Hatam Soferet

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 alert for that kind of thing.

Again, you need knowledge of letter forms. You need to know why the above is a problem.

The problem is this little join. Such a little thing, but so important.

I like thinking of it as being similar to electricity. Electricity doesn’t care if it’s only a little tiny wire making the short-circuit; that little tiny wire short-circuits your thing and boom, it isn’t working any more. Same with letters. This mem is short-circuited, and it doesn’t work any more.

And like the more annoying kind of short-circuit, you can’t just take out the offending part and have everything work, no, you have to take the thing apart and rebuild it.

(Super-geekies can read chapter 8, paragraph 6 of the Keset ha-Sofer for info on how to fix a short-circuited mem, but the non-super-geeky may prefer to give it a miss.)

Couple more examples, for your delectation. One’s a shin with a short-circuit, the other is supposed to be a yud followed by a nun, but the short-circuit there has turned it into a mysterious tzaddi-ayin hybrid. Internet cookies for anyone who explains how to fix them.

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 as words, you’re much too liable to remember what you think ought to be there rather than what actually is there. That’s how most of these mistakes get in there in the first place.

You’re also liable to confuse phononyms, liable to skip silent letters, liable to attempt to remember too much and thus forget parts unawares.

And all this is only answering “Is the letter there?”. The question of “Is it kosher?” requires more mental processing, as we saw earlier – is it touching another letter, does it have all the parts it needs, does it have the right decoration. The above list doesn’t leave much brain left over for processing these questions.

More about how we deal with that later. First, we’ll see some other cases where such mental processing is required.

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 than once, before you release it into the wild, as it were, and read from it.

Here’s a place where I was merrily writing along, wrote the wrong letter, and realised it at once. The ink was still wet, so I blotted off as much as I could with kitchen paper, that’s why it looks grey and shadowy. Makes the erasing easier.

To fix this sort of thing, you need to let it dry and then scrape off the excess. But letting it dry takes a good fifteen minutes (if you try fixing it sooner you just rub it in and make it worse) and it’s inefficient to sit about watching ink dry for a quarter of an hour. If you’re writing tefillin or mezuzot, you’ve got no choice, you’ve got to fix it before continuing, but when you’re writing Torah you can skip over the mistake and come back to fix it later.

Now we’re in the proofreading stage, it’s “later,” and time to fix.

These pale-grey blotted ones are obvious – when you made the mistake, you realised it at the time, you blotted it, perhaps you made a note in pencil in the margin – these aren’t difficult to see. The really taxing part comes next.

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 or any part thereof. You really, really, really aren’t allowed to do it.

If the letter is a hey, the Divine Name is still, as it were, live. The smudgy part would have to stay there, not be erased to make it tidier. If the letter is a hey, we must leave it alone.

If the letter is a kuf, the Divine Name will have been switched off, and we can remove the smudgy part and make it back into a pretty hey. It can’t stay as a kuf. If the letter is a kuf, we must erase it.

We need a decision. Which is it? Adult brains see the problem in shades of grey, and become unable to reduce it to the necessary black and white. Young child brains only see things in black and white, so we use their eyes. My friend Hillel’s young child told us that the letter was a kuf, so kuf it was.

***Really technical bit coming up***

You have to erase a smudge like this from the top down, not the bottom up. Very important. If you erase from the bottom up, you’ll at some point turn the letter back into hey, but by hak tokhot. A letter made by hak tokhot isn’t a proper letter from the perspective of Torah reading, but it’s definitely a proper letter from the perspective of erasing Divine Names. So if, during your erasing, you make this:

you’ve got a REAL problem – a hey that isn’t valid, but which you can’t erase and write validly.

This is one of the reasons soferim have to study lots of halakha; so that they know how to anticipate and avoid pickles like that.

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 scribe, and you find that the shins have flat bottoms, you’d be foolish to go through and change each shin to having a pointy bottom.

It’s like American vs British spelling – if you’re a Brit (okay, or a Canadian) editing the New York Times and you find words like “plow” and “theater,” you’d be an idiot to impose British spellings and change them to “plough” and “theatre.” But if you find a word like “rabibt” whilst editing Watership Down, it’s quite appropriate to change it to “rabbit” because “rabibt” is obviously wrong according to absolutely everyone. Is your ambiguity a plow or a rabibt?

The image above, to explain in more detail, has a letter that ought to be a yud, but it’s really a bit too long in the tail to be a yud. It’s more like a vav. More about that shortly.