No Peace for Pinchas

פִּינְחָס בֶּן-אֶלְעָזָר בֶּן-אַהֲרֹן הַכֹּהֵן, הֵשִׁיב אֶת-חֲמָתִי מֵעַל בְּנֵי-יִשְׂרָאֵל, בְּקַנְאוֹ אֶת-קִנְאָתִי, בְּתוֹכָם; וְלֹא-כִלִּיתִי אֶת-בְּנֵי-יִשְׂרָאֵל, בְּקִנְאָתִי לָכֵן, אֱמֹר:  הִנְנִי נֹתֵן לוֹ אֶת-בְּרִיתִי, שָׁלוֹם

Pinhas son of Elazar son of Aaron the Kohen turned My wrath away from Israel through My zealotry which he exercised among them and I did not destroy Israel. Therefore I hereby grant him My covenant of peace. (free translation)

The vav in the word "Shalom" is famously written with an intentional crack, but that will not be the subject of this post. Instead we will talk about the practicalities of Pinchas and why he doesn't get much peace after all.

The maftir readings for all Jewish holidays occur in Parshat Pinchas. Most established congregations have at least two Torah scrolls, one for the regular reading and one for the special readings when a second scroll is required. Naturally this second scroll is constantly being rolled to Pinchas and then moved around within the parasha. This leads to the section where Pinchas occurs wearing out a lot faster than the rest of the scroll. This week over sukkot, I noticed several damaged letters and even some whole words rubbed out in or around the maftir reading. Apparently this is very common in scrolls only ever used for maftir. In fact, the original yeriot of that section were replaced years ago and this is the second round of fading.

I'm not sure what can be done to prevent it, but if it were up to me I would rotate the assignment of Torahs to readings every few years. Unfortunately there are no pictures for this post. I noticed the first faded letter on shabbat and I neglected to take pictures while doing the touch-ups.

Worst Mezuzot Ever I

These mezuzot were actually taken off of somebody's door.

Both mezuzot were probably not written by Jews, definitely not by trained scribes. There are letters that look like other letters, letters that look like numbers numbers, and letters that look like nothing much in particular. The bottom mezuzah is also written on "klaf mashuach," literally "smeared parchment."  

Klaf mashuach is ordinary parchment covered with a chalk based substance called log in Hebrew. At one time, it was standard procedure to coat the backs of sheets used in Torah scrolls with log so that it would be uniformly white instead of showing the natural variations of the skins. Ashkenazim stopped doing that a while back, preferring the natural look (I also think it looks nicer personally) but many sepheradim still write on parchment that was mashuach on the reverse.

This mezuzah, however was mashuach on the inside which presents two major halachic problems which render the mezuzah worthless according to the majority of poskim  regardless of the awful handwriting:

1. If the mezuzah is written on chalk paste, then it isn't written on parchment (chatzitza)
2. Moreover, even if for some reason the chalk paste were to be considered part of the parchment negating the first issue (battel) the chalk paste is prone to peeling and flaking when rolled up, causing the writing to rub out as you can see in the specimen above.

Despite all of this, there are less than honest scribes who continue to write on klaf mashuach because is easier to write on since it has a more papery texture. Many mezuzot and cheaper pairs of tefillin are still written on Mashuach.

Blooper Reel 1

I have several long, serious, and research intensive posts in the works. One is on the economics of STA"M, another on the precise definition of "shinui tzura". Unfortunately I have no time so here are some pictures instead.

Retzua held together with duct tape

Tefillin straps are leather made of the skin of a kosher animal. Which species of bovine grows a duct tape hide? Obviously a retzua cannot be held together with duct tape, but what about using it to cover up faded bits? 

There is nothing wrong with the dye used in duct tape per se. The problem is that it is a new layer, not dye. This is similar to the issue of tiach -- a manufacturing practice where the battim were covered in putty instead of painted. The halacha is that if the putty comes of in small flakes, it might as well be paint; otherwise it hasn't been painted. Therefore covering an unpainted retzua in tape would not make it kosher.

Textbook bal tosif

This past shabbat we read about the prohibition of Bal Tosif -- not adding to a mitzvah. The classic example of this given in the literature is "not putting 5 scrolls in your tefillin." I recall that every time we came across this in school someone would ask "but why would anybody do that?" and the response was always something like "I have no idea. It's hypothetical."

Well, here you go. It is common to stuff tefillin with scraps of parchment so that the parshiyot don't rattle around. This shel-yad was stuffed with many extra pieces as shown here ... including an extra parsha taken from a shel rosh (the scroll on top.)

A question of chatzitza

I've decided to postpone the series on checking tefillin for a week or so, when I get a load of new parshiyos which should provide some material. In the meantime, here is a halachic question for my vast readership. Come on, at least two of you are rabbis. :)

There are various foul-smelling chemicals available to sofrim to clean klaf, smooth it, or produce other desired effects. Every once in a while, a new additive comes out and people wonder if it constitutes a chatzitza. The latest round of this debate is about a product which raises a variety of other questions, but one remark that I read piqued my interest: "A layer one millimeter thick is obviously a chatzitza and one molecule is obviously not, but what is the cut-off?"

1. Is that premise true? Or is a contiguous layer deliberately applied to the klaf (or the hand, or anything else where these laws come into play) a chatzitza regardless of its thickness? Do those criteria even matter?
2. Even granting the premise, is that discussed anywhere? 

The Rambam in Yesodei Torah 6 about erasing Shemot on your skin comes to mind but it's unhelpful because all it tells us is that there is something that can block the water without being a halachic barrier. Same for the halacha about ink on one's hands for נטילת ידים -- the fact that you can wash means the ink is too thin to constitute a chatzitza, but I'm not sure there is any upper limit anywhere.

House keeping

Wise words from Randall Munroe of xkcd.com

Since I only have about five readers anyway, that part is taken care of. Content generation will start on Thursday afternoon with a series on checking tefillin.

Hilchos Legibility I

I titled this post with a "one" even though I don't plan on doing a series because a major component of the specs for any product is usability, and for manuscripts that means legibility so I'll probably be writing about it a lot. Last week I finally got around to getting certified as a sofer by the Vaad Mishmereth STa"M, the self-declared international regulatory body for scribes. (They used to do a lot of consumer protection seminars and things. Now they license sofrim under the assumption that if the scribe has an up-to-date license a consumer can trust him.) In true Israeli style this involved under one hour of testing and paperwork that blew up into a full-day ordeal thanks to travel time, waiting time, and another-two-hours-because-that's-how-we-do-things time. I can now compete with my friends' tzav rishon (Israeli draft board) stories.

Anyway, on to the topic. One of the questions on my written exam was "what if the leg of an ayin is horizontal and short?" I answered that it is passul (invalid) because it looks like a tet. No idea how they graded it, but I think I was justified the very next day while trying to read something in yeshiva.

This is one style of the font family commonly known as "rashi script." In fact this is the kind used in the older prints of books found in yeshiva libraries. Look at the tet and the ayin (the 9th and 19th letters going right to left); it wouldn't be too hard to confuse them if you didn't see them in the context of the whole alphabet in order.

Creative writing

I don't really have much time to post, but I finished the Eicha I was writing and am now in the proofreading stage. Safrut usually isn't associated with creativity. You basically copy letter for letter and if you try to play games on your own the work becomes worthless. Last week I found a repeated word in the first column and that's where the creativity came in.

Ignore the x in the margin. That was a different error already fixed. This picture will also be used for a later post on chok Tochos. On the right side towards the middle of the picture you will see the word אני and a smudge. The words אלה אני were written there before though I don't have pictures of the rest of the process. I had to erase everything, and then rewrite אני leaving an unsightly and almost certainly passul space. The solution: See that ב right after אני? Well...

Still unsightly, now kosher. So, now you know. Safrut does involve creative writing.

A (sometimes-serious) Glossary to Bava Basra

I haven't been writing this week so here is something from the holy walls of the Yeshiva.

There are plenty of Yeshivish dictionaries out there. There is even a New Testament translated into Yeshivish, but all of the dictionaries focus on making fun of the way people talk, or in one case teach others how to talk funny too. This glossary is more technical, and focuses more on what people are saying than how they say it. It isn't a Yeshivish lexicon per se but another Talmudic one presented with most sincere apologies to Rabbeinu Marcus Jastrow.

Agud: See גוד-אגוד
bas-habas-haben: A great-grand-daughter. She inherits before a daughter because as far as inheritance is concerned, she might as well be a son.
Beit Rova: n. pl batei rova. A quarter.
Ben: The son. He is first in line to inherit
Bor: n. Any one of several varieties of hole. More specific definitions are forbidden, especially in the form of context clues
Bur: n. A major ignoramus (spelled the same way in Hebrew)
Chazaka: n. (maybe) v. (could be one of these too) an assumption of fact; an assumption of ownership; an act of taking possession; the process of acquiring squatter's rights; a tenous claim of some sort of entitlement to use someone else's property (v. Reuven v. Din Torah)
Chenvini: n. v. gavra esp. one who only plays bit parts; a storekeeper; is known to keep meticulous records of everything, but cannot be trusted to send a kid out with a delivery.
Cur: A unit of area equal to 10 Lessekh which equals an unspecified number of  Batei Rova. No one knows or cares how many. The important thing is that there are more than 4 of them. Computing the number of batei rova requires algebra(v. סתרי תורה)
Din: n. a fortiori reasoning (because it's one of those latin words we learn in Yeshiva); Law/legal battle; a loud cacaphonous noise (v. definition 2)
Eishes Ish: A woman whose chief role in this mesechta is to be told she can't sue her ex-husband because she isn't actually divorced
Gavra: n. A man who makes his living acting out some of the most improbable legal battles in Jewish history. He is usually dishonest but wins anyway
Get: n. document, bill of divorce; exists primarily to get lost so we can talk about Chazaka
Get Mekushar: n. The direct opposite of a Get Pashut
Get Pashut: n. A document written entirely on one side of a piece of paper, not post-dated, and signed by two witnesses with a minimum of funny business
גוד-אגוד: Good fences make agood neighbor
HaHu: lit. "There was this..." Usually serves as a cue for a Gavra.
Iyov: n. Protagonist of the book of Job. He may or may not have existed, may or may not have been a blasphemer, and may or may not have encountered the various Gavras of Bava Basra during his troubles
Kilayim: n. Something that doesn't belong in Bava Basra but is mixed in to force Yeshiva guys to learn Zeraim.
Levi: n. An understudy Gavra
L'Mafreya: adj. wibbly wobbly, retrospective, retroactive timey-wimey...
Magla: n. axe; saw; shovel; some other tool that if you wanted one you would not request it in Aramaic, so who cares
Mara: n. shovel; see magla
Mara Kama: n. Original owner (but only of real estate)
Metalt'lin: n. Movable merchandise, the opposite of real estate. Under talmudic property laws, Metalt'lin can pretty much be accurately termed "fake-estate" as you suspected it should be all along
Reuven: n. The penultimate Gavra
Shimon: n. The ultimate gavra

The "People of The Book" are an Oral People

בעזרת הגדול והנורא

אכתוב מסורת התורה

With these lines begin the Mesorah Magna, literally "The Great Tradition," a comprehensive collection of practically every statistic imaginable on the Hebrew bible. It includes everything from the page layout to the number of times each letter occurs. For unusual characters it even tells us where. The introduction to the JPS study bible (more on them later) defines it as "everything in the Hebrew Bible other than the consonants." The Mesorah is the spec to which all Hebrew Bible texts are written and is treated as being of almost divine origin (Jewish tradition holds the consonants of the Masoretic Chumash to be given to Moses at Sinai. The punctuation came later) as it is our device for ensuring our own Torah's fidelity to that of Moses. The theory is that every scribe creates a letter-perfect copy of the Mesorah for a particular text from another copy before, which was in turn copied from one before that all the way back to Ezra. That's my job, to create letter-perfect copies.

Last week I posted about finding a mistake in my tikkun. (If you're one of the tiny handful of people who read this blog, you probably also appreciate the  kind of humor that leads me to call this edition a תיקון שורפים). How did I know it was a mistake? Somebody told me, and then I confirmed it by checking agaist the Mesorah, i.e. a well-edited tanach. Last week's error was the Written Tradition at work: sloppy scribe makes mistake, lazy scribe copies mistake, senior scribe points out mistake, lazy scribe checks Mesorah and makes correction. This system has served the Jewish people well for millenia to the point that Kiruv^tm bills it as conclusive proof that our text is perfectly faithful to the original.

All of this would be great if there was one definitive Mesorah, which there isn't. I've always known vaguely about some discrepancies here and there but since they are all in the sixth decimal place so-to-speak they never really impinged on my view of any given copy of the text as basically perfect. The reality is that "letter-perfect" is very difficult to achieve, especially without computers. Here is this week's issue: There are 3 זעירות in Eicha as per Koren and the Breuer Aleppo Codex. One of them exists in Tikkun Sorfim. None of them exist in Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensis. Which Mesorah do I follow? For some, this is more than a simple technical issue. For the followers of Kiruv^tm I alluded to earlier, it has very disturbing theological implications as well.

The thing is, Judaism does not rely solely on a written text. Our traditions are first and foremost oral ones, which are learned from people, not books. As the Talmud puts it, מפי ספרים ולא מפי ספרים. You see what I did there. One of those is pronounced sofrim -- scribes, while the other is sefarim -- books. You need to hear the words from a living person to know the difference. Jews are called the People of the Book, but not by other Jews. Everything follows the chain from teacher to student, even the unalterable septuple-checked-changing-one-letter-is-blasphemy written text. That being said, when encountered with my problem   all I had to do is email my teacher, who knows what text to use because someone taught him. Of course it's fair to ask how his teacher knew. The answer is that someone taught him. And so on and so forth back to Ezra. That being said, you can guess what answer I expect. He will probably tell me to follow the Koren because it reflects the Mesorah as practiced over the BHS which is older and therefore ostensibly more but. It may very well be, but it reflects a tradition preserved, as opposed to a tradition alive.

Modern day applications of an old story

Every scribe is familiar with, and sometimes over-fond of telling the following story from the Talmud Bavli, Sotah 20a (my translation):

Rabbi Yehuda related the following in the name of Shmuel about Rabbi Meir (more on him next week). Once I was mixing ink and Rabbi Akiva asked me my trade. I replied that I am a scribe to which Rabbi Akiva responded "My son, be very careful for your work is Divine and you may come to leave out a letter or add an extra one and destroy the entire world.

Sofrim, in particular authors of books on safrus, like this story because it illustrates the responsibility of the position. The sofer, especially in our story before the advent of printing, was responsible for faithfully transmitting scripture (and tradition as well) to the next generation with absolute fidelity. Today, of course, most of our books are printed and the sofer's work is almost entirely for ritual use but textual accuracy is still paramount. A couple days ago I was, as halacha requires, copying letter-for-letter out of a Tikkun Sofrim or official copyist's guide.

Here is the text of Eicha 3:33:

כי לא ענה מלבו, ויגה בני-איש.

Here is a picture of my copyist's guide:

Note the missing vav

 Trusting the sofer who made this copy, I copied letter for letter without checking and did not even suspect a mistake until I showed it to someone much more familiar with the text who picked up on it right away. This is the kind of error that can go undetected for years and even -- as I found out the hard way -- make its way into "official" texts. Fortunately there was no harm done as I was able to add the missing vav without much trouble but I learned a lesson about picking up just any old Tikkun and got a good scare about the responsibility to triple check everything. Somebody might copy from it one day.

Some thoughts on Megillat Eicha

 I'm currently copying Megillat Eicha (technical post with pictures to follow) and I keep coming across quotes that seem very out of place in the “Book of Lamentations”. Some of them are taken as the words to very happy and upbeat jewish songs. The second-to-last verse of the book is the well-known השיבנו ה אליך ונשובה. In Chapter 3 (which I am writing now) there is actually a good sized passage that sounds nothing like mourning: “This I recall and my soul is calm. I remind myself of this, therefore I have hope: That the kindness of God is infinite – that his mercy never ends...” and it goes on in this vein for a while. Megillat Eicha is composed of four elegies followed by a prayer for redemption. Each of the elegies contains verses like this, mostly towards the end. These are not lamentations. They are ecstatic praises that belong in one of the Hallelujah sections of Psalms.

I think these interjections can tell us something about the way Jeremiah viewed Jewish mourning. Eicha is the essential textbook on Jewish mourning much more so than Job. Job was a good man (or character, see Bava Basra 15) to whom bad things happened. Jeremiah is a prophet of Israel teaching us how to mourn. Job suffered in silence until he could no longer bear it and he broke down and challenged God angrily, who answered him in kind. Jeremiah cries immediately. The book begin with an expression of shock and loss – “how could this have happened”. That is the central theme from which Megillat Eicha takes it's name, literally The Scroll of “How?!”

Because Jeremiah begins with a human response to loss instead of trying to be superhuman and failing, his faith does not break like Job's does. At the end of each chapter he can still declare (1:18) צדיק הוא ה כי פיהו מריתי or pray for relief in 2:20 from the same God he calls an enemy in 1:4. Eicha, like a lot of things in Judaism is a paradox.

Next post will be less depressing, I promise.

The Tyburn Convent Megilla

Last post was about restoring a megilla, but I only restored the text. Here is a photo-diary of veteran Sofer-Sta"m Marc Michaels restoring an old megilla belonging to a convent in England. His expert conservator's job includes repairing minor rips, stains on the back, and anything else necessary to restore the scroll to near new condition.

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10151556849275856.1073741827.55615525855&type=1&l=13ce54bd6d


Here are some pictures of the damage.

A very inexpert repair done with scotch tape

 

Mold or dirt on the back.

The writing itself.

There are several interesting things in the last picture among them the very old sephardic font, the pairing of that font with the iron gall ink, and the flourishes where different parts of letters overlap e.g. the second yud being written inside the nun of יכניה.

My first ever project

My first real scribal project was restoring an old megilla belonging to my teacher Rabbi Marvin Schneider shlit"a. The megilla is 150-200 years old and was in pretty bad condition. Rabbi Schneider found it in a nursing home about 50 years ago in very bad condition. He kept it around meaning to fix it "one of these days" and in June 2012 when he deemed me ready to start working on real scrolls it finally happened.

Before

The background image for this blog is an "after" picture from the next column over.

And here is a more visible copy of the same image.

Hello World!

Hi, I'm Yitzchak, computer programmer by training, sofer STA"M and DIY geek by hobby.

This blog will chronicle the process of a guy with no artistic talent and notoriously awful handwriting to learn the art of sacred Jewish calligraphy. In between I'll post random thoughts regarding what's left of my year in Israel (which started in August) and the world at large. Please feel free to leave comments, by which I mean "Please comment! I want to pretend I have a readership."