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 do think it’s very much a deal-breaker. They may even avoid Torah readings from a Sephardi-style Torah on this basis. Some Sephardi scribes add a nominal point to their shins, as here, for compatability:
This is a formalised example of how minor variation in letter forms can affect how kosher it is – formalised because the variation is accepted as valid by different branches of the tradition. Accidental variation is more likely for the sort of proofreading I’m doing. A more common example, of ambiguity affecting kashrut, follows shortly.
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 second head is like yud; its head is tilted slightly upwards, and ideally it has a little prickle on it. The third head must be made like zayin, and it has three taggin on it. The left heads of all the letters שעטנז גץ are like zayin. One must take care that the heads do not touch each other. The leg of this left head should lekhathilah be particularly vertical…
and it goes on, I won’t give you all of it here.
Specifically, it’s interesting that the later authorities – i.e. the ahronim, post-Shulhan-Arukh, more or less – devote a lot of space to defining how the letters should look, but the rishonim and earlier (including the Shulhan Arukh) don’t seem too interested in that – they know how the letters ought to look, and they content themselves with reminding you particular ways in which you ought not to stray, like not making alefs ayins and suchlike.
Alef-bets differ with region and period. We’ve already seen some of the ways Ashkenazic and Sephardic alef-bets differ, when we were discussing influence of writing implement on letter style. We didn’t discuss there how those styles relate to the laid-down rules for letter forms.
Letter shin is a case in point. Literally.
Sephardi shin
Ashkenazi shin
More about that later.
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 time. This is why we have a rule that even one mistake in a Torah scroll renders the entire scroll invalid for use until the mistake is fixed – zero-tolerance is really the only policy you can have if you want to ensure that your document will be absolutely unchanged.
This, incidentally, is also why we have the rule about copying from a copy. The scribe simply isn’t allowed to write the scroll down from memory – he may have it more or less accurate, but in a culture where each letter has the status of being divinely dictated, even a variation of one letter can’t be accepted, and recall from memory might meaan whole words or phrases were a little bit off.
Relatedly, the roles of scribe and editor were pretty much interchangeable throughout much of history, and in most other documents, the occasional variation here and there doesn’t matter much, or is even expected (for further reading on this subject, see for instance Scribal Culture and the Making of the Hebrew Bible). But the Torah’s integrity was, for rabbinic Judaism, a theological principle, and as such, deviation from the text could not be accepted.
So it is that when you write a Torah, you have to proofread it extremely carefully.
You have to go through the scroll and check that each and every one of the 304,805 letters is there and has its proper form. Ambiguity in form can be a bit of a disaster, since it can turn one word into a completely different word rather easily. More about that later.
