Hatam Soferet

I aten't dead

Mon, 17 Oct 2011 14:21:08 GMT

Well, I'm back in the States. Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible.

JFK was full of chasidim going to the big Sukkot parties in Boro Park. Many of them have shiny black coats. Just like my dog. Maybe the dog frummed out when I wasn't looking?

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La vie soferet

Fri, 20 Aug 2010 21:42:37 GMT

logThe Soferet has moved house, from the ideal-for-young-families suburbanity of Riverdale, Bronx, NY, to the somewhat grittier New Frankfurt, otherwise known as Washington Heights, New York, NY.

I have been a Manhattan resident for two full days, and I have not yet bought a fur coat, drunk cocktails, joined a yoga studio, had an affair with my personal trainer, or acquired a tiny dog to go in my handbag. I am perhaps Doing It Wrong?

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stage management

Sun, 27 Sep 2009 00:23:17 GMT

Sukkah-building. Ink in foreground.

The Soferet likes a bit of human interaction now and again, and so on Thursday I was working in the library of the Jewish Theological Seminary here in New York.

There's a bit of the library which is set up as a beit midrash, with Talmud volumes instead of the usual academic books. It's got great big windows, and most of the time it's very quiet. (The real beit midrash is elsewhere, you see. Underground, so the light isn't as good. But with free tea. I might work there next week.)

A young woman passed by and did a double-take: quill and ink? what is that happening there? crikey, it looks like Torah... and we ended up having a nice conversation, in which she mentioned that she'd never before seen a Torah in the process of being written, and indeed had never really thought about how the Torah gets to be the way it is.

A soferet's job is like that. You work in the background, doing your job, and when it's done, all attention is on your product, the shiny new Torah, and perhaps you deliver it and interact with the community and perhaps not, but in any case afterwards you fade back out and the Torah takes over.

Personally, I don't mind this - I also enjoyed stage-managing in college - but what grabbed me particularly was that outside the lovely big windows, the JTS ground staff were building a sukkah, ready for the Sem to use next week. Next week perhaps the students will have sukkah-decorating and perhaps they won't, but the actual building of the sukkah took place, like much Torah-writing, in the background, so that next week the sukkah will be ready for use and the ground staff will have faded into the background.

So, that was a nice parallel, last Thursday. Me inside, writing Torah more or less unseen, and them outside, building a sukkah more or less unseen, setting the stage for the pageantry of Sukkot and Simchat Torah, upon which the curtains will open next week.

(Edited to add: bother, while I was working I evidently missed this pathetic protest - check out the link, the picture is fantastic! That crush barrier!)

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Good weather

Mon, 27 Jul 2009 22:20:54 GMT

livredor and I went touristing on Sunday, to the Brooklyn Bridge. First we had EXTREME PIZZA in the East Village, and then we went over into Brooklyn (via 14th St to see the moving platforms) so as to walk back over the bridge towards Manhattan.

Weather.com had told us that there would be Isolated T-Storms (I insist upon interpreting this as "isolated tea storms," because it pleases me), and standing in the sunshine at the Brooklyn end of the bridge, we could see an Isolated Tea Storm over Manhattan.

Liv observed that it's obvious why the Dutch liked Manhattan; the sky had that curious opaque grey with funny pearly-yellow clouds look to it that you see in Dutch paintings.

Walking over the bridge towards the storm, we saw a huge streak of lightning fizzle out of the clouds and ground itself in the lightning conductor on the American International Building. That's the Empire State Building in the picture, so it was like that except a bit further south. Anyway, the American International Building is the tallest building in Lower Manhattan, so you would sort of expect lightning to ground there, but I've never actually seen actual lightning actually sparking into an actual lightning conductor before. It was very exciting.

Mostly it wasn't raining on us, either. We were on the bridge between Brooklyn which was doing just fine and Manhattan which now had proper lowering clouds absolutely filled with sheets of lightning periodically grounding itself in any tall building that happened to be handy, watching the storm (you can see a lot of sky, from the bridge), not getting wet, and having occasional bouts of engineering lust at how pretty the bridge is.

I had the Umbrella of Utter Happiness with me so when it started actually raining we were okay. The Umbrella of Utter Happiness is concentric fuschia and marigold stripes with radial blend, and I love it to bits. (It is from the guy with a stall at 73rd and Broadway, if you're interested.) It wasn't much use against the Total Tropical Downpour, but happily we were basically in the subway by that time.

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Mon, 06 Jul 2009 02:00:39 GMT

Cor, what a day; boroparkpyro was our driver, and we acquired a temporary car and drove to Vernon, CT. In Vernon, there was a shul which was closing, and getting rid of lots of stuff, books mostly. It so happens that [Unknown site tag] knows lots of people who could just happily use Stuff, so in Vernon we collected all this Stuff and conveyed it to NY, whence bits of it will go to various parts of Scandinavia.

The shul is perfectly splendid - in this glorious turn-of-the-century mansion, with glorious grounds, pretty trees, and so on. It's late and I've been on the road all day so I'm not going to post pictures, just, it was lovely. And the drive was pretty and there wasn't too much traffic and it's really fun going on road trips with linguists.

Total and utter props to boroparkpyro, hero of the hour, and B'Nai Israel, shul heroes. Yay.

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