Ever wonder what makes heavy Torahs so heavy?
Size is part of it, of course. Before Good Electric Lighting and Universal Spectacles (in the eyecare sense, not in the entertainment sense), having bigger letters helped the reader. Line height these days is regularly 8mm, only two-thirds the size of the letters on older, bigger Torahs.
But another thing is coating. Torahs used commonly to be coated with a substance called log, a plaster-based white stuff that made the parchment pretty and white and heavy. See this next pic, klaf viewed from the back – clicky to see bigger – on the left, splotchily applied log; on the right, brush-marks.
That’s basically a thin layer of stone, right there on the parchment, and the thing about stone is that it’s darn heavy.
I work with so many synagogues that have these enormous heavy Torahs that no-one can lift. They never get used because there’s no-one in the congregation who can do hagbah with them – they barely even get taken out on Simchat Torah, poor things. But these Torahs used to be used, once upon a time. What happened?
I already suggested that we can have smaller Torahs these days because we have better synagogue lighting and more people have specs. I also think that we need smaller Torahs these days because we don’t have people who can lift them any more. Where are the blacksmiths, the butchers, the carpenters? the carters, the porters, the men who worked with their muscles for a living and on Shabbat they lifted the Torah? They’ve all gone, replaced by power tools.
Without getting overly nostalgic for times when women routinely died in childbirth (except in today’s USA where they still do, lucky us!) and their children died in infancy and their husbands died young in industrial accidents, I do get a little sad for these big old Torahs, standing solid and beautiful in the backs of arons all over the country, their lovely big legible script unseen and unread, as we read our tiny light Torahs with our halogen lights and our contact lenses and bear them aloft with our feeble withered arms.
The very best sorts of people do mitzvot as soon as the opportunity presents itself, correct? And we read Hebrew from right to left, so surely we should put tagin on the right-hand head of letters such as tzaddi, which have more than one head? Like the image at left, in fact.
The biggest price factor of a set of tefillin is the parchments. They have a lot of writing on them, and the writing is very small, even in big tefillin like in the picture (see? Big tefillin have four lines of writing in a space narrower than my finger. BIG tefillin). Small writing is hard to do well, so a good set of tefillin parchments takes a lot of time and effort to produce, which makes good parchments expensive. 