to writing Torahs, but it's unnatural - try typing with every letter T capiTalised, and you'll see; you have To mainTain a differenT kind of focus.

The long letters are to prevent anyone coming along and writing extra bits between the lines afterwards. I'm not sure why there's so much space between the lines; I assume it's the conflation of two requirements: a) that the text be fitted into twelve lines b) the document must be longer than it is wide. Whence these requirements, I don't know really.

The picture is actually part of a poem; because gittin are so important, we don't noise them around. Unlike a ketubah, which you get to hang on your wall, a get is squirrelled away once it's written, so as to reduce the potential for things to go wrong.

As with other sorts of important writing, the question of who's allowed to do it comes up pretty early, but unlike a Torah, practically anyone's allowed to write a get, according to the Mishnah. Gittin 2:5 says Anyone is kosher to write a get; even a deaf-mute, even a witless person, even a child. A woman may write her own get, and a man may write his own receipt, because the get is solely established by its signatories.

We'll pick up here in part 2.

Gittin - the other text a sofer does - part 2

Part 1

Unlike a Torah, practically anyone's allowed to write a get, according to the Mishnah. Gittin 2:5 says Anyone is kosher to write a get; even a deaf-mute, even a witless person, even a child. A woman may write her own get, and a man may write his own receipt, because the get is solely established by its signatories.

Well, I'm just a little bit of a halakha nerd, and it pleases me very much when unlikely halakhic situations apply to my own life. Not, you understand, that I would have chosen to get divorced, but accepting that as a fact of life, it's clearly much cooler to write one's own get.

So I did.

The actual process is very formal. There's a whole ritual during which the woman stands silent while the rabbi, the husband, and two witnesses, establish that the husband wishes to divorce his wife here and now of his own free will. The husband appoints a scribe and instructs him to write the get, and instructs the witnesses to sign, and all while the woman doesn't say anything.

As the sofer, I had a more active part. I got to accept the responsibility of writing the get.
I learned that although the wife is allowed to write the get, the husband isn't allowed, which pleased me very much; the balance of power is not usually tipped that way. In any case, I was glad to be a real part of the process. I like my Judaism to be part of me - or should that be, I like to be part of my Judaism?

Then I wrote it, copying from a text. You can't write it in advance, and you can't print it. This is because the verse says "he shall write for her a severance document," and we take "writing" and "for her" very literally indeed. This is unlike a ketubah, where you may take a printed form and fill in the names - a get has to be produced wholly for the specific recipient, and has to be written, not printed (see Part 1).

Most of the text concerns itself with name and location. The city is not just named, but identified as being in the vicinity of bodies of water (the idea being that these are hard to mistake or mislay). The participants are not just named, but are named by all the names that they use or have previously used, so I'm Yonah Esther otherwiseknownas Yonah otherwiseknownas Jennifer otherwiseknownas Jen. That's about two-thirds of the text. Then there's a little bit at the end which says, more or less, I, Husband, am not being coerced and you, Wife, are free to go.

I made a couple of mistakes; these I fixed in the usual way, with a knife. I'd brought some moral support, who was also a sofer, and he and the rabbi talked shop. It was most interesting to listen to.

When I was finished writing, the rabbi and the witnesses checked it through very carefully for mistakes. Then the witnesses signed it. It passed from my possession (as the scribe) into the X's possession, and then he passed it back into my possession, this time in my role as wife. Ex-wife, that is. It was very amusing to be playing two parts, scribe and wife, especially when the script required the X to appoint the scribe Hatam-Soferet to write a get for the wife Hatam-Soferet.

After I had accepted it as my get, releasing me from the marriage, the rabbi took it and tore into it with a knife. This shows it has been used, so there is no possibility of anyone's using it for another divorce.

The ceremony finishes with an admonition that now this get has been written, signed, and delivered, anyone who casts doubts on its validity is subject to excommunication and is a really bad person and doesn't get any cookies. I like that very much: it's a recognition that messing with this could really cause trouble, and we believe we've done it properly, and for the sake of Jewry, don't go looking for problems. Very humane, and sensible.

So anyway, there we go. I've written my own get. I bet there aren't many women around who can say that.



PS - It feels good now it's done, and I rather enjoyed doing it. I'm really rather a nerd.