Hebrew Voices #142 – Sign Language of the Synagogue

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Nehemia: When I was at university, they mentioned how in ancient times they used to have hand signals, and I’m like, “Wait, wait, wait, it wasn’t ancient times! I’ve seen it!”

Marc: I’ve seen it! Yeah, yeah, yeah!

Nehemia: I’ve seen it in the 20th century!

Nehemia: Shalom, and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I'm here today with a practicing scribe, Marc Michaels, AKA Mordechai Pinchas. Shalom, Marc, Mordechai, how are you?

Marc: I’m fine. Shalom Nehemia, lovely to see you again.

Nehemia: Now, last time I spoke to you, you were working as a scribe, a Jewish scribe who repairs Torah scrolls, writes the scroll of Esther, and now I'm going to say you've gone up a level in your qualifications.

Marc: Gone to the dark side!

Nehemia: We're here at Cambridge University, and you’re a PhD student at Cambridge University. Is that right?

Marc: Yes, I’m currently doing a part-time PhD. I'm actually their first - as far as I understand – part-timer, doing work around Sefer Tagin. I think I might have mentioned that last time…

Nehemia: And we'll talk about Sefer Tagin later on.

Marc: … under Geoffrey Khan and Ben Outhwaite.

Nehemia: Oh, wow. So, you’ve got the big hitters there.

Marc: Yeah, absolutely.

Nehemia: So, you mentioned to me that here at the university you have something that we don't really have a parallel to in the US or in Israel, your status as a…

Marc: Yeah, this term, apparently, and I didn't really understand what it was at all, because having come in slightly from the side as opposed to the standard academic trail, I was awarded senior scholar status…

Nehemia: So, you’re a senior scholar…

Marc: … for academic achievement.

Nehemia: Wow!

Marc: Excellent academic achievement, and that was very nice.

Nehemia: You’re a senior scholar at Cambridge University, that’s pretty cool.

Marc: Apparently, that is the case. It means I can wear a gown at the high table, apparently. I don't even know what that means.

Nehemia: I was walking to breakfast the other day. I'm staying at one of the colleges, they call them, and there were these people walking around with these… I'm just going to call it what it is - Harry Potter outfits.

Marc: Yes.

Nehemia: And I asked somebody, “Do they make you wear that every day?” And they're like, “No. We're graduating today.”

Marc: Well, you are supposed to wear them at formal dinners, apparently. I’ve not been to one. And apparently, if I'd got senior scholar status, I think it's at Trinity, then I'm allowed to walk on the scholar’s lawn.

Nehemia: Really?

Marc: But only if I'm wearing my full robes.

Nehemia: Okay.

Marc: Again, I have no idea if any of this is true. It’s just something that happened this term and I was like, “This is interesting.” I have no idea what it means.

Nehemia: So, you’re a senior scholar at Cambridge, but you told me before we started that you actually didn't start out in academia, that you almost sort of fell into it.

Marc: Completely by accident.

Nehemia: Tell me about that.

Marc: So, I'm a graphic designer by trade. I'm actually a marketing director full-time in a London agency. But back then I was a graphic designer, and I was designing leaflets and posters and websites and stuff like that really early on for lots of Jewish organizations including one, which was the Leo Baeck College…

Nehemia: Oh, that’s a really famous one.

Marc: … which trains rabbis in this country. My dad and I actually got an MA at exactly the same time because he was training to be a rabbi and I was doing the MA. But the reason I fell into the MA was purely on the fact that I was designing the leaflet to tell people about the MA, and I was reading the copy thinking, “I do this for fun. I am that geeky that I look at this stuff for fun. I could get an MA, wow!”

Nehemia: Which is a master’s degree.

Marc: Yeah. So, I applied, from my own leaflets that I designed.

Nehemia: It was a very effective leaflet!

Marc: It was extremely good marketing basically. And then it was going really, really well up until the last day before the interview, where they said, “Oh, and by the way, you have to do an exam.” And I went, “What?” They said, “Well, you haven't been in college for a while. We need to understand how good you are at Hebrew and biblical knowledge.” And I said, “Oh, okay, so when?” “Tomorrow.” And I went, “I get no notice to revise, to prepare? Just turn up?”

Nehemia: How many years had it been since you’ve been to formal schooling?

Marc: A good three or four.

Nehemia: Okay.

Marc: Since I’ve actually done any proper hard-nosed studying.

Nehemia: Okay.

Marc: And then suddenly I was doing an exam the next day. Which I did okay on, although the guy who was marking it was quite strict. But then when he was told that I had less than 24 hours’ notice he went, “Oh, he did quite well then.”

So, yeah, that was okay. And so, I got through and I was first person through their variant MA program, and I didn't really think much of it. I obviously graduated at the same time as my dad, which was different. There’s photos of both of us in our robes. And then didn't really worry about it at all until this opportunity came up, when I was, "Again, I could do a PhD, this is interesting.” And then I went around, and people were like, “This is very niche. I’m not sure if we can help you,” et cetera, et cetera, and eventually I came across Ben, Dr. Ben Outhwaite, with whom I'd actually had some dealings in the past because I'd used some of the Genizah material in a couple of books.

Nehemia: He’s the head of what’s called the Genizah Research Unit at Cambridge University Library.

Marc: Yeah, and I basically came in to see him and Professor Geoffrey Khan and convinced them that it was worth taking a risk to take on a part-time student. Apparently, they had to go and talk to the powers that be. But I'd done a lot of research, which eventually turned into my book on Sefer Tagin that's out there now, so they could see that I was serious.

Nehemia: That's an interesting… we’ll talk about your book. I’m making little notes for myself… it's interesting though, this whole thing at Cambridge University, because when I was looking to do my PhD, I looked at a bunch of schools, and one of them I looked at was Cambridge. And they said, “Well yeah you’d definitely get in, no problem, but you'd have to live here for three years, and that's an absolute hard requirement.”

Marc: Yeah.

Nehemia: “And you can't have another job. It has to be your full-time thing for three years.” And I said, “Well, that's a non-starter for me.” But they actually let you do part-time?

Marc: Well, part of this was 100% correct, that you don't feel like you're necessarily part of the student body unless you're here. As it happened, even if I'd been full-time because of Covid, I wouldn't have been part of the student body anyway!

Nehemia: You would have been, but they’re all isolated.

Marc: But they’re all isolated. So the reality was, being a part-timer hasn't been quite as bad, and now the world has changed. I think people have recognized that that's perfectly feasible.

Nehemia: Well, one of the things that's different about Cambridge… correct me if I'm wrong here. So, at most universities, let's say in the US or Israel, in the US it’s even more so, you have a certain amount of coursework you have to do. And I’ve been told…

Marc: No coursework for PhD, which is wonderful.

Nehemia: There's no coursework! Oh, wow!

Marc: It's just research, it’s pure research. Although again, that can be quite daunting because you're mostly on your own, and so it's great to come here in real and meet with colleagues and talk and bounce ideas and also look at the manuscripts. I've got a blog coming out on the Genizah website shortly. Actually, I have no idea when it’s going to come out, but it will come out!

Nehemia: So, you’ve written an article for the Genizah Research Unit?

Marc: I’ve written an article about the importance of seeing manuscripts in real, with some examples. And it was going to be a paper, and it may well turn out to be a paper or a presentation as well, but literally some of the examples are things where if you just look at it digitally, you don't get the whole story.

Nehemia: Can you please tell this to all the librarians? Because I've been to some libraries where…

Marc: I will tell this to every librarian.

Nehemia: I've been to libraries where they say, “You don't need to see that, we have color photos on the website.” And their color photos are sometimes amazing, sometimes they're not as good as what I can do on my iPhone. And what I find is, I'll spend a lot of time studying photos, and then I need to go in and see it. But I'm not looking at everything, I'm looking at specific things where I'm like, “I'm not sure what that is. I'm not exactly sure about that, I don't know what the different shades of color are there. I need to go see it for myself.”

Marc: So, I ran a “fragment of the month” for the Genizah Unit around…

Nehemia: Tell everyone what that is, because they don’t know what that is. What’s this blog of which you speak?

Marc: Well, there's a blog, and there's also a thing called Fragment of the Month, where somebody finds something of interest in the fragment. And then they'll talk about what they've found, and usually the ones that are unidentified…

Nehemia: This is Cambridge University’s Genizah Research Unit… they have Fragment of the Month?

Marc: Fragment of the Month.

Nehemia: So, you've written one of those?

Marc: I've written one of those, and it's around a piece that I found which was around cantillation, the trope, ta’amim in Hebrew.

Nehemia: Okay, so this is interesting. There are three different terms for this. In Yiddish we call it trop or trope. I always called it trop. In Hebrew it’s called ta’amim or ta’ami mikra, and in English they’ll often refer to it as accent marks.

Marc: Accent marking or cantillation marks.

Nehemia: Right, cantillation marks. And accent isn’t really exactly right, because it’s more than accent, but cantillation's not the full story either.

Marc: So, what I found, and it’s slightly different to many of the… so, there are listings of the different notes, and each of those fragments are interesting in their own respect, but this one was particularly interesting because it was clearly a kind of trope trainer.

Nehemia: Oh, really?

Marc: It was a little fragment being written by a teacher to teach a student.

Nehemia: Wow.

Marc: He’d taken little excerpts of verses and made sure that he’d covered up most or, pretty much all of the notes, and I think a sof passuk was missing. He’d written it out really nicely and written the names of the notes on the top, next to the notes, it was obviously a teaching thing. The Genizah Unit hadn’t seen anything like that before. They hadn’t stumbled across this one, so I wrote about what was different about it.

Nehemia: Very cool, that's awesome.

Marc: And, obviously, as someone who lains Torah in a synagogue, I actually…

Nehemia: Tell them what lain means.

Marc: Laining is reading, but with chanting.

Nehemia: Okay.

Marc: So, you read the Torah, it has no vowels, and it has no notes, so you actually have to remember them.

Nehemia: It has them in the printed book, but in the actual Torah Scroll it doesn't have any.

Marc: In the actual Torah Scroll, it doesn’t have any, it’s literally consonants. So, when you're laining, and last week I did Shishi, which is the sixth call-up.

Nehemia: Can you recite a portion of that of the off top? I don't know, a few words, or something?

Marc: Well, I can sing the kind of normal things, for example, you get, “Ma’hapach pashta zekef katan zekef gadol mircha tipcha mircha sof passuk.” Which is an Ashkenazi trope, and that's a fairly standard kind of lilt to the reading.

Nehemia: Is there a passage you know by heart that you can do with that? I’m putting you on the spot there.

Marc: No, no, no, I don't tend to remember stuff. Either you do it with a little bit of notice, or you do it on the day and you may have to make up some of it because you're not sure of everything that's there.

Nehemia: I know at my bar mitzvah, there were people holding their hands over their ears because I can't carry a tune.

Marc: Yes, so in last week’s on Shishi there were two pazehs, so “paz’ehe’ehe’ehe’ehe’ehe” and that was on ve’im, and I think ha’isha, ‘and if’ and ‘the woman’. They used to have hand signals, but they don’t do that anymore.

Nehemia: No, I have seen the hand signals.

Marc: I would love to have hand signals, because if somebody had the hand signals, then I wouldn't have to practice it so much.

Nehemia: Let's explain this. I saw this in the 80s in Chicago. I was at a synagogue and there was somebody standing on the side doing these things, and I’m like, “What is this?” And they explained to me that each symbol represents one of the different trope or accent marks, and the person who's reading, he sees the words in front of him, and he's reminded of which accent is on that word or that set of words. And I'm like, “This is incredible!”

Years later, when I was at university, they mentioned how in ancient times they used to have hand signals, and I’m like, “Wait, wait, wait, it wasn’t ancient times! I’ve seen it!”

Marc: I’ve seen it! Yeah, yeah, yeah!

Nehemia: I’ve seen it in the 20th century! I don't know if people still do it. I'm sure somebody still does it.

Marc: Yeah, some people still do it.

Nehemia: So, it's incredible that what was written down, as far as we know, by the Masoretic scribes, had existed in the form of these hand signals at some point, and maybe at another point just in the form of a tune or a way of chanting. Or, as one scholar argues, prosody, meaning like… yeah, that's what I said too.

Basically, what she explained at a lecture she gave at SBL, that it's just like every language has - and I might be mis-explaining it - basically every language has sort of like a singsong to it.

Marc: A cadence.

Nehemia: A cadence, a sing song, intonation in a sense, maybe, she didn’t use that word. She used prosody, so I want to get this right. But basically, this recorded those speech patterns, and what's attractive about her explanation is that… So we have this whole system of what the accents do and how they interpret. They combine certain sets of words and break apart other words. But how would anybody know that hearing it, right?

Marc: I mean, the whole idea why it's called ta’amim, which means taste, flavor, it’s supposed to give you a flavor, a feel of the word, more than just the sense of the word.

Nehemia: Ta’amim can also mean reasons, or meanings.

Marc: It can also mean both of those.

Nehemia: So, the way they read it conveyed meaning, right?

Marc: Yes.

Nehemia: And look, there's this famous example where there’s this one sentence with seven words, that can mean seven different things, I don’t remember what it is. But basically, it's something like… I don’t know, it depends on the word that you emphasize that can change the whole meaning of the sentence.

Marc: You can do that in English.

Nehemia: Absolutely, we do it in every language.

Marc: Every language.

Nehemia: That was her point, that it's part of the natural patterns of language, and no one's ever attempted to explain the ta’amim, the accent marks, the trope in that way. And so, she's trying to figure out, “Okay, how does this apply to that now that we have these terms in linguistics?”

Marc: I suspect some of the things like pazeh, for example, might be sarcasm or emphasis, certainly, really emphatic.

Nehemia: Shalshelet, obviously is emphasis, right? “Va’yitmameah’eah’eah’eah.”

Marc: Exactly.

Nehemia: Okay, that one I know. I actually did lain, I read from the Torah a few years ago. I did it once at my bar mitzvah, and it was horrible. It was horrible because I didn't understand, I came from a family where nobody sang. My father would sing Shabbat songs on Shabbat and we would say, “Dad please stop, it hurts to hear you.” Because he couldn't carry a tune. And then the rabbi tried to explain to me reviah, a rising tone, and I’m like, “Do I stand up as I'm saying it?” I literally didn't understand what he was saying.

And then I decided, about five years ago, I said, “Now that I understand a little bit better about music theory,” I don't know all that much. I said, “I want to go, and I want to actually read from the Torah.” And I started going to the synagogue every Shabbat, and one Shabbat, they said, “We have no one to read Shlishi,” or whatever it was. And I'm like, “I will do it,” and I was so nervous! I got up there to read from - this was a conservative synagogue in Dallas - I got up there and this guy pulls out a book and he says, “If you don't know it, you can read it from the book.” I'm like, “No, I prepared it. I can do it.” And I did it.

Marc: Kol hakavod.

Nehemia: Did it hurt people's ears? Maybe. But I was able to do it, and I'm like, “Okay, that's off the checklist.” And I want to say it was my bar mitzvah portion, but I don't know, this was like five years ago, so I don’t remember, it probably wasn’t. No, I think it was something in Devarim, and my bar mitzvah portion was Va’yishlach.

Marc: Well done.

Nehemia: I'm still traumatized by that. So, you found a text that teaches children how to do trop, and hopefully it was better than the rabbi who tried to teach me, because he never explained it really well.

Marc: I hope so, he’s obviously taken some care to find the verses that had all of the different notes on there.

Nehemia: Oh, that’s cool.

Marc: And it's tiny. And it was written on…

Nehemia: How did you find it?

Marc: I just stumbled across it.

Nehemia: That’s how it happens often, isn't it?

Marc: Literally, because you're always looking for stuff, you stumble across other stuff that you weren’t expecting to stumble across.

Nehemia: Right.

Marc: And I was in, looking in real, flipping through the folders with the different manuscripts in, then I went, “Oh, this is interesting,” because I recognized the notes. “I haven’t seen anything like that before, that's really interesting.”

Nehemia: So, do they look like the notes that we have today? Or do they look like the notes in the Aleppo Codex?

Marc: They're similar to today, but they're not exactly the same. But they have different names, that's the thing.

Nehemia: Oh! Give me an example.

Marc: That will be in the article.

Nehemia: Okay, fair enough.

Marc: That will be in the article. There's a lot of different names, because a lot of them are actually in Arabic.

Nehemia: Oh, wow.

Marc: So, I had to get Professor Khan and Ben to help me on that one, because I have no Arabic whatsoever. Aramaic? Fine. But Arabic? No. And some of them were Aramaic, and some of them were in Hebrew, it was a real mixed bag of different things.

Nehemia: I was really shocked when I moved to Israel and I found out that not everybody calls it nachteh, nachta? The Sephardim will call it etnach.

Marc: Well, you just called it revi'iyah.

Nehemia: Reviah.

Marc: And I call it revee’ee.

Nehemia: Okay.

Marc: Because that's what I learned.

Nehemia: Oh, interesting!

Marc: Everybody has slightly different pronunciations.

Nehemia: And then I found between Ashkenazi, and Sephardim, and Yemenite, there's different names.

Marc: Yep, different names.

Nehemia: They’re not completely different, a lot of them are like nachteh, and etnachta, are just two forms of the same thing.

Marc: I think munach in this particular manuscript was shofar, because it looks like a mini, little shofar. So, all completely different names.

Nehemia: Wow. Were any of these… well, okay, let's move on.

Marc: Yeah, let’s move on because that will come out soon.

Nehemia: So, people can read this on the Genizah Research Unit at Cambridge University? We’ll throw up a link when that comes out.

Marc: Yeah, yeah, yeah, people should go to the Genizah website, there's lots of stuff on there all the time.

Nehemia: Okay. And you mentioned something about a blog, you also did something in the blog for the Genizah Research Unit?

Marc: So, the blog that’s currently being edited is around why it's so important to go and see the manuscripts in reality just to see what it’s on, so actually that particular one was on paper, and it was rag paper.

Nehemia: Oh, wow, yeah.

Marc: I could tell because of the fibers. To see the size, I had to go and measure it because there were no measurements on the thing. And one of the most important finds that I've had, which is the core of the book for the Sefer Tagin - because I’d first came across it on a screen, I had no sense of its scale. Whereas when I saw it in this office, on that desk, it's actually quite tiny, it's a notebook. But I thought it was this massive manuscript, but it's not, it's literally a scholar’s notebook.

Nehemia: So, I have a great story about scale. I was looking at this one manuscript, it’s a Hebrew translation of the New Testament, the Epistle of James, I want to say, and it belonged to King Henry XIII, and it's called Royal… something or another, it's part of the Royal Collection because it was personally his copy. And I had assumed that because it had the word ‘royal’ in it, that it was this massive thing, and I got to the British Library a few years ago, and it fit in my hand. It was literally something somebody maybe would put in his pocket when he was traveling, maybe even a curiosity.

Marc: Then it tells you what it was used for, and how it was used.

Nehemia: Well, yes and no. Meaning, part of me thinks maybe it was just a curios, a curiosity. You have these little Torah scrolls that are - maybe you could talk about that - the curiosity Torah Scrolls, I don't if anybody ever read from these - the ones that are like this big.

Marc: I wouldn’t be able to, not unless I was doing this!

Nehemia: Right! You’ve seen those, right? Well, they have one at the Memorial Scrolls Trust that you've worked at as well. What were those for? Do you know anything about those?

Marc: I mean, they're probably personal travel scrolls, because rabbis would go from community to community and they would take them with them, partly to study, and partly to use if the community didn't have a Torah.

Nehemia: Okay.

Marc: One of my friends in Canada, he is a rabbi and he moves around communities, and he has a small Torah.

Nehemia: That’s interesting, even today they’re doing that?

Marc: Even today.

Nehemia: That's really interesting! So, it's something you could throw in your saddlebag or something like that.

Marc: What is it… the Frisco Kid!

Nehemia: Frisco Kid!

Marc: It’s the Frisco Kid.

Nehemia: No, but this is much smaller than that.

Marc: Yeah.

Nehemia: This is a Torah that’s literally this big, and you look closely, and you’re like… And I was surprised, there's one in Oxford I looked at, and it has corrections. I’m like, “How did they even know there’s a mistake, it's so small!”

Marc: Because they do, I mean it's also for study, because we study from a Chumash, but they studied from…

Nehemia: No, but these were relatively modern.

Marc: Oh, okay, that’s interesting.

Nehemia: This might have been 17th, 18th, 19th century. Somebody once told me that they would give these as a gift to the Czar when he came to a Jewish village or something.

Marc: Possible, certainly in some communities they would… so one of my books, one of my children's books, is called The Empty Torah, and it's about…

Nehemia: So, you've written books, and books for children?

Marc: Yeah, teenagers actually, but I’ve written some children's books and illustrated them as well.

Nehemia: So, there's a book called The Empty Torah.

Marc: The Empty Torah. So, The Empty Torah is based on the Megillat Syracuse, and that story is about when the king would come to the village, to show honor to him, they would bring out the Sifrei Torah and they would parade them in front of him.

Nehemia: Okay.

Marc: But actually, one year, the sages decided that he shouldn't get that honor because he's just a non-Jewish King. So, we're not going to put the Torah, we're just going to take the empty cases, the tick, or you say teek, the tick, which is this up right thing, which is what I read from him in our synagogue because it’s a Sephardi community.

Nehemia: Wait, that's important, we should explain that. Today, most Torah Scrolls that we see…

Marc: They’re wrapped in…

Nehemia: They’re wrapped in velvet.

Marc: Yeah.

Nehemia: But, in the Sephardic world…

Marc: Or Yemenite.

Nehemia: They’re put in what’s called a tick, or a teek, or Yemenite, and that’s a box, a wooden box.

Marc: It’s a wooden box, often with silver and gold and other things on it, but it could just be a plain wooden box.

Nehemia: Okay. So, they brought out an empty teek.

Marc: So, they brought out empty ones, but there was a guy who converted, and he knew that they were faking it, basically, and he told the king. And so, the king got really angry, and he came unexpectedly to the village.

Nehemia: Okay.

Marc: But the prophet Elijah had come to the warden of the synagogue the night before, and he told him to fill the cases of the Torah. And he’d sort of sleepwalked to…

Nehemia: I’ve got to stop you here. This isn't a story you made up, right?

Marc: No, no, no, this is an actual megillah.

Nehemia: This is a medieval document?

Marc: No, this is a megillah. So, there are Purim Ktanim, Small Purims. There are many, many different scrolls that have been written by different communities, when Jews have been saved from persecution.

Nehemia: Okay. This is something in Syracuse, Sicily, or something?

Marc: So, in fact, in Sicily, they’ve brought this back as a tradition, and they now read a megillah.

Nehemia: And this is a few hundred years old or something?

Marc: Yeah, and they read the Megillah Syracuse now.

Nehemia: So, as far as we know, this is a story that actually happened 500, 600 years ago or something?

Marc: Yeah.

Nehemia: Okay. So, Elijah comes…

Marc: Maybe Elijah was not in it, but anyway, in some way in the story…

Nehemia: The way they told the story, Elijah was in it.

Marc: In the story…

Nehemia: I’ve got to stop you there. So, you didn’t add the Elijah part? That’s actually in Megillat Syracuse?

Marc: That’s in the Megillah Syracuse.

Nehemia: Okay, so they claimed Elijah came.

Marc: Yeah.

Nehemia: Okay, that’s cool.

Marc: So, in effect Elijah came, and he basically told the beadle of the synagogue, the warden, to fill them. So when the king came, he said, “I would like to see this Torah of Moses. Could you open them for me?” And he's got all these heavily armed soldiers.

Nehemia: And he think's "Gotcha!" the king is thinking.

Marc: And the converted guy, who’s a turncoat, he's going, “Ah, got them now.” And they're all petrified, they're absolutely scared livid because they don't know that it's been changed over. Anyway, he opens one, and there’s a scroll inside, and everyone goes, “Ohh!” And he opens another, and there’s a scroll inside.

Nehemia: Wait, the congregation doesn't know that Elijah warned…

Marc: The congregation didn’t know.

Nehemia: … the gabbai, or whoever.

Marc: Yeah, the gabbai.

Nehemia: The deacon. Okay, oh wow.

Marc: And he's done this in his sleep, so he's not aware of it either.

Nehemia: Oh!

Marc: Right. And everybody opens the things, and scroll after scroll, they’re there.

Nehemia: Okay.

Marc: And it’s a miracle, and everybody’s safe, and the king is happy, and the other guy gets hanged.

Nehemia: Wow! So they had some kind of annual celebration about this.

Marc: And then they called it an annual celebration.

Nehemia: In Sicily.

Marc: And there are many, many of those.

Nehemia: That’s pretty cool. I didn’t know that.

Marc: There’s Megillat Mitzraim, there’s all sorts of stuff.

Nehemia: What’s Megillat Mitzraim? Do you know that story?

Marc: Another time, another time.

Nehemia: So, you wrote a book telling over this story from the Middle Ages.

Marc: Yeah. What I did is, I did an illustration on the front that was in a 15th century style, illuminated manuscripts, and then I did pretend woodcuts inside to tell the story.

Nehemia: That’s cool.

Marc: I was just nice, and eventually I will actually do a critical edition of it because there are different versions of it flying around.

Nehemia: Oh, wow. So, talk about your book. Since we’ve last met, you have a book that was published.

Marc: Yes.

Nehemia: Published by Brill, a very respectable publisher, and it’s on the Sefer Tagin. In fact, you know what we're going to do? We're going to end this part of the program, and in the second part he's going to tell us about Sefer Tagin, about this ancient document which contains information about letters and…

Alright, in the next episode we’ll come back. Thank you for joining us, and any final words for this part of the program that you want to share with people?

Marc: Please visit the website.

Nehemia: What’s the website? Tell the people.

Marc: And that’s sofer.co.uk. It’s really easy, S-O-F-E-R.co.uk. And there's several stories, and there's also a Facebook page with videos and stuff.

Nehemia: What’s the Facebook page called?

Marc: It’s Mordechai Pinchas.

Nehemia: Okay, we'll put up a link on NehemiasWall.com.

Marc: And as I said, there are videos, and pages, and lots of photos of the different stories and tales, tales of Torahs, Torah tales.

Nehemia: You should make that the name of your website.

Marc: Torah Tales?

Nehemia: I don't think Torah Tales, it should be Tales of Torah. I like that better, but whatever. Alright, TOT, you heard it here. Thank you for joining us Marc, Mordechai, shalom.

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