Hatam Soferet

Questions from an artist who writes blessings and creates art around them.

Q:“Am I allowed to draw over the letters, including Hashem’s name if you can see them underneath?”

A:How you treat Hashem’s name is a metaphor for how you treat Hashem. How literally Jews take metaphors roughly depends on where they fall on the denominational spectrum. Thus some (most) Jews would say that painting transparent watercolour over a Divine Name is fine if it contributes to making it beautiful, but a few would think it inappropriate. Without knowing you personally I cannot say how you should feel about all that.

Q: “If I make a mistake and the writing is not legible anymore, do I need to bury it?”

A:If a text is damaged but contains legible Divine Names it is proper to bury it because it is improper to dispose of Divine Names in any other way. If you made the Name itself illegible by making the mistake, such as spilling opaque paint onto it, opinions vary since the Name has already been destroyed, but you should probably go to the extra effort of burying it, to teach you to be more careful next time.

Q:“I use canvas, is that ok?”

A:Okay, look, there is an opinion that says you aren’t allowed to write verses from Tanakh on anything except kosher parchment, with anything except kosher ink, in anything less than book-length amounts. There is also an opinion that says someone who writes down blessings is like someone who burns the Torah (כותבי ברכות כשורפי תורהת Shabbat 115b). The vast, vast majority of Jews do not abide by these opinions.* I assume you are among them since you create blessing art on printed material. In that case, obviously it is fine to use canvas; canvas is a respectable art material. I wouldn’t suggest you go all “Piss Christ” because ugh, and I personally think it would be weird to write blessings on parchment made from pigskin, for instance, but basically there are no rules about this beyond “Don’t do it.”

* Even very frum ones. They too use prayerbooks, for instance. I might talk about that at some later time.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

A clip from a testimonial,* signed by appreciative members of an Italian community in 1956. In the subsequent sixty years, note how one of the substances in the black ink has spread out around the signature, giving it a sort of halo. Ink can be funny like that. It’s one of the reasons artists use “archival-quality” materials–the idea is that they aren’t going to do this. Not sure how they know.

* Before you start grumbling: you’ll see the whole thing next time, so hang in there.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

Today we have some public health notices from 1923 (DR5-L73 and 74).

Images copyright Jewish Theological Seminary of America. Used with permission. Click to see larger image.

“Either you’ve washed your hands and nails with soap and water, or you mustn’t eat or touch your eyes. Contagious diseases are in dirt!”

Thanks to Alex Casser for translations from Yiddish.

‘Dam, tsfardeya, kinim’–the third plague is the worst! Check yourself for lice! Typhus comes from lice!”

Also observe the interesting font, how the lamed doesn’t rise above the line of type, nor the kuf descend below it.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

The hardest part was getting the braid around the outside right. I wanted it to be just one line, going round and round, but if you just run a sinewave around the edge, you get either two or four lines, and I very much wanted only one line, because I only wanted to have the one text in the border.

It frustrates me no end that I no longer have the mathematical vocabulary to articulate the problem and thus find the solution easily. I contemplated asking a certain chap I know who works with knot theory, but didn’t want to admit defeat, and eventually figured it out the painful way, by drawing it on squared paper.

If you look carefully, you can see that there are eleven troughs along the top border but only ten along the bottom border. This is because a one-strand braid works if your border isn’t a whole number of wavelengths but is something-and-a-half wavelengths. The easiest way to do that is remove one of the troughs on one of the short edges and stretch the others a bit to make up for it – you could say, ok, the border is 100cm and the wavelength is about 4cm which would come out to 25 phases so let’s make it 24.5 okay divide 100 by 24.5 that’s 4.08 rightio let’s make the wavelength 4.08cm and figure out how to centre that so that the side borders are level with each other…but that’s very tiresome, so I didn’t bother.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

Part 1

Since this is a poem for Shabbat Nachamu, a poem which references the first verse of the haftara we say that day, I wanted to have that haftara in the border. It’s Isaiah chapter 40:2 ff and a bit of 41; it starts in the top right-hand corner.

There are a couple of scribal errors in the haftara part (click here for closeup of entire thing). It’s hard copying a text you’re not totally familiar with into a pattern, when your attention is largely focused on getting the pattern right. I could have avoided that by writing it all out in pencil first, but…well, I just didn’t want to bother, and I paid the price!

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

(Click to see bigger)

Bride and groom,

When we started this process, you said “I don’t think it could possibly work out, but I just had to give it a try.” You asked for something you thought was impossible, and it turned into something quite lovely. May your marriage have many similar shots at seemingly-impossible targets.

The text you chose for your ketubah is a modern one, reflecting your commitment to each other as equals. Yet you chose to have it translated into Aramaic, reflecting your awareness of your heritage. May your marriage be as strongly rooted.

Your text has traditional legal language sprinkled with phrases from Tanakh. The legal language is written in an ordinary book-hand, but the Torah phrases are written in Torah script – distinctive when you look for it, but subtly blending into the broader context. May your marriage have joyous discoveries of the divine amongst the everyday.

The texts adorning the edge of your ketubah are also traditional texts for ketubot. Although the border seems to be one gloriously intricate swirl of letters, if you look carefully, you will see that the two texts are in fact still distinct. May you each preserve your individuality, yet blend together into a harmonious whole.

One of the texts is Sos asis – a haftarah for the Seven Weeks of Consolation, and also traditionally recited on the Shabbat before the wedding. It starts with Isaiah 61:10: “I will greatly rejoice” and goes up to 62:10, a verse whose wordplay means it can read “Lift up a flag over the people” or “Raise a miracle over the people.” May your marriage have whichever you need of consolation and rejoicing, inspiration and miracle.

The other text is Eshet Hayil, Proverbs 31:10-31. Eshet Hayil sings the virtues of a fine wife, and in doing so it shares its vision of a well-balanced, comfortable, smoothly-functioning household. May your marriage also have this contentment.

Eshet Hayil wasn’t quite enough to fill up the space allotted to it, so I also added a line or two from the sheva berakhot, the wedding blessings – “Blessed is the one who created joy and gladness, groom and bride, mirth, song, delight and rejoicing…” The blessing continues: “…love and harmony and peace and companionship.” As your text contains only the beginning of the blessing, may your wedding contain only the beginning of a life of love and harmony, peace and companionship.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

Here’s an interesting question:

Dear Ms. Friedman,

this is not specifically about religious scrolls, but as a scribe, could you tell me how many handwritten letters can usually fit on the parchment made from one cow, or on the parchment made from one goat,
or on the parchment made from one sheep? Assuming the letter sizes, lines distances, and margins that were usually used before the invention of printing, so that the result is readable and doesn’t look
rushed or squeezed.

I’m asking out of curiosity; I was wondering what kind of short stories, treatises, poems or articles could fit on one hide.

Answer:

“Assuming the letter sizes, lines distances, and margins that were usually used before the invention of printing, so that the result is readable and doesn’t look rushed or squeezed.”

That’s a huge assumption, which may be shaping your thinking in an unhelpful way. If you look at different manuscripts from the appropriate period you will see an enormous variation in letter sizes. A skilled scribe with good materials can write a truly tiny book which nonetheless doesn’t look “rushed or squeezed.” The style of writing also makes a difference; for instance, black-letter takes up a great deal less space than uncial letters of the same height, so one can fit more letters in. Speaking as a scribe, the amount of text I have to write and the size of the available media often dictates my choice of script and size.

An instructive exercise would be to look at, for example, a small psalter or prayer-book; note the page dimensions, and count the average number of letters per line and lines per page. Many libraries have online collections, see below. Find out how much writing surface one generally gets from a hide by asking parchment suppliers. Use your page dimension to calculate number of pages per hide; remember you can write on both sides. You might also find the fields of book history and codicology fruitful.

Links: http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Default.aspx
http://digitalgallery.nypl.org/nypldigital/explore/dgexplore.cfm?topic=arts&col_id=173

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

A question from someone typesetting a ketubah:

“I’m using typefaces that have a hand-done feel to them, but obviously they are mechanical. There are some typefaces (Guttman Stam and Guttman Stam 1) that recreate a sofrut look. One of these uses taggin and one is plain. I have no pretension to be following sofrut laws, but I’d prefer to use a typeface that won’t look completely ridiculous or pretentious to somebody familiar with the customs of how these documents are traditionally written… Is it appropriate to use the font with the taggin as the general typeface, or are those letters with taggin only reserved for special instances of letters?”

That is…instead of going for something instantly identifiable as “font that came with your computer,” like this:

she’s going for something that is both prettier and evokes some of our more cherished solemn traditions, like this:

“I just had this nightmare scenario in mind where I had my beatuiful, tag-saturated ketubah on my wall and then became friends with someone savvy in sofrut who looked at it and saw the equivalent of an entire contract composed entirely of those giant gothic storybook letters that are supposed to come at the beginning of a paragraph in an illuminated manuscript”

Like this, that is to say:

where it ought to look like this:

The answer: in our days, tagin are letter-specific, not context-specific; they generally occur on the letters שעטנז גץ only. You can use a font with tagin without looking like an utter chump.

Now, some people do hold that since this is the script used for sifrei torah, tefillin, and mezuzot, it should be reserved exclusively for use on those documents; that using sta”m script on things such as ketubot isn’t appropriate. I don’t hold that way personally, and this isn’t even a script we’re talking, it’s a font, so it’s not really even the same thing since you basically can’t use it for sta”m anyway.* Still, something to bear in mind; if one’s community fetishises the script, best not to use it for a ketubah.

I’ve even heard the view that since this is the script used for gittin, tagin aren’t appropriate for ketubot – gittin being divorce documents and tagin apparently being a kind of bad-luck talisman when employed in wedding contexts. Except that we don’t put tagin on the letters in gittin, so that one kind of falls down at the starting post, but underneath what it’s saying, again, is that there’s a desire to keep these letters apart and special – “gittin” is just the language used to clothe that concept.

But some people** take it in the other direction, and say that since this is the script used for our most important and significant documents, it makes sense to use it for a ketubah.

Which is fair enough, so long as one does it with awareness.

* Not without some innovative responsa, anyway
** I haven’t got published sources for either of these views. This is just “I talked to some rabbi, and he said…” territory.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

What happens when you let the nose on your dalet get out of control: it turns into an elephant.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

This is one of my favourite letter-halakhot, from the rules of how to make straight nun:

And from the rules of straight khaf, clarifying the point:

Many people have difficulty visualising (and remembering) this. I hope that the animation displayed here will help.

The very best sorts of people do mitzvot as soon as the opportunity presents itself, correct? And we read Hebrew from right to left, so surely we should put tagin on the right-hand head of letters such as tzaddi, which have more than one head? Like the image at left, in fact.

We don’t, though. We put them on the left-hand head, like the image at right. Why’s that?

Because if you put them on the right-hand head, they’d fall off. (Keset haSofer, 5:2, letter tet.)

And this is why we make the right-hand heads curvy and upward-tilted.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.