The way we divide the Torah-readings nowadays, parashat Naso always falls out adjacent to Shavuot, the festival upon which we celebrate the Giving of the Torah, and upon which we read the Ten Commandments. Thus it is that the following Midrash is especially appropriate for the Naso/Shavuot period (thus, yes, I should have posted it […]
So – recently, someone sent me these tefillin, and as you can see, they have these little tags wired onto them. Funny, eh? Here are close-ups. They’re little seals, stamped into blobs of lead. One side reads “כשר” and the other side reads “הרבנות הראשית ת”א-יפו” – kosher: chief rabbinate of Tel-Aviv-Yaffo. I didn’t know […]
Occasionally I dip my pen, by accident, into my tea instead of into my ink. When that happens, I wipe the tea off my pen, and dip the pen into the ink as per original plan. But sometimes apparently I don’t get all the tea off my pen. A tiny drop of it lurks in […]
and they coil madly out of the box! and I get to sort them into pairs! and have them fixed! And Emfish says to recite the blessing Lehaniakh, tefillin!, or “Lie down, tefillin!” so I will do that later and they will all uncoil themselves and behave perfectly.
I keep sets of tefillin for loaning to women. Women, because men have an easy time of it if they want to borrow tefillin. A woman who wants to borrow tefillin – because she wants to try the practice before committing a few hundred dollars to tefillin, or because she hasn’t got that sort of […]
A post that can be of no possible interest save to the very very few. Thus. On klaf, 8mm lines of 62 yuds (average) are done at 134mm wide, because that’s what works. Therefore, a column of 47 yuds needs to be 102mm wide, one of 66 yuds needs to be 143mm wide, one of […]
In an ideal situation, then, you have your .doc file, with the names and everything neatly filled in. Next to the portable drafting board, the most awesome tool in the ketubah artist’s kit is – VARIABLE MARGINS! Yes. You open your .doc file in Word*, and you mess with the margins. It’s great. I’ve learned […]
