The boyfriend works on glioblastoma. Which is a cancer that happens to astrocytes, so he says. giantmicrobes.com has neurons, but not astrocytes, so I made a plush astrocyte. With a wire skeleton so that all its tentacles are posable, because who wants a non-posable astrocyte, really?
It’s purple because all the pictures of glioblastoma are purple.
Look, cute little tail!
Everyone has a challah cover that says “Shabbat v’Yom Tov,” don’t they? It’s a compulsory wedding gift, I believe. But not many people have one like this. Bwahahaa, geekery.
I might post a pattern at some point, if anyone wants it.
Today’s parchment: a bit smooth and slippy, so I want to treat it with gum sanderac before writing. It’s a resin that you grind finely and rub into the parchment.
Grinding gum sandarac in a cereal bowl with a spoon is annoying, because so much of the gum sandarac sticks to the surface of the bowl that you end up with not very much left for yourself. It’s also not great for the bowl or the spoon.
So I have finally got around to buying a small lab-type pestle and mortar on ebay. It is rather amusing how I can get ALL THE SUPPLIES on eBay except for parchment and ink.
In a spirit of procrastination, I searched for “gallnuts” on ebay, to see if one could at least get the ingredients for ink. It altered the search to “walnuts,” which is not quite the same thing. “Gall nuts” it changed to “gill nets” (something to do with basketball).
“Oak galls” actually scored a result: OAK GALL INK 100% HAND MADE ECWS* WICCA. The description says it “darkens to a lovely, rich black/brown colour,” which doesn’t sound too good for us, since we can’t use brown ink.
The “Wicca” bit is viscerally more disturbing, although actually ink doesn’t HAVE to be made for the specific purpose of holy scrolls, and you CAN technically use idolatrous wine in it, so you COULD use Wicca-specific ink…but it looks like “Wicca” is just there to boost his search results, seems the maker is a historical re-enactment nerd.
No raw oak galls though, at least not today. I’ll do you a post sometime soon about how oak galls work in ink; it’s extremely interesting.
* English Civil War Society, apparently.
This morning I’m writing chapter 14 of Exodus:
And Moses stretched out his hand, and a strong wind blew all night, and dried up the sea. And the children of Israel came into the sea on dry land, and [this bit is recited with the special tune for the Song of the Sea] the waters were like walls to them, on their right and on their left, וְהַמַּיִם לָהֶם חוֹמָה מִימִינָם וּמִשְּׂמֹאלָם.
It so happens this morning that while I’m writing this piece, I’m listening to the last movement of Berlioz’s Te Deum, Judex crederis, which is remarkably well-placed as an accompaniment to this particular piece of Torah. Have a listen:
Berlioz scored the Te Deum for two orchestras, three choirs, and an enormous organ, which makes it sufficiently breathtaking for the scene at the Sea, all that water and all those people and the mighty strength of God through-and-over all.
The text is pretty appropriate too; in English it starts We believe that you will come to be our judge. We therefore pray you help your servants…. Full English and Latin here.* Berlioz’s musical interpretation certainly reflects how I think the children of Israel must have been feeling at that point. Right at the end, when all the choirs and all the instruments combine in this enormous cry of In te Domine speravi, non confundar in æternum! (O Lord, in you have I trusted, let me never be confounded) as the waters tower over them and the warriors follow them and the strong winds blow and the trop changes to the slow, sweeping, dramatic cadences of the Song of the Sea…
* I admit the bit about redeeming with blood is rather Christian, but it’s not too bad, especially given the blood of the Exodus, and the rest of the text is spot on really.
I see, updating the progress meter, that we’re at 25%. A quarter of the way there. Still a long ways to go, but I feel like we’ve got a nice big chunk done now.
This week’s parsha contains the phrase “The Torah of God shall be in your mouth.”
Rabbinic tradition expands this concept: if we are to put the Torah in our mouths, it obviously cannot be made of things that we may not eat. So all animal products used on Torahs are made from the kosher species.
Quills – swan or goose feathers, turkey or duck, but no peacock or ostrich, eagle or crow. Glue – before synthetic glues, sticky stuff was mostly made from animal products, did you know that? – fish glue or cow-hoof glue, but not rabbit-skin glue or horse-hoof glue. Thread, which is made from tendons and glue – cow tendons, but not horse tendons. And parchment.
Torahs are written on parchment, in Hebrew klaf, קלף, (with a kuf). Proper parchment is really a type of leather – here’s a site which talks about how klaf is made. Nowadays most Torah parchment is made from cows, because the meat industry mostly deals with cows; older Torahs are often goat, one also sees deer and occasionally sheep; you could use bison, or chicken or turkey (but that would make very small pieces, and probably not be worth it). You could even use a giraffe, if you could find one.
And yes, I have this dream that one day someone will give me a dead giraffe and I will be able to write a Megillah on it, because you could fit the whole Megillah on one giraffe skin* and that would be unbelievably amazing so if you do know anyone with giraffes that are looking a bit tottery, do introduce me, or if you know a parchment-maker who’s up for an adventure, likewise.
I digress.
The one kosher animal you may not use is a fish. Klaf can be made out of fishskin, but the rabbinic sources say that it smells truly terrible, and for that reason you can’t use it for sacred scrolls – you don’t want your holy books to be stinky. This I like very much.
Goat parchment retains a distinctive goaty tang for a Very Long Time – goats are like that, very assertive – and you can usually identify a goat Torah because it smells like a goat. I like this too, it is a pleasing reminder that the scroll is not just a text, it is a physical object as well.
The picture at right is a piece of klaf held up against a window. You can see very clearly where the cow’s backbone was. Sometimes you can also see where the kidneys were, and if it had a fat bottom, sometimes you see that as well.
The two images at left are close-ups of the surface of klaf. The top picture is the front side, and the bottom picture is the back side. A word about that, first: if you’re processing parchment for a book, you make both sides the same, because you want to write on both sides of the page. But we only write on one side for our scrolls, so we only bother processing one side. That means that the front side is beautifully smooth and silky, almost like very very fine suede, but the back side is rougher and generally less “finished.”
You can see that the front side has lines on it. All Torahs have to be written with lines – it’s both a scribal aid, to keep the lines straight, and an halakhic (legal) requirement – i.e. even if you’re really good at keeping your lines straight, you still have to have lines. You probably didn’t notice them last time you read Torah, but they’re almost certainly there – you just don’t notice them because you’re looking at the letters.
The lines are scored in. One can score one’s own lines, with a ruler and some kind of scoring tool, such as an awl, or one can have the lines put in by the klafmachers (people who make the parchment). That’s very clever – they have a grid of wires, and they set the wires to the appropriate positions, and then they press it hard into the klaf, bang, and that makes lines. Sort of like when your socks leave a line pattern in your ankle, only the klaf is dead so they don’t fade away quickly like they do on ankles. Sometimes they will fade with extreme age, hence that “almost” above.
So anyway, on the front side of this particular piece you can also see the veins. The front side is generally bleached quite white and nice, but sometimes hints of animal-ness remain.
On the back side of this piece, you can see the hair pattern quite distinctly. The back will often keep some of the colour of the cow – greyish, brownish, whatever. Sometimes it’s splotchy. I think that’s rather lovely.
On most older scrolls, you won’t see the splotching, because for a long time it was the fashion to paint the backs with a substance called log, to make them uniformly white. This undoubtedly makes the backs of the scrolls attractively white and shiny, but unfortunately it also makes the scrolls extremely heavy. Log is some variety of sticky substance mixed with some variety of white powder, for instance boiled klaf and powdered chalk, so when coating, you’re effectively adding a layer of stone to the Torah, and of course that’s going to be heavy.
So these days we don’t coat the backs, we whiten the parchment by bleaching it, and any remaining discolouration serves to remind us of the complex relationship between animals and Jewish ritual worship. We generally get one sheet of parchment per cow, which works out to about sixty-five cows per Torah; that’s a lot of cows.
I have explored the ethical implications of this in two related blog posts, here and here, but the intertwined ethics of the contemporary meat industry and the Jewish community’s response have only just started to develop, so that particular aspect of Torah-making is one which will evolve in the direction we choose to take it.
* Technically you would have to cut it into sheets because you mayn’t have more than eight columns on a sheet, but that’s okay, I’m very good at tiny neat seams, so the pattern wouldn’t be too obviously disrupted.
Dear everyone,
Thanks for all the emails. No-one else needs to send me the article about Hanna, okay? Yes I know her, yes I’ve seen the article(s), we’re good.
Hanna recently started her first complete sefer Torah; she works in Israel, which makes her braver than me, given how hard it is in Israel for women to do even comparatively ordinary things like riding the bus. Another female Torah scribe of my acquaintance in Israel keeps her head down because she’s afraid that if articles appear about her, she’ll become the target of misogynist hate crimes. So Hanna is being rather courageous, making her project all public. Good for her.
I’ve not met Hanna in person; my student Linda has, when they were working together on the Women’s Torah Project. We’ve corresponded, naturally. It’s great having colleagues.
I generally write at home in Manhattan, on a sloping table (good for your back), but sometimes I feel like getting out of the apartment.
As many of you will have seen by now, a Torah scroll starts out as individual sheets of parchment upon which I write. The sewing together of the sheets into a scroll comes later. Single sheets are much more portable creatures than large Torah scrolls, so it often happens that I will take a single sheet and go and write somewhere different.
This week, actually, I had to go to England on family business, but most weeks I’ll maybe go down to my yeshiva, hang out at the Jewish Theological Seminary, maybe take in the Drisha Institute or the Yeshiva University Library. There’s something very delicious about writing Torah in a place of Torah surrounded by the sounds of Torah learning, and more prosaically, if one has to go to England on short notice (all is well, don’t worry), it’s good to be able to stay on schedule.
For these excursions, I have a fabulously professional-looking Torah transport bag. It’s actually a chess championship bag, of all things. I had no idea such things even existed until I got a student who’d done chess championships; she used her old chess bag to bring her parchment to lessons. Me, I know a good idea when I see it, so I got online and got a chess bag (sans contents).
Chess tournament players use a roll-up chessboard, which is about the same size as a piece of parchment. So you roll your parchment up and secure it in the straps for the chessboard. There are handy little slots for chess-players’ pens and a drink (or quills, knives, and ink); a nice zipper compartment designed for a tournament clock which is just the right size for holding my lunch; another compartment for chess pieces which holds miscellaneous things like my camera,* bits of tile, gum sanderac, teabags, erasers, and so forth; even a dear little windowed pocket for business cards. And a document flap which holds my sketchbook and Kindle for keeping busy on the subway. Really, it’s perfect. I used to use a yoga-mat bag, but this is just so much classier. Lends a certain gravitas to tooling around the city with my bits of Torah.
A journalist was interviewing me the other week (this, thankfully, does not happen as often as it used to; not that I mind exactly but certain story angles got very old very fast) and asking how I avoided making mistakes whilst writing Torah. I left the interview with the uncomfortable feeling that we’d been talking at cross-purposes; from my perspective, your job is to write the words and you do that as best you can in every aspect, and the mistakes you take in your stride. She seemed to think that the main thing is to avoid mistakes, and then maybe you can focus on doing a good job of the rest of it, which is not really how I see it at all.**
This is, perhaps, illustrated in the matter of accessories. To take a sheet of Torah to the yeshiva, you can roll it up and stick it in a cardboard tube and wrap that in a garbage bag and fill your purse with your writing kit. This keeps the parchment from getting battered and gets all your stuff there, certainly. But it’s just nicer if you can leave in the morning knowing you’ve got everything you need neatly stashed in your bag. No scrambling, no forgetting things, just being prepared and confident.
There’s a profound conclusion (or several) lurking here, I feel sure, among the miscellaneous vignettes of soferet life and musings on the difference between tools and accessories. But the jetlag is catching up with me, and the conclusion by the same distance escaping me. You’ll have to put it together yourself. This is called “empowering the student to create their own custom learning experience” in modern pedagogical-speak, so you can rest assured you have the very latest in educational blogging experiences. Shavua tov.
* It’s always good to have a camera with you. You never know when someone is going to show you something interesting in a sefer Torah, and you’ll kick yourself if you can’t take a picture.
** Yes, if you can’t convey what you’re thinking, you didn’t interview very well. I know. Not her fault.
The start of Sefer Shemot finds us in Egypt and returning to the story of the alef-bet.
In Egypt, as everyone knows, they wrote with hieroglyphs, an intensely complex system of writing based on pictograms. Literacy in hieroglyphs is relatively hard to attain; literacy also endows power, such that an Egyptian scribe occupied an elite position in society and had a god devoted to his efforts.
At the other end of the social scale in Egypt, we have people like the Israelites–migrant workers, slaves, people with no power. Also monotheistic, and if you need a god to keep track of your writing system, you need a simpler writing system if you’re going to stay monotheistic.* An alphabet, a system of representing constituent sounds of a language, is a good solution, because you can make phonetic represnations by memorising only a couple of dozen symbols rather than a couple of thousand.
At the end of last time, I had just introduced the idea of acrophonic writing, in which a (stylised, abstracted version of a) picture comes to represent the first sound of the associated word. Hieroglyphics developed in this direction, to a degree, so from about the seventeenth century BCE you find alphabetic hieroglyphs.
No-one quite knows how our particular alphabet came into being, but there’s a theory cautiously advanced that possibly Semitic workers in Egypt had something to do with it. There isn’t really enough data, and we also run into scholarly tangles concerning the definition of an alphabet. What concerns us now is that sometime around 1500 BCE symbols now known as Proto-Canaanite or Proto-Sinaitic script were in use, assigning sounds to symbols based on what the symbols represent.
Henceforth I’m going to be using five letters for examples; alef, vav, khaf, ayin, and tav. Remember that alef used to be a guttural consonant and not just the silent vowel-carrier it’s become. Here’s the Proto-Canaanite symbols:
Reading left to right (since our base language right now is English), these are pictures of an ox, a hook, a hand, an eye, and a (tally-type) mark. In Hebrew the words are ‘alef, vav, khaf, ayin, tav; the people who used these systems were not speaking Hebrew, but a remote ancestor thereof, but my impression is that those particular words didn’t change much.
Five hundred years later, around 1000 BCE, the Proto-Canaanite symbol set has become a true alphabet, the Phoenician alphabet. You can see how the symbols have become somewhat more abstract. (The right-to-left text direction has also been established by this point, interestingly.) Again: alef, vav (or waw), khaf, ayin, tav.
The Phoenicians were a widely-spread culture with a powerful and pervasive economic and cultural system. As such, their writing system got spread all over the ancient world; the Phoenicians’ influence declined after about the eighth century, and the script ceased to exist in any form after about the third century. The cultures which replaced them, and the descendants of their script, however, kept right on going. Israelite tribes settled in Canaan around the 12th century BCE, adopted the local script, and it came to look something like this:
This is the period of the monarchy (united and divided); Israelite national identity is an independent thing, so language and script and culture are all somewhat distinctive. Tangentially, Phoenician used 22 consonants, so their alphabet had 22 letters; the Israelite dialect had more than 22 consonants, so some letters had to do double duty, and this is why shin and sin are both represented by the same symbol.
By about 600 BCE (the period where Assyria and Babylon are vying for supremacy and the children of Israel are getting repeatedly squashed in the struggle), Hebrew letters look something like this:
For those thinking “This looks nothing at all like the alef-bet”: yes, you’re correct, it looks nothing at all like the alef-bet. After Babylon absorbed the Israelites and exiled them, national culture was rather hampered, and use of this Hebrew alphabet began to decline. The Hebrew script (or Paleo-Hebrew, to aid disambiguation) was preserved in religious writings, a last pocket of national identity. Thus it is that we have examples of the Paleo-Hebrew script from about 100 BCE, from Qumran:
Paleo-Hebrew was revived as a national Jewish script by Bar-Kokhba, but the script ultimately fell out of use with the failure of the rebellion. Jewish textual identity had long since taken a different direction, which we will follow next time.
Further reading:
Paleo-Hebrew
Phoenician alphabet
History of the alphabet
* That was a joke.
Well, this has been a busy week. As well as working on your Torah, I’ve been apprentice-master-ing–my sometimes-apprentice has winter break from her yeshiva, so she’s back being my apprentice, which means I’m spending a good deal of time supervising her.
I’ve got a number of other women I’m invested in in this way. It’s something to do with how, when I was trying to learn, I didn’t have much company–once I got knowledge and skills, I wanted to share them, so that I’d have company. (Also noble ideas about making the world a better place, etc, but that sounds kind of pretentious so we’ll put that bit in parentheses.) Three of them are working on Torah scrolls of their own now, and various others are engaged in repair and other projects.
So I didn’t get time to write the history of the alef-bet post I wanted to write, but the world is an incrementally better place because of my apprentice. Good trade?
Instead, I’m going to share some thoughts that came into my head as I was writing the parsha, Vayechi.
When I’m writing, I’m paying some attention to the content as it goes through my fingers. If I’m studying Torah, I’m thinking about it in an intellectual way; when I’m writing, it’s more of a musy kind of thinking.
The exception to this is when it’s poetry. There you are, scribing along, and suddenly you don’t understand more than half the words. This is how you know you’re in a poem. The translations and the printed chumashim use layout to denote poetry–that and the sudden slew of footnotes “Meaning of Hebrew uncertain”, so it’s not just me that gets confused.
Since I want to understand what I’m writing, poetical bits usually go slower because every few words I’m referring to a translation or a dictionary.
This bit in particular struck me, this time round:
Dan shall govern his people,
As one of the tribes of Israel.
Dan shall be a serpent by the road,
A viper by the path,
That bites the horse’s heels
So that his rider is thrown backward.
I wait for your deliverance, O Lord! (Genesis 49:16-18)
Check out Rashi there, if you’re wondering what on earth that’s all about. Lots of stuff about Samson.
Just made me chuckle, though–here’s Jacob saying semi-prophetical things to his sons, and the basic meaning of this part is “Dan will be a judge. Of sorts. God help us all.”
