Ketubah drafting part 2 – on ketubah texts

Ketubah texts come in three varieties.

The most common variety up until just a few years ago was a tenth-generation photocopy from the Rabbi’s Manual, the text so blurry you could barely distinguish the letters, and GIANT DOTTED LINES whose giant dots rendered semi-invisible the names, scribbled in pencil by a rushed rabbi. It didn’t really matter that the names were semi-invisible, because it is a criterion for graduating rabbinical school that you have to have illegible Hebrew script,* so you always had to phone and check anyway.

Today, most rabbis have access to computers which can handle Hebrew, so you can email them a .doc of the standard text (sometimes they even already have one, such is the progress we have made!), and they will fill in the names and send it back to you. This is super.

The third category is really a subset of the second – rabbis who fax you back a bit of shul notepaper with the names scribbled on it because they can’t type in Hebrew. A fun variation is the set of rabbis who can’t type in Hebrew but think they can type in Hebrew, so you get names like יןסף and you have to edit judicially.

Editing judicially is a double-edged sword, of course, because on the one hand you know perfectly well that no-one spells Yosef with a terminal nun in the middle, but on the other hand you can’t just go around correcting rabbis, that destroys the illusion that they’re infallible and is a Threat to the World Order causing volcanoes and suchlike. So you phone them and double-check.

I realise at this point that you might have been expecting “three varieties” to mean something like “Orthodox, Conservative and Reform,” but this is an art series, so I was speaking as an artist – and as an artist, that’s what you need to know.

* This is also important when you are writing out the names of the sick to be prayed for. It isn’t a proper prayer for the sick if the prayer leader can read all the names. It is especially important to have terrible writing if you are transliterating English names of non-Jews.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.