December 25, 2009 – 21:53
Pasul letter mem Proofreading has to pick up on letters which have real problems in their form. Maybe the scribe’s hand slipped, maybe the letter got smudged by accident, maybe the ink spread after being put on – letters can go wrong, and we don’t always notice while we’re writing. So proofreading has to be […]
December 24, 2009 – 23:52
We saw an example of one sort of thing which proofreading turns up – where the text is Just Wrong: Text should read שמנה מאת שנה. That was a case where the extra letter vav completely changed the meaning – “eight hundred” became “one hundred and eight.” But in some cases, an extra or missing […]
December 24, 2009 – 21:51
All this place-finding and looking up and down takes time. Only a couple of seconds each time, but that adds up fast, as you can probably imagine. Holding a string of letters in your mind isn’t efficient either, partly just because one can forget things, and partly because of anticipation; when you’re reading the text […]
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 […]
