Proofreading, part 7

Getting back to proofreading proper.

As we’ve heard, in order to encourage integrity of the text, we have a rule that even one wrong letter invalidates the entire Torah.

When you’re writing 304,805 letters, you’re bound to slip up on some of them. So, when you write a Torah, you proofread it extremely carefully, more than once, before you release it into the wild, as it were, and read from it.

Here’s a place where I was merrily writing along, wrote the wrong letter, and realised it at once. The ink was still wet, so I blotted off as much as I could with kitchen paper, that’s why it looks grey and shadowy. Makes the erasing easier.

To fix this sort of thing, you need to let it dry and then scrape off the excess. But letting it dry takes a good fifteen minutes (if you try fixing it sooner you just rub it in and make it worse) and it’s inefficient to sit about watching ink dry for a quarter of an hour. If you’re writing tefillin or mezuzot, you’ve got no choice, you’ve got to fix it before continuing, but when you’re writing Torah you can skip over the mistake and come back to fix it later.

Now we’re in the proofreading stage, it’s “later,” and time to fix.

These pale-grey blotted ones are obvious – when you made the mistake, you realised it at the time, you blotted it, perhaps you made a note in pencil in the margin – these aren’t difficult to see. The really taxing part comes next.

Mirrored from Hatam Soferet.

Proofreading, part 8

When I’m proofreading my writing for the first time, there are two questions I’m asking regarding each of the 304,805 letters: is the letter there, and is the letter kosher?

The process goes like this.

With a sheet of freshly-written Torah in front of you, you find your place in the tikkun and look at it to see what letters ought to be written.

Carrying those letters in your mind, you look down and find your place on the klaf, and compare the letter string in your mind to the letter string on the klaf.

If they don’t match, fix it.

For instance, this is just wrong, but I didn’t realise it at the time. It ought to read שמנה מאת שנה.

Then look back up and find your place in the tikkun, and repeat.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

Proofreading, part 9

All this place-finding and looking up and down takes time. Only a couple of seconds each time, but that adds up fast, as you can probably imagine.

Holding a string of letters in your mind isn’t efficient either, partly just because one can forget things, and partly because of anticipation; when you’re reading the text as words, you’re much too liable to remember what you think ought to be there rather than what actually is there. That’s how most of these mistakes get in there in the first place.

You’re also liable to confuse phononyms, liable to skip silent letters, liable to attempt to remember too much and thus forget parts unawares.

And all this is only answering “Is the letter there?”. The question of “Is it kosher?” requires more mental processing, as we saw earlier – is it touching another letter, does it have all the parts it needs, does it have the right decoration. The above list doesn’t leave much brain left over for processing these questions.

More about how we deal with that later. First, we’ll see some other cases where such mental processing is required.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

don't worry, nothing's going to change...

You might've noticed a new appendix to posts, mirrored from hasoferet.com.

This is cos I'm posting Soferet-type posts at hasoferet.com/blog.

This is because a) I feel like a pillock with a dreamwidth address on my business cards b) I want to be able to schedule posts and you can't do that with lj or dw.

If you're happy reading this, stay here; you're not going to miss anything.

If you read this mostly for Soferet posts, and you get bored with hearing about what I had for breakfast, you can add hasoferet.com/blog to your reading list instead of this. I know I stopped reading at least one interesting feminist blog because there were too many posts with pictures of the author's entirely uninteresting cats - now you can read Torah posts without cats, that's all. Enjoy.

Proofreading, part 10

We saw an example of one sort of thing which proofreading turns up – where the text is Just Wrong:

Text should read שמנה מאת שנה.

That was a case where the extra letter vav completely changed the meaning – “eight hundred” became “one hundred and eight.” But in some cases, an extra or missing yud or vav doesn’t actually change the meaning, thanks to the accommodating nature of Hebrew vowels. These are known as haser (deficient) or malei (overblown) spellings. Like this:

This is a word spelled haser – lacking a vav – where it should be spelled with a vav, ויולד.

If you’re reading in the Torah and you find the first kind of Wrong, it’s a problem, and you have to stop and switch Torahs. But if you find the second sort, you don’t have to switch Torahs. The mistake ought to be fixed soon, because thinking “oh, it doesn’t matter” is the first step on the road to propagating mistakes which jolly well do matter, but you don’t have to stop reading.

This has to do with the extent to which we think the text of the Torah is incorruptible. I simplified a bit earlier – the integrity of the text is a theological principle except for these kinds of spellings. These ones we’re not exactly certain of, and haven’t been since Talmudic times.

So we weigh values. Stopping and switching out Torahs is not good, for various reasons; reading from a Torah with wrong spelling is not good either. With very egregious misspellings, the badness of the mistake outweighs the badness of switching Torahs. But haser and malei misspellings, since we’re not absolutely certain they’re actually wrong, there’s a chance our spelling could be the right one, and on the strength of that chance we swing the balance the other way. Interesting, huh?

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.