{"id":680,"date":"2010-11-07T17:36:28","date_gmt":"2010-11-07T22:36:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/hasoferet.com\/blog\/?p=680"},"modified":"2010-11-07T17:38:19","modified_gmt":"2010-11-07T22:38:19","slug":"essay-questions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hasoferet.com\/blog\/2010\/11\/essay-questions\/","title":{"rendered":"Essay questions"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I get these by email every so often. <\/p>\n<p><i> 1.        What is your favorite part of your job?<\/i><\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re very lucky, in your life you&#8217;ll find an activity &#8211; maybe something physical, or intellectual, or creative, or none of those &#8211; that is just *right* for you. When you start doing it, everything feels good and right and comfortable. When I&#8217;m writing, that&#8217;s how I feel. That&#8217;s my favourite part of my job.<\/p>\n<p><i> 2.       How long did you have to study to become a soferet?<\/i><\/p>\n<p>I studied about three years, but not full-time.<\/p>\n<p><i> 3.       How many Sifrei Torah have you written?<\/i><\/p>\n<p>Three so far.<\/p>\n<p><i> 4.       What is the hardest part of your job?<\/i><\/p>\n<p>Often, when a scribe makes a mistake, they can fix it with their knife, and no harm done. But just sometimes, a scribe will make a mistake in God&#8217;s name, and you aren&#8217;t allowed to use your knife on God&#8217;s Name. That means that if you make a mistake in God&#8217;s Name, you have to bury the sheet, because there&#8217;s nothing you can do to fix it. Maybe it&#8217;s four or five days&#8217; work, and it&#8217;s going to be difficult and expensive to catch up. The hard part is when you are sitting, all alone, and you think &#8220;No-one would ever know if I just fixed it with my knife.&#8221; And it&#8217;s true. No-one would ever know. That&#8217;s when you have to face up to your mistake, accept that you&#8217;re going to lose a week&#8217;s work, and start over &#8211; and that&#8217;s hard. It&#8217;s very hard.<\/p>\n<p><i> 5.       How old were you, when you knew you wanted to be a Soferet?<\/i><\/p>\n<p>It wasn&#8217;t a Goal I had. It just sort of happened one step at a time.<\/p>\n<p><i> 6.       Can you describe how it feels to be a Soferet \u2013 perhaps the first in history?<\/i><\/p>\n<p>I think it&#8217;s important to remember the words of Kohelet &#8211; &#8220;There is nothing new under the sun.&#8221; We remember that the sacred scrolls, the Torah in particular, represent the Judaism we live for, and it is very special when a community trusts you to transcribe that Torah. Of course it&#8217;s exciting to do something unusual, but from a historical perspective the important thing is the sefer, and not the sofer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I get these by email every so often. 1. What is your favorite part of your job? If you&#8217;re very lucky, in your life you&#8217;ll find an activity &#8211; maybe something physical, or intellectual, or creative, or none of those &#8211; that is just *right* for you. When you start doing it, everything feels good [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[37],"class_list":["post-680","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-la-vie-soferet","tag-faq"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hasoferet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/680","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hasoferet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hasoferet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hasoferet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hasoferet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=680"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/hasoferet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/680\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":682,"href":"https:\/\/hasoferet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/680\/revisions\/682"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hasoferet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=680"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hasoferet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=680"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hasoferet.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=680"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}