Hatam Soferet

Received:

We discovered an error in [our] Sefer Torah this Shabbat. The error...involves a Tav that should be a Hay.

There are two aspects to dealing with this; the theoretical and the practical.

The theoretical side represents hours and hours of study. Before you go anywhere near fixing a Torah, you've got to know why this is a total disaster, for instance:


and you have to learn the several thousand other potential disasters that a sofer has to know how to avoid.

However, the practical side of a fix like this is actually very easy. It's a tiny bit of knife work and a tiny bit of ink work.

I've put in the hours and hours of study, and we live in a digital world. Suppose Esther lives hundreds of miles away from any sofer, and her Torah has this problem. She takes a picture of the problem in the Torah and emails it to me. I can look at it, and chances are I'll know how to fix it. If she knows how to use a knife and ink, I can send her something like this:*


and she can fix the problem. She can be my hands over hundreds of miles. If necessary, we could use a webcam, so that I can see exactly what she's doing.

Of course ideally Esther's community would have a fully-trained sofer. But in the real world, I think this could be the next best thing. It's better than reading from a non-kosher Torah, and it's better than having the Torah languish unused until a sofer happens to come to town.

I think this could happen. I could take a day and teach people how to use these:



and how NOT to use them (can you identify the things there that you must NEVER NEVER use on a Torah?).

In a day, someone is not going to learn all the rules about how to fix letters (what do you do with something like that thing to the right? do you need to do anything?), but I believe they can learn enough that they can make basic repairs under remote supervision.

One might say that letting half-trained people loose on Torahs is a dreadful idea, with unlimited potential for havoc to be unleashed. However, of course one would teach boundaries. Fences around tricky areas. When not to attempt something. The importance of not overestimating one's ability. And it might very well be better than the present state of affairs, where entirely untrained people attempt repairs that are quite horrifying.

* NOTE: Don't try this at home. This is not Torah writing. This is Times New Roman. It would not look quite like this on a Torah.


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That's my vision. I reckon I can teach someone to do this in a day, if they've got some arts-and-crafts background. Anyone want to have a bit of a Manhattan guinea-pig day?

New addition to HaSoferet.com:

Outline, with many useful links, of how one learns to be a sofer. Including an easy Hebrew calligraphy worksheet for a pretty aleph-bet and a hard worksheet for learning ktav Beit Yosef, one of the sofer's aleph-bets.

Today: Sofrut III started. We did some quill work, and then some halakha. We did the first chapter of the Keset ha-Sofer, where the message, more or less, is: This is serious stuff. Don't mess with it. Lay tefillin. Those who couldn't make it: I will (iy"H) send you the sources and summarise by email.

Next week, the laws of How to Write the Letters.

On the way home, realised with horror that I'd left my keys in the city. Went to neighbour to request couch space; incredibly, she had a spare set of my keys, left there by W ages ago. Such relief, goodness. Literally weak at the knees. People: deposit keys with your neighbours, because being locked out is really horrid.

This year's crop of Megillahs has been harvested and sent to the happy recipients. This makes seven Megillot since I wrote my first for Purim 2004.

In the academic year 2003-4 I was in Israel, learning at Pardes. In my spare time, I continued to study the laws of sofrut - as my learning skills improved courtesy of Pardes, I was able to make better progress with this - and eventually I felt ready to attempt the Megillah.

The Megillah is a traditional starting point for new scribes. It's not too long, and it doesn't contain any of the Names of God. Thus, it's pretty hard to make any really terrible mistakes, and the baby scribe can get through the project in a manageable sort of time.

You can study theory all you want, but if you can't get hold of materials, and you wouldn't know how to use them if you did, you're a bit stuck. Fortunately for me, since there are opinions which say a woman may write Esther, a sofer who teaches at Pardes was willing to help me write it. He would get materials for me, and show me how to use them. That was a courageous thing for him to do, because in giving me those skills he would be helping me along the road to writing sifrei Torah, tefillin and mezuzot, which is something he could not condone. Many people would say that he should not give me a tool to do something permitted if there were to be a chance of my using it for something forbidden. He gave me the tool and let me choose what to do with it, and I thank him for that.

That year, there was an earthquake in Israel. I was in Pardes' study hall that morning, writing away, but I stopped writing when the building rocked and the room started wobbling up and down. For a second we thought it was a bomb, but bombs don't make the floor ripple. Pardes has a very diverse community; you could tell the Californians, because they dived underneath their desks. The rest of us sat there gaping until the room came to a standstill. People came over to me, asking "How's the Megillah?" It was fine.

I finished the writing, and took it to the sofer. He looked at it. I waited. "It's a very good first Megillah," he said. At three years' distance, I see just what he meant. Still, it was nice enough, I was proud of it, he was satisfied. I think I was his first female student to complete a Megillah.

I took it to Rabbi Landes, the top bod at Pardes. I asked him: can we read from a Megillah I've written? He looked at me from behind his beard. Had I already written it, he asked. Yes? He would need some time to think about this. Give him a few days. He had to decide whether it was okay, in principle and in particular.

Pardes does things by the book. It's not an Orthodox institution, but it's an institution Orthodox people can be part of. That means when it does something, it does it properly. R' Landes riffled through some enormous tomes and decided that in principle, he was okay with reading from my Megillah, but - but - if I hadn't written it properly, Pardes' reading would be completely invalid. So he talked to my sofer. Was this a kosher Megillah? I wasn't in on that conversation, but the answer must have been yes, because R' Landes hunted me down and said the Pardes reading for that year would be from my Megillah.

I was over the moon. My work had been weighed in the balance and found worthy. It could be used to fulfil the mitzvah of Megillah reading for the yeshiva.

A decision like that isn't taken lightly. The Megillah reading fulfils the obligation of an awful lot of people; someone co-ordinating a reading has a responsibility to the whole congregation to make the reading kosher. Approving my Megillah meant that serious people with heavy responsibilities were satisfied with my grasp of the scribal arts to the extent that they would trust the reading - the fulfilment of everyone's obligation - to my scroll.

That was when I felt I'd graduated. For sure I still had a long way to go - still do - but I was over the bar of being minimally competent.

So I kept studying!

It occurred to me the other day, teaching someone about wood glue, that I've been building up to this work for twenty years. I haven't been doing calligraphy for twenty years, far from it - more like six or seven. I took up calligraphy in college, because I didn't have space in my college room for all my other craft stuff. But I've been doing crafts since I was five, when my mum taught me how to sew things for my toy Bunny, possibly as a ruse to get me off her back.

( Why crafts are good )

Twenty years of dollshouses don't make you a sofer, but they certainly help.

I've finished translating the alef-bet part of Mishnat Soferim, a treatise on the letter forms by R' Yisrael Meir Kagan, the author of the Mishnah Berurah. Despite its name, it doesn't have much to do with the more famous Mishnah. It's a 19th-century Polish work.

My translation is here.

Here's a sample of the sort of thing you'll see; this is from the directions for the form of letter khaf which comes at the ends of words.

Its leg should be long and its roof short, so as not to resemble reish, although the roof should not be too short, because then it might look like a long vav or like straight nun, and a child's reading it as such would invalidate it. Accordingly, at the end of a line one may not stretch it to make it long at all. In general one should not stretch letters, but this is because that's the nice way to do it and bedeavad [post facto; in less-than-ideal circumstances - JTF] they aren't invalid; if one extends the roof of straight khaf so that it looks like reish it is invalid.

This is a nice segue into the Stretchy Letters post, which I've been meaning to write for a while now. I'm planning to write it after I've had supper...not that we have any actual food around the place; I'm going to have to go shopping, bleugh. Booooooring.

Haha! The Sekrit Projekt has come to fruition!

Now, a warning: it's kind of technical, so don't be too disappointed that it doesn't involve lots of shiny pictures.

However, here it is: complete online English translation of the Keset ha-Sofer and a translation of the most relevant section of the Shulhan Arukh, with the entire Mishnah Berurah in funky funky javascript footnotes. It's part of a somewhat wider halakha resource which I've been putting together - the other bits are still brewing (because translations take time).

Getting that online involved an unbelievable amount of admin faff and general fiddling. Now it's done, I can go back to my usual normal-paced, relatively admin-free existence.

That said, today was full - a column and a quarter, swimming, teaching leyning, therapist (I'm a New Yorker now), and Sofrut I. Except that Sofrut I rescheduled, so W and I watched The Fellowship of the Ring instead, which was less educational but more thrilling.

Hung out this evening with Proto-Soferet LC. Proto-Sofer DMV was sick, so he wasn't there. LC and I talked technique for a bit, and read through the Mishnah Berurah's definitions of some of the letters.

I thought I had an English translation of them somewhere, and thought I'd post it here, but I seem to've mislaid it, and there's not a great deal of point putting only the Hebrew up (since if you're able to comprehend it, chances are you have access to the Mishnah Berurah already; this bit's at the end of siman 36). Bleah. margavriel, you haven't perchance made a translation, have you?

So I wrote this huge long article about why exactly women can write sifrei Torah from a non-egalitarian halakhic perspective.* I didn't want to put it in the public domain until it'd been read by people I respect who are friendly, in case I'd made terrific clangers, since I'd rather have that pointed out by my friendly teachers than by enraged persons who want to tear me apart (I mean, anyone can pick holes in an argument, but it would just be embarrassing to have one's argument destroyed because of a clanger).

Anyway, I sent it to various people, and today I got a response from Ross Singer, he of Women and Writing the Megillah fame, who said he was impressed with the scholarship, if not entirely convinced by the conclusion. And he used various complimentary adjectives, which I won't quote here since I haven't asked him if I may, but suffice it to say my confidence was boosted.


* look at me being post-denominational. I could have just said "Orthodox." Am I good?