Hatam Soferet

You’re merrily checking through a sefer Torah, one in which the scribe tends to underestimate his lines, and has to stretch at the ends to compensate (lines 1, 2, 6, 7). And you see a chunk (lines 3, 4, 5) of squishied-up writing. Why?

This usually happens when you accidentally leave words out. Calligraphers have various ways of dealing with missing lines; here’s a particularly sweet example from the St John’s Bible, where the missing words are written in the margin and flown into place by a little bird:

Homoioteleuton in St John's Bible

Torah scribes don’t have such luxury. No writing words in the margin for us.

We do, technically, have the option of writing the missing words above the line, but a) that’s Not Done these days b) if there are a lot of words, that’s not going to work.

So what options remain? Either start the sheet over, or erase words from the surrounding text, and make enough space that we can squish the extra words in.

Note that the second item in line 3 is an obligatory space. The space has to be in the middle of a line. I expect he started erasing after the space because repositioning the space would have been even more tiresome than not.

Also, note that the second item in line 6 is a Divine Name. These can’t be erased. So the scribe erased the two-and-a-bit lines of 3, 4, and 5 to write in the proper text, unless he realised his error before he got to the divine name.

So what was his mistake?

From the shadows, I can sort of see where some letters used to be:

But whatever did he write first? I’m stumped by those apparent two kufs. Maybe we’ve got two rounds of erasing to contend with? Certainly that “et” is on a double erasure – maybe it’s actually on a triple erasure?

Real scribal archaeologists have UV lights and all sorts of toys for reading the underneath writing on palimpsests. If this was actually important we could use some of those toys, but it isn’t really – just fun. So – any thoughts?

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

As I said last time, for pity’s sake, don’t go trying to use this to write the Torah.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

See how the scribe here has adjusted his lines to fit around the hole in his klaf?

Rabbi Dan describes this perfectly: “a loving reminder that we live in a very, very wealthy time when we can have perfect klafim in our synagogues, and admiring the sofer who adapted to the needs of the moment.”

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

The New York Public Library is having an exhibition this winter, about Three Faiths And Manuscripts, or some such. Judaism, Islam, and Christianity, and their various adventures with calligraphy.

I’d link you to the relevant Library page, but the exhibition is not on the website yet, not even under “Upcoming.”

Anyway, part of the exhibition is going to be films of various calligraphers doing their various calligraphic things, and one of the calligraphers is me.

The Library is this gigantic building on 42nd St. I got out of the train at Times Square and walked across town, because I don’t do that very often and it’s sort of picturesque, in a startling kind of way. It was chucking it down with a) rain b) tourists; I contemplated taking pictures of both, but I was running a little late, so I got you that image from Wikimedia instead, and you’ll have to fill in the rain and the tourists from your imagination.

We were working in a large panelled room with large panelled doors and a large marble doorway and a lot of fancy-pants lights, some part of the museum’s setup and some part of the photographer’s kit. He was the best sort of photographer, the kind that just films and lets you get on with writing. The annoying kind keep going “Can you do that again? -Can you dip the pen again? Now can you kind of hold it like that?”. I don’t take that sort of direction while I’m writing any more; either you let me write, or I do something fake, but you don’t get to tell me how you think me doing writing should look, because that messes up the writing, and I decided some time ago that my priority is always my work and never the camera – but I didn’t have to explain that to this chap, which was a treat and a half.

The Library were most emphatic that if they had to have a lady scribe, she had to be doing something politically acceptable, so that orthodox visitors wouldn’t freak out. Personally I think that once you have a Reform scribe in your video (which they do) you’ve got no reason to exclude a female scribe, but that just goes to show that the concern is not so much Orthodox Legal Sensibilities as Icky Girl Cooties. Then again, they could have chosen to exclude me completely, so I guess I’m mostly grateful.

Anyway, that meant I didn’t do anything Torah-related for their film, nor even the mezuzot I’m presently working on, no, I wrote some of the Megillah of Kohelet.

I’m sort of writing Kohelet and thinking maybe I’ll finish it in time to read on Succot – at the present rate that doesn’t seem very likely, but we’ll see – anyway, as it turned out, I was writing this bit that day. Good for being filmed, because of the distinctive pattern.

It’s the bit – you probably remember it, it’s the only thing anyone remembers from Ecclesiastes – “a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to uproot; a time to kill and a time to heal; a time to tear down and a time to build…” It’s poetry, obviously, and the rhythm of the words is reflected in the rhythm of the layout.

Side of computer included in image for size comparison and general pleasingness of contrasting media.

I did not take any pictures of me writing, on account of, I was busy writing. But afterwards, I took a picture of the view out of the window. And I took some photos of the tourists who kept trying to come in, for amusement’s sake, but they didn’t come out so well.

Days like that are rather funny to blog. I go to whatever location it is, and set up, and do my thing as I would at home, and someone hovers around with a camera, and then they go home and cut and paste and eventually they turn it into something that is splendid video but looks most unlike how I was feeling. I guess maybe an egg feels like that when it gets made into a cake. So too with blogging – I think you’re sort of expecting to hear about the cake, and I’m more inclined to write about it from the perspective of the egg.

Thus it is that I can write a whole post about “Today I went to the NYPL to be filmed doing writing” and have no pictures of Teh Soferet Writing.
It was cool to go to the fancy-pants library, and see the pretty pretty architectural details, and swan nonchalently through doors labelled “Staff Only,” but I’m most excited about this photo of the view from the window.

Never mind, eh? When the exhibition opens, I’m sure they’ll have something online, and I’ll tell you about it then. In the meantime – this is what it’s like being an egg.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

A post that can be of no possible interest save to the very very few.

Thus.

On klaf, 8mm lines of 62 yuds (average) are done at 134mm wide, because that’s what works.

Therefore, a column of 47 yuds needs to be 102mm wide, one of 66 yuds needs to be 143mm wide, one of 75 yuds needs to be 162mm wide, and one of 90 yuds needs to be 195mm wide.

It is not particularly ideal to have columns of such very varied width, but it is not per se problematic.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.

Ketubah texts come in three varieties.

The most common variety up until just a few years ago was a tenth-generation photocopy from the Rabbi’s Manual, the text so blurry you could barely distinguish the letters, and GIANT DOTTED LINES whose giant dots rendered semi-invisible the names, scribbled in pencil by a rushed rabbi. It didn’t really matter that the names were semi-invisible, because it is a criterion for graduating rabbinical school that you have to have illegible Hebrew script,* so you always had to phone and check anyway.

Today, most rabbis have access to computers which can handle Hebrew, so you can email them a .doc of the standard text (sometimes they even already have one, such is the progress we have made!), and they will fill in the names and send it back to you. This is super.

The third category is really a subset of the second – rabbis who fax you back a bit of shul notepaper with the names scribbled on it because they can’t type in Hebrew. A fun variation is the set of rabbis who can’t type in Hebrew but think they can type in Hebrew, so you get names like יןסף and you have to edit judicially.

Editing judicially is a double-edged sword, of course, because on the one hand you know perfectly well that no-one spells Yosef with a terminal nun in the middle, but on the other hand you can’t just go around correcting rabbis, that destroys the illusion that they’re infallible and is a Threat to the World Order causing volcanoes and suchlike. So you phone them and double-check.

I realise at this point that you might have been expecting “three varieties” to mean something like “Orthodox, Conservative and Reform,” but this is an art series, so I was speaking as an artist – and as an artist, that’s what you need to know.

* This is also important when you are writing out the names of the sick to be prayed for. It isn’t a proper prayer for the sick if the prayer leader can read all the names. It is especially important to have terrible writing if you are transliterating English names of non-Jews.

Mirrored from hasoferet.com.