Hebrew Voices #102 - The Scribe's Toolbox

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Nehemia: You’ve broken my heart! Everyone knows that you do it with the barb on…

Mordechai: No, you don’t, because it…

Nehemia: So, you don’t do it?

Mordechai: No, you don’t, you don’t. And the reason being – and there is halakha around this, right? So, imagine I’m sitting down to write. So, what is going to happen with the quill?

Nehemia: It’s going to go up your nose.

Mordechai: And what’s going to happen?

Nehemia: You’ll sneeze?

Mordechai: You’ll sneeze, and what happens then?

Nehemia: Then it gets on the scroll.

Mordechai: It gets on the Torah. And getting snot out of a Torah is next to impossible.

Benjamin Netanyahu: Le ma’an Zion lo ekhesheh, u’l’ma’an Yerushalayim lo eshkhot. (For Zion’s sake I will not be silent, and for Jerusalem’s sake I will not rest. Isaiah 62:1)

Nehemia: Shalom, this is Nehemia Gordon. I am here in London with Mordechai, known also as Marc Michaels, who’s written a series of books. He is a professional scribe, and you’ve written books about the history of scribal activity and other things that we’re going to get to. Shalom, Mordechai.

Mordechai: Shalom, Nehemia. Welcome.

Nehemia: So, one of the reasons I wanted to do this program was, I took a course at Oxford, and it was on, among other things, codicology, that is the history of Hebrew books and how they were put together. And I really walked away with an appreciation for what artisanship it is to write a book when you’re doing it by hand, not with a modern pen, but with what’s called a calamus, which is basically a reed, or with a quill.

And I knew about this. I mean, I studied this for years. I’ve been working with manuscripts for years through photographs, but actually getting my hands on the manuscripts and learning some of the techniques, I was really blown away. And I wanted you to communicate some of that to the audience. What is it like to be a scribe, writing books in the 21st century? Writing books by hand?

Mordechai: Okay, so to describe me, I’m a sofer STa"M, and STa"M stands for Sefer Torah, Tefillin and Mezuzah. Those are main things…

Nehemia: A Sefer Torah is a Torah scroll, tefillin are phylacteries, and mezuzah…

Mordechai: Is the stuff on the doorpost.

Nehemia: I don’t know how to translate it, yeah.

Mordechai: It actually just means doorpost, literally.

Nehemia: Right.

Mordechai: But it’s the scroll inside, and people get that confused.

Nehemia: Okay.

Mordechai: And nowadays, you either get commission to write a new one, if you’re very lucky…

Nehemia: A Torah scroll?

Mordechai: Yeah, a Torah scroll for a community. But actually, for a sofer, a lot of the work is around repairs and restoration, and particularly some of the really older ones, the historical ones. I mean, I’m working at the moment on one from the Czech scrolls at the Memorial Scrolls Trust.

Nehemia: So, guys, we’re actually here at the Memorial Scrolls Trust. And I didn’t know this when I invited you - this was just a space where we would speak, and I found out you’re one of the authorized scribes who works here.

Mordechai: I am one of the authorized scribes. The work is massively interesting, because you’re writing down the Torah or megillah, or whatever, and you’re reading it without any Rabbinic interpretation. You’re seeing the text there and then… which is very important. But, you know, you also want to try and beautify, particularly if you are… I mean, I’m a designer and a creative director. so, you want to beautify even more.

It says, “zeh Eli veanveiHu,” “this is my God and I will beautify Him.” So, scribes try to make ornate things, do different decorations...

Nehemia: So for example they have some scrolls here where the top line of the scroll… I’m going to use the Texas word, doohickeys. There are little doohickeys on top there.

Mordechai: Doohickeys.

Nehemia: They’re like little flowery… they’re not just crowns.

Mordechai: Not just crowns.

Nehemia: They’re like these ornate crowns.

Mordechai: And rainbows.

Nehemia: And it’s on top of the Shin. And this is in a Torah scroll, not an Esther scroll.

Mordechai: Yeah.

Nehemia: You can see rainbows in a Torah scroll.

Mordechai: I’ve seen rainbows.

Nehemia: In a Torah scroll?

Mordechai: In a Torah scroll. It was beautiful.

Nehemia: Really?

Mordechai: The rainbow tag.

Nehemia: Wow.

Announcer: The scribe’s toolbox.

Nehemia: Can you show us some of the things you do as a scribe?

Mordechai: Yeah, sure. Okay, so the first thing you do, as a scribe, right, has got nothing to do with the kit.

Nehemia: Okay, and kit is the British word for equipment, just for…

Mordechai: Oh, absolutely. Sorry… It’s all right, I’m very British.

Nehemia: I’m just translating. I have a British brother-in-law.

Announcer: The Rule Book.

Mordechai: Basically, as with all Jewish things…

Nehemia: It starts with a book.

Mordechai: It starts with a book, the rule book.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Mordechai: And the thing about being a sofer is, it’s not just calligraphy. Yes, you have to have calligraphic skills. But actually, you need to understand halakha. So, when I was trained, I was an apprentice to a sofer, Vivian Solomon, zichrona livracha, I miss him dreadfully. And I learned masses from him, but it all starts from the books, the rules.

So, there are rules here. There are tons and tons of rules, and this is actually only one of the many, many text-books that are…

Nehemia: It has pictures.

Mordechai: It has pictures, because you need to have pictures occasionally.

Nehemia: Ah, Keset HaSofer.

Mordechai: Keset HaSofer.

Nehemia: I’ve studied this in some of my research.

Mordechai: Keset HaSofer is a very important book. It’s not quite as important as some people will make it out to be. It’s not…

Nehemia: So, in this book, Keset HaSofer he talks about what we mentioned before; he says, “If you make a mistake and leave out a word,” he says, “don’t write it above the line because our readers aren’t familiar with that and they’ll be confused.”

Mordechai: Because that’s not… in his time, things have changed, right?

Nehemia: Right.

Mordechai: So, what you’ve got to do is think about the time period in which this was written, and then try and…

Nehemia: And this was 19th century.

Mordechai: I think it was a little bit earlier. So, you can see here, for Mem there’s a whole lot of rules of how you write Mem. Here are the things that you don’t do with a Mem. So, literally, here’s a tikkun for Eichah, and so on. If you want to write Eichah…

Nehemia: It’s line…

Mordechai: …different letters, there’s loads of different rules, because you need the rule book. Because if you don’t follow the rules, even if it looks like it’s all right, it might not be. So it’s the difference between it being kasher, kosher – valid, the real meaning of the word – and passul, which is invalid. And it might look fine, but actually the scribe has broken a whole bunch of rules in order to do this. You’re not allowed to do that.

Announcer: Intention.

Nehemia: So, one of the rules that’s of particular interest to me is around God’s name.

Mordechai: Yes.

Nehemia: So, in the Gemara, in the Talmud, it says that a “Torah scroll in which one single instance of the name is written without the proper intent - the whole scroll’s invalid.” So, tell us that means.

Mordechai: Okay, so there’s this concept called “kavanah,” you know the word.

Nehemia: Intention.

Mordechai: Kavanah is spiritual intention. And there’s no blessing for writing or fixing a Torah. There is no blessing for it. But what you have to do is make a statement, and that statement is largely around, “I am doing this. Behold, I am doing this for the sake of the holiness of the Torah, the tefillin”, whatever you’re doing. And then, when you get to God’s name, and there are several versions of God’s name, obviously…

Nehemia: In other words, it’s God’s personal name and titles are seven different…

Mordechai: There are 10 that you have to kind of think about. And you stop, and you go, “I am writing this for the sake of God’s holiness,” right? And if you don’t do that, then you go back to that idea of, it’s kosher or passul. It looks like God’s name’s been written fine, but actually, it hasn’t been written with the right spiritual intention. It’s one of the reasons why you can’t print a Torah.

Nehemia: Because the machine has no intention.

Mordechai: And there was a robot writing a Torah in Berlin, and I got really quite irate about this, because it was not writing a Torah. It was writing a Chumash, which is like the five Books of Moses in a printed form, because a robot can’t have spiritual intention. Only a human can have the holiness to imbue that Torah with the holiness.

Nehemia: This is a key concept here. So, it’s not just an act of artisanship - writing the scroll is a holy act.

Mordechai: Yes.

Nehemia: It’s a sanctified act.

Mordechai: Which is why a sofer needs to be ethical. They need to be in the right frame of mind. There are sometimes where I can’t do the work, because if something has terribly upset me, then I can’t do the work because I don’t have the right frame of mind. You can’t concentrate either, to be perfectly honest.

And if you’ve had a particularly bad day, you just don’t feel that you’ve got the right intention. On the other hand, if you have the right intention… There was a big power cut here the other day. My son phoned me up, Aryeh phoned me up, and he said, “Dad, there was a power cut. Did you not notice?” I said, “No, I was fixing Torah.” Apparently it was for 20, 40 minutes, I don’t know how long it was. I had no clue…

Nehemia: ‘Cause you were in the zone.

Mordechai: I was in the zone.

Nehemia: So, it’s really interesting, so I was looking at this one Torah scroll, and there’s a verse where… I think it was Genesis… I want to say 24, where he says, “Adoni”. And what the scribe had done is written that word, Aleph-Dalet-Nun-Yud, but with the intention of it being a sanctified word.

Mordechai: Right, which is wrong.

Nehemia: And so, he cut out with a razor, Aleph-Dalet-Nun-Yud referring to God and rewrote it as Aleph-Dalet-Nun-Yud, meaning, “My Lord”, referring to a human. And I was thinking, “This is incredible. It’s literally the same four letters, but it’s the intent that goes into it that is key in that instance.”

Mordechai: And I mean, I know of one sofer who is so dexterous, he can slice off the top of the parchment with God’s name on it.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Mordechai: And without disturbing. I couldn’t possibly do that. You need the hands of a surgeon, I think. And he slices it off, and then he’s got clean parchment underneath to write on. That’s very impressive. It would scare the living daylights out of me, because you’re not allowed to damage God’s name.

Nehemia: Right, you’re not allowed to erase a single letter.

Mordechai: You’re not allowed to erase it.

Nehemia: Wow, wow.

Mordechai: So, if you’ve got a problem with God’s name, then there are again, there are a whole raft of rules, and you have to look up the different things…

Nehemia: And Keset HaSofer goes on for numerous pages. He has these excurses.

Mordechai: Yeah, and Keset is not, by far… I mean, it’s not actually the halacha le’ma’aseh. It’s not actually definitive on the halacha. There are other books over and above that. There’s Mishnat HaSofer, which is a commentary on Keter HaSofer. There’s the Mishna Berurah on tefillin, which is kind of slightly different. There’s a whole raft of different halachic texts, and different opinions. So, the Taz, it sounds like the…

Nehemia: He’s a superhero.

Mordechai: He’s not the Australian - the Taz was a rabbi. He’s very lenient. So, sometimes you go and you get to a repair what somebody else has done in the past. Could you leave it? The Taz probably says, “Yes, it's okay,” but other people might be stricter, in which case, you’ve got to work out in your head what you feel comfortable with.

Nehemia: Wow.

Announcer: Parchment.

Mordechai: The Tyburn Megilla was written on this. This is called “gevil”, and it’s like leather. It’s really difficult to work on.

Nehemia: So, it’s sort of a rough… I mean, gevil in Hebrew means “unhewn stones”, or “avnei gevil”.

Mordechai: Yeah, so this is non-split parchment, and this is what they used to have in… most Sifrei Torah are written on, which is one of the reasons they’re very heavy, the Teimanim, the Yemenites, they’re big on gevil. There was a big movement a few years back to try and bring back gevil, but it’s horrendously difficult to work on.

So most people use this stuff which is called “klaf”. It doesn’t have quite the rules of klaf which used to be klaf. There are three kinds…

Nehemia: Wait, wait, wait. There’s gevil, there’s klaf and duchsustus…

Mordechai: Duchsustus. We won’t go into that one.

Nehemia: Maybe we won’t get into that. Maybe we won’t get into that level of detail.

Mordechai: So this stuff’s much easier, and whiter and nicer and stuff like that. And it’s used in…

Nehemia: Now, why is it white? Is it bleached?

Mordechai: No, it’s not bleached. They did go through a period where the quality of the skin was so bad that they would coat it with a chalky substance called log, which is a nightmare for anybody repairing it, because it means…

Nehemia: I’ve gotten it all over my hands.

Mordechai: The ink kind of lifts off and it bounces off. And I’ve fixed a number where you fix it and then you come back to it, and literally the next day, it’s bounced off again.

Nehemia: Oh, wow.

Mordechai: So, you need to add some more extra gum arabic into the ink, and stuff like that. So, this is the klaf.

Nehemia: So you don’t work anymore, or most scribes don’t work anymore with the gevil, with the rough stuff.

Mordechai: No.

Nehemia: They’re mostly using very thin…

Mordechai: It’s klaf, and klaf is the best.

Nehemia: And I was speaking to a scholar about the definition of “parchment”, and I was rebuked to never use that word, because it has a very narrow definition of parchment, and velum, and she said, “Just use the Hebrew words, because those Latin words have very narrow definitions.

Mordechai: They do.

Nehemia: And even libraries will write in their catalogs that it’s on velum, and she says, that’s completely wrong. She said, “You should always speak about ‘skin-based materials’.” I’m like, “Okay. We’re just going to use the Hebrew words,” which is what she suggested. Even those have some ambiguity, because in some texts they mean one thing, in some texts they mean another thing.

Mordechai: And they have to be prepared in a particular way. I mean, there is only parchment maker left in the UK, and he does all the stuff for Parliament.

Nehemia: Really?

Mordechai: I’m writing an article on that at the moment. But frankly, if I stood behind them when they put it into the lime to get rid of the hairs, and I made the declaration of intent, again, that could be kosher klaf. But somebody would have to…

Nehemia: Wait, wait. So, klaf has to be made with the intent?

Mordechai: Absolutely.

Nehemia: Even for a Torah scroll?

Mordechai: Particularly for a Torah scroll.

Nehemia: Okay, I would know that for tefillin and mezuzahs.

Mordechai: Mezuzah, you can get away with, according to Rambam, get away with not having the intention, and also for megillot and other sorts of…

Nehemia: Megilla, yeah.

Mordechai: …Nach things. So, that’s that.

Announcer: Ink.

Mordechai: Ink.

Nehemia: Yeah.

Mordechai: This is the ink I use. I get it in Israel, it’s called Hadar. My wife, who’s a soferet, she was the first ever soferet in modern times…

Nehemia: Really?

Mordechai: Avielah.

Nehemia: A female scribe.

Mordechai: Avielah Barclay, a female scribe; so she’s my wife. It’s a quite interesting household.

Nehemia: Wait, wait. So, we’ve got to back up there. [Mordechai laughing] So, would an Orthodox synagogue accept a Torah scroll made by a female scribe?

Mordechai: No.

Nehemia: Would they accept a megilla made by a female?

Mordechai: Yes.

Nehemia: Okay.

Mordechai: Well, most of them would. Most of them would, because there’s, again, lots of discussions, but the big giveaway is, it says, “vatichtov Esther,” “Esther wrote.” So, you can’t really argue with that one, because if Esther wrote it…

Nehemia: You could argue with anything if you want to.

Mordechai: Yeah, and she was, as far as I last checked, she was a lady.

Nehemia: You could say she ordered someone to write it, you know…

Mordechai: She could have, and that’s what some of the Orthodox will argue.

Nehemia: I see. But generally, the Orthodox would accept a…

Mordechai: A female megilla, mostly.

Nehemia: And what about Conservative Jews? Do you have that in the UK, Masorti?

Mordechai: Conservative, Masorti, so Masorti would probably accept, yeah, and that’s fine. So, I work across the spectrum for everyone, and my wife works in a slightly narrower spectrum, depending on how modern and progressive that community is.

Nehemia: Okay.

Mordechai: So, Hadar is the ink I like. She doesn’t like it. She’s got a different ink, which is much shinier. I don’t like it. So, if you’re doing repairs, Hadar is really good, because it’s not quite as shiny.

Nehemia: Let me see what this says here. All right, I’m just reading the label here. Okay, they want to you water it down, or to thin it, I guess.

Mordechai: To thin it down sometimes. And actually, for the Tyburn Megilla, I did thin it down a bit, because I was working with something that had… Especially the blackest of black, right? But in the Tyburn it had faded particularly, and if I’d repaired it black-black, it would look ridiculous. So again, it’s part of the conservation.

Nehemia: So, the repairing that you were doing there is re-inking it? Meaning, you’re going over the letters?

Mordechai: It was going over the letters that completely faded, and some of them have disappeared completely.

Nehemia: Okay. Now, going back to God’s name, are you allowed to re-ink Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey?

Mordechai: Yes. But again, with the right intention. And it also depends on how damaged…

Nehemia: If it’s faded, you’re allowed to?

Mordechai: If it’s faded to grey, or brown, then you probably don’t… and it’s guf echad, it’s one body, the letter is complete, then you don’t actually need to go over it. If there are cracks in it, or bits have broken away, or bits have faded or jumped off the skin, then you do.

Nehemia: I see.

Mordechai: If it fades to red, then the ink was probably not kosher in the first place.

Nehemia: Okay, if it fades to red, then that’s because it’s iron gall ink?

Mordechai: No, iron gall ink’s fine, it’s just that the recipe was wrong.

Nehemia: So tell us what the recipe is? What’s the secret recipe?

Mordechai: Well, okay, there are…

Nehemia: Guys, you’re going to hear the secret recipe.

Mordechai: There are many secret recipes, there are many secret recipes.

Nehemia: Okay.

Mordechai: But they all start with these.

Nehemia: Aha.

Mordechai: And these are not Maltesers, as I quite often tell the children.

Nehemia: Maltesers?

Mordechai: Maltesers are British chocolate. They look exactly like…

Nehemia: I’ve seen Maltesers. Okay.

Mordechai: And they’re not Maltesers, because they’re actually what’s called gallnuts. So, when you say, “iron gall”, that’s exactly what it is. It was iron sulphate - or copper sulphate, some people use - and this stuff, which is basically gallnuts.

Nehemia: So tell us how gallnuts… in the Hebrew, that’s aphatzim.

Mordechai: Aphatzim.

Nehemia: How are these made?

Mordechai: They grow on oak trees. So the scribes grow around and we climb those oak trees, and we pull these down.

Nehemia: Do you have those in the UK as well?

Mordechai: Yeah, yeah. We have them in the UK. These are actually picked in the UK…

Nehemia: Oh, really?

Mordechai: …in a local park, yeah.

Nehemia: Wait, you went to a local park and picked those?

Mordechai: I went to a local park and picked these with my son, Aryeh, when he was younger.

Nehemia: That’s awesome. And tell us how the oak tree makes those?

Mordechai: So basically, the gall wasp stings the oak tree, and this is a swelling. And it’s tannic acid. Basically, it’s pure tannic acid. Plus, its baby’s inside, and then the baby comes out and flies away. You could see the hole.

Nehemia: This is a product of…

Mordechai: You can’t… It’s completely natural.

Nehemia: …wasps interaction with… Wow.

Mordechai: It’s completely nature. It’s natural. And that’s the thing about Torah, that everything’s natural. In fact, you try to avoid things that are metal, if you can avoid them. You can’t always, because some knives, you have to use knives or scalpels. But I look at a scalpel in terms of healing, because it’s used in a hospital. But most metal implements you want to try and avoid, because they’re used for war. So you try and stick to the nature things.

Nehemia: Okay.

Mordechai: So, you call see the gall wasp has gone…

Nehemia: So there’s a little hole in there, I don’t know if they can see that here. There’s actually a little hole where the little wasps went out. And this is left behind, and this stem is ground up into a powder, right?

Mordechai: You grind it up into a powder. It’s basically pure tannic acid. You mix it up with the iron sulphate, you add some gum arabic.

Nehemia: And this is mentioned…

Mordechai: Some people add alcohol, some people add honey. I’ve no idea why, because it doesn’t seem to have any purpose, but it’s in recipes, and it’s in the Talmud and its various…

Nehemia: Right, so the Talmud mentions aphatzim, which are these gallnuts, and so, this has been done for a very long time.

Mordechai: It has, although this wasn’t the original ink. In fact, there were some scribes way back when who said, “Oh, no. You mustn’t use this stuff.”

Nehemia: And that’s actually discussed in the Talmud.

Mordechai: You have to have lamp black, which is basically soot from boiling oil. So, olive oil, and you collect the soot from the glass that was underneath. And then you turn that into slabs of ink.

Nehemia: Or from actual lamps that would become carbonized, yeah. That’s what’s called carbon ink, in the hard sciences.

Mordechai: And then there’s a whole bunch of arguments over ink.

Nehemia: Well, the statement in the Talmud is one rabbi says, “I have a substance I can throw into the ink and it makes it permanent.” And they then discuss, “Are we allowed to do this?”

Mordechai: Because of the sotah, the ritual of the sotah.

Nehemia: Right. So, explain that.

Mordechai: So, the ritual of the sotah is the supposedly adulterous wife, that she has to eat this kind of noxious mix of earth and parchment and writing ink, written with the paragraph of the sotah, the adultress…

Nehemia: And what’s interesting about that is, Maimonides says that specifically they write God’s name, Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey and wash that off…

Mordechai: And they wash it off.

Nehemia: And they wash that.

Mordechai: And it’s the only time you’re allowed to damage God’s name. And that’s why the permanency of the ink was questioned, because you couldn’t do that if…

Nehemia: You can’t wash it off.

Mordechai: …you can’t wash it off. You could make it very soggy, it would crack a bit, but you can’t…

Nehemia: And part of that is because it stains the actual parchment.

Mordechai: It sits quite proud, but it also sinks into the parchment.

Nehemia: And I’ve seen examples where… you talked about how they peel off a layer of parchment - I’ve seen examples where they peeled off a layer of parchment and you can still see ink underneath.

Mordechai: Because it’s soaked in.

Nehemia: It’s soaked in, exactly.

Mordechai: It depends on the recipe, basically.

Nehemia: Right, so what’s your secret recipe?

Mordechai: So, gallnuts…

Nehemia: No one will ever know.

Mordechai: It is literally, it’s water and gall nuts, and iron sulphate, and gum arabic.

Nehemia: What is gum arabic?

Mordechai: Gum arabic is a resiny sap thingy…

Nehemia: That comes from some tree.

Mordechai: It comes from a tree, and it basically gives it an adhesive quality and a bounce. So, it stretches, because remember, you’re rolling. And if you didn’t have that in there, they’d just go boing.

Nehemia: It’d crack, wow.

Mordechai: It’d crack. That’s one of the reasons why a lot of mezuzot are actually not kosher, because they’re written very cheaply on coated parchment, and the moment you roll it up, the ink cracks off.

Nehemia: Oh, wow.

Mordechai: So, you think you’re putting a kosher mezuzah up, and you’re not, because…

Nehemia: Okay. But you don’t know, because you haven’t opened it up.

Mordechai: You don’t know, because you haven’t opened it up. But it’s very important that you have a kosher mezuzah. I mean, this is a giant mezuzah. Here is a giant mezuzah that someone gave…

Nehemia: Wait, did somebody actually use this?

Mordechai: No… actually there are people. So, some…

Nehemia: You have a mezuzah that big.

Mordechai: Some communal organizations will have a mezuzah this big.

Nehemia: Really?

Mordechai: I did one recently for the Alexander House, which is an inter-faith peace house in Germany. I fixed the Alexander Torah. I also wrote a book about that one… because it’s really about the Shoah and the Holocaust. But basically, somebody gave me a sample of some new klaf, and I thought, “What am I going to do with this tiny bit of klaf?” And I wrote a giant mezuzah for show and tell.

Nehemia: Can I feel? Oh, wow.

Mordechai: This is using sort of all the extra tagin that some rabbis say you’re supposed to have.

Nehemia: So, tell us what tagin are.

Mordechai: So, the tagin are decorative pieces. The rabbis say they’re little daggers to ward off the demons Satan, Ez and Gats.

Nehemia: I’ve never heard that, okay.

Mordechai: Right, She'atnez Gats, because they're the letters …

Nehemia: These are the letters that have…

Mordechai: …where you actually have the three tagin on, and the rabbis have this…

Nehemia: But some people say they have mystical meaning.

Mordechai: And some people say they have mystical meaning. People don’t really understand the tagin, particularly, but there are lots of rules.

Announcer: Quills.

Mordechai: Okay, so the next thing you need is a quill. So, as you called them the kulmus. And I’ve got three here for you to have a look at, and then a fourth. Now this, this is a swan’s quill. Don’t tell Her Majesty.

Nehemia: Tell us why. I just heard this a few weeks ago.

Mordechai: Because swans are a protected species.

Nehemia: So, swans belong to the Queen of England, except for one college at Cambridge that’s allowed to eat swan.

Mordechai: Yes.

Nehemia: I forget which one it is, but it’s St. John’s, or something like this.

Mordechai: Yeah, and they’re really good for photo opportunities.

Nehemia: What do you mean?

Mordechai: So, if you’re a scribe and you’re doing a photo opportunity at a siyyum, which is a completion ceremony, fantastic to have swan…

Nehemia: To have a swan there.

Mordechai: …a swan’s quill. It looks beautiful.

Nehemia: But you’re actually writing with it?

Mordechai: Writing with it… it’s too soft, right? This is a goose quill, and they’re good, and some people use those. But I find them too hard. And this is a turkey quill.

Nehemia: Hard meaning the material?

Mordechai: Hard, yeah. And this is a turkey quill, and it has a sort of bounce in it, and it’s just right… as they said in The Three Bears, you know. And this one - this one you don’t use at all.

Nehemia: What is it?

Mordechai: Well, you tell me. What do you think this is?

Nehemia: Some kind of bird, an eagle?

Mordechai: It’s a bird. It is actually an eagle, well done.

Nehemia: Okay, because it’s not a kosher animal, therefore…?

Mordechai: It’s not a kosher animal, and it’s a bird of prey. Remember what I said about war? And you are what you eat, kind of thing.

Nehemia: I only guessed from the context that it was an eagle. I had no idea, but it made sense that you would… it was a trick question.

Mordechai: So, you’re not allowed to use this one. You just mustn’t use this. So, you’ve got your quill. No self-respecting scribe ever, ever writes with the barb still on.

Nehemia: You’ve broken my heart! Everyone knows that you do it with the barb on…

Mordechai: No, you don’t, because…

Nehemia: So, you don’t do this with the…?

Mordechai: No, you don’t. You don’t. You don’t. And the reason being… and there is halakha around this, right? So, imagine I’m sitting down to write, okay? So, what is going to happen with the quill?

Nehemia: It’s going to go up your nose.

Mordechai: And what’s going to happen?

Nehemia: You’ll sneeze?

Mordechai: Sneeze, and what happens then?

Nehemia: Then it gets on the scroll.

Mordechai: It gets on the Torah. And getting snot out of a Torah is next to impossible.

Nehemia: Okay.

Mordechai: It’s not one you thought you would actually…

Nehemia: I never thought I’d have that conversation. No, but it’s a real…

Mordechai: You take the barbs off, so you pull them off and stuff like that. And then you scrape it clean, and then you start to basically shape it into the quill that you want. And that’s how it works.

Nehemia: But that looks so much more dramatic with the feather.

Mordechai: That’s why you’d have them for the photo opportunities.

Nehemia: So, you’re telling me that in the Middle Ages, people didn’t sit there in a monastery, or Jews writing with a big feather.

Mordechai: No, generally not.

Nehemia: Okay.

Mordechai: But when they did manuscript illustrations - yeah, absolutely.

Nehemia: Ah, so they do prefer them.

Mordechai: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: So, it’s not my imagination. I’ve seen that somewhere.

Mordechai: Yeah. No, they absolutely prefer them, because that’s what you do. Some people will leave a little bit on.

Nehemia: So, it’s artistic license.

Mordechai: It’s artistic, you know? But that’s very important.

Announcer: String.

Mordechai: So this…

Nehemia: Ah, what is this, giddin?

Mordechai: What is this? This is giddin. This is exactly giddin. If you’re a vegetarian…

Nehemia: I’m not a vegetarian.

Mordechai: …then it’s definitely not for you. So, giddin, so gid, you can tell the story if you want, about Ya'akov.

Nehemia: Gid is a sinew in English.

Mordechai: Good.

Nehemia: So, we have the story of Gid Hanasheh. I’m going to let you tell the story.

Mordechai: Okay, so basically, Jacob wrestled an angel, which some people say was Esau’s angel.

Nehemia: Really?

Mordechai: Yeah, yeah.

Nehemia: Is that what some people say?

Mordechai: Yeah.

Nehemia: I didn’t know that, wow. Like Esau had his own angel.

Mordechai: He had his own angel. Esau was not the bad guy that actually people don’t really…

Nehemia: Maybe bad guys have angels too, I don’t know.

Mordechai: Esau was not such a bad guy, actually, in the Torah. If you read the Torah cold without getting all the commentaries and all the Midrash and all the other stuff that’s kind of layered on, then Esau doesn’t seem quite so bad.

Nehemia: Oh, interesting.

Mordechai: So the angel touches the thigh of Ya'akov, Jacob, and as a result, he gains a limp. He also gains a new name, Yisrael, because he struggled with God. And then, we’re not allowed to eat this.

Nehemia: Wait, that’s the gid hanasheh, according to…

Mordechai: Yeah, yeah. This the gid.

Nehemia: Oh, so it’s not just any gid, it’s that specific gid.

Mordechai: It’s the gid, yeah. So, you can take the gid from the thigh or the back of the heel, generally. And then it is rolled and spun. So, you bash it with a stone and it kind of forms this kind of soft, stringy stuff, and then very clever people - much cleverer than me - will spin it into a yarn.

Nehemia: Wait, so this all comes from gid hanasheh, the sciatic nerve?

Mordechai: Yes, and there is a secret way of doing this, and I think only a couple of families in Israel now that do it. I know how it was done, but nobody says how it’s done.

Nehemia: We won’t say.

Mordechai: We won’t say.

Nehemia: I don’t know the secret.

Mordechai: Yeah, so this is basically what you use. And whilst it kind of looks like nothing…

Nehemia: Like yarn?

Mordechai: It kind of looks like yarn, it’s like cotton, or something, it’s much stronger.

Nehemia: Really?

Mordechai: And that’s what you sew, the bits together. So, the yiri'ah - so you have a yiri'ah which is a sheet, and then amudim which are the columns on it. And you have three to five amudim on a yiri'ah, and then you have to sew them all together, and this is what you use to sew.

Nehemia: Wow, so I didn’t know they were the gid hanasheh. I knew there were giddin. That’s interesting. Wow, that’s really interesting. And this isn’t that unusual, like for example, my understanding that, I think it’s violins use like cat sinews, or something like that, right? So, this is from a cow though, right, not a cat?

Mordechai: So, this is basically what you use. And quite often, I’m doing repairs because they’ve come apart, and stuff like that. So you have to have a supply.

Nehemia: Actually, this morning I was looking at a Torah scroll from China. And there, instead of giddin they used silk.

Mordechai: Silk. I knew you were going to say it, because I’ve seen that. And I’ve actually used silk myself once for an emergency repair. So, fundamentally, silk is allowed for emergency repair. If you don’t have giddin with you, they’ll allow silk, and then you have to come back later and repair it properly. The Chinese one, they obviously never got around to it. They didn’t change it.

Nehemia: They didn’t change it up, yeah.

Mordechai: They probably didn’t have any giddin at all in the nation, and so they used silk, because silk is…

Nehemia: Not prepared in this manner. It was available.

Mordechai: Silk is available and silk is permitted, bediavad, after the event, if it’s an emergency.

Nehemia: Okay.

Mordechai: So there you go.

Nehemia: Very cool.

Announcer: Inkwell.

Mordechai: So fundamentally you need this.

Nehemia: That’s for ink.

Mordechai: That’s my kesset. A kesset hasofer is the inkwell of the scribe. This is my inkwell, and I’ve had it for a number of years, which is good, it’s very important to me.

Nehemia: You’re supposed to pour the ink in…

Mordechai: Pour the ink into that, and that’s what you dip the… it’s like an inkwell. I actually used to use contact lens cases, because…

Nehemia: Oh, really?

Mordechai: Yeah. When I do a siyyum, I use…

Nehemia: You make it sound like the young generation should remember what inkwells are.

Mordechai: Yeah.

Nehemia: I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say when my mother was in like elementary school, that they still had inkwells - I think. In my generation, they didn’t, and certainly the younger generation doesn’t know anything past the iPhone, so.

Announcer: Blotting out the name of Amalek.

Mordechai: Now, before you write anything - so you’ve got your quill, you’ve got your parchment, you’ve got all your bits. You’ve got all your bits, you’re ready to write, yes?

Nehemia: Yeah.

Mordechai: No. No, because apart from obviously making that declaration of intent, you also have to do this. This is my Amalek envelope.

Nehemia: Your Amalek envelope.

Mordechai: The Amalek envelope. So, Amalek, the bad guys in the Torah…

Nehemia: The Amalekites?

Mordechai: The Amalekites, who we are commanded to “Timcheh et zecher Amalek,” “blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under the heavens,” because they are really evil. Now, you can’t do that, because A) we don’t know who the Amalekites are today, and B) the police would probably be upset if you started to go around blotting out Amalekites. There are Amalekites knocking around. There’s a lot of anti-Semites who are sadly Amalekites today.

Nehemia: There’s an interesting paradox in the Torah, because it says, “To write this in a scroll,” and it includes the name Amalek. And then it says, “remember to blot it out.”

Mordechai: “Remember to blot it out.”

Nehemia: Yeah.

Mordechai: So, you can’t do that commandment, but a scribe can. So, the scribe does that commandment, because fundamentally, what the scribe does, before they start to work, they will take a piece of parchment, write the word “Amalek” and then cross it out, usually with three lines. Those are my little Amaleks. And then, eventually, these will all get burnt, but this is my little envelope for show and tell.

Nehemia: So, every time you write a writing session…?

Mordechai: Every time you are going to start a new writing session, you write “Amalek,” and you cross it out because you are doing that commandment. So, that commandment gets done for everybody. But more importantly, you are testing your quill. And you’re testing your quill on something that you don’t care about, because you don’t like this word, right? This is not a nice word. We don’t like it.

Nehemia: Right. So, if you mess up on Amalek, it’s okay?

Mordechai: Yeah, that’s fine.

Nehemia: If you mess up on God’s name, you’ve got a problem.

Mordechai: Yeah. So, if your quill’s rubbish, you will very quickly discover that your quill is rubbish.

Announcer: Ruler and Awl.

Mordechai: If you are writing a Torah, and here we are writing with a little scrap of parchment, okay? But if you are writing a Torah or a megilla or a mezuzah, or tefillin, any of those things – although actually, there are some leniencies with tefillin, but let’s not go there – you have to have ruled lines. Because it’s like an exercise book, but actually the Hebrew hangs from the line, as opposed to sits on the line. So, you need a thing called a sargel and this is my sargel, which is basically a rose thorn that’s attached to a…

Nehemia: That’s a rose thorn.

Mordechai: It’s a rose thorn.

Nehemia: Oh, wow.

Mordechai: We’re weird people, right?

Nehemia: And so, you’re essentially cutting a line in the parchment.

Mordechai: I’m essentially scoring a line into the parchment, right?

Nehemia: Scoring, okay.

Mordechai: So there’s a very faint line there on it.

Nehemia: And we see this in Torah scrolls and many scrolls.

Mordechai: You see that in Torah scrolls, and you’re supposed to do that, and it’s really important. And then, we’re dipping the quill in here, and I’m just going to check that it’s a reasonable cut, because I cut it earlier.

Nehemia: So you did that on a regular piece of paper.

Mordechai: So I did it on a regular piece of paper. Now, it’s much harder to write on a piece of paper, actually.

Nehemia: Is it really?

Mordechai: Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Nehemia: Why is that?

Mordechai: It doesn’t have the… what’s the word?

Nehemia: It’s too smooth.

Mordechai: It’s too smooth. It doesn’t have that sort of feel to it that you get with parchment. Parchment just has this great texture.

Nehemia: It has a texture.

Mordechai: A texture. It’s like if you actually look at parchment through a microscope, it’s like a carpet. It’s quite interesting. So let’s write “Amalek”.

Nehemia: So, you’re writing the Ayin.

Mordechai: So, I’m writing the Ayin down here. And then you’ve got a couple of tagin…

Nehemia: The little doohickeys.

Mordechai: The Ayin has little doohickeys.

Nehemia: So again, I want to emphasize what you said, that in English, the letters sit on the ruled line, and in Hebrew they hang from the ruled line.

Mordechai: They hang from the ruled line. So, there’s an Ayin and a Mem. And I’m doing this…

Nehemia: You can see, the Mem is like a Kaf and a Vav.

Mordechai: Yes, it’s a Kaf and a Vav.

Nehemia: Oh, nice.

Mordechai: That’s exactly what it is. And that’s the actual root of the letter, is a Kaf and a Vav. And then the Lamed is here, and I’m trying to do it as big and quickly…

Nehemia: And your Lamed has two little horns here.

Mordechai: Two little horns.

Nehemia: And that’s on purpose, right?

Mordechai: And that’s on purpose, a decorative thing that goes on. And then a Kuf, and the Kuf is kind of like a Zayin…

Nehemia: Hanging from part of a kaf.

Mordechai: It also has a tag, yeah. So, very pretty.

Nehemia: Very pretty, yeah.

Mordechai: Very pretty, and then we just do this to it, because we are blotting out…

Nehemia: Crossed out. Okay. Blotting out Amalek.

Mordechai: That’s Amalek, we don’t like Amalek.

Nehemia: That’s interesting. Well, it’s interesting you do it with a strike-through. I call this a strike-through from Word, MS Word.

Mordechai: That’s a bit…

Nehemia: Well, no. So, it’s interesting, so the term for that is people will actually call this in Hebrew, “ha’avarat kulmus”, but that could mean other things, as well. Whereas, this strike-through is very specific. So, do you ever let it dry and then scratch it off with a razor?

Mordechai: No.

Nehemia: You don’t do that?

Mordechai: No.

Nehemia: Okay.

Announcer: Scratching off mistakes.

Nehemia: When you’re correcting a mistake…

Mordechai: When I’m correcting a mistake, then there’s scraping with a scalpel. As I say, it’s like a hospital thing. And then you’re basically polishing down with a smooth stone.

Nehemia: Oh, you have some scraps. Can you show us that process on your Amalek scraps? Of the scratching?

Mordechai: Of the scratching? Okay.

Nehemia: And we’ll show it up here in the screen, for those who are watching. So, I saw this Medieval manuscript where it shows a scribe sitting in his chair, and he writes with one hand, “Amalek”, and in the other hand he has a razor and he’s scratching it off. And it was interesting to me, because it shows what tool they used, like in the 14th century or whatever.

Mordechai: So here’s my little knife kit with a little brush to do things… a razor blade to help split the kulmus…

Nehemia: So, this is what you would do…

Mordechai: Some sandpaper.

Nehemia: Oh, wow. So, this is what you would do if there was a mistake that did not involve God’s name.

Mordechai: If there was a mistake that didn’t involve God’s name, then you would literally…

Nehemia: And this happens all the time, that there are mistakes, right?

Mordechai: You do this very, very, very, very carefully. Du, du, du, du, du.

Nehemia: How often does it happen that there are mistakes? Like, could you write a whole Esther scroll without a single mistake?

Mordechai: I would say, the last one I did, I probably had about four mistakes in it, which was pretty good.

Nehemia: That’s pretty good.

Mordechai: I did check, I was a Magihah, a checker, for one of my colleagues, and he probably made about seven mistakes in each sheet of Torah he did, on average. And you just have to roll with it. It’s all about concentration, it really is.

Nehemia: But it’s unlikely to write a whole scroll, even the size of Esther, which is really small, and not have some mistakes? So, it has to be proofread?

Mordechai: Yes.

Nehemia: And talk about in the Mishna, it talks about the Temple courtyard proofreaders... Oh, don’t scratch the whole thing off, or at least the whole letter. I want to see what the process is and show people what it is. Because this is important. Look, to me, one of the things that’s really important about our Bible texts we have today, is it was copied with incredible accuracy, but it was also proofread. And like, for example, Aaron Ben-Asher… Maimonides says he proofread it for many years. Wow, so the Kuf is completely gone now.

Mordechai: The Kuf is now completely gone. And what you would do is… So, I would get a pencil eraser, which I didn’t happen to bring today, smooth that out a bit…

Nehemia: Can you show us with the stone how you do it?

Mordechai: Yeah, so you take the stone and you just rub it round like that, and it smoothes out the parchment. Then - I didn’t bring this today, because it stinks. It’s called pe’er klaf, it’s kind of, again, a very noxious mixture, and if you paint it onto there it stops the ink from spreading.

Nehemia: When you write the new ink, you mean?

Mordechai: When you write the new ink.

Nehemia: Okay, that’s interesting.

Mordechai: So, pe’er klaf is kind of very important. I have absolutely no idea how that stuff’s made, and I’m sure it’s not very good for you if you breathe it in.

Nehemia: Probably not, it seems like.

Mordechai: But it’s very cool.

Nehemia: And so this is one of the interesting things to me is, when I look at these Medieval manuscripts, I can see where a word was erased, because it leaves a trace.

Announcer: The Torah in the Wardrobe.

Nehemia: So, tell us about this Torah scroll from the Holocaust. You wrote a book about it, about how you restored it.

Mordechai: And the Amalek thing fits very nicely in this, because actually, the biggest Amalek in modern times were the Nazis. And one of the things that they tried to do was destroy sifrei Torah, so they burned stuff. And on Kristallnacht in particular, there was one synagogue, that was the Great Synagogue, which was raided, and it had all its sifrei Torah burned. The Torah that was supposed to be in that synagogue wasn’t, right? Because that Torah, which was written in 1790 and because it’s a family Torah, it’s the Alexander Torah, it’s quite famous in this country, actually.

Nehemia: Why is it called the Alexander Torah?

Mordechai: Because that’s the name of the family who own it. So, The Torah in the Wardrobe basically is the history of restoration of the Alexander Torah. And the Alexander Torah was written in 1790 in Germany, and you can follow it because it was passed down to the oldest male heir. And so, you can follow it all around Germany, and then you can follow it to the UK, and then, it eventually reached my drawing board, and in fact, my wardrobe, because it’s so big, I couldn’t actually keep it… I had nowhere to keep it, and I had to keep it in a wardrobe.

It was a massive Torah. Those old ones are generally very, very heavy and very large, because they were written by candlelight, so they made them large.

Nehemia: Wow, that’s interesting. So, I was recently at the State Library of Berlin, and they have there two things, one is they have the Erfurt 6, which is a 40-kilogram… that’s a 90-pound Torah scroll. And they also have the Erfurt Bible, which is also massive. So the librarian there, she says to me, “Were there Jewish giants in Germany in the thirteenth or fourteenth [centuries]?”

Mordechai: No, literally, it was that.

Nehemia: It was functional, really.

Mordechai: It was functional, and I actually had to… So, it was written in Thalmässing in Germany, and I actually had to build… I was trying to find the picture here. I had to build an extension to my drawing board in order to accommodate it.

Nehemia: Oh, wow. Because it was so big.

Mordechai: Because it was so huge, I actually literally had to do some special stuff in order to make sure this was fixed properly. So, you could see here me working on it. And I had to stand up for the first half of the column. I had a massive backache, it’s huge.

Nehemia: I can imagine.

Mordechai: I’m doing it at the moment, one from Pardubice, the Czech scrolls, the one from Newcastle I had previously was also a Czech scroll. Backache - because the first half of the column you have to do standing up on the extension, and then you can sit down. It’s a mechiah, which is Yiddish for a blessing, it’s kind of a wonderful thing.

Nehemia: A relief.

Mordechai: A relief when you can sit down halfway and actually carry on working on it.

Nehemia: So, this is a Torah scroll from the Holocaust that isn’t part of the…

Mordechai: It’s not part of the Czech scrolls.

Nehemia: Not part of the Memorial Scrolls Trust?

Mordechai: No.

Nehemia: So, there are Torah scrolls from the Holocaust that didn’t come from here.

Mordechai: That didn’t come from here at all. So this one in particular, it was supposed to have been donated for use in the synagogue where it was burned by the Nazis on Kristallnacht, but they turned round and said, “Oh, we’ve got enough Torahs, we don’t need another Torah.” And because it wasn’t there, and it was actually in a wardrobe, right, and this was with the family, it was rescued. And when the family had to flee Germany, they sent back for their belongings, and because the maid didn’t know what it was, she put it in with the belongings. So, it made its way to the UK. So, it also had…

Nehemia: Wait, wait. So, this was before…?

Mordechai: It was nearly burned in one synagogue.

Nehemia: This was before the war started, she sent it?

Mordechai: Just before the war started. So, literally…

Nehemia: So if she had known it was a Torah scroll, she might not have…

Mordechai: She might not have done it at all.

Nehemia: And certainly, the Nazis, if they’d have known about it, wouldn’t have let it out of the country. Wow.

Mordechai: And so, the book chronicles the history of where this Torah went, who potentially used it, which synagogues it was used in, how it got to the UK, and then the massive repairs. It’s also got loads and loads of the otiot meshunnot in it, so it’s a beautifully written one. What was really interesting, one of the things I discovered, was that actually it was written by two scribes.

Nehemia: Really?

Mordechai: In between bits of the master scribe, there was a student. He was desperately trying to ape the style of the master scribe, but he’s nowhere near as good.

Nehemia: But you can tell the difference when you look at it?

Mordechai: I can tell the difference, basically. Most people wouldn’t, but obviously, I’m a sofer, I can. And my theory is that the guy who wrote it gave bits of it to the guy who commissioned it, Moshe Alexander, and he wrote some of it - I’m convinced of it, that he was trying to write some of this Torah, because I’ve come across this before. In fact, recently…

Nehemia: You mean the patron wrote some of it?

Mordechai: The patron wrote some of it, because that means they own the Torah.

Nehemia: He’s a part of the Torah.

Mordechai: Because the commandment is to write…

Nehemia: Part of writing the Torah.

Mordechai: …your Torah, write for yourself.

Nehemia: I heard that sometimes the patron will write like the last few words…

Mordechai: The last few words, or the last letter, sometimes, or, “Torah tziva lanu Moshe, morasha kehilat Ya'akov,” he would write that verse, because…

Nehemia: That was my father’s favorite verse in the Bible. “Torah tziva lanu Moshe,” “Moses commanded us the Torah, an inheritance for the congregation of Jacob.”

Mordechai: Yes, so basically…

Nehemia: It’s actually on his tombstone.

Mordechai: It’s a really important verse, and sometimes a patron will write that verse.

Nehemia: Will write that verse, okay.

Mordechai: It might start with, “Bereishit,” the first words there up to the God’s name, because you don’t want somebody who’s not a sofer writing God’s name, because then they could mess it up. And then, that “Torah tziva lanu”, and then maybe the end bit. But this one, it was all over the place. So it was three lines here, and five lines here.

Nehemia: So was it an apprentice?

Mordechai: I’m convinced of it - either an apprentice or it was the patron. And the reason I think it’s the patron is because the master would not have let some of that work go through. It was so bad. I actually had to 'repair' it.

Nehemia: Okay, whereas if it’s the patron, it’s like, “You did this. What do you want from me?”

Mordechai: Yeah, exactly.

Nehemia: Okay, I see.

Mordechai: So I think he went easy on the patron, whereas he probably wouldn’t have gone easy on the apprentice...

Nehemia: Did he let the patron, or whoever it was, write God’s name?

Mordechai: I don’t think I remember seeing God’s name being written... I’m pretty convinced, so it’s really quite interesting. So, it’s a fascinating story.

Announcer: Final thoughts.

Nehemia: Can you tell us any last things about being a scribe, any things you want to share with the audience?

Mordechai: I think being a scribe, it’s very different, obviously. I mean, in my normal day, I’m surrounded by technology, and then I’m not - I’m suddenly in the world of parchment and quills and ink and stuff like that. But really, the best thing for me about being a sofer is that you have a personal relationship, a deep and intimate relationship with the text with no intermediaries, because most people will read the Torah with Rashi as the commentator, or Rambam, or Ramban or every commentator known unto man. Or they’ll be looking at stuff from the point of view of Midrash, and stories that are actually not in the Torah at all, and things like that, and almost have taken on like they’re in the Torah, but they’re not. So, that’s very important.

But if you read the text, and I know, because I’ve seen some of your stuff, if you read the text…

Nehemia: I do love the text.

Mordechai: …then you go and you look at it, and you go, “Ah, that’s what it really meant, back then, in the time it was actually written.” And subsequent interpretation may have taken it in a completely different direction, but actually, what they meant was this. And by reading that cold; you know, disintermediated…

Nehemia: Raw, in a sense.

Mordechai: … raw, you get way more out of it, because you have that personal relationship with the text.

Nehemia: Wow. That’s amazing. Well, thank you so much, and guys, go to his website, sofer.co.uk, and learn more about what he does in his 16 or 17 books, and maybe commission him to write a Scroll of Esther, or something. Thank you, Mordechai.

Mordechai: A pleasure.

Nehemia: Shalom.

Mordechai: Shalom.

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