This is based on a talk I gave a few weeks ago, on Shabbat Bereshit. It concerns the reading for the second year of the triennial cycle, which starts in chapter 4, in which God creates beings with plurality, male and female.
זה ספר תולדות אדם ביום ברוא אלקים את האדם בדמות אלקים עשה אותו, זכר ונקבה בראם, ויברך אותם ויקרא את שמם אדם ביום הבראם
This is the book of the generations of mankind. On the day that Elohim created mankind, in the image of elohim he made it; male and female he made them. And he blessed them, and he called their name mankind on the day of their creation.
In the sefer Bet Haverim read from this year, the first letter of the paragraph looks like the image at left, ordinary zayin.
In their new sefer, the first letter looks like the image at right. The zayin has a little curl on its right-hand side.
This new sefer has a lot of little annotations like this. The annotations invite you to look deeper.
One commentator says these may be functioning as delete marks; if you ignore the letters marked up by the tagin, you are left with the singular word El, making the point that although Elohim seems to be a plural word, you should be in no doubt that it is a singular quantity. In context, this could be a commentary on the nature of the beings created by God; although the language suggests that they are plural (compare the interpretation that says originally these beings were multi-gendered dual-body creatures which were separated only at a later date), you should make no mistake that they were actually singular.
Tagin also invite us to think about additions, rather than deletions. What does a set of three tagin bring to mind? Maybe it invites us to look for threes. For instance, look in the verse, at the letters following the three instances of the word adam. Alef-bet, alef-bet, alef-bet. Av, av, av. Three fathers. What other threes come to mind?
We’re asking what might be hinted at by three tagin on top of the regular letters. This might remind us of pardes–peshat, remez, drash, sod–and the three extra exegetical layers which ride above the plain text.
You might ask why all this exegesis is necessary. Why not just write it all out explicitly? Surely that would be easier. Well, one answer is that God was being merciful–has hakadosh barukh hu al mamonam shel yisrael–if it was all written out explicitly, it would be all but impossible to fulfil the mitzvah of ketivah sefer Torah.
Which sounds like a joke, until you consider the Talmud, which is the fifth-century attempt to do just that, write everything down explicitly, and how many complete copies of the Talmud–the central text of rabbinic Judaism–survived the Middle Ages? One. Just one. The bigger the book, the harder it is to ensure its survival.
So the traditions of extra tagin serve as easy-to-write reminders of extra content. Footnote markers, a hint that something extra is going on. The challenge is to remember the footnotes, a challenge which we have largely failed at this point.
So in our verse, what’s going on? To explain one idea, first we need to talk about the mechanics of writing God’s name.
Before writing the combination of letters representing God’s name, a scribe has to have the intention that God is the subject. Consider the letter string alef-lamed; sometimes it means God, sometimes it means a god in general, sometimes it means towards, sometimes it means don’t. Before you write it, you need to know which it is; we say it’s the thought that counts and the scribes’ code takes that literally.
Generally, the meaning is clear from context; it is holy, or it isn’t. But sometimes it isn’t clear. Sometimes it’s ambiguous, and will remain so till the coming of Elijah. In our verse, the first Elohim has the status of definitely-holy, and the second has the status of permanently-ambiguous. Was man really created in the literal image of God?
Consider those three fathers, above; one opinion thinks that the three fathers were created in the literal image of God, but subsequent generations were not. We also find these tagin in the first paragraphs of the first creation story, where three tagin emphasise hu v’lo malakh, hu v;lo saraf, hu v’lo shaliach–words we recognise from the Passover liturgy: He and not an angel; He and not a seraph; He and not a messenger. It’s possible that the tagin here, on the ambiguous Elohim, are a tradition expressing an opinion on the question.
There are a great many threes that three tagin could be hinting at. We’ll finish with another three, the three judges on a bet din. Elohim means judge, and the commentator Sforno says that our verse means mankind was created baal bechira, a master of choice, a possessor of free will. Three tiny lines serve as a powerful reminder of humanity’s capabilities and responsibilities.
Dots in parashat Nitzavim (yes I know it’s almost Vayelech now, sorry)
In parashat Nitzavim we read:
הַנִּסְתָּרֹת לַיקֹוָק אֱלֹהֵינוּ וְהַנִּגְלֹת לָנוּ וּלְבָנֵינוּ עַד עוֹלָם לַעֲשׂוֹת אֶת כָּל דִּבְרֵי הַתּוֹרָה הַזֹּאת:
Concealed acts are the responsibility of the Lord our God [to judge]; but overt acts are the responsibility of us and our children unto eternity, to carry out all the words of this Torah.
In the Torah scroll, it appears thus:
Let’s start with the dot over the ע of עד, unto. Why is only half the word dotted?
עד is a word suggesting continuity, time extending uninterrupted forever. A dot on one of the word’s only two letters breaks it up, brings the continuity to a stop. We are reminded of the distinction between this world and the world to come – the words לנו ולבנינו, us and our children, are obscured as if to say, we may not know the secret things now, but in the world to come they will be revealed. We simply have to do the best we can now with what we know.
If we don’t read the phrase לנו ולבנינו, us and our children, the verse starts “Concealed acts are the responsibility of the Lord our God, and overt acts also.” While the children of Israel are still in the wilderness, they are not wholly responsible beings; God is concerned with both their public and private acts and will dispense judgement, like a parent. Once they cross over the Jordan, though [Rashi], into their promised homeland, they have to take collective ownership of their actions. Now they are adults with autonomy. They have a responsibility to maintain law and order among themselves as best they can.
This is the longest run of dots in the Torah, eleven of them, and immediately before the dots is an eleven-letter phrase – ליהוה אלהינו. As we’ve seen, we don’t ever erase God’s name. We avoid even a suggestion of doing such a thing, so we wouldn’t put those eleven dots above ליהוה אלהינו. But the association is there; is it coincidence that there are exactly the right number of dots for ליהוה אלהינו, put in right next to the phrase, on the next available words? What if we read the verse without God? Then it reads “Concealed acts and overt acts are the responsibility of us and our children unto eternity…”
This means that we have responsibility for each other, helping each other obey the rules and do mitzvot – and we also have responsibility for ourselves. Each individual has to keep the laws, technical and ethical, as best they can, in public and in private. God is still there, to forgive us if we do something bad completely unknowingly, but we have to do the best we can by ourselves.
Jubilees
Well, it’s my Queen’s diamond jubilee weekend, so I’m going to post about jubilees this week.
This is Bet Haverim’s fifty-year anniversary, their proper jubilee. The concept of jubilee comes from the Torah, from Leviticus. So when we were discussing which section of the Torah Bet Haverim would be writing as a community, we naturally came to the section describing the original jubilee.
On the visits I’ve made to Davis, we’ve been writing that section, letter by letter. Last time I was there, we also had a discussion session talking about the concept of jubilee from a slightly different angle.
The biblical jubilee features, amongst other things, the idea that everyone should go home, back to their family lands. But Bet Haverim’s jubilee features the fifty-year mark of a community. Some people have been at Bet Haverim right from the beginning.
I wanted people to explore that tension, between the idea of jubilee as homecoming on the one hand, and as home-creating on the other hand.
Here are the different texts we looked at. You might like to print the sheet and discuss it with family or friends.
This is one of the songs we talked about:
After the discussion, Elaine sent me this very interesting article, which adds a whole other perspective to the discussion.
Planting
(Meant to post this last week, sorry.)
Leviticus 19:23–And when ye shall come into the land, and shall have planted all manner of trees for food, then ye shall count the fruit thereof as forbidden; three years shall it be as forbidden unto you; it shall not be eaten.
Except in our sefer it’s more like this:
Kind of as if the text read …plAnted…, or:
I just like that.
That kind of ayin doesn’t always indicate growing, I don’t think; later in the same paragraph (19.28) we have Do not put soul-cuts in your flesh, and do not make tattoo-writing in yourselves…:
and I don’t think that’s talking about growing. Unless it’s hinting at a meaning which involves growing, i.e. scarification rather than tattooing, but that is most unscientific, so don’t quote that.
Tezaveh and scribal exuberance
Exodus 28:36, a verse from this week’s parsha; ועשית ציץ זהב טהור… “Make a tzitz of pure gold…” Go look it up.
In some sifrei Torah, the final tzaddi of the word ציץ is writ large, including in the sefer I’m presently writing:
Here’s another one, from a different sefer (presently in Berlin; my last congregation but one donated the sefer to a community in need when they got their new sefer written by me; isn’t that beautiful?):
Here, note particularly the little fractal zayins on the word זהב.
I’m not writing about why all this, this week. Have a think about it for now. When I come to CBH in a few weeks’ time, we’ll be learning more about these. Look out for the schedule.
Parashat Teruma and vavei ha’amudim
This week’s parasha describes the worship-tent that God commands the Israelites to construct in the wilderness.
Around the tent, they are to construct a courtyard, of panels held between columns.
Perhaps you’ve seen a Torah scroll being unrolled around a sanctuary at Simchat Torah. You’ve seen how it’s long enough to go around the whole room, the panels of Torah surrounding the congregation like the panels surrounding the worship-tent.
It’s here in our parasha that we find the phrase ווי העמדים. Vavei ha’amudim, the hooks of the columns.
We haven’t made a worship-tent for millennia, but this particular little phrase lives on today in our Torah scrolls in an unexpected way. Scrolls have columns–of writing. And they have hooks–letter vav.
Most new scrolls today, CBH’s being no exception, are written such that almost every column starts with the letter vav.
It wasn’t always so. As late as the 1830s we find scribes’ rulebooks faithfully repeating that it is more or less forbidden to arrange the columns thus. In order to contrive a vav at the top of the column, scribes would perform tremendous feats of stretching and squishing, at the cost of uniform script and column width. Since a Torah is supposed to be a beautiful scroll and not a cutesy word game, scribes were vigorously discouraged from doing it.
By now, it has become an entrenched custom, such that I occasionally get panicked phonecalls from people who have noticed that their scrolls don’t have every column starting with vav, and I have to reassure them that it is perfectly all right.
How did it start? There seems to have been a rather early (gaonic?) custom of arranging for six particular words to appear at the tops of columns, for added significance. As it happened, these six words began with the letters ביה שמו. Over time, some scribes started to arrange their scrolls so that every column began with one of those six letters (53% of the words in Torah begin with one of those letters, so it’s not so difficult to arrange). And at some point, the idea of doing this just with vav (17% of the Torah’s words begin with vav) seeded and took root, becoming widespread sometime in the past 300 years.*
When did it start? Not clear. The Maharam of Rothenberg (thirteenth-century Ashkenaz), fulminating against it, said that there was no evidence the gaonim ever thought of doing it.** Rather, he said, the idea originated with one Leontin of Milhausen, who was showing off his skills.
Not everyone was against the custom. Various kabbalistic authors wove marvellous romances around the letter vav and its numerical representation, six, and the mystical and messianic relationships therein. The Hida has an interesting comment:*** he asks howcome vavei haamudim has become a widespread custom even though respected authorities say it is forbidden? Paraphrasing him a little, the answer is that Jewish communities are blessed with insight from God, so if communities are drawn to a thing, that thing must have some deep significance, and its existence is somehow divinely sanctioned.
The word vav literally means a hook, and the letter vav is also how we say “and” in Hebrew. Hooks hold physical constructs together, and vavs hold linguistic constructs together. What do the vavei haamudim hold together?
Some say the sheets of Torah–yeriot; curtains, veils—are held up by the hooks between heaven and earth. The columns of Torah form the metaphorical worship-tent in which Israel dwell, watched over by God above.
We might also suggest that the vavs of the columns are a reminder that times change. From being a minority position disapproved of by generations of Torah greats, vavei haamudim Torahs have become the default, with layers of meaning woven into them. Every generational vav, every individual “and”, contributes to incremental change; the old still hooked into the new, all held together, but the despised becoming beloved.****
* Yonatan Koletch (p392 footnote 200) quotes R. D. Yitzchaki: the concept of vavei haamudim scrolls “was introduced only during the past several hundred years by R. Ezra of Pisa”, but this seems to be an oversimplification.
** Quoted in the Hagahot Maimoniot, hilkhot sefer Torah, 7:7, but remember this is polemic and we don’t know how much evidence he was looking at.
*** Birkei Yosef, YD 273.
**** Add your own hobby-horse here. Social justice, feminism, disabled rights, race equality…
Did I mention I love my job?
This morning I’m writing chapter 14 of Exodus:
And Moses stretched out his hand, and a strong wind blew all night, and dried up the sea. And the children of Israel came into the sea on dry land, and [this bit is recited with the special tune for the Song of the Sea] the waters were like walls to them, on their right and on their left, וְהַמַּיִם לָהֶם חוֹמָה מִימִינָם וּמִשְּׂמֹאלָם.
It so happens this morning that while I’m writing this piece, I’m listening to the last movement of Berlioz’s Te Deum, Judex crederis, which is remarkably well-placed as an accompaniment to this particular piece of Torah. Have a listen:
Berlioz scored the Te Deum for two orchestras, three choirs, and an enormous organ, which makes it sufficiently breathtaking for the scene at the Sea, all that water and all those people and the mighty strength of God through-and-over all.
The text is pretty appropriate too; in English it starts We believe that you will come to be our judge. We therefore pray you help your servants…. Full English and Latin here.* Berlioz’s musical interpretation certainly reflects how I think the children of Israel must have been feeling at that point. Right at the end, when all the choirs and all the instruments combine in this enormous cry of In te Domine speravi, non confundar in æternum! (O Lord, in you have I trusted, let me never be confounded) as the waters tower over them and the warriors follow them and the strong winds blow and the trop changes to the slow, sweeping, dramatic cadences of the Song of the Sea…
* I admit the bit about redeeming with blood is rather Christian, but it’s not too bad, especially given the blood of the Exodus, and the rest of the text is spot on really.
Bo and parchment
This week’s parsha contains the phrase “The Torah of God shall be in your mouth.”
Rabbinic tradition expands this concept: if we are to put the Torah in our mouths, it obviously cannot be made of things that we may not eat. So all animal products used on Torahs are made from the kosher species.
Quills – swan or goose feathers, turkey or duck, but no peacock or ostrich, eagle or crow. Glue – before synthetic glues, sticky stuff was mostly made from animal products, did you know that? – fish glue or cow-hoof glue, but not rabbit-skin glue or horse-hoof glue. Thread, which is made from tendons and glue – cow tendons, but not horse tendons. And parchment.
Torahs are written on parchment, in Hebrew klaf, קלף, (with a kuf). Proper parchment is really a type of leather – here’s a site which talks about how klaf is made. Nowadays most Torah parchment is made from cows, because the meat industry mostly deals with cows; older Torahs are often goat, one also sees deer and occasionally sheep; you could use bison, or chicken or turkey (but that would make very small pieces, and probably not be worth it). You could even use a giraffe, if you could find one.
And yes, I have this dream that one day someone will give me a dead giraffe and I will be able to write a Megillah on it, because you could fit the whole Megillah on one giraffe skin* and that would be unbelievably amazing so if you do know anyone with giraffes that are looking a bit tottery, do introduce me, or if you know a parchment-maker who’s up for an adventure, likewise.
I digress.
The one kosher animal you may not use is a fish. Klaf can be made out of fishskin, but the rabbinic sources say that it smells truly terrible, and for that reason you can’t use it for sacred scrolls – you don’t want your holy books to be stinky. This I like very much.
Goat parchment retains a distinctive goaty tang for a Very Long Time – goats are like that, very assertive – and you can usually identify a goat Torah because it smells like a goat. I like this too, it is a pleasing reminder that the scroll is not just a text, it is a physical object as well.
The picture at right is a piece of klaf held up against a window. You can see very clearly where the cow’s backbone was. Sometimes you can also see where the kidneys were, and if it had a fat bottom, sometimes you see that as well.
The two images at left are close-ups of the surface of klaf. The top picture is the front side, and the bottom picture is the back side. A word about that, first: if you’re processing parchment for a book, you make both sides the same, because you want to write on both sides of the page. But we only write on one side for our scrolls, so we only bother processing one side. That means that the front side is beautifully smooth and silky, almost like very very fine suede, but the back side is rougher and generally less “finished.”
You can see that the front side has lines on it. All Torahs have to be written with lines – it’s both a scribal aid, to keep the lines straight, and an halakhic (legal) requirement – i.e. even if you’re really good at keeping your lines straight, you still have to have lines. You probably didn’t notice them last time you read Torah, but they’re almost certainly there – you just don’t notice them because you’re looking at the letters.
The lines are scored in. One can score one’s own lines, with a ruler and some kind of scoring tool, such as an awl, or one can have the lines put in by the klafmachers (people who make the parchment). That’s very clever – they have a grid of wires, and they set the wires to the appropriate positions, and then they press it hard into the klaf, bang, and that makes lines. Sort of like when your socks leave a line pattern in your ankle, only the klaf is dead so they don’t fade away quickly like they do on ankles. Sometimes they will fade with extreme age, hence that “almost” above.
So anyway, on the front side of this particular piece you can also see the veins. The front side is generally bleached quite white and nice, but sometimes hints of animal-ness remain.
On the back side of this piece, you can see the hair pattern quite distinctly. The back will often keep some of the colour of the cow – greyish, brownish, whatever. Sometimes it’s splotchy. I think that’s rather lovely.
On most older scrolls, you won’t see the splotching, because for a long time it was the fashion to paint the backs with a substance called log, to make them uniformly white. This undoubtedly makes the backs of the scrolls attractively white and shiny, but unfortunately it also makes the scrolls extremely heavy. Log is some variety of sticky substance mixed with some variety of white powder, for instance boiled klaf and powdered chalk, so when coating, you’re effectively adding a layer of stone to the Torah, and of course that’s going to be heavy.
So these days we don’t coat the backs, we whiten the parchment by bleaching it, and any remaining discolouration serves to remind us of the complex relationship between animals and Jewish ritual worship. We generally get one sheet of parchment per cow, which works out to about sixty-five cows per Torah; that’s a lot of cows.
I have explored the ethical implications of this in two related blog posts, here and here, but the intertwined ethics of the contemporary meat industry and the Jewish community’s response have only just started to develop, so that particular aspect of Torah-making is one which will evolve in the direction we choose to take it.
* Technically you would have to cut it into sheets because you mayn’t have more than eight columns on a sheet, but that’s okay, I’m very good at tiny neat seams, so the pattern wouldn’t be too obviously disrupted.
Vayehi–a bit of a chat
Well, this has been a busy week. As well as working on your Torah, I’ve been apprentice-master-ing–my sometimes-apprentice has winter break from her yeshiva, so she’s back being my apprentice, which means I’m spending a good deal of time supervising her.
I’ve got a number of other women I’m invested in in this way. It’s something to do with how, when I was trying to learn, I didn’t have much company–once I got knowledge and skills, I wanted to share them, so that I’d have company. (Also noble ideas about making the world a better place, etc, but that sounds kind of pretentious so we’ll put that bit in parentheses.) Three of them are working on Torah scrolls of their own now, and various others are engaged in repair and other projects.
So I didn’t get time to write the history of the alef-bet post I wanted to write, but the world is an incrementally better place because of my apprentice. Good trade?
Instead, I’m going to share some thoughts that came into my head as I was writing the parsha, Vayechi.
When I’m writing, I’m paying some attention to the content as it goes through my fingers. If I’m studying Torah, I’m thinking about it in an intellectual way; when I’m writing, it’s more of a musy kind of thinking.
The exception to this is when it’s poetry. There you are, scribing along, and suddenly you don’t understand more than half the words. This is how you know you’re in a poem. The translations and the printed chumashim use layout to denote poetry–that and the sudden slew of footnotes “Meaning of Hebrew uncertain”, so it’s not just me that gets confused.
Since I want to understand what I’m writing, poetical bits usually go slower because every few words I’m referring to a translation or a dictionary.
This bit in particular struck me, this time round:
Dan shall govern his people,
As one of the tribes of Israel.
Dan shall be a serpent by the road,
A viper by the path,
That bites the horse’s heels
So that his rider is thrown backward.
I wait for your deliverance, O Lord! (Genesis 49:16-18)
Check out Rashi there, if you’re wondering what on earth that’s all about. Lots of stuff about Samson.
Just made me chuckle, though–here’s Jacob saying semi-prophetical things to his sons, and the basic meaning of this part is “Dan will be a judge. Of sorts. God help us all.”
Vayigash and writing
So, that was part 1 of a history of the alef-bet. More to follow on that shortly.
In the meantime, consider this week’s parsha, when Yosef is reunited with his father after twenty years’ absence. His father has thought him dead all this while.
Check out Genesis 46:29 in Hebrew for me. Yosef has sent his brothers to bring his father Yaakov to Egypt, where there is food. When Yaakov is approaching, Yosef rides out to meet him, and this is what it says:
וַיֵּרָא אֵלָיו וַיִּפֹּל עַל צַוָּארָיו וַיֵּבְךְּ עַל צַוָּארָיו עוֹד
If you don’t know any Hebrew, take this as another nudge to go get started on learning.
Once you know a bit of Hebrew, you might be struck by the weirdness of the word “od” there. Translation’s roughly “He appeared to him [Yosef to Yaakov, probably] and he fell on his neck, and he wept on his neck od.” עוד usually means “again” or “more” or something like that, but how is that possible here when they’ve not seen each other in twenty years?
Well, I asked Rashi, and Rashi thought it was odd too, so to speak. But Rashi says “od” sometimes carries connotations of great profusion, which is why we get translations like “he wept on his neck for a long time”. (You can find Rashi’s commentary translated online here.)
Then Rashi adds that while Yosef was weeping on Yaakov, Yaakov was not weeping on Yosef.
Rashi says that Yaakov was reciting the Shema (rabbinically, this is what you do when you’re convinced you’re about to die, and Yaakov does say “If I die right this second I’ll be happy now I’ve seen you,” or words to that effect), but I don’t know. While writing this story, I’ve been thinking, really Yosef? Would it have killed you to write home, let them know how you’re doing?
And I sort of think maybe that’s what Yaakov’s thinking. Okay, maybe you couldn’t have written because maybe all you know is hieroglyphs and maybe Yaakov’s an illiterate shepherd or maybe he doesn’t know hieroglyphs, but all this time you were rich and successful and you couldn’t send a messenger?
I better go call my parents…shabbat shalom.