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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.
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.
Originally, they used to accept testimony about the new moon all day which triggered the Priestly Song, which is sort of the trigger for its being properly Rosh haShana.
One time, the witnesses took their time about turning up, and the Priestly Song was messed up and that messed up the accounting of the days – they didn’t know if it was Rosh haShana or not, so they didn’t know which sacrifices to do, and everything went Horribly Wrong.
they would only accept testimony about the new month until mincha-time, and if witnesses came at or after mincha-time, they kept that day as holy, and the next day was also holy. Something like this diagram.
And if you look at it from a bit of a distance, it’s basically the same as it was before, see? But it’s been adjusted to protect Rosh haShana, in that now there will always be time to do the Priestly Song.
This is kind of a big deal, since it affects what day Rosh haShana is. The SAME DATA now gives a DIFFERENT RESULT. But we decide to accept a bit of variation in the possibility of when exactly Rosh haShana officially is, so as to ensure that the Priestly Song never gets messed up.
And indeed the rabbis found this kind of disturbing. Once the Priestly Song was no longer a consideration, because there was no Temple Service, rabbinic Judaism found other ways of expressing “Today is officially Rosh haShana” – and a safeguard for the Priestly Song was no longer needed.
So they accepted testimony all day again: After the Temple was destroyed, Rabban Yohanan ben Zakkai made an enactment: they would accept testimony about the new moon all day.
In other words, what happens if we remove the Temple from the world? To what extent can we – should we – still behave as though there is a Temple? Rabbi Yohanan is apparently saying the Temple’s effects – in this respect, at any rate – are permanent; Resh Lakish is saying that we can’t go around behaving as though the Temple is still there when it isn’t.
Rabbi Yohanan and Rabbi Yehoshua both seem to be saying, in a sense, that the halakhic system is made not of string, but of wire. (Excuse the wobbliness of the wires in this picture. Wire’s harder to work with than string, and I didn’t take the time to fetch out hammer and pliers. Imagine them beautifully non-wobbly, if you would.)
With wire, when you remove a pin, everything stays in the same place. You can continue with everything pretty much as it was before, and indeed you should. You should offer sacrifices even when there is no Temple. The rules about offering sacrifices outside the sacrifice-zone should apply even when those zones don’t really exist any more.
Halakhic data points. They might be any of a number of things – biblical verses, perhaps; facts of life (”men cannot give birth”); real objects (”this woman”); theoretical constructs (”love,” “justice”); combinations thereof (”my husband;” “the Temple”). They seem to be pretty independent of one another.
Indeed, you might think you can remove a data point here and there (”this woman,” say, or “the Temple”) and the others will be pretty unaffected, although of course you’ll still be able to see the holes where they were.
This is where we start to get a little abstract. I am winding string around the pins to create string-patterns, to represent the connections that exist between halakhic data points. The connections could be exegetical, or theoretical, or they could just be other halakhic data points. Together, the strings and the pins represent the mass of laws and ideas and facts that together make up the halakhic system, and I am asking you to consider the mashal, the parable, on its own terms, without trying overly hard to work out exactly what represents what. The halakhic data points are all connected, is what we are saying here.
Indeed, they are all interconnected, each one to every other. This is a lesson of yesterday’s Tanhuma. (Now do you get why I titled these posts “halakhic string theory”?)
And if we remove one of the data points – say, “Do not commit adultery,” or “The Holy Temple” – all the things that were directly connected to that certainly go wobbly…
…but so do other things that weren’t apparently connected at all. You wouldn’t have thought adultery would be connected to violating Shabbat, but we make the effort to show that it is, and that’s because we don’t want to forget about all the knock-on effects.
With a bit of tweaking, you can create something that works pretty well, even minus the missing data points. We do this all the time when people die. “It’s not proper Judaism without my parents,” you might say. “Life isn’t the same any more.” And you go through mourning, and you rearrange the remaining datapoints in your halakhic world, and you come up with something workable, and life goes on.
In the meantime, check 
