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. […]
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 […]
Okay! This bit is what got me started on this in the first place. יא) אבל בשיטין נתנו טעם, כמסעות ארבעים ושנים, וכרבבות של ישראל ששים, וכזקנים של ישראל שבעים ושנים, וכתוכחות של משנה תורה תשעים ושמנה, הכל לפי הכתב. כמסעות, שנאמר ויכתוב משה את מוצאיהם; כרבבות ישראל, שנאמר כתב לך את הדברים האלה כי […]
Here’s the white space in Kohelet – chapter 3, and the poetry a time for bearing and a time for dying; a time for planting and a time for uprooting…. The repetitive structure of the words is reflected in the structured layout. (Did I show you this one before? Oh well, won’t hurt to see […]
Downstairs neighbour has spent the afternoon in the garden in a deckchair. I come in through the garden carrying a sefer Torah. You see I left the sifrei Torah in the old apartment. First and foremost because I didn’t want to put the sifrei Torah in the moving truck, in boxes as if they were […]
