Hooray nice articles about Julie!

Yay Julie, in the New York Times!

Ms. Seltzer’s performance — an admittedly odd word for what she’s up to, and one she doesn’t like — at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco [is] unique and compelling...

As the central element of a new exhibition, “As It Is Written: Project 304,805,” a simply and elegantly organized introduction to the fundamental role of the Torah in Jewish life, she is creating a new holy scroll.The work is indisputably artful, but it’s not intended to be expressive. The idea is to copy exactly; writing a Torah is less an act of creativity than of sublimation.

“I know the museum sees it that way, but if I thought this was a performance, I wouldn’t be able to do it,” Ms. Seltzer said.

And indeed, in that very denial lies the art in her performance. Watching her impossibly steady hand, the deft maneuvering of the quill (each of the 22 letters of the Hebrew alphabet requires its own separate technique) and the inexorable progress of the text across a column and down a page yields a palpable sense of ancient ritual that slows your breathing, and you can’t help seeing that she is communing deeply with the text as she copies it. The writing is an act of faith...

What I like best about this is that she's in the paper not for being A Woman Coo Ur Gosh, but as A Torah Scribe Doing Something Unusual who just happens to be a woman. That is tremendous. That's the world I want to be part of - where women doing things isn't remarkable just because they're women.

other note on ny times article/soferot generally

Further to previous post squeeing about Julie.

Her primary teacher is Jen Taylor Friedman, a New Yorker born in Britain who is just 30 but among the very few women to have completed an entire Torah. According to Ms. Wolf, she may indeed be the only one who has ever done so.

"I’ve never seen a source that says otherwise," Ms. Friedman said in a telephone interview. "But 'ever' is a big word, and Judaism has been around for a long time."

As ever, I would be charmed to see a source which says otherwise. There's bound to be one somewhere. We know we've had female copyists, general non-ritual scribes, and I've had one source sent me which speaks of a woman who wrote a chumash; it is possible to interpret that as "a sefer Torah for ritual use," but yeshiva-educated scholarly-rabbi friend RHCY says it means a regular book-type chumash, and he generally knows what he's talking about. We know women have worked on repairing Torahs, both many generations ago and within the past twenty years. Writing? Don't know.

A Torah's a big, expensive thing, right? Before the late twentieth century, if you were somehow in the Torah trade - married to a sofer, or something - and you somehow got the skills and materials and free time and you wrote a Torah, you weren't going to tell everyone about it! because then your Torah would have no market value. Scribes have never earned much; you can't afford to throw away a whole Torah like that. You're going to pass it off as your husband's and you're going to sell it.

Of course that isn't very proper, because technically it wouldn't be fit for ritual use, pre-gender-egalitarian congregations - that's why it has no market value - call it economic necessity, call it feminism, call it what you will, Judaism is a religion of human beings, not of saints. Of course it's happened. It'd be pretty darned remarkable if, in the whole of Jewish history, no woman had ever written a Torah. If nothing else, that would mean that I, me, Jen, possess some quality that no other Jewish woman has ever had, and that's preposterous.

What I have is the luck to live in a generation where I could write a Torah openly, as part of a community that was happy and excited about that. That's what's unusual about this generation of female scribes. Not that we write Torah, but that we're part of a world that can accept that.

This perspective rarely comes across in articles, you understand. Journalism doesn't really do in-depth explanations of subtle points that detract from the thrust of the story. For practical purposes, the simplified version does the job - conveys what is exciting without needing lots of feminist-historical consciousness.

This is why Julie's Torah project is arguably more exciting than mine. We've got the whole "gosh look a vagina wrote a torah" thing out of the way, and we can get on with the important thing, which is "gosh look, a Torah."

Soliciting input

Poll #1644 What's next?

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: Just the Poll Creator, participants: 15

There's only another week-and-a-half of Quill Month. I seem to be in a period where I can write about things easily, which I like very much. So, what shall I write about next?

Halakha of women and Torah writing (the last substantial stuff I wrote about this is from a non-representational-of-me orthodox perspective)
7 (46.7%)

Niddah and other types of ritual impurity, how they affect Torah writing
13 (86.7%)

Layout rules - columns, paragraph breaks and the like
6 (40.0%)

Following on logically from quills - letter formation
5 (33.3%)

Experiential aspects of writing Torahs
6 (40.0%)

Proofreading and corrections
6 (40.0%)

Different styles of alphabet
10 (66.7%)

Something else which I will explain in a comment
0 (0.0%)

The following topics aren't on the menu because I don't have time just now to do the requisite extensive studying: Big and Small Letters and Dots; Women Scribes In History; Variant Manuscripts of Torah; and anything involving academic palaeography. Is that terribly disappointing?

Yes, I am devastated
0 (0.0%)

It would be nice but I get that you're not made of free time
9 (64.3%)

I am supremely indifferent
2 (14.3%)

I would like to hear about the dots and things but I don't care about the others much
3 (21.4%)

All this Torah stuff is a bit much, can you post more about puppies?
0 (0.0%)