Hatam Soferet

Wondering about the midrash on Esther, as well.

At the beginning of the story, the king sends for Queen Vashti to show her off to his mates. And she says she's not coming, whereupon everyone gets into a gigantic tizzy lest it get about that Vashti got away with saying no to her husband, and they dethrone her and all sorts of nasty things, and generally overreact.

Which you can read as being tremendously misogynist, if you like. Or you can be a bit more subtle and read it as satire - the megillah poking fun at people who overreact when their wives don't do as they say.

The midrash, somewhat later, goes to great lengths to explain exactly why Vashti deserved everything she got. It says she was a slut, she was rude to the king and humiliated him in front of his friends, she made Jewish girls work on Shabbat with no clothes, etc.

So if you read the story in light of the midrash, people's reaction to Vashti saying no is totally proportionate.

Why is the midrash so invested in doing this? Does it take the first reading above and have problems with the idea that the biblical characters are overreacting? Does it take the second reading and just not get the idea of satire, or not accept that the Bible can do satire if it wants? Or what? I'm intrigued.

ETA: livredor points out that what the midrash is doing is emphasising a doctrine of just reward and punishment, which is something the midrash rather likes doing - in part because the midrash is often directed at communities in exile who are rather miserable and need to be able to pin their hopes on something - so what it's doing makes sense in its own context. Good.

She also points out that in midrashic parables, a king often represents God. Accordingly, stories where kings do unjust and rotten things are sort of disturbing. So if the king appears rotten and unjust, the midrash-influenced reader is going to feel like it's God being rotten and unjust, and the midrash is going to want to address that, by providing extra background which makes the king/God appear perfectly reasonable. This also makes sense.

Drisha is a lovely makom Torah, a place of Torah. I sit in classroom 5 doing my writing, and I can hear all sorts of learning going on - snippets of Talmud and halakha and general Torah come floating in from the corridors.

Rabbinic tradition takes the verses of the Torah and submits them to layers and layers of interpretation, adding here people's cultures and narratives, there logic and exegesis, a mightily ornate chain of tradition at the end of which is contemporary Judaism.

Scribal tradition, on the other hand, takes the verses of the Torah and reproduces them exactly. There is no interpretation, no narrative, no process. You start with a verse, and end with a verse; this is the Written Torah, plain and simple.

Drisha students immerse themselves in learning the rabbinic tradition, and at present Devorah's class are learning Talmud dealing with civil damages - what happens if you inadvertently injure someone, that sort of thing. It's based on verses in Exodus 21. As it happens, today I was writing Exodus 21, and Devorah brought her class in to see.

Her class are the latest link in the rabbinic chain. I'm the latest link in the scribal chain. By the time you get to the present day, the two chains of tradition don't seem to be connected at all, but today we connected. I saw them come full circle and link their studying, their focus on the chain of the Oral Torah, to my writing, the chain of the Written Torah - at one and the same time an anchor thousands of years old, but written by a living person that very morning.

If I am the bass, they are the melody, the harmony and the descant. If I, sitting in my classroom scribing, am the quiet heart beating the age-old beat of the Written Torah, they are the moving, breathing, complex, beautiful Judaism which we live for and by and in. They connected with me, and their Torah goes in me and through me and onto the page, into the writing, round again, and round and round, Written and Oral, Ancient and Living, then and now and evermore.

Talmud for Scribes meets on Mondays. Sometimes we just learn pieces of Talmud of interest to scribes, and sometimes we learn other interesting rabbinic texts about scribing. This week and last, we've been looking at a ketubah text, from a wedding which took place in Tunisia in 1953. It's written in a Sephardic cursive hand, both pretty and difficult to read if you're not used to it - and the text is very interesting. This is a scan of the text, and this is almost a full transcription.

The text is very interesting:
* The wedding date is given in Gregorian, Hebrew, and Hijrah
* The bride and groom's names are French, not Hebrew, but they are given as "son of," "daughter of," like a Hebrew name. They're also identified by their mothers' names as well as fathers' names, their Gregorian birthdays, and (I think) place of birth, place of residence, and something that might be occupation but I can't quite tell.
* The amounts are given in francs, and are quite substantial amounts. I understand that this kind of realistic approach is common among Sephardim.
* The paper is stamped, like a receipt for a secular document might be. There's a 30F stamp and a 120F one, as well as Protectorate of Tunisia watermarks, and some official rabbinate stamps.

וילון <- velum (curtain, veil)
Vellum <- velin (O Fr) <- vel, vedel (veal) <- vitulus, vitellus (calf) (Online Etymological Dictionary)

=> not the same word, despite vellum sometimes being used as a cheaper alternative to glass.

There's something ironic about someone who is so engrossed in reading the Chofetz Chayim that he bumps into you on the street and doesn't apologise.

PDF analysis of an interesting passage of Talmud. The twiddles at the end, quite frankly, blew my mind.

Nice day messing with a chunk of the Jerusalem Talmud. The chunk, as is so often the case in the J.T., is rather obscure, and the two major commentaries have rather different, and also obscure, ways of interpreting it. So, today: combing out all the strands and working out what commentator 1 thinks the chunk means, and what commentator 2 ditto.

That sort of gratuitous exercise in tidying things up is one of the things I enjoy about both Talmud and mathematics. You have some information; you work out how it all fits together; you fill in the steps in between, and end up with a nice set of steps leading from one place to another.

Both come with the smug academic satisfaction of knowing that you've solved a problem, and the secure academic calm of knowing that it in and of itself is not going to change anything at all. The difference is that Talmud has the advantage that at some point that exercise might form a building block in how I understand my life (or be useful to someone else, even), and I was never going to be that good a mathematician. Which is why I am a scribe and Pharisee, and not a mathematician.

My article about women writing Torahs* got accepted by Meorot, formerly known as the Edah journal. I'm rather jolly pleased about that, personally, in that it's an indication from complete strangers that my scholarship is fairly decent. More generally, it might contribute towards women's participation re writing Torahs in the orthodox world, which would be nice.** Of course, I'm also laying myself open to vicious criticism, but hey, things were getting a bit quiet round here, right?

They do double-blind refereeing, so the referee assumes I'm a man, and uses phrases like "his argument" when referring to the author. This makes me wonder how much responses are going to be biased by my being female. People might not consciously say "Oh, a woman? Well, it can't be much good then," but I think there's an awful lot of that under the surface. I wish there was a way to test this, don't you? Alternatively, to avoid it, but I don't think it's quite the done thing to use a pseudonym in an academic journal.

Anyway, more about all this when it comes out. Stay tuned :)



* the one which says: there are ways to say it's okay even in classically orthodox places, so long as the community's interested in saying that.
** unless one thinks that it would be a really bad idea, obviously, in which case it would not be good at all. Some people think that. That is okay, so long as they don't give me grief about it. I am fine with people disagreeing with me provided they do it politely.

Hey...anyone have a US landline phone with speakerphone they aren't using? I'm trying to Use Technology To Enable Learning, by having three learners in one room and the fourth learner a few hundred miles away, and it ain't going to happen without speakerphone so's we can all talk. I thought we had one, but apparently we don't any more (what's with that, huh?). hotshot2000, is there one kicking around your mum's place?

I did not go swimming this evening, and as I result I feel rotten. Rotten rotten rotten. So I didn't get any learning done, which is a shame, because I've been reading this extraordinary responsum about soferim who have personal hygiene problems. ( It gets icky, you've been warned ) I'm learning this to extend my knowledge, just so's you know - not because I have a pressing need to know the answer.

So, no learning. Instead I made a Barbie-size Torah, so that Hagbah Barbie can join the merry crew. I'll take a piccy tomorrow when the paint's dry.