The question you all want answered, of course, is What happens if you make a mistake????, but before we get to that, I’m going to explain how I know what to write.

A Torah has to be copied from another Torah – which was copied from another Torah, which was copied from another Torah, all the way back to the first Torah. Even if someone knows the whole Torah by heart, they still have to copy from something.

This helps to make sure the text is transmitted accurately. If someone has memorised a text, they risk rendering it a little bit differently when they come to write it down. For most texts, that wouldn’t matter an awful lot provided the sense was preserved, but we want the Torah to be rather more accurate than that.

And symbolically – if we’re going to base our lives around a book, we want it to be the actual book, not someone’s memory of a book. Copying from an actual scroll reminds us of the chain of transmitted Jewish tradition which has been handed down since misty antiquity, all the way back to the divine revelation. It reminds us that all the links in the chain were real – real scrolls and real people. It keeps Judaism rooted in the physical world.

Most scribes today copy from a book called a tikkun soferim, which has been put together by expert scribes and has been carefully checked.

The recto page of a tikkun soferim looks like this:

It is printed with vowels and notation, chapters and verse numbers, and directions for the weekly reading in synagogue.

The verso page has the same letters, but with Torah script, as it would appear in the Torah – and with no vowels or other markings. Instead of a verse number, there is a line number. For a copyist, knowing which line you are in is much more useful than knowing which verse you are in.

The two letters in grey on the right-hand side are the most helpful “extra” information for the scribe. Since not all words are the same length, it’s not possible to make each line have exactly the same number of letters in it – but we want each line to form neat columns. The scribe needs to adjust the spacing of the letters to achieve this, and the little grey letters tell them how.

Letters are measured in yuds, because yud is the smallest letter. Yud counts as one, obviously. So do the narrow letters (gimel, vav, zayin, and nun), and a space between words. All the other letters count as two yuds when written in the normal way, except shin, which counts as three.

The person who put the tikkun together looked at this Torah that someone with a lot of experience wrote once, and counted the number of yuds to a line. The standard length is taken as 62 yuds, and sometimes a line will have the exact equivalent of 62 yuds; in that case it will be labelled ש”ת, shin-tav, which stands for “shita temima,” or “complete line.”

Otherwise, it will be labelled by the number of yuds it has gained or is lacking. The line above is labelled yud-hey. Yud stands for yoter, which means “extra,” and hey has the numerical value of 5, so we know that the line is over by 5 – it would measure 67 yuds if you wrote each letter its usual size. So you have to squish everything up a little bit to make it all fit in nicely. The alternative, when there are fewer letters, will be labelled chet-something, the chet standing for chaser, which means “lacking.” So chet-gimel would mean lacking-three, or 59 yuds.

When you see me writing, you’ll see my tikkun in front of me. Drop by and check it out on one of my CBH visits.

So. If something doesn’t match the tikkun, we’ve got a problem. Next post: what we do about that.