Hatam Soferet

Shabbat 103b/Sifrei Vaethanan

וכתבתם – שתהא כתיבה תמה; שלא יכתוב אלפ”ין עיינ”ין, עיינ”ין אלפ”ין, בית”ין כפ”ין, כפ”ין בית”ין, גמ”ין צד”ין, צד”ין גמ”ין, דלת”ין ריש”ין, ריש”ין דלת”ין, היה”ין חית”ין, חית”ין היה”ין, וו”ין יוד”ין, יוד”ין וו”ין, זיינ”ין נונ”ין, נונ”ין זיינ”ין, טית”ין פיפ”ין, פיפ”ין טית”ין, כפופין פשוטין, פשוטים כפופין, מימ”ין סמכ”ין, סמכ”ין מימ”ין, סתומין פתוחין, פתוחין סתומין. פרשה פתוחה לא יעשנה סתומה, סתומה לא יעשנה פתוחה.

When the Torah says “ukhtavtam,” it means that it should be ketivah tamah – perfect/simple writing. So you shouldn’t make:
alephs into ayins or ayins into alephs.
Nor beits into khafs or khafs into beits.
Nor gimels into tzadis or tzadis into gimels.
Nor dalets into reishes or reishes into dalets.
Nor heys into hets or hets into heys.
Nor vavs into yuds or yuds into vavs.
Nor zayins into nuns or nuns into zayins.
Nor tets into pehs or pehs into tets.
You shouldn’t make bent ones straight or straight ones bent
Nor mems into samechs or samechs into mems.
You shouldn’t make opens closed or closeds open.

If you mix up alefs and ayins, this happens:

(אתון=donkey. עתון=newspaper.)

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

It’s Shabbat Rosh Chodesh, so there’s an extra Torah reading this week.

I bet most of you reading this have two Torah scrolls in your shul. There’s the one you read from every week, and there’s the Rosh Chodesh Torah. It gets used on Rosh Chodesh and festivals for the seasonal readings, and never gets used for anything else. It’s probably the heavy one, or the old one people don’t really like using.

Talmud study:

המפקיד ס”ת אצל חבירו גוללו כל שנים עשר חדש פותחו וקורא בו אם בשבילו פתחו אסור סומכוס אומר בחדש שלשים יום בישן שנים עשר חדש ר”א בן יעקב אומר אחד זה ואחד זה שנים עשר חדש

If one deposited a sefer Torah with his fellow, he rolls it every twelve months, opens it and reads from it. If he opened it for his own needs, he may not read in it. Sumchus says one rolls a new Sefer Torah every thirty days and an old one every twelve months; R’ Eliezer ben Yaakov says whether new or old, they must be rolled every twelve months.

Bava Metzia 29b; the Talmud is talking about how you keep objects in good order if you’ve been entrusted with their care. To keep a sefer Torah in good order, you must roll it from end to end at least once a year and possibly once a month, and reading causes wear and tear.

People who repair Torah scrolls can always identify a Rosh Chodesh Torah. The Rosh Chodesh section is in unbelievably bad condition, like this:

Sorry for the fuzzy image–if you can see it, the letters are flaking off and the section is in no way kosher.

It is possible to repair damage like this, but it is time-consuming, expensive, and not especially long-lived.

You should be rotating your scrolls. If the big one is the Rosh Chodesh Torah this year, make it the main reading Torah next year (and I don’t care if no-one can lift it; do you want a pasul Torah on your hands? No you don’t). If you’ve got spare ones, get the bar mitzvahs or the ritual committee to roll one of them each month and bring them into the rotation next year.

If you’ve just commissioned a shiny new scroll (hello, CBH!), make it the reading scroll this year and the Rosh Chodesh scroll next year and roll it end-to-end every month to keep it healthy. Otherwise in fifty years it will look like the one in the picture, and you do not want that to happen.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

I forget why I wanted her safely out of the way, but this worked nicely.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

Learning to cut and shape quills is one of the most stumbly stumbling-blocks a newbie scribe has to negotiate.

I learned to cut quills from a combination of websites (regia.org, liralen, and the ever-helpful Mordechai Pinchas), assistance in person, and practice.

When you’re starting out, you don’t know what a good quill is supposed to feel like, so you don’t know if you’re doing it right or not. Assistance in person is especially useful at this point.

When I was learning, Mordechai Pinchas was kind enough to send me a couple of ready-cut quills. It really helps. (Also especially worth noting is his tip about the Sharp Click – read his instructions; where he says A loud “click” confirms a good sharp cut and thus a clean edge, pay extra attention.)

Mediaeval re-enactment sites are jolly good for telling you how to recreate the mediaeval way of doing things, but they aren’t very useful for incorporating modern technology. Fair enough, obviously, but one thing it took me a long time to learn was: a razor blade is the best tool for cutting the ink channel. I was shown that particular trick by the sofer at Pardes, and life got easier.

But practice is the main thing. If you’re a beginner, it’s quite normal to spend all morning wrestling with your quill. If you’re a beginner whose teacher is nearby, they can sort you out; if you’re not that lucky, you just have to keep working at it. When I started my first Torah, I could get a decent quill eventually, although it might take me an hour or more; by the end of that year, I could get a decent quill pretty much every time. Practice.

Waan attempts to shape a quill:

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

Well, it’s my Queen’s diamond jubilee weekend, so I’m going to post about jubilees this week.

This is Bet Haverim’s fifty-year anniversary, their proper jubilee. The concept of jubilee comes from the Torah, from Leviticus. So when we were discussing which section of the Torah Bet Haverim would be writing as a community, we naturally came to the section describing the original jubilee.

On the visits I’ve made to Davis, we’ve been writing that section, letter by letter. Last time I was there, we also had a discussion session talking about the concept of jubilee from a slightly different angle.

The biblical jubilee features, amongst other things, the idea that everyone should go home, back to their family lands. But Bet Haverim’s jubilee features the fifty-year mark of a community. Some people have been at Bet Haverim right from the beginning.

I wanted people to explore that tension, between the idea of jubilee as homecoming on the one hand, and as home-creating on the other hand.

Here are the different texts we looked at. You might like to print the sheet and discuss it with family or friends.

This is one of the songs we talked about:

After the discussion, Elaine sent me this very interesting article, which adds a whole other perspective to the discussion.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

I’ve talked a bit about how it’s okay to fix mistakes, in most circumstances.

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.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

We reached a halfway point this week; 122.5 columns of 245.

As it happens, 245 is also the number of words in the Shema (full text here). The Shema is the cornerstone of the liturgy; the Torah is the cornerstone of the religion. The Shema says, bring God into all your doings; the Torah is the guide as to how. The Shema declares faith in God; the Torah symbolises God’s presence. 245 words; 245 columns.

We could leave it there, and that would be very nice. However, the Shema in liturgy has an interesting peculiarity, thus: when praying as individuals, we precede it with the three words אל מלך נאמן, God truthful King. When as a community, three words are added after its silent recitation – the last two words ה’ אלהיכם the-Lord your-God are repeated aloud, and the word אמת, emet, true added.

Why’s this?

Well, 245+3=248, and 248 in the rabbinic narrative corresponds to the number of pertinent parts of the human body. Proverbs 3 says of the Law It shall be health to thy navel, and marrow to thy bones; how better to map the fundamentals of the Law onto the fundamentals of the body than by reference to the Shema? One word for each body part, says Rav Nehori,** and everything will be good above and below.

248 is also the number of positive commandments in the Torah, as it happens. 248 imperatives, 248 vital body parts, and 248 words in the vital liturgical element.

245 columns in the Torah seemed jolly nice a few paragraphs ago, but now it seems we’ve got three bits missing.

Well, the Torah lives on a pair of rollers. Some call them spindles, some call them atzei hayim, trees of life – and some call them amudim, columns.

Recall that the three words added to the 245 in the Shema are אל מלך נאמן, God truthful King or ה’ אלהיכם אמת the-Lord your-God [is] true. Both times, it’s two words and emet, truth. With our Torah, we’ve got 245 columns of words, 2 wooden columns, and…and something.

What is it, this final something?

Our clue comes from another “column,” the amud, the desk from which the Torah is read. Torah reading is, after all, the link between the scroll and the life of the community, both now and in all the generations before. The Torah does not mean much if it is not part of people. The Shema is only 247 mumbled words without the emet. The 248 body parts aren’t much without the spark of life.

* Not all Torahs have 245 columns. Column height and width can vary, and therefore so can the total number of columns. People are often surprised to learn this.

** Midrash Ne-elam (Zohar Chadash to Ruth), via the Mishnah Berurah on this aspect of Kriat Shema (61:6), see also Virtual Beit Midrash.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

When we look at words in the Torah scroll, we notice unusual decorations on the letters.

What are they? Why are they there? A very few seconds’ thought tells us that they are not vowels or cantillation, the more usual “decorations” of Hebrew letters.

The fourth-generation amora Rava states [Men 29b]: There are seven letters that each have three zayins: Shaatnez Gatz.

One of the places in Torah where the seven crowned letters cluster together:

As interpreted today, the “zayins” come in all sorts of forms, sometimes several forms in the same sefer:

Some choose to connect these zayins to kabbalah. Part of the kabbalistic apparatus is the set of sefirot, sort-of divine levels of understanding. The ultimate one is Infinity, the utterly-unknowable-unless-you’re-God, then you get revelation and understanding (the intellectual realm, apparently), then a bunch of things like mercy and grace (the emotive realm), but this is a very bald rendering and properly it is terribly nuanced and subtle. And there are ten altogether.

Zayin is the seventh letter in the alef-bet, and it has three taggin. That makes ten sefirot! So one interpretation of a zayin is that the seven part, underneath, corresponds to the seven sefirot in the emotive realm, and the three part, the three higher.

In which case, the three taggin correspond to Keter (Infinity), Hokhmah (Wisdom), and Binah (Love). The middle one is the tallest, and represents Keter, which is the highest possible state of being; Hokhmah is the next tallest and the next most important so it sits on the right, and Binah is the shortest and sits on the left (Understanding the Alef-Beis, Dovid Leitner).

There is a famous story about tagin, told of the third-generation tanna Rabbi Akiva.

When Moses ascended Mount Sinai to receive the Torah, he found God tying crowns onto the letters.

“God,” said Moses, “surely you don’t need those?”*

God replied: “After many generations, there will be a sage named R’ Akiva, who will derive heaps and heaps of halakhot from them.”

Because in some Torah-writing traditions, letters other than שעטנ”ז ג”ץ have adornments. For instance, Exodus 6:2-3 saysוַיְדַבֵּ֥ר אֱלֹהִ֖ים אֶל־מֹשֶׁ֑ה וַיֹּ֥אמֶר אֵלָ֖יו אֲנִ֥י יְהוָֽה׃ וָֽאֵרָ֗א אֶל־אַבְרָהָ֛ם אֶל־יִצְחָ֥ק וְאֶֽל־יַעֲקֹ֖ב בְּאֵ֣ל שַׁדָּ֑י וּשְׁמִ֣י יְהוָ֔ה לֹ֥א נוֹדַ֖עְתִּי לָהֶֽם — God spoke to Moses, and said to him, I am YHVH. I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as El-Shaddai, but by my name YHVH I was not known to them.

That second YHVH looks like this, in some traditions:

Three tagin per hey, see? This doesn’t happen on all heys, nor yet on all instances of YHVH–just on certain ones. Why?

One scholar explains: There are tagin on the Name to indicate that this is the crowned, distinguished Name, the superior, explicit Name. And why on the heys specifically? Twice hey is ten, and ten are the modes of existence: (1) Utter height, (2) utter lowness, (3) utter east, (4) utter west, (5) utter north, (6) utter south, (7) utter good, (8) utter bad, (9) utter firstness, (10) utter lastness.**

These tagin are altogether more obscure than the straightforward שעטנ”ז ג”ץ. It is probably these the midrash alludes to.

The sefer I am writing for CBH is following one of these traditions of special tagin. I am copying from a sefer owned by my synagogue in Washington Heights. I don’t know much about that sefer, except that it is old, beautiful, and part of my community, and I think the tradition of adorned letters it represents is probably worth preserving.

* Only You can understand them, God, so why give them to me? alternatively, isn’t the Torah already perfect with just its letters?
** G. Wasserman, trans.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

Exodus 28:36, a verse from this week’s parsha; ועשית ציץ זהב טהור… “Make a tzitz of pure gold…” Go look it up.

In some sifrei Torah, the final tzaddi of the word ציץ is writ large, including in the sefer I’m presently writing:

Here’s another one, from a different sefer (presently in Berlin; my last congregation but one donated the sefer to a community in need when they got their new sefer written by me; isn’t that beautiful?):

Here, note particularly the little fractal zayins on the word זהב.

I’m not writing about why all this, this week. Have a think about it for now. When I come to CBH in a few weeks’ time, we’ll be learning more about these. Look out for the schedule.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

This morning I’m writing chapter 14 of Exodus:

And Moses stretched out his hand, and a strong wind blew all night, and dried up the sea. And the children of Israel came into the sea on dry land, and [this bit is recited with the special tune for the Song of the Sea] the waters were like walls to them, on their right and on their left, וְהַמַּיִם לָהֶם חוֹמָה מִימִינָם וּמִשְּׂמֹאלָם.

It so happens this morning that while I’m writing this piece, I’m listening to the last movement of Berlioz’s Te Deum, Judex crederis, which is remarkably well-placed as an accompaniment to this particular piece of Torah. Have a listen:

Berlioz scored the Te Deum for two orchestras, three choirs, and an enormous organ, which makes it sufficiently breathtaking for the scene at the Sea, all that water and all those people and the mighty strength of God through-and-over all.

The text is pretty appropriate too; in English it starts We believe that you will come to be our judge. We therefore pray you help your servants…. Full English and Latin here.* Berlioz’s musical interpretation certainly reflects how I think the children of Israel must have been feeling at that point. Right at the end, when all the choirs and all the instruments combine in this enormous cry of In te Domine speravi, non confundar in æternum! (O Lord, in you have I trusted, let me never be confounded) as the waters tower over them and the warriors follow them and the strong winds blow and the trop changes to the slow, sweeping, dramatic cadences of the Song of the Sea…

* I admit the bit about redeeming with blood is rather Christian, but it’s not too bad, especially given the blood of the Exodus, and the rest of the text is spot on really.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.