Here’s a section of parashat Shemini, from Leviticus 10:16: וְאֵת שְׂעִיר הַחַטָּאת דָּרֹשׁ דָּרַשׁ מֹשֶׁה וְהִנֵּה שֹׂרָף – And Moses he inquired diligently concerning the goat of the sin offering, and, behold, it was burnt. See how the scribe has stretched out the first words of the verse so dramatically? What’s going on there? An [...]
February 23, 2012 – 20:54
This week’s parasha describes the worship-tent that God commands the Israelites to construct in the wilderness. Around the tent, they are to construct a courtyard, of panels held between columns. Perhaps you’ve seen a Torah scroll being unrolled around a sanctuary at Simchat Torah. You’ve seen how it’s long enough to go around the whole [...]
December 30, 2011 – 13:49
I wanted to do you a post about why there aren’t any vowels or musical notation-marks in a sefer Torah, but when I came to study the subject, I realised it’s a good deal more complicated than can fit into one post. It seemed to require a brief history of vowel-marks, which in turn required [...]
You’re not supposed to write your name on the back of a sefer Torah, just in case you were wondering. What *is* this? And what is it doing scribbled on the back of a sefer torah? By the way, if anyone can decipher these, I’d be delighted to hear about it. I really do wonder [...]
You haven’t had time to forget the story of the spies yet. Moses sends twelve good men and true out of the wilderness to check out the Promised Land; they come back reporting that the land is full of scary giants; the people decide that they actually don’t want to invade right now thanks all [...]
You could be taking my class at Yeshivat Hadar! Or one of the half-dozen other Tuesday night classes which will also be happening. Here’s what mine is going to look like: Apprentice with a Sofer Learn basic Torah repair and maintenance skills which will enable you to keep your community’s Torah scrolls in good working [...]
So how was your Shavuot? I spent it in Washington Heights, davening at Breuer’s. Breuer’s looks like this on Shavuot: Green velvet draperies, all hung about with boughs and flowers, with trees in tubs, and a chuppah-thing over the amud made from green branches. When it is a hundred degrees out and you walk into [...]
I can’t remember which of you asked me about the word יששכר last week, but MarGavriel just sent me a translation of part of S. S. Boyarski’s work Ammudei Shesh and it had a tangent about יששכר in it, so here goes. The question was “What’s the deal with there being two letter shins in [...]
Although scrolls of the Pentateuch have been common among almost all groups of Jews throughout the millennia, scrolls of the rest of the Tanakh have been much more rare. One colorful individual in the story of Tanakh scrolls was a character in the Old Yishuv of Jerusalem, in the 19th century. He insisted on returning [...]
טז) לא יעשה חציו גויל וחציו קלפים, אבל עושה חציו גויל וחציו צבאים, אף על פי שאינו מן המובחר. He shouldn’t do half of it on gevil [=a thicker type of cow parchment, more like leather] and half on klaf [a thinner type of parchment made by splitting a cow skin laterally]. But he may [...]
