aw cuteness

Jewish Week mention - sweet article, and would you believe I'm one of the optimistic voices for once?!

In the spirit of Chanukah, I’ve polled more than a dozen prominent Jewish women about miracles, about the brightest moments in the news since last December, especially those which illuminate new frontiers for Jewish women. But many of my sources, normally an eloquent bunch, hesitate to respond...

When the author polled me, I'd just had email that started "Hi, I'm the new scribe on the block," and I was all pleased and happy about that, but I'd also spent a lovely day writing Torah at Hadar, and I was all pleased and happy about that too. So it was jolly nice to be asked "hey, what's good?" at just that moment.

Nice.

And yes, it uses the dreaded phrase "first soferet." In a bid to stave off the inevitable hatemail: please remember that journalism doesn't really do in-depth explanations of subtle points that detract from the thrust of the story and need lots of feminist-historical consciousness. I emailed and requested less hyperbole, and I expect the editor will think it too minor to be worth bothering with. They generally do. Please read this post. Thanks.

Proofreading, part 1

I've talked a bit about how it's okay to fix mistakes, in most circumstances. This series of posts is going to deal with the finding of said mistakes.

The sages were well aware that when you copy a document, and then copy from the copy, and so on, mistakes are likely to creep in over time. This is why we have a rule that even one mistake in a Torah scroll renders the entire scroll invalid for use until the mistake is fixed - zero-tolerance is really the only policy you can have if you want to ensure that your document will be absolutely unchanged.

This, incidentally, is also why we have the rule about copying from a copy. The scribe simply isn't allowed to write the scroll down from memory - he may have it more or less accurate, but in a culture where each letter has the status of being divinely dictated, even a variation of one letter can't be accepted, and recall from memory might meaan whole words or phrases were a little bit off.

Relatedly, the roles of scribe and editor were pretty much interchangeable throughout much of history, and in most other documents, the occasional variation here and there doesn't matter much, or is even expected (for further reading on this subject, see for instance Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible). But the Torah's integrity was, for rabbinic Judaism, a theological principle, and as such, deviation from the text could not be accepted.

So it is that when you write a Torah, you have to proofread it extremely carefully.

You have to go through the scroll and check that each and every one of the 304,805 letters is there and has its proper form. Ambiguity in form can be a bit of a disaster, since it can turn one word into a completely different word rather easily. More about that later.

hashgacha pratis...

Writing at Hadar, as is my habit. I'm mostly concentrating on work, but I've got about a quarter of one ear open to the shiur that's going on. So it happens that I'm writing a verse about maaser, and at the exact same moment, Rav Eitan starts talking about maaser...I do like when that happens.

halakha yom iyyun

I forgot to post about the Halakha Yom Iyyun - a lot of the sessions were recorded, and you can download source sheets and watch the videos at http://www.mechonhadar.org/yomiyyun.

In particular, I heartily recommend the Opening Plenary: "Framing Halakhah: Law, Ethics, Philosophy or Values?" Professor Chaim Saiman, Villanova Law School - he had that kind of virtuoso skimming through his sources that you can only get away with when you know your topic ridiculously well, which is just good to listen to.

Proofreading, part 2

A scribe today has an exhaustive list of rules for how each letter ought to look – here's an example for letter shin, from the Mishnah Berurah:

Shin has three heads. The first head, with the leg which is drawn out of it, is like a vav, and its face is tilted slightly upwards. The second head is like yud; its head is tilted slightly upwards, and ideally it has a little prickle on it. The third head must be made like zayin, and it has three taggin on it. The left heads of all the letters שעטנז גץ are like zayin. One must take care that the heads do not touch each other. The leg of this left head should lekhathilah be particularly vertical...

and it goes on, I won't give you all of it here.

Specifically, it's interesting that the later authorities - i.e. the ahronim, post-Shulhan-Arukh, more or less - devote a lot of space to defining how the letters should look, but the rishonim and earlier (including the Shulhan Arukh) don't seem too interested in that - they know how the letters ought to look, and they content themselves with reminding you particular ways in which you ought not to stray, like not making alefs ayins and suchlike.

Alef-bets differ with region and period. We've already seen some of the ways Ashkenazic and Sephardic alef-bets differ, when we were discussing influence of writing implement on letter style. We didn't discuss there how those styles relate to the laid-down rules for letter forms.

Letter shin is a case in point. Literally.

Sephardi shin

Ashkenazi shin

More about that later.