Thing about being an artist: you make stuff, and you make more stuff, and sometimes you don’t have space for some of the stuff any more. On sale: Alef-bets; papercuts; Tefillin Barbie. Struck-out items=claimed already Bibbly-bobbly alef-bets Torah ink, parchment-look paper, alef-bet going forwards and backwards with pleasingly organic curves. 4*6 inches each, framed. The […]
Well, it’s my Queen’s diamond jubilee weekend, so I’m going to post about jubilees this week. This is Bet Haverim’s fifty-year anniversary, their proper jubilee. The concept of jubilee comes from the Torah, from Leviticus. So when we were discussing which section of the Torah Bet Haverim would be writing as a community, we naturally […]
A scribe today has an exhaustive list of rules for how each letter ought to look – here’s an example for letter shin, from the Mishnah Berurah: Shin has three heads. The first head, with the leg which is drawn out of it, is like a vav, and its face is tilted slightly upwards. The […]
I’ve talked a bit about how it’s okay to fix mistakes, in most circumstances. The sages were well aware that when you copy a document, and then copy from the copy, and so on, mistakes are likely to creep in over time. This is why we have a rule that even one mistake in a […]
(Meant to post this last week, sorry.) Leviticus 19:23–And when ye shall come into the land, and shall have planted all manner of trees for food, then ye shall count the fruit thereof as forbidden; three years shall it be as forbidden unto you; it shall not be eaten. Except in our sefer it’s more […]
Something you do not need to see when you open tefillin: BUGS. The vacated exoskeletons of bugs, I grant you (note the hole in the centre one where the bug burst its way out), but still, ick. At least a dozen of them. Perhaps surprisingly, the klafim were ok, once I’d brushed the crumbled bugs […]
We reached a halfway point this week; 122.5 columns of 245. As it happens, 245 is also the number of words in the Shema (full text here). The Shema is the cornerstone of the liturgy; the Torah is the cornerstone of the religion. The Shema says, bring God into all your doings; the Torah is […]
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 […]
Following on a bit from last week’s post, here are a few of the other things this sefer contains. Descriptions are mine, not hallowed by tradition.
When we look at words in the Torah scroll, we notice unusual decorations on the letters. What are they? Why are they there? A very few seconds’ thought tells us that they are not vowels or cantillation, the more usual “decorations” of Hebrew letters. The fourth-generation amora Rava states [Men 29b]: There are seven letters […]
