I was going to give a class on checking your own mezuzah, but it got prevented by weather. Today I found the notes I’d made for it, so I’m typing them up. But I’m not putting in the pictures here because that’ll take hours of scanning and photographing; if you want those you’ll have to […]
My beloved student Julie has been writing a Torah in San Francisco at the Contemporary Jewish Museum for the past year, and once she’d finished writing (yay) it came time to sew it together and have a bit of an Event. So I went out there to help with the sewing and to be part […]
I like challenges. This challenge was to cook up illuminations for a Megillah being given as a bar mitzvah present. Bar mitzvahs are tricky – you want something appealing to a 13-year old, but it also needs to be something they won’t hate in twenty years’ time. The family sent me pictures of things – […]
This Purim, I was commissioned to write a megillah for the Abramson Center for Jewish Life, and not just create a megillah, but also a case for it to live in. The Center’s rabbi asked if I could make a design that drew on the Center’s existing artwork, and that’s what you see above. The […]
The original stone tablets were written by the finger of God, etzba Elohim. Nowadays we write their less cumbersome representations, the Torah-scrolls, with quills, but what most people today don’t know is that ideally you don’t use a quill to write sifrei kodesh. You’re supposed to use the index finger of your dominant hand — […]
February 12, 2011 – 20:31
What happens when you let the nose on your dalet get out of control: it turns into an elephant.
In honour of its being Adar, I give you Dog Torah. I have a puppy. Parts of her are tan-coloured like parchment, and parts of her are black and shiny like Torah ink. She likes to squirm around on the couch. I am a sofer stam. Now read on…
Tuesday night, I was teaching at my scribe school, as is my wont on Tuesday nights. Three-quarters of the room was speaking Yiddish. Now, I posted recently about the surreal experience of being at a party of young, egal-type Jews where three-quarters of the room was speaking Yiddish. That was strange, yes. But having three-quarters […]
Tears in Torahs are scary, people. I know. You see a big tear, you want to STICK IT BACK TOGETHER REALLY HARD so it WON’T TEAR ANY MORE. Nobody could be calm about finding this in their Torah, for instance: But for the love of all things holy, don’t whip out the duck tape and […]
Some repairs you don’t need a sofer for. You just need wood glue. Yes, folks – if your rollers are falling apart, get yourself some wood glue and jolly well stick them back together. Just don’t get the glue on the Torah, but you figured that out already. No scribal training required.
