Hatam Soferet

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?

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!)

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.

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

Sefertorah.net has for sale sofer's ink. Online suppliers are rare enough, and online suppliers in the USA (cheaper shipping & no customs fees) rarer still.

Torah ink is not only good for scribes, it's also excellent for calligraphy. It is shiny and slightly raised, and can do incredibly fine detail where regular calligraphy ink spreads out and doesn't hold the shape (I guess because it doesn't sink into the paper as much). Here's a lot of stuff about how sofer's ink is different from regular calligraphy ink.

That site also has gid, the special thread you need for fixing seams. A whole ball of gid is stupidly expensive; I keep enough on hand that I can sell people a few feet for one or two seams if that's what they need.

HaSofer.com has a much wider range of supplies for sale online, but is in Israel, so shipping and customs to non-Israel addresses don't come cheap. However, if you have a friend in Israel, you can get stuff shipped to their house and they can bring it home for you - good if you can't persuade anyone to go shopping for you.

Ugh, flying.

Bottles of ink, once breached, have a tiresome habit of opening themselves in transit and distributing themselves liberally, indelibly, and irretrievably, all over their surroundings. Accordingly, when I travel with breached bottles of ink, as I do frequently, I carry them in my backpack, so that I can make sure they stay upright.

I fell victim to an arbitrary search at the flight gate. The lady looked at my ink, neatly packed in the mandatory ziplock baggie. She looked at the bottle, and looked again, not finding any English words anywhere on the Hebrew label.

She didn't like this.

Even less did she like the two inkpots; they don't carry any label at all.

"You can't have these," she said, "they're not labelled."

"Where does it say liquids have to be labelled?" I asked her. "And in any case, isn't the entire point of the liquids rule the assumption that you can't believe any claims I make about the nature of these liquids?"

"This is an internal secondary-level search" she replied, as if that answered anything. "So we can take these away from you if we want to."

She called over a colleague.

"You can have one of these," he said. "You can choose which one you take on board."

"What?"

"One. You can take one."

"Can I combine the contents of these three bottles and you can have this empty one?"

He pondered this for a few moments. "No. How badly do you need these?"

"I don't need them on the flight at all. I carry them in my backpack so that I can make sure they don't spill. That isn't against the rules."

"How badly do you need them? You can keep one."

I explained that ink is exceedingly expensive and I am not, in fact, willing to discard any of it unless given a significantly more compelling reason than those hitherto offered.

"It's not about how expensive it is," he interrupted.

Fine. "You asked how badly I needed it, and need is a subjective concept. My need for this ink is based on its cost. I am answering the question you asked."

"So you don't need them."

"I'm not going to use them on the flight, no. I carry them in my backpack so that I can make sure they don't spill." He unscrewed one of the lids. "Don't get that on your clothes, it won't come off." He wiped his fingers nervously. Inwardly, I smirked.

He indicated the inkwells. "These aren't labelled."

"That's correct. They're inkwells."

"We can't tell what's in them, without labels."

For goodness' sake. "You wouldn't be able to tell what was in them even if they did have labels, would you?"

It irritates me immensely that if one does not comply blindly with illogical, unwritten, and wholly arbitrarily applied regulations, one can be designated a terminal security risk and refused permission to fly. Nonetheless, at this point I was ready to take non-compliance to the next level and request to see a supervisor, but to my surprise the male one turned away shaking his head, and the female one pushed the bottles towards me, saying "OK."

I'd have stalked off disdainfully, but a dignified exit is hard to do when you've still got to put your shoes back on. I had to settle for sitting on the floor wrestling with my bootlaces disdainfully, and to tell you the truth I think some of the effect may have been lost.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got an airline meal to eat. It looks rather distressingly soggy and greasy and like mutant green goo, but the label says "spinach pasta," and apparently labels are reliable indicators of content, so obviously it must indeed be spinach pasta. I might have to spice it up with some of that ink, though. Lucky they let me bring it on board.

Planning to be in Oxford this weekend; have plans for Shabbat (expect there could be extra space at lunch, but basically booked), but am intending Friday lunch & early afternoon in town and Sunday afternoon noodling about (i.e. working on laptop unless anyone wants to hang out). Mobile is 07984 950678; may not have internet terribly reliably (is there any free wireless in the city centre?).

livredor and I spent Shabbat in the centre of Stockholm, borrowing a flat in the city centre for convenience's sake.

And it was really, really nice.

( decadence, gospel choirs, and tube stations )

( daylight and islands )

( immense and startling shul )

( mind-broadening )

( culture, protein, opera, and celestial commentary )

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.

I know what you're thinking, I really do. You're thinking "Jen, all these posts about menschkeit are all very well, but we read this blog to hear about Torahs. Where are the Torah posts?"

I do have some Torah posts on the way, I promise. But there again, part of being a sofer is being a good person. Some people attain this by studying chassidut and mussar. I do it - partly - like this.

So, that said, here's an appeal for help. Not just to regular commenters - if you're a lurker, now would be a good time to come out of lurkdom.

I have a friend, a fine and lovely person, who is coming to LA to rabbinical school (AJU) very shortly. She is newly-married, and the US visa system being what it is, her husband is trapped behind in Europe, because while she can get a student visa, spouses of students don't get any consideration.

People in LA: this is someone who has left her husband and her homelands to come to LA. Can you extend the hand of friendship? She can't yet drive; can you extend the hand of friendship a little further, and at the same time help her feel welcome? Can you welcome her into your home, help her learn to drive, take her shopping, tell her where to find good food, check in on her when rabbinical school starts to drive her potty?

The husband is an IT type. Anyone want to offer him a job even vaguely close to LA and sponsor him through the visa process? He'll do stuff other than IT, if it means he can be near his wife.

Anyone know an immigration lawyer who could do a bit of pro bono for them?

Anyone like to donate some air miles so that they can see each other?

Anyone want to offer her some pulpit work so that she can earn some $ to e.g. manage LA without a car?

Anyone want to help her out with unwanted household goods? She'll be needing to set up house and the baggage allowance is only 80lb.

Leave your email here, or email me, and I'll put you in touch. Little mitzvah, big difference.

Shabbat shalom...