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The book "21 Truths About Heaven" doesn't have any customer reviews on Amazon. I find this simultaneously amusing and reassuring.
Scribes' class last night (the unoffical hardcore class for serious fledgling scribes). We're doing the laws of hak tokhot at the moment, the concept that you can't turn something into a valid letter by scraping at it. It's pure formalism, in a way - it doesn't look any different, whether you make it by scraping or inking; you can't tell the difference - but it's also a sort of homiletical point: you can't form Torah from destructive acts. The letters have to be made with additive processes, not subtractive processes. The creation has to go in one direction, adding to the body of the letter, not taking away from an existing body. Me, I like the formalism better, I'm very much one for abstract concepts, but it's nice that there are both aspects.
Relatedly, Calligraphy for Fun (i.e. official Wednesday night class at Drisha) is looking at erasing God's Names. That too is a formalism, in a way: you mayn't destroy certain combinations of letters which represent God. Formally, the problem is basically with letters which were written to indicate God. Printing, for instance, isn't necessarily a problem here, because the letters weren't written with specific, verbalised intent and hence don't technically have the status of a Name Which May Not Be Destroyed. But it's not just the formalism. The formalism is an articulation of a broader value, namely how do we want to treat these things? A printed Bible doesn't, perhaps, technically have the status of a Torah vis-a-vis disposal, but disposal makes a statement about the item, which is what's really being addressed. If we toss printed Bibles into the trash along with newspapers, that's basically saying a Bible is just like a newspaper. Saying that printed matter also requires respectful disposal is formalising the idea that Bibles ought to be treated differently from newspapers.
What I like about this is how there's the kernel of formalism, the ruling that one may not destroy the items in a small category. Then there's the broader application of the formalism, the idea that all sacred texts should be disposed of respectfully. Then there's the unarticulated underlying values expressed through the formalism - that disposal affects status and that one ought to treat certain types of content in a different way. And this reflects an even more fundamental human tendency to sanctify things.
I want to say it's a bit like matrices, although I'd have a lot of trouble expressing just exactly why. They feel the same. Lots of layers which do different things depending what the other layers are doing.
Scribes' class last night (the unoffical hardcore class for serious fledgling scribes). We're doing the laws of hak tokhot at the moment, the concept that you can't turn something into a valid letter by scraping at it. It's pure formalism, in a way - it doesn't look any different, whether you make it by scraping or inking; you can't tell the difference - but it's also a sort of homiletical point: you can't form Torah from destructive acts. The letters have to be made with additive processes, not subtractive processes. The creation has to go in one direction, adding to the body of the letter, not taking away from an existing body. Me, I like the formalism better, I'm very much one for abstract concepts, but it's nice that there are both aspects.
Relatedly, Calligraphy for Fun (i.e. official Wednesday night class at Drisha) is looking at erasing God's Names. That too is a formalism, in a way: you mayn't destroy certain combinations of letters which represent God. Formally, the problem is basically with letters which were written to indicate God. Printing, for instance, isn't necessarily a problem here, because the letters weren't written with specific, verbalised intent and hence don't technically have the status of a Name Which May Not Be Destroyed. But it's not just the formalism. The formalism is an articulation of a broader value, namely how do we want to treat these things? A printed Bible doesn't, perhaps, technically have the status of a Torah vis-a-vis disposal, but disposal makes a statement about the item, which is what's really being addressed. If we toss printed Bibles into the trash along with newspapers, that's basically saying a Bible is just like a newspaper. Saying that printed matter also requires respectful disposal is formalising the idea that Bibles ought to be treated differently from newspapers.
What I like about this is how there's the kernel of formalism, the ruling that one may not destroy the items in a small category. Then there's the broader application of the formalism, the idea that all sacred texts should be disposed of respectfully. Then there's the unarticulated underlying values expressed through the formalism - that disposal affects status and that one ought to treat certain types of content in a different way. And this reflects an even more fundamental human tendency to sanctify things.
I want to say it's a bit like matrices, although I'd have a lot of trouble expressing just exactly why. They feel the same. Lots of layers which do different things depending what the other layers are doing.
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