Hatam Soferet

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.

Envy me, y'all. I have a housemate who gets up an hour earlier than she needs to so that we can travel together and learn gemara on the subway.

Visited the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island today since sister is visiting. Beautiful day for it, my goodness; perfect sort of day to be out on the water.

I liked two things especially about the Statue of Liberty. One, the way the statue was made of sheets of copper shaped by hammering into a mould, and then bolted over a framework - that's just very interesting; I knew it was hollow, but not *that* hollow. The other thing I like is that her tummy sticks out further than her bosom. It is so unusual to see representations of women which look like an average woman. I can look at Liberty and think "Hey, I look like that!" and that is more inspiring than you might believe.

Ellis Island was interesting for being modern. My mental immigrant is apparently stuck in 1850; the building has mostly been restored to its 1920s look, tiling and panelling and so forth, with many photographs of people doing things which, if you look carefully, are quite obviously not set in 1850. Intellectually of course I know that immigrants weren't all coming from 1850, but I was continually being surprised by how modern everything was. Telephones and consumerism and Roaring Twenties.

(And even so, there were still a lot of deaths from infectious diseases like measles. Vaccinate your children!)*

I was surprised to learn that most people only spent a few hours there, also. It makes sense in terms of red tape - controlling illegal movement and infectious disease* - but seems awfully cumbersome to ferry thousands of people out there and back again almost right away. The building has these gigantic echoing halls, which reminded me, a first-generation immigrant myself, overwhelmingly of Customs&Immigration at JFK airport, in whose gigantic echoing halls I went through much the same sort of procedure.

What I noticed very strongly, and hadn't been expecting at all, was how white it felt. Liberty Island is covered in stuff about how coming to the USA was an escape from tyranny, oppression etc, and the statue is symbolic of hope, freedom, etc. Ellis Island is covered in stuff about how coming to the USA was a chance at a new life, a better life, free, hopeful, etc. I couldn't help thinking that there are a heck of a lot of people for whom coming to the USA was an *act* of oppression and a deprivation of liberty, hope, freedom etc. Different period, obviously, and historical context and so on; you wouldn't expect Ellis Island to be talking about anything much other than Europeans. I was just suddenly very aware of white privilege and having it, and that awareness flavoured my day.

Especially re Statue of Liberty - she is placed strategcally in the harbour such that she is the first sight of new immigrants, and as such she comes to represent hope and freedom and suchlike as per American Dream. Except that said immigrants were not a) Native American b) South American c) Black d) Asian, and I find myself wondering if Liberty's cultural significance looks different from other perspectives, or whether it's all melting-potted.

So an educational day, but not at all in the ways I had been expecting.


* gratuitous pro-vaccine plug, yes

Tikkun for learning Megillat Esther, in large print for the partially sighted. 48pt bold type, 1.25 line spaced, 4Mb, .pdf file.

Scrolls for ritual readings don't have vowels or cantillation marks, so readers often use a book called a tikkun to prepare readings. A tikkun has the unadorned text on one side and the text with vowels and cantillation on the other side. However, the text is usually pretty small, much smaller than the letters in a scroll, and the vowels and cantillation smaller still, so preparing from a book may be a good deal harder than reading from the actual scroll.

I have a partially-sighted friend who wants to learn to read Megillah, so I made a large-print tikkun. I figure she's not the only such person in the world, so I'm putting it online for all. Here it is. Enjoy. Leave a comment if you find it useful.

Printing and binding 164 pages is annoying, so I have also made it available on lulu.com, for $11.10 (cost of production).

Here are some resources for learning to chant Megillah:

Virtual Cantor - downloadable recordings of each chapter, and CD available

JOFA's Esther resources (mostly not free)

Mechon Mamre's Esther tikkun. When you mouseover words, the vowels and cantillation appear. The text resizes well.

Thanks to Gabriel Wasserman for proofreading.

What a nice day.

Did a little final-tweaking on a piece of art, right; click for bigger. Illustrated Torah portion for a bat mitzvah gift.

Then second-breakfast at the Corner Cafe in Riverdale, fulfilling the ritual requirement of doughnuts, it being the last day of Hanukah. The Corner Cafe features, in my mental map, largely as a provider of truly atrocious parve cookies, so it was with a certain degree of resignation I bit into my doughnut, but my unflagging commitment to ritual duty was rewarded; it was a very nice doughnut. Sweet but not nauseating, crisp on the outside but nice and springy in the middle. Three cheers for the Corner Cafe, say I, and we'll say no more about those unfortunate cookies.

This with CH, doing the sort of admin tasks which loom intimidatingly and are better tackled in company. There's only so long you can spin out a doughnut, so then we adjourned to her place for more work on said admin, which turned into lengthy conversation on all kinds of things with intermittent tea and cholent. Decided that she and LSB and I should disagree concisely and pithily every so often, since we disagree interestingly and creatively; more on this as and when.

Haven't had a day in quite some time where I didn't have a quota to fill or some other guilt hanging over me, where I could just noodle about doing stuff, not doing stuff, at will. Coming home, it was quite odd to realise I don't have to spend the next four hours working late to compensate for having wasted the day - really very cheering, once I got used to the idea.

a) I love charity shops; loads of lovely practically-new clothes for peanuts, and the peanuts go straight to charity.

b) John Wyndham's books have been reprinted! They were issued in 1960 and 1963, and again this year. After 35 years! I love John Wyndham.

c) I had neonchameleon to myself for a whole afternoon :) Amongst his other sterling qualities, neonchameleon is one of the few people who can and does lift me two feet off the ground in a hug.

d) Starbucks in Oxford serves tea in lovely chunky mugs, if you're going to stay and drink it there obviously. That's very nice indeed. But on the other hand they close at 6.30, which is a bit of a culture shock when you're used to the Manhattan ones which are still open at bedtime. On the other hand here you can decamp to a pub and have another cup of tea there, and they're all non-smoking these days, so it's just as good really.

e) On a packed train, I claimed the seat I'd booked. This amounts to a social whoopsie on a grand scale, but I was buggered if I was going to stand all the way to Southampton on this ankle. I've never done that before, would you believe, but aside from a few dirty looks from other people it was no problem, and it was jolly nice to have a seat.

Me an' pseudomonas wrote a one-page guide to getting involved with Wikipedia editing, aimed at people like me who don't want to spend days learning jargon but want to fix the occasional typo or add a reference here and there. Here it is.. Discussion here.

One of the great things about having a really portable job is that you can have extensive holidays whilst working at your usual rate. Thus it happens that this week I've been in Sweden, writing Torah by day and spending time with livredor by night.

I like Sweden very much.

( Sweden and Swedish )

( Sweden and Food )

( Sweden and Architecture )

We had a super Shabbat, which I shall put in a separate post.

One day in Ireland, we went for a walk around a pretty bay. That was the day there were the ADORABLE PUPPIES, and after a nice cuppa tea (and PUPPIES) we went for a walk around the other side of the bay, which was awfully blue, all dark blue and aquamarine and light blue and greyish and other sorts of blue...

...for someone who does art and is reasonably literate, that was an appalling effort at describing a beautiful sea on a beautiful day, but I can get round that by saying it defied description...

...and we walked up a track, and the guidebook said there was a holy well at the end of it, so we thought, let's go see the holy well then.

We didn't find the holy well for some time, but we did find a LOT of sheep. There was also lots of wool all over the place, caught on things and blowing about. I seriously thought about collecting it up, so that I could send it to sen_ichi_rei and she could spin it, and then she'd have wool from Real Irish Sheep - but fresh wool is kinda greasy and I didn't have a plastic bag, only a daypack that also had e.g. books and stuff in it. But I thought about it. Next time I'll be better prepared.

The holy well, when we reached it, was rather disappointing - a foot-deep hole with some rocks around it. No water. My theory is that it must have been a proper holy well when some Holy Person was doing Holy Things, but he must have started going to bars and looking at girls and skipping minyan church and not being terribly Holy any more, and in response it must've dried up. But it was by a splendid beach with Great Big Rocks, which we chucked into the water with most pleasing sploshes, so that was okay.

Part 1

Unlike a Torah, practically anyone's allowed to write a get, according to the Mishnah. Gittin 2:5 says Anyone is kosher to write a get; even a deaf-mute, even a witless person, even a child. A woman may write her own get, and a man may write his own receipt, because the get is solely established by its signatories.

Well, I'm just a little bit of a halakha nerd, and it pleases me very much when unlikely halakhic situations apply to my own life. Not, you understand, that I would have chosen to get divorced, but accepting that as a fact of life, it's clearly much cooler to write one's own get.

So I did.

The actual process is very formal. There's a whole ritual during which the woman stands silent while the rabbi, the husband, and two witnesses, establish that the husband wishes to divorce his wife here and now of his own free will. The husband appoints a scribe and instructs him to write the get, and instructs the witnesses to sign, and all while the woman doesn't say anything.

As the sofer, I had a more active part. I got to accept the responsibility of writing the get.
I learned that although the wife is allowed to write the get, the husband isn't allowed, which pleased me very much; the balance of power is not usually tipped that way. In any case, I was glad to be a real part of the process. I like my Judaism to be part of me - or should that be, I like to be part of my Judaism?

Then I wrote it, copying from a text. You can't write it in advance, and you can't print it. This is because the verse says "he shall write for her a severance document," and we take "writing" and "for her" very literally indeed. This is unlike a ketubah, where you may take a printed form and fill in the names - a get has to be produced wholly for the specific recipient, and has to be written, not printed (see Part 1).

Most of the text concerns itself with name and location. The city is not just named, but identified as being in the vicinity of bodies of water (the idea being that these are hard to mistake or mislay). The participants are not just named, but are named by all the names that they use or have previously used, so I'm Yonah Esther otherwiseknownas Yonah otherwiseknownas Jennifer otherwiseknownas Jen. That's about two-thirds of the text. Then there's a little bit at the end which says, more or less, I, Husband, am not being coerced and you, Wife, are free to go.

I made a couple of mistakes; these I fixed in the usual way, with a knife. I'd brought some moral support, who was also a sofer, and he and the rabbi talked shop. It was most interesting to listen to.

When I was finished writing, the rabbi and the witnesses checked it through very carefully for mistakes. Then the witnesses signed it. It passed from my possession (as the scribe) into the X's possession, and then he passed it back into my possession, this time in my role as wife. Ex-wife, that is. It was very amusing to be playing two parts, scribe and wife, especially when the script required the X to appoint the scribe Hatam-Soferet to write a get for the wife Hatam-Soferet.

After I had accepted it as my get, releasing me from the marriage, the rabbi took it and tore into it with a knife. This shows it has been used, so there is no possibility of anyone's using it for another divorce.

The ceremony finishes with an admonition that now this get has been written, signed, and delivered, anyone who casts doubts on its validity is subject to excommunication and is a really bad person and doesn't get any cookies. I like that very much: it's a recognition that messing with this could really cause trouble, and we believe we've done it properly, and for the sake of Jewry, don't go looking for problems. Very humane, and sensible.

So anyway, there we go. I've written my own get. I bet there aren't many women around who can say that.



PS - It feels good now it's done, and I rather enjoyed doing it. I'm really rather a nerd.