Guestblogging at JWA – crosspost

“You know Barbie’s getting a new job,” says my friend Mimi to me. “People can vote for her new career.”

I put tefillin on a Mattel Barbie doll in 2006, unwittingly creating the Jewish icon now known as Tefillin Barbie. Tefillin Barbie has a frum-girl denim skirt, a T-shirt, the tallit and tefillin more generally worn by Orthodox men during morning prayer, and a volume of Talmud; a whimsical activity for a vacation morning, she generated a vast and wholly unanticipated amount of reaction, positive and negative.

“Hurrah,” people say. “Now we can have Rabbi Barbie!”

But why, people? Why? Barbie put on tefillin and picked up a gemara, so now she has to be a rabbi? Why can’t she be an IT engineer who prays with tefillin and learns gemara in her lunch break?

Read the rest of this post at http://jwablog.jwa.org/tefillin-barbie%27s-new-career.

March 9, 2010 – 18:35 | Posted in Tefillin Barbie, feminism | Comments (0)

Holocaust Torah scrolls, and judging favourably

Hatam Soferet’s inbox today twinkled with forwards of this Washington Post article.

Basically, there’s a guy, R’ Youlus, whose shtick is rescuing sifrei Torah from Nazi-stricken Europe – removing them, restoring them to usable condition, and rehousing them in America. (As someone with a personal interest in resurgent European Jewry I have my reservations regarding the idea that the appropriate way to “rescue” a sefer Torah is to remove it to America, mind you.) Jolly good. He’s been doing this for some years.

This article suggests that perhaps all is not quite as it should be in the realm of R’ Youlus’ sifrei Torah, that these are no more genuine Holocaust-surviving sifrei Torah than they are splinters of the True Cross.

In particular, certain highly-coloured, heartwrenching tales of dramatic Torah-scroll rescues don’t appear to stand up so well to close examination.

There was a legend of a Torah scroll that had been hidden under the floorboards at Bergen-Belsen…[R' Youlus] came to Bergen-Belsen on a tour and literally fell into a hole in the corner of the floorboards, felt something strange, suspected that this might be where it was. It was dug up. Indeed it was the Torah, fully there. After some negotiations, Rabbi Youlus was able to purchase the Torah…

But Youlus’s discovery at Bergen-Belsen comes as news to the historian at the camp museum. “I can definitely exclude that there could have been a find of the Torah scroll on the grounds of the Bergen-Belsen Memorial” in recent years, writes Thomas Rahe.

That sort of thing. Well, you can read the article yourselves and see what you think. Wouldn’t be the first time a pious-looking person has fleeced people by selling fake relics.

But. Read More »

January 26, 2010 – 00:45 | Posted in General | Comments (0)

A bit of boundary-setting

Generally I like when people share stuff with me. “Have you seen this?” they say, and usually I haven’t and it’s interesting. Thanks, sharers – keep it coming, I much appreciate your thoughtfulness.

Sometimes, though, people share jokes, and I’m observing a trend – when total strangers share jokes (sometimes by internet, sometimes by phone), it’s always men, and the jokes are always about sex.

It’s not that I mind rude jokes per se, but this is getting a bit creepy. I’m famous for having a vagina; that doesn’t mean I want to share it.

So, if you’re a man and you’re thinking about sharing a rude joke with me, please remember that so doing will make you look like a creep, and think again. If you absolutely must share your rude joke with me, get your mom to send it. Thanks.

January 19, 2010 – 23:00 | Posted in General | Comments (0)

Atheists daven too…

The Forward’s got an article this week about an atheist siddur.

My knee-jerk reaction to that is “eww, what?!” but I know myself for a liturgical conservative, so when the nice Forward people asked for an illustration, I got out my special Mental Crowbar I use for inducing open-mindedness, and came up with the piece you see here.

See how it works? It’s a well-known phrase from the liturgy, both expressing the idea that every living thing has the urge to commune with the divine, and leaving the viewer to contemplate just what that means.

Note, by the way, that we say “every living being,” not “every living person,” or similar. This surely consciously includes living beings who don’t have theology, like fish, say, or deer, and why not atheists? The idea of non-theistic beings seeking spiritual communion is hard-coded into theistic liturgy, so really an atheist siddur is not such a bizarre idea as all that.

You can’t really see from the picture, but the pen-flourished decoration is an old manuscript adornment done in a très modern ice-blue metallic ink, a visual echo of what the siddur is attempting.

It’s for sale, make me an offer :)

January 18, 2010 – 23:23 | Posted in calligraphy | Comments (0)

the pleasingness of knowing sources

Two friends at Yeshivat Hadar are learning about tzitzit, specifically the extent to which women are permitted* to engage in the mitzvah. One of them comes over to me:

“We’re learning about women and tzitzit, and whether women are allowed to make tzitzit, and there’s a famous Tosafot, maybe in Gittin, that talks about that…?”

And I admit to being rather pleased at myself being able to go “Right, Gittin 45b, Rabeinu Tam has a whole thing about it…”

I only wish I knew the entire body of Tosafot so well that I could do that for any subject!

Of course, the reason I know that particular reference is because Gittin 45b is where the Talmud stashes the main bit about why women (and children and non-Jews etc) can’t write Torahs.

Here’s the text:

כל שישנו בקשירה ישנו בכתיבה – מכאן אומר ר”ת דאין אשה אוגדת לולב ועושה ציצית כיון דלא מיפקדה ואין נראה דהא מדפסלינן בריש התכלת (מנחות דף מב.) ציצית בעובד כוכבים דדריש בני ישראל ועשו ולא בעובדי כוכבים מכלל דאשה כשרה ואמרינן נמי סוכת גנב”ך כשרה בפ”ק דסוכה (דף ח:) ודוקא בס”ת ותפילין ומזוזות דכתיב וקשרתם וכתבתם דרשינן הכי.*

And here’s me pontificating:

Rabeinu Tam (Gittin 45b, s.v.”Kol”) applied ruthless logic to the ruling that women may not write tefillin since they are not obligated to lay tefillin, and ruled that since women are not obligated in the mitzvah of tzitzit, they may not tie tzitzit for men; since women are not obligated to take up a lulav, they may not bind together lulavin for men. This was rejected by the anonymous Tosafist, who cited baraitot in Menaḥot 42a and Succah 8b which permit women to tie tzitzit and build succot, despite being exempt from both. The general position is that one who is not obligated in a mitzvah may create the objects associated with the performance of that mitzvah, and Tosafot conclude that the case of tefillin (and its associates sifrei Torah and mezuzot) is anomalous in that those not obligated in this particular mitzvah may not create the objects required for its fulfilment.

So, good news for a piecemeal approach to egalitarianism re tzitzit, not so good re sifrei kodesh; and it’s really really cool to know your stuff well enough that you can point other people to references when they want them. Now if I could only do that for a couple hundred pages of gemara instead of just a couple pages, I’d be doing well.

Back to work.



* Permitted is a term hovering in an egalitarian no-mans’-land. Must get round to talking about that sometime or other. Someone remind me plz.
** fair use copied and pasted from the Bar-Ilan text database at Spertus’ Feinberg E-collection; access to many resources only $35/year, recommended as very much worth it

January 16, 2010 – 22:39 | Posted in General, talmud and halakha | Comments (0)

Stretchy letters in print

We talk about stretchy letters in Torah, now and again. Here’s a post about stretchy letters in print.

You know this icon. In the universal language of word processors it means “right-aligned text.” Lines run level down the right side of the page; if a line doesn’t fit perfectly, there’ll be a little bit of white space at the end of the line, and the left edge of the page will be ragged. This paragraph is left-aligned (and made narrower than the rest of the page, so the justifying will show up better), so the right edge is ragged.
If you don’t want a ragged edge, you use this one, the icon for justified text. The word processor does its clever tweaking so that the lines come out nice and straight down each side of the page. This paragraph is justified, so both edges are straight.
Computers accomplish this by averaging out the amount of space between each word, so that the words are evenly spaced along the lines. We don’t usually notice that the spaces between words are different sizes on each line, unless the variation is noticeably huge. The variation is rather pronounced in the couple of lines to the left, for instance.

This is actually a rather involved process. Computers can do it because they are rather good at sustaining hundreds of calculations per second, and it is easy for them to add or remove bits of space here and there. It is not so easy when you are a compositor using movable type.

So there are tricks printers, and manuscript scribes, use to keep their lines manageable. Abbreviating is one. Too many letters in a line? Knock a few letters off common words, the sort peo. will be able to rea. anywa.
Or initialising – turning common phrases into acronyms. P. G. Wodehouse does this, although probably not for the same reasons – Mix me a b.-and-s., Jeeves – perhaps he had learned rabbinic texts and knew the despair of sentences which end with i.o.u.a.* (And perhaps not.)
Or sometimes they stretch letters. Here’s some stretchy letters in movable type – compare the two sizes of hey, especially.
Printers like symmetry in their stretchy letters. You don’t see stretched reish in print much, but you see it all the time in sifrei Torah; you don’t see stretched final-mem in sifrei Torah much, but you see it in print.
More symmetry – when they stretch lamed, they bring its foot faaar forward and bend its neck right back, so that it’s more or less balanced. Scribes don’t do this. I think this has to do with where your eye is drawn – in Ashkenazi Torah scripts the horizontal carries far more weight than the vertical, so your stretch is mostly concerned with its horizontals; but in print both dimensions are roughly equal, and you want to stretch letters that are going to stay balanced despite that.

Not a definitive list of Letters Stretched In Print by any means – just I went to a shiur, and the handout was a photocopy from a page typeset in this way, and it caught my eye.

* Brandy-and-soda, and “impossibly obscure unguessable acronyms,” of course!

January 15, 2010 – 22:08 | Posted in General | Comments (0)

Proofreading, part 30

The very observant will note that this series has talked a lot about letters, but really not about layout at all. The reason for this is that while letter forms are relatively inflexible and easy to get wrong, layout is relatively very flexible and (these days) pretty hard to screw up, so it’s not part of the proofreading process.

If you were making a chair, you wouldn’t need to check that it had four legs; you’d know darn well if it didn’t have four legs. These days, layout errors for scribes like me are of that order of magnitude.

It was not always so. More about that in a week or two.

In the meantime, I will just note that I generally proofread a little faster than I correct, so the proofreading gets ahead of the correcting, and thus it was a couple of weeks ago that I was learning leyning in Bereshit, correcting in Shemot, proofreading in Vayikra, and writing in Bemidbar. Heh.

January 14, 2010 – 22:07 | Posted in proofreading | Comments (0)

Proofreading, part 29

I summarised my attitude towards women writing Torahs by saying that the full citizen, the adult male in good standing, may participate in the transmission of the community’s symbolic centre, and the adjunct classes of women, children, and slaves, may not; today, it is a matter of principle that women not be an adjunct class and therefore may participate on the same basis as men.

This is not how the language of halakha expresses itself, naturally. Halakhically, the issue is framed in terms of the mitzvah of tefillin – those who are Biblically-commanded and socially-accepted as tefillin-wearers may write the sacred scrolls; others may not. Women are not Biblically commanded to wear tefillin, therefore they may not write the scrolls.

It seems simplistic to say that in communities where halakhic validity and gender equality are equally indispensable, women do wear tefillin, and that said wearing is held by said communities to be equivalent to men’s. Simplistic, but when an immutable principle meets an overwhelming imperative, on some level the answer is simple. The community says in its actions “this is what we do, this is what we expect of people, this is how it’s going to stay” – and once that sentiment is in the heart of a community, we don’t wrench it out, so the halakha must perforce adjust to accept it.

You can’t run a religion like that, changing the rules of the society every time you sniff hurt feelings. This is a halakhic sledgehammer, and swinging it too freely will destroy the halakhic structure. But societies where gender equality is well-grounded and gaining demonstrate that gender equality does not render a society inherently unstable (on a century of evidence; give it another five centuries and we’ll be better placed to tell), and thus one may say with a fair amount of certainty that applying the halakhic sledgehammer to the principle of gender equality will not render the halakhic structure inherently unstable either.

We’ve got off the topic of proofreading rather, but there again, proofreading is the process that ensures the stability of the Torah text, which itself is symbolically the stability of the Jewish people, so it’s vaguely associated. Anyway, that’s about all I’ve got to say concerning proofreading at the moment.

January 13, 2010 – 22:06 | Posted in proofreading | Comments (0)

Proofreading, part 28

Most readers here, I imagine, live in countries where rights and responsibilities in the social plane are officially not apportioned with reference to gender. Broadly, this is because it is a matter of principle that women and men function as equal members of society. How well this actually plays out in practice is another matter, but in principle, that’s how it is.

It is then implausible to expect the religious plane to stand orthogonal to the social plane. To function as a full citizen in one plane and an adjunct citizen in another plane requires either a superhuman suspension of disbelief or an impaired existence in one or both planes.

This isn’t good for religion’s chances – if you’re used to functioning fully in a social plane, you’re not going to take kindly to being told you have lesser status in a religious plane. But further, it encourages the idea that the religious and social planes are and must be distinct. As someone who sees religion as an enhancement to, not a removal from, the social plane, this doesn’t work for me.

Like it or not, social climate filters into Jewish life, and in social climates which foster egalitarianism, there will exist egalitarian Jewish life, in which the idea of women as an adjunct class is in principle both redundant and repugnant. Given such a change in the makeup of society, it is not implausible for its women to write Torahs. Naturally there are communities in which women are, and are content with being, adjuncts, and certainly these communities shouldn’t have women writing their Torahs, but these are not communities I choose to live in.

The halakhic aspect to follow.

January 12, 2010 – 22:06 | Posted in proofreading | Comments (0)

Proofreading, part 27

Of course, people say “um, no actually” to me, being female. It wasn’t the handless guy’s fault he had no hands, it’s not my fault I’m female. He just didn’t have the physical makeup to write a valid Torah and that was too bad; I don’t have the physical makeup to write a valid Torah and that’s too bad also.

Really, I do know a lot of decent people who have to say “um, no actually” to me, and they do act like yesterday’s posited rabbi – feeling really sorry that he’s got to say “um, no actually” to this person who’s put in so much effort and so badly wants to be part of the community and it isn’t their fault they can’t participate through this activity.

So why’s it different? why am I expecting the handless guy and the Braille-writer to suck it up, while I go right ahead and write Torahs?

You could say I’m just a hypocrite, a case of “one rule for us, one rule for them.” Some people do say that. I see where they’re coming from.

Way I see it, women doing men’s things isn’t exactly a physical makeup thing, it’s about how gender affects one’s communal status. Women are barred from Torah writing in the context of societal strata; some classes of people may participate, some may not. In particular, the full citizen, the adult male in good standing, may participate in the transmission of the community’s symbolic centre, and the adjunct classes of women, children, and slaves, may not.

This is perfectly sensible as far as it goes, except that in our days it is a matter of principle that women not be an adjunct class.

Such a statement requires some unpacking. More on that tomorrow.

January 11, 2010 – 22:05 | Posted in proofreading | Comments (0)