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[cremains]

I dreamt I was a live-in caretaker for two very elderly ladies. They were dying and required palliative care. At some point they switched from merely dying in principle to being truly on the verge of death, and I would no longer touch them for fear of nudging them over the brink. One evening, one of them was sitting comatose on the couch. The standing one said to me, "Pick me up and put me in her arms." I drew my sleeves over my hands to somehow make it less like touching, lifted her, and sat her down right beside the other. I said, apologetically, "Well, this really isn't in her arms." She answered me, "When you're old enough, everywhere is your arms."

I'm learning to write on gawil/jawil (the whole skin of the animal), the preferred writing surface for a bunch of texts, as opposed to qalaf (parchment, much more paperlike). The products come out incredibly charming, but the process is balls. If you make a mistake, that's basically it as there's no truly satisfactory way to erase writing, unlike qalaf where with the aid of an electric fibreglass eraser, it can be as though the mistake was never there. Also, the ink bonds differently with the surface and going over a crooked line to fill it out can make it bumpy and sticky, rather like trying to touch up nailpolish 30 seconds after application. This is complicated by a surface which often has tiny depressions. So basically everything has to be good the first time around. It's also much harder to get any sort of nuance in the line.

With apologies for a dirty scanner bed, here's the first parshiyah of a mezuzah I'm writing on gawil. (I'd like to post it finished but I've got the flu today and don't want to fuck it up by trying to push through and finish just for the sake of a post.) While it has its issues, looking at it and holding the soft, heavy skin in my hand, I actually feel pretty content. It's not line-justified, as I learnt in a sugiya in Menahoth that they don't have to be justified, and I still haven't found a very compelling basis for stretching letters as they often are. The writing and the tagin are according to Ramba"m and the Darda'im (the gawil itself is from a Darda'i scribe who refuses to employ anyone who believes in the Zohar or other "superstitious nonsense"). Basically, all its details are intimately connected with sources I myself learnt and people/communities I myself know and love. I used to feel somewhat alienated and a weirdo, but looking at this I see how I'm caught up, surrounded, and preceded by people I care about.



Speaking of the Darda'im, on Parashath Naso I went to them for minhah only, because in the morning I was reading Torah for another congregation. There are usually no women at minhah. As I left, a bunch of the men came out and asked "Hey, where you this morning?" and told me where they were in learning hilhoth shehitah so next week I could come early and learn with them (which I did). I had no idea the people on the men's side even knew if I lived or died, they're so invisible to me, so that was touching.

Comments

[hatam_soferet]

Good stuff. I like where you're using that slightly smaller nib size; it's giving your lameds an easier time of fitting in.

I don't know what the Darda'im say about this, but you see where you've got that lamed of לטטפת sticking into the ך above--our guys say not to do that. Something to develop awareness of.

[cremains]

Some of the lameds are still disaster zones but it's getting better.

Do you have a source for the thing about the letter-fitting, which I've also heard before but unattributed? H said the aharonim worry about it on account of the infringed-upon letter potentially looking like another letter. If that's it then I feel pretty chillaxed about it as long as I'm writing for myself (not really into aharonish humroth). But if it's got a source in the Gemara I'll definitely make it a bigger priority and concern.

[hatam_soferet]

Quick reference is SA OH 32:28; haven't followed it back from there in some years so don't know how far back it goes, but let me know what you find :)

[cremains]

Thanks so much for this, I really appreciate it.

[hatam_soferet]

No problem at all.

[cremains]

I want to preface this by thanking you again and acknowledging I should be more careful about this when writing for other people. Now here are the results of what I read.

There is no Gemara source for it. Ramba"n seems to be the first one seriously worried about "wrecking" the appearance of, specifically, a hei or a heth with the tail of a lamedh. With respect to Ramba"n I personally find this surprising. If you had an A and a Y underneath but a little off to the side, so the arm of the Y was inside the A, would that "wreck" the shape of the A? (this is analagous to the heth example, it's a complete and continuous letter and the tail of the lamedh doesn't make it look like any other letter in the alphabet)

Note that wording of SA seems to be bedieved language, although apparently he worded it more strongly in the BY

About the Darda'im, they don't really have a direct comment. However Rav Qapah does weigh in on this: apparently for the lamed in the daledh space, the Ashkenazi aharonim say you should cover the rest of the lamedh and then show it to a child. My personal feeling is that this completely defeats the purpose of the child test, which is to look for a natural, not directed, reaction; here there is not just direction but actual withholding of information in a way that suggests that the child would of course discount the tail if s/he could see the lamedh beneath. Anyway about this Rav Qapah says that if you're going to show a letter to a child, you don't cover up surrounding letters. In other words, context matters because that is the normal way that people read. He is commenting on Ramba"m who doesn't mention "wrecking" letters by proximity at all, which for me put together with the Gemara's lack of concern is persuasive.

[hatam_soferet]

Hmm. I wonder if there's a trend concerning the airspace, so to speak, of letters. You recall how the Keset haSofer says that nuns, for instance, ought ideally to be right-angles, and you only angle them backwards when you really *have* to so that they don't bang into other letters; that's apparently quite old, and when you write that way you have a yud in a nun's airspace, and it just looks kind of odd. It would be interesting to see if one could identify a historical trend.

Have you ever seen the kind of sefer (nineteenth-century Polish ones, particularly) where the verticals are hair-thin, and in bad light you can barely see them? When you combine that kind of lamed with those rather unsatisfactory short khaf-peshutas, it genuinely can be a bit confusing if you're trying to read from it. I think it may actually stem from a practical concern, in other words.

"Context matters because that is the normal way that people read"--that's interesting because it seems to me that the point of the child test is to be, in some degree, acontextual, a black-and-white filter on a shades-of-grey situation, in which context is not part of the decision-making apparatus one way or the other.

Gosh. I haven't had an intellectual discussion about safrut in I don't know how long. Thanks.

[cremains]

You're right about the later Ashkenazi texts and their spider-thin work; yeah, I've seen old ones and it absolutely doesn't hold up well.

About the child test, depends what you mean by context. Yes acontextual in terms of not letting the meaning of the pasuq auto-edit what a letter "must" be, hence the ideal subject being a kid who doesn't read fluently but rather recognises letter shapes. But yes contextual in terms of actually letting them see what the shapes involved are and where those lines go. Obscuring those shapes (bottom lamedh) still seems bizarre, and like I wrote before implies that any child would notice and care that the invading tail was actually part of another letter and would think it was fine. It is as pointless as if you were to cover the tail of a lamedh and ask the kid if it's a kaf. The answer you get back is useless because the kid is not able to see what's actually there.

[hatam_soferet]

It is as pointless as if you were to cover the tail of a lamedh and ask the kid if it's a kaf.

Hence, I suppose, the strictures about only using a kid to clarify genuinely ambiguous situations--yud/vav rather than does-this-broken-aleph-still-look-like-an-aleph-to-you. I mean, there's definitely recognition that the child test can be absolutely absurd if misapplied, and this conversation reads like a meta-question on where kashrut of letters begins and ends. Does it concern the airspace of the letter, and that alone? A strictly logical (Briskerish?) view would say yes, and because of that it makes sense to cover the rest of the lamed. But if it concerns the letter and its function as part of a text, then no, it doesn't make sense at all.

I'm reminded of one of the Ramah camps. Their sefer had a lot of crumbling, pasul letters, but you could still more or less discern the form of letters. With some vague memory of the child test, the rabbi said authoritatively "The rule is that you ask someone who knows nothing about safrut whether the letter is okay. I know nothing about safrut, and it looks fine to me, so it's kosher and we're going to keep using it."

[cremains]

I disagree that it is more "logical" to cover any part of the text. Covering the rest of the lamed is like showing someone one of those closeups of eyelashes and asking a kid "Does it look like a human body part?" Manipulation of the data has nothing to do with increasing objectivity on the part of the child -- rather, by stacking the deck, it is a way of saying that the writer shouldn't do it in the first place.

About the Ramah camps... yyyyeah. I've also heard from many "But a child could recognise it (note no attempt to arrange this even) so it's good, right?" The mistake is in thinking that what a child thinks constitutes the basic kashruth of the letters, rather than being the decider in a case of safeq.

Man, conservative rabbis :( obviously I'm grateful they exist but they can (CAN) be so tough to talk to. Recently at the yeshivah I overheard one of the teachers ask the rosh yeshivah to talk to the students about increasing accuracy in Torah reading, because it's clear many of them do not care enough to work on it sufficiently. His answer was that it would be very hard to convince them they were in any way lacking because they were all rabbinical students. I wish so much that being a rabbinical student would have the opposite connotation, of caring greatly about learning and growing, as opposed to needing to prove you're already there.

[hatam_soferet]

I disagree that it is more "logical" to cover any part of the text

I differentiate between "logical" and "sensible." I do think it's logical within a particular frame of reference. I just think it's an idiotic frame of reference. Unlike the "A child could recognise this!!!111" which isn't logical even within its own frame.

Rabbinical students--OY.