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So last weekend I was in Berkeley. There were persimmons on trees, and a cute bunny in the garden next door going hoppity-hop!

Basically, I was there to be Inspirational. Jewish Milestones is a group that, hm, let's say, it recognises that quite a lot of people want to be Jewish off their own bats and don't want to join a shul so that the rabbi can be Jewish for them. Further, it recognises that sometimes people need a bit of help with that cos not everyone has a full set of Jewish Skillz. So it helps Being-Jews find Action-Jews and make Judaism, and to that end, it also has a stock of Jewish Stuff - which didn't include a Torah, which is a bit of a handicap when e.g. doing services.

Then it got a Torah, and that is rather a big deal, so there was a Hooray-We-Have-A-Torah event, and I got to play the role of Yay-Torahs-Are-Super.

So you can read about that in this nice newspaper article, here.

I also...

( did a lot of stuff, actually... )

Talking with the Milestones staff about what they do and the general Berkeley Jewish Scene, was both really nice and really interesting.

There's a story about Rabbi Meir, who in addition to being a sage, was also a scribe. He came to a little community one Purim, and they didn't have a Megillah, so he sat down and wrote them one so they could have a Megillah reading. Strikes me the Milestones peeps are like that.

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Went last week to fetch Torah from Orthodox Sofer-Shop Dude, who had arranged for its scanning by Some Other Chap.

Dude did that plumber thing where you suck air through your teeth, and goes at me "Tss...there were a lot of mistakes in that."

This often happens. I recall taking a Megillah some other place for a computer check. They were all over it - this is lovely, this is really skilled etc - and then they learned I'd written it and when scan came back, again, there were a lot of mistakes in that...

I find it dispiriting. I know I make mistakes, and I know the scan is going to pick up on the ones I didn't, and there are probably a fair old number of them, sure. Given my professional development track, it's to be expected. But still, I'd much rather hear "Well, you've got some stuff to fix, but on the whole, not bad," or some such. Constructive, not negative, you know?

sofersaurus points out that the wish is probably father to the thought, and I think he is right.

I mentioned to Dude that I had been using plastic nibs because the klaf surface had been so horrid to write on, and he did the air-sucking thing again and said "Yes, I noticed that. It's not like the klaf I get. Not a good surface at all. I get stuff that's different from this. Where did you get this?"

And beautifully, the answer was "From you..."

I think the term is PWND!!

But you see what I'm getting at?

Have you ever been somewhere you weren't entirely comfortable, and you were hyper-critical of it? It's one way people make themselves feel less threatened by alien surroundings - convince themselves the aliens are way below them. I know I do it sometimes. sofersaurus reckons that's what's going on here with Dude.

If I was a man making the same amount of mistakes, Dude'd probably be saying "You've got some stuff to fix, but it's okay." But Orthodox Dude isn't 100% comfortable with me writing Torahs, and this is one way of taming the cognitive dissonance enough that he can stomach working with me. He wanted to see bad klaf, so he saw bad klaf. He wants me to be inferior (non-threatening, in other words), so he makes a big deal out of my mistakes.

If that's the price I've got to pay for co-operation, that's the price, that's all.