Not much Torah writing this week

[hatam_soferet]

But lots of Torah repair.

It’s Elul, the season of repentance. It’s perhaps no coincidence that at this time of year, many communities want to get their Torah scrolls in good working order.

This involves checking through each and every letter of the scroll, making sure that it’s kosher, and if we can, making it beautiful as well. Elul, for comparison, involves checking through your relationships, repairing broken ones and strengthening existing ones.

To this end, this week I and my apprentices:

* worked on CBH’s Goldman scroll
* packaged up CBH’s Rosh Chodesh scroll for shipping home
* spent two days at a synagogue in Queens, fixing a scroll on-site
* worked on a scroll from Florida
* almost finished a scroll from Indiana
* completed and returned a local scroll
* put new atzei chayim on another local scroll.

I also moved house on Tuesday. I’m still in Manhattan, but further south now, on the Upper West Side.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

Comments

[tircha]

That's very poetic. I'd assume that (as I did) they brought them in for repair because you need enough sifrei Torah for Kol Nidre (possibly for multiple concurrent services. )

[hatam_soferet]

Well ahem yes that too.

XEXlnIRxGIQTzKS

[(Anonymous)]

I don't think tech support is trtdiaionally devalued because it's feminine . I think it's feminine because it's trtdiaionally devalued; patriarchy as usual leaves to women the jobs considered the worst. This is a separate phenomenon from devaluing jobs that trtdiaionally belong to women, but both are real phenomena.Let me offer an alternative account. I suspect that tech support is trtdiaionally devalued for capitalist rather than patriarchal reasons. Capitalism values work that increases the value controlled by the capitalist: shareholder value. So it values work that produces capital assets that produce value over time and stay with the company when the employees leave, such as machining, programming, accounting, or project planning. It doesn't value work that is part of cost of sales where the capitalist needs to buy twice as many man-hours to make twice as much revenue because competition with other capitalists exerts constant pressure on how much he can profitably spend on that work. It doesn't value work whose primary value is to build knowledge, because knowledge goes with employees when they leave. The cost of tech support, when done by employees, is part of the per-customer cost of providing a service, so it's essentially part of the cost of sales. It has a very important benefit for the provider, too: if they pay attention, they learn what aspects of their service are most valuable to their customers, and what aspects destroy the most value. I think that's why Craig Newmark is a customer service representative.The funny thing is, there are a wide variety of software-based services where the customer derives much more value from the support than they do from the software, often even from fewer man-hours. And I'm not just talking about the EDS model where the customer brings in a team of hourly consultants to set the software up; even in cases where the customer pays the same regardless of how many man-hours of support they need.Whether support really *is* worth less than coding at Dreamwidth is something I'm not informed enough on to offer an opinion on. I'm just pointing out that, even if it isn't, there are other possible explanations someone might irrationally devalue it than merely because it's trtdiaionally feminine.