December 24, 2009 – 21:49
When I’m proofreading my writing for the first time, there are two questions I’m asking regarding each of the 304,805 letters: is the letter there, and is the letter kosher? The process goes like this. With a sheet of freshly-written Torah in front of you, you find your place in the tikkun and look at […]
December 24, 2009 – 21:46
Getting back to proofreading proper. As we’ve heard, in order to encourage integrity of the text, we have a rule that even one wrong letter invalidates the entire Torah. When you’re writing 304,805 letters, you’re bound to slip up on some of them. So, when you write a Torah, you proofread it extremely carefully, more […]
December 24, 2009 – 21:45
Gabriel points out, correctly, that some authorities permit erasing of a Divine Name which was created by hak tokhot. You see why that should be, of course? The logic goes, if the shapes made by hak tokhot don’t count as letters, then the Divine-Name-like things created thereby cannot be proper Divine Names, and if they […]
December 24, 2009 – 21:41
Here’s a case where a small child came in handy, though. The final hey in a Divine Name got smudged accidentally, so it sort of looks like an ugly hey and it sort of looks like an ugly kuf. It’s definitely one or the other, but which? Remember you aren’t allowed to erase Divine Names […]
December 24, 2009 – 21:40
Here we have a something that ought to be a yud, but looks an awful lot like a vav. (This isn’t DE’s Torah, by the way. Just part of my stock of interesting Torah photos.) This kind of ambiguity can, interestingly, be resolved by showing the ambiguous letter to a small child. Adults are troubled […]
December 24, 2009 – 21:40
As a proofreader, you have to be rather aware of what you’re dealing with. If you come across, say, a yud which looks far too much like a vav for comfort, like this, you certainly ought to fix it; everyone agrees that that’s no good at all. But if you’re proofreading something by a Sephardi […]
December 24, 2009 – 21:39
Sephardi shin Ashkenazi shin Shin, for Ashkenazim, has to have a pointy bottom. But Sephardim don’t necessarily agree with that, and many Sephardi styles give shin a rounded or flat bottom. Now, most Ashkenazim don’t think that this is a deal-breaker; you can still recognise the letter as shin, after all, but a few Ashkenazim […]
December 24, 2009 – 21:38
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 […]
December 24, 2009 – 21:28
I’ve talked a bit about how it’s okay to fix mistakes, in most circumstances. This series of posts is going to deal with the finding of said mistakes. 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 […]
