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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
December 30, 2011 – 17:07
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 […]
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 […]
December 16, 2011 – 14:54
I’ve been neglecting you a bit, I’m afraid. This is because I’ve been posting regular posts for my current Torah client at their special blog, and I haven’t had energy to do two lots of posts or to set up proper cross-posting. Check out last week’s post A single mistake invalidates the entire sefer Torah […]
November 23, 2011 – 20:35
I thought that crash was just Them Upstairs dropping something. Turns out it was the mezuzah falling off my bedroom door. I’d taken it off for a Hebrew school on Sunday, and apparently not stuck it back on hard enough. I found the mezuzah case some hours later, in the middle of the hall. That’s […]
Following a visit home, during which old toyboxes were opened and photographs taken, here’s a window into my childhood. I spent uncountable hours making this kind of stuff–not only accessories, but a whole village of wonderful houses, none of which have survived the years. When you’ve seen all this, you should realise that the question […]
September 4, 2011 – 15:13
The original Tefillin Barbie was a 2006 model with a long denim skirt.* She’s getting increasingly difficult to find, but people are still buying Tefillin Barbies. So I’ve bought a dozen Computer Engineer Barbies to play with instead. Computer Engineer Barbie wears leggings, which is a bit of a change from the frummie skirt. Still, […]
