Hebrew Voices #181 – The Woman Who Writes Torah Scrolls: Part 1

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Avielah: Andevery time you see God’s name written by this particular scribe, you’ll see it written like that.

Nehemia: Really?

Avielah: Because there is a tradition. Not everyone writes God’s name like this.

Nehemia: Shalom, this is Nehemia Gordon, and welcome to Hebrew Voices. I’m here today in London, England with Avielah Barclay, who is a soferet STaM. She is a professional Jewish scribe who writes STaM, which is Torah scrolls, phylacteries, and mezuzas, right? Do you write all three of those?

Avielah: I do write all three of those.

Nehemia: Wow. So, I wanted to start off with… we were discussing before we started about whether you’re a sofer STaM or a soferet STaM. Soferet is the feminine. Normally what people say, and by normally I mean… almost every time in my life I’ve ever heard the term, it was sofer STaM.

Avielah: Yep.

Nehemia: And STaM is an acronym for “Sefer Torah, Tefillin, Mezuzah.”  “Torah scroll, phylacteries,” and “mezuzas”. Which you’ll talk about… we’ll talk about. So, you’re a soferet STaM. You self-identify as a woman, and you are a woman!

Avielah: That’s right!

Nehemia: Okay. You self-identify as soferet STaM because you are. So, is it unusual? I feel like I’m asking a loaded question. It is unusual to be a soferet STaM. Of all the working professional scribes in the world, let’s put it that way, what percentage are sofrot (feminine) versus sofrim (masculine)?

Avielah: Well, I couldn’t put an exact number on it, but it is very unusual. But it’s getting less and less unusual all the time. So, that’s the important part. The very vast majority of Hebrew ritual scribes, and I’m not just talking about being able to do Hebrew calligraphy, it’s not only Hebrew calligraphy, it’s Hebrew calligraphy weighed down by thousands of rules and centuries of tradition.

Nehemia: Yeah. And when you say thousands of rules, you literally mean thousands of rules.

Avielah: I mean…

Nehemia: Oh boy, here we go. So that’s the book full of the rules for being a… I like the term Hebrew ritual scribe.

Avielah: Right. Well, I mean, I think that’s the best way to describe it in English, myself.

Nehemia: Well, it’s a good description. I like it.

Avielah: Because there’s a lot of ritual attached to it, and the items that we create are used ritually. So, it doesn’t include everything. Obviously, a ketubah, a Jewish wedding contract, is also used in ritual. It’s used in a wedding, right? And so is a get, a Jewish divorce, used in a ritual, but anyone can write those. You just have to make sure that you are writing them correctly.

Nehemia: So, I think we need to back up here for the audience.

Avielah: A little bit.

Nehemia: So, this is almost a profound concept. Let’s start with the fact that Jews today write scrolls, which is an ancient technology which most of the world stopped using on a wide basis in the 2nd or 3rd or 4th century, something like that. Jews were using scrolls… and this is actually a bit debated.

Avielah: Right, because different cultures moved over to codices at that point, what we know as a book now, and didn’t keep using scrolls, yeah.

Nehemia: Right. But Jews continued to use scrolls, even for non-ritual texts, up until probably, we believe, the 8th century. And “we believe” is another way of saying this is what scholars guess based on almost no evidence.

Avielah: Yes. Well, we have that dark area, don’t we? Where there’s very little written material. It’s just poof for a few centuries, as you know, and then, oh, it’s back again. It’s like someone turned out the light, and now it’s back on.

Nehemia: Yeah, that’s really interesting. So, it ends with the Dead Sea Scrolls, and more particularly the Bar Kokhba Scrolls in 135 CE, and then the next time we have written manuscripts… it’s a bit debatable, but it’s sometime around the 800’s. Maybe there are one or two things from the 400’s and the 700’s. There could be a few things like that, but they’re generally Torah scrolls, which is kind of the point we’re trying to get to.

But as far as codices, or codexes, that is, book form, those start to show up in the 800’s. And full-blown in the 900’s. They’re the standard thing. People are still using Torah scrolls even today though, in the 21^st century.

So, let’s start with that. Why are Jews using a technology that went out of vogue in the 3rd century CE or the 9th century, depending on which community you were in? Why are they still using that in the 21st century? That’s the question.

Avielah: Well, there are a lot of reasons. If you want the practical reason, then obviously technology, book technology, did change. And it changed at different rates and with different materials, right? So, inks changed, styluses changed, depending on the place, and we got different materials also coming from different parts of the world. So, you know, we didn’t have paper until China invented it, and then it made its way over, for example. We used to only use gvil, this more tanned leather, until parchment was invented in Turkey.

Nehemia: Well, papyrus existed, but we still didn’t use papyrus.

Avielah: No, that’s true. Papyrus was used earlier, obviously, because that’s basically the advent of writing, where we used… when I say “we” I mean humanity who was writing, were using reeds, such as this, that come from the Middle East. This is an Iranian reed, that’s what we would call it now. It’s a Persian reed, and they would write on papyrus.

Nehemia: Is that because it came from Iran? Or is that a style of reed?

Avielah: You can grow it in other places. I didn’t import this from Iran. But that’s a valid question.

Nehemia: So, it’s a style of reed.

Avielah: It’s a variety of reed. I’m not a plant specialist. I’m not a botanist.

Nehemia: Oh, you mean the style of the actual plant.

Avielah: The actual plant, yeah. Not the way it’s cut, no.

Nehemia: Let’s talk about that for a second. The classic image that we have, for most people, I think, is that Moses was sitting around, and there was a feather coming out, and he was writing a scroll. Did Moses use a feather, a quill?

Avielah: Moses did not use a quill. Moses did not use a feather. I can pretty much guarantee that. Basically, all writing with ink and stylus back then, like in Egyptian times, would have been done on papyrus, and using a reed. And in the beginning, it was…

Nehemia: What do you mean by stylus?

Avielah: When I say stylus, I just mean any pointy thing, as it were. These aren’t pointy per se, because they’re cut, as you can see, so that they have a broad nib, and they’re all cut in slightly different ways. This one was actually made for me by a Bukharan sofer who’s a friend of mine.

Nehemia: Ooh, okay.

Avielah: Yeah, and he’s a sofer, so that’s how they cut reeds in Bukhara if you’re a Jew.

Nehemia: And Bukhara is in Central Asia, where there were Jews up until the fall of the Soviet Union, when they were all ethnically cleansed.

Avielah: Yeah, and some escaped to the US and some escaped to Israel, and there’s still a little valley, I think. Yeah, you should talk to a friend of mine, Reuben. He’s an expert. He’s a Bukharan Jew in the United States. So, a stylus is…

Nehemia: So, a reed is a type of stylus?

Avielah: Yeah, because “stylus” is a more general term. A stylus could also be… you could maybe refer to this as a stylus. This is my bone folder; it’s made out of elk bone.

Nehemia: Wait, what is that?

Avielah: Well, a bone folder is something used in bookbinding, but you also use it in sofrut.

Nehemia: And sofrut is the Hebrew word for scribal arts.

Avielah: Yes. So, when you’re writing or repairing Sifrei Torah (Torah scrolls), or tefillin, or…

Nehemia: Mezuzot.

Avielah: …Mezuzot, or actually Megilot as well, Megilat Esther, the Book of Esther, you use this to score the lines because you have to imprint the lines into the parchment.

Nehemia: Okay, that’s what you use.

Avielah: It’s what I use. My husband, who you have already interviewed, actually uses a wooden dowel with a rose thorn.

Nehemia: Wow!

Avielah: Because that’s what his teacher taught him, and we have different teachers. So, this, as long as it’s either vegan or comes from an animal that is kosher if you were to eat it… so elk is fine because it’s a kind of deer, and deer are ruminants. They chew their cud and have cloven hooves, so according to the Torah we’re allowed to eat them.

Nehemia: And they’re quite delicious, I can say from personal experience.

Avielah: Where I’m from, in Canada, you can get kosher bison and venison.

Nehemia: I’ve had elk.

Avielah: Num, num, num.Yeah, yeah. So, you can use it for burnishing as well. I actually used this last week to burnish…

Nehemia: Tell us what you mean by burnishing.

Avielah: Burnishing is when you want to flatten a surface. So, if you’re going to do, say, for example, gold leaf, which we’re not allowed to do in STaM; that is a specific rule that they discuss in the Talmud, saying you cannot put gold letters in a Torah scroll, otherwise that invalidates the whole thing. But when I make Judaica, like ketubot, wedding contracts, or prayers, or whatever psalms for people, then if they want to have gold leaf, I will burnish it. You can use a stone; you can use something like this. It just gives the metal a really lovely, mirror-like finish, so that it’s brighter.

Nehemia: So, I want to go back to this. You said that anybody can write a… well, what were the things?

Avielah: Well, a get, you really need to be Jewish and a scribe, because there are so many rules attached to gittin.

Nehemia: Okay, and the get is the certificate of divorce.

Avielah: Right, and the certificate of divorce in some ways is actually more important than the wedding contract, because at least in Judaism, in ancient Judaism, the ketubah was important because then it outlined the responsibilities, and duties, and rights, et cetera, of a husband and a wife, and that is important. But a get was more important, in some ways, because we needed to be really clear who was free to marry whom. But a ketubah, as long as you know Hebrew well enough, or Aramaic, whatever text you’re going to use, to not make an error, then you’re good to go. But with a get, you really do need to be a Jewish scribe. It’s more of a closed practice, like a lot of Judaism is a closed practice.

Nehemia: What do you mean by a closed practice?

Avielah: I mean, only Jews can do it, and some of the practices are only for certain kinds of Jews. For example, I’m not a Kohen, I’m never going to be the high priest, so I don’t need to know any of those rules. Although it’s very interesting, and if I were ever invited to do anything a high priest would do, for example, I would not do it, because it’s not for me. That’s all. So, that is closed to me. Ithas nothing to do with my gender, it has to do with the fact that I’m a Yisrael. I’m just a regular Jew. I’m not from that lineage, right? And it’s the same with anything Levitical. And again, some people would say, “Well it’s also because of your gender,” but it’s not for me. So, it’s the same thing; certain things are for everybody, certain things are just for Jews, and certain things are just for certain kinds of Jews because we have a hierarchy.

Nehemia: So, this is really interesting. I want to nitpick here on a small point you just made in passing, which is that there are three categories of Jews: Kohen, Levi, and the third category isn’t called Yehudi, Jew, it’s Yisrael. Which is just another way of saying a regular Israelite who’s not a Kohen, meaning a priest, or not a Levi.

Avielah: An Israelite, yeah.

Nehemia: That’s really interesting. Alright, so let’s go back to…

Avielah: The technology; why are we still using this technology in the 21st century? Well, on the one hand, tradition is really important in Judaism; any kind of Judaism. It doesn’t matter what brand or denomination of Judaism someone may ascribe to, it’s still been influenced by our traditions to one extent or another.

And when it comes to the Masora, the tradition with scribal practice, although there is more than one way of doing it, it’s definitely a very specific tradition. And it has always been done Ish m’pi ish, literally, “mentored from man to man”. It literally means from the mouth of one man to another. But in my case, it would be isha because I’m a woman. So, it’s been handed down for hundreds of years, thousands of years. When I say that, there has been some evolution of the tradition, and depending on what part of the Jewish Diaspora someone may have learned in, they might do things differently.

So, for example, a Mizrahi, or a Yemenite, or a Maghrebi, or a Sephardi scribe is more likely to use a reed, it can just be bamboo, it doesn’t have to be a particular kind of reed, than a feather. Because really the Ashkenazi, the Western and Eastern European Jews, were using feathers. And why is that? Because when Jews started moving into Europe, during Roman times, the further north we got, we realized that the same varieties of reeds don’t grow in Europe as grow in the Middle East and the Near East.

So, you could not… this is one of the reasons why Europe could never have invented writing, at least not in this way! It’s because the reeds that grow here you can’t use as a pen. There’s actually a halacha, there’s a rule, in here, that talks about, “Oh, you have to use a reed. You must never use anything else but a reed. We always use reeds.” I’m paraphrasing, of course.

And then another voice chimes in, because this is a collection of many, many sources over the generations, and says, “What about feathers? We can use feathers, can’t we? Why did we start using feathers? Because we all use feathers.” And the answer comes, “Well, why do we use feathers? Because they don’t make reeds like they used to.”

Nehemia: Wow. So, it was a practical consideration.

Avielah: Because Christian scribes used feathers, and we could not find the reeds, so we started using feathers. Depending on where Jews lived, they would adopt Islamic book arts, perhaps, because of the materials available. Or, out in China; you’ve seen Kaifeng Torah scrolls, right? Those are also made differently because of the available book arts and available technologies.

Nehemia: Oh, the… I was going to say parchment, but I know that’s not correct. The leather.

Avielah: It’s more like an alum-tawed goat. It’s a white, white leather.

Nehemia: It’s the coolest material I’ve ever seen in a Torah scroll.

Avielah: Isn’t it amazing?

Nehemia: Yeah. The Chinese scrolls are just so distinctive.

Avielah: The other thing I wanted to say about the tradition is the fact that we can’t just print them, or silkscreen them, or whatever, because the thing that puts the sanctity into them… because you’re obviously well aware of the kind of kavod, the kind of respect, that we pay to Torah scrolls for example, and the deference we have for these objects. Not in any inappropriate way, it’s not worshipping the objects, obviously, but they as a vessel hold the word of God. And what’s important is that the person who writes them has the appropriate kavanah, the appropriate intention, and the right sort of holy consciousness, and that is what imbues these things with the sanctity. That’s why you have to say each word before you write it. You have to say each letter before you write it, and you have to make a special declaration every time you’re going to write God’s name because you’re never supposed to write God’s name…

Nehemia: What’s the declaration?

Avielah: Well, it’s basically, “I’m writing this name for the sake of the sanctity of the holiness of the name.” Some people also say, “…for the sanctity of this particular piece of STaM,” whatever it is, so if it’s a Sefer Torah or a mezuza, or something like that. But you need to do that, and there are different traditions around that, some say. You have to make a special dip of your pen…

Nehemia: Oh really?

Avielah: Yeah and have that consciousness even when you’re dipping. And then others say, “Oh, if you dip you still need to test your pen, because you don’t want to dip then write, because if you make a blob, you will have blotted God’s name, and that’s very…”

Nehemia: And you can’t erase the mistake; the “blob” mistake, right?

Avielah: No, no, you can’t. That’s one of the many, many rules. You can only correct it by adding ink. And you can’t correct by carving away or shaping. That’s another reason why we can’t have things like screen printing and stuff like that. Although we have books that we use in the synagogue, obviously, that are a printed version that we can read, we can’t have a public reading. We need to have a scroll, and we need to have somebody who is minimally observant, you know, Shabbat, kashrut, and that sort of thing, to be writing those things for us.

Nehemia: I want to dwell on this point for a minute. This is a key… I wouldn’t assume that the audience knows this, that there are these three ritual objects: the Torah scroll, phylacteries, and we can describe what that is, I suppose, and mezuzas, which you can show us, actually. They are these three ritual objects that have to fulfill certain specifications and be prepared in a certain way in order to be valid for ritual use. That’s basically what it comes down to. Is that right?

Avielah: Yes, and there’s a long chain of that. It begins, actually, well before the scribe. It begins with when you’re making the skin, the hide, into parchment. Actually, it starts with the animal; the animal has to be kosher. The feather you write with has to come from a kosher bird that you would be allowed to eat.

Nehemia: So, you can’t use an eagle’s feather?

Avielah: Never, ever. Then the whole thing is not kosher. The whole thing is pasul, and if you did something like that, and then you sold it to someone and they didn’t know, all the blessings they would say on that would be in vain, and they would all land on you. There’s going to be a special place in the afterlife for people who do that.

Nehemia: Just so the audience understands, and it’s not just a tradition, meaning it’s a halakhically binding, if you consider it binding, ritual that you hear the Torah read every week in the synagogue. And if the Torah is read from a scroll that wasn’t prepared according to all these specifications, then you haven’t fulfilled the duty. Is that essentially what it is?

Avielah: It’s essentially true. Now, we’re very lucky that God is merciful. So, if it’s just through a mistake, then… you know, humans do make mistakes. And that’s one of the reasons why when you write something like a Torah scroll, not only do you have to be so, so, careful about copying it exactly from another Torah scroll, or from a book that we call a Tikun le’Sofrim. I have a little bit of one. I have just Breishit here, just Genesis, it’s just a small… and it has all of the top and the bottom of the columns, and it has little codes on it. So, it tells you how much you have to stretch or cramp your letters. And it also tells you if one of God’s names is coming up. You see, it says “kodesh” over here, because sometimes there are words that can refer to idols or things that are not God, so you have to be careful not to sanctify those, because that…

Nehemia: That’s really interesting. I saw a Torah scroll when I was doing my research, where there’s a phrase where it says, “Elohei Adoni Avraham“, it’s in Genesis 24, “the God of my Lord Abraham.” And the word “Adoni” was cut out, leaving a blank space, and then rewritten in very small letters above the line. And it’s very clear to me, at least, that what the scribe did is, he wrote “Elohei“, and then instead of “Adoni” he wrote the exact same four letters, but with the thought that it was one of God’s titles. And when he realized that he’s like, “Oh no, I wrote a sacred name here!” Even though “Adoni” means “my Lord”, referring to Abraham, he wrote the Lord,referring to God. And so, he had to cut it out, because now he has a holy name where it doesn’t belong. Even though it’s graphically identical to the word that means “my Lord”. Meaning, anybody besides that scribe would look at that, and could never even theoretically know it was done wrong, but he knew.

Avielah: Right, and that is exactly why you have to be able to trust your scribe, like you trust your lawyer, your doctor, your jeweler, et cetera. You need to be able to trust them 100%. Not that they’ll never make a mistake, but that if they do make a mistake, they will make it right and they’ll be honest about it. You know, I’ve made mistakes. It’s awful, but it happens. And just to add to your story, some opinions would say he shouldn’t have just cut that name out. He would have pasul-ed the entire yeria, the entire sheet of parchment, and he would have had to start that sheet again, just rewrite that entire sheet, and he would have had to bury that.

Nehemia: This is in the Middle Ages. They quite routinely cut out the name of God.

Avielah: Yeah, yeah. And you can still do that. You’re really supposed to cut out other things on either side, and not just the name of God, but again, there are different opinions. And practice has changed, like I said, not just by location, but over time to some extent.

Nehemia: Yeah, I found one passage where it talked about if you left out a word, that what it talks about in the medieval literature is you write it above the line.

Avielah: Yep!

Nehemia: And this rabbi in the 19th century or something says, “Today nobody will know what that is and they’ll be confused, so don’t do it.”

Avielah: Yeah.

Nehemia: Because they’re not used to it. Back in the day, meaning even four or five hundred years ago, they would routinely write entire verses above the line. And now they don’t do it, or if they do it it’s extremely rare, I suppose.

Avielah: I’ve seen that. Yeah, it’s very practical to be able to do that, and it’s not ideal, but at the same time, when you come across that, at least you caught the mistake.

Nehemia: Yeah. It’s probably more common, I would think, in an Esther scroll. Let’s go back to this. We have Torah scrolls, tefillin, which is phylacteries, and mezuza, and Esther scroll. Does that have to be written with the proper intent? Meaning, there’s specific intent that goes into writing those first three things, right? And that’s why you need to trust the person. Like whenever you write God’s name, you have to be thinking “this is a holy name”. Right? And you were saying some people even say the words, “I’m writing this for the sake of…”

Avielah: And say each letter as well.

Nehemia: Tell me that.

Avielah: Because that’s one of the ways you avoid making a mistake. If you look at your layout guide, if you look at your tikun, and you’ve got that isolated so you’re not accidentally writing something from a different line…

Nehemia: So, open that up and show me a place where it has God’s name and tell me what you would do when you got to that.

Avielah: Okay, so right here, for example, it says “Kodesh” here.

Nehemia: Holy.

Avielah: Right. So, you go along, and you go, “Oh, look, here we go.”

Nehemia: Okay.

Avielah: And there’s a circle above it. And there’s actually another one down here. See? Circle…

Nehemia: Let’s find my favorite one, the Tetragrammaton.

Avielah: There’s also instances where it says “chol“, because it might be referring to idols or something like that. So, it makes sure that you don’t sanctify it. It also takes your attention to that.

Nehemia: Right. Like, for example, in the Ten Commandments, where it says “Lo ihye leccha Elohim acherim.” You shall not have other elohim…

Avielah: Exactly.

Nehemia: So, elohim there doesn’t refer to God.

Avielah: No. Don’t go running after other gods. That’s right. So, you can’t sanctify that word, because you’re talking about the other gods.

Nehemia: So, you have to make sure not to sanctify that word. That’s amazing.

Avielah: Exactly. Otherwise, you start again, and that’s your punishment.

Nehemia: We’ll talk about the mezuza, because that’s fascinating in and of itself. That’s like a special case, right? Of course, when I want to find it, I’m not finding it…

Avielah: That is exactly the same for me.

Nehemia: Okay, I know there’s one here in Genesis 15…

Avielah: I’ll tell you another story while you’re looking for it…

Nehemia: Yeah, tell me.

Avielah: So, I was writing part of… oh, yeah, that’s not what you’re looking for. This is not the “God’s name” you’re looking for.

Nehemia: Oh, okay, so I’m looking for where it says kodesh here.

Avielah: You’re looking for where it says kodesh, and then go across and you can see here we’ve got…

Nehemia: Right. So, I’ve seen other ones where it’s underlined, and they’ll write above it, “kodesh“.

Avielah: Right, yeah, sometimes they do that as well. It’s depending on the layout guide; there are different ways of doing it as long as they get your attention.

Nehemia: Oh, here is… so that is Alef-Dalet-Nun-Yud, right?

Avielah: Right, and that is “kodesh”. There are instances of a little word on the side, that instead of “kodesh” or “chol“, it actually says “safek“, which means… oh, here we go. There’s “chol”. So, here we go. This is “chol”, so you do not sanctify that.

Nehemia: Ahhh.

Avielah: It’s already warned you. “Don’t do it!”

Nehemia: Okay. It says “rak la’anashim ha’el”, “only to these people,” and “ha’el” means “these”, but it could also, if you didn’t have a context, it could be God.

Avielah: And if you’re not paying attention to what you’re doing, or if you don’t understand what it says. It needs to be all those things, right?

Nehemia: Right. Wow! So, you have to mentally form an intent in your mind that, “When I write this word…” Here’s an example of “Adoni”, my Lord – not referring to God. And it says “chol.”

Avielah: It says chol.

Nehemia: Which means non-holy, or non-sacred.

Avielah: Right.

Nehemia: We’ll talk about this in a second. So, that was interesting. I was trying to explain this to someone, and I actually wrote an academic journal article, and I referred to non-sacred words. And one of the peer reviewers said, “What do you mean? Isn’t every word in the Torah sacred?” Yeah, but not in this context. Meaning, a sacred word is one of the seven or ten names of God, and everything else is non-sacred. Even a title of God like “Rachum“, merciful one, is considered non-sacred, meaning you’re allowed to erase it.

Avielah: Yeah, there are seven that you have these extra special rules applied to them, but yes, in theory in Judaism, God has around 100 names. “Harachaman“, the Merciful One…

Nehemia: Right. But those you’re allowed to erase by traditional law, by Halacha, which means they’re considered chol, they’re considered non-sacred. Alright, so here we’re in Genesis 19 verse 5, and, oh, it’s talking about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. And it says Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey…

Avielah: Right, and it says “kodesh”.

Nehemia: And it says “holy”. So, how would you do this? You come to this, you’re a scribe, you’re working. You’re writing a Torah scroll. What do you do?

Avielah: So, I get to that line, and I generally will have something over, like that, and I just move this down so that I…

Nehemia: That’s so cool! You know why that’s cool? Wait, I don’t know if people saw that. So, she has something that makes sure she only copies from the line she’s on, and not another line.

Avielah: It is so easy to copy from the wrong line because you often have repetition as well.

Nehemia: So, there are so many manuscripts, Torah scrolls even, where we have these scribal errors. Where it’s clear that the scribe’s eye jumped as he’s looking back and forth at his source, and his eye jumped from one line to the next line, and he missed an entire line. Then he has to come back, and he has to scratch out five lines, and rewrite them as four, or four, rewrite them as five… different scenarios…

Avielah: It’s not funny. That is where your burnisher comes in handy so you can re-prepare the surface of the parchment so you don’t get furry letters. You want to have nice, sharp letters.

Nehemia: Well, sometimes they get furry letters. And sometimes the entire page, after 800 years, the entire sheet, all the ink has flaked off except for those five lines that he rewrote. There, the ink stuck better. And sometimes it’s the opposite; everything is intact except for those lines.

Avielah: Right.

Nehemia: Alright, so you come here, and you mark off so you don’t go to the wrong line, and you write ki mashkhit normally. And now what do you do?

Avielah: The other thing you do is… I mean, what I do is I always have paper, just printer paper, just normal craft paper, down on top of the naked parchment, like the blank stuff that I haven’t written on yet. And then, where I’m writing, I’ll have this very close at hand so that I have it right in front of me. And then, like I said, I’ll cover everything up…

Nehemia: So, this is what you’re copying from?

Avielah: Right. So, I basically isolate everything that I’m doing to avoid mistakes. Partly because, again, some of them have tremendous significance and consequences, and other times… you just don’t want to waste your time. Let’s face it; it’s backbreaking work, literally. Then I would come to this, and then I’d go, “Okay, so ki – Kaf, Yud…”

Nehemia: Do you say the word “ki”? You say it out loud?

Avielah: Yeah. This is what I was taught. Now, you could speak to other sofrim or sofrot and ask them what they were taught. Some of it will be exactly the same and some of it will not be. Right. And you just do that, and then… but you take notes…

Nehemia: I want to stop you for a second. That is so interesting. So, one of the things I found in the medieval literature as I was working on my PhD dissertation is that there are two types of approaches, and I was dealing with Torah scrolls and God’s name. So, there are two approaches. One is: We examine in great minutiae and detail the Talmud and the writings of Maimonides, and we come to the conclusion as to what the law is. And there’s a completely different approach, which is, we go, and we ask the scribe down the street. And some of the top rabbis of the Middle Ages will say, “Well, yes, we’re supposed to do X, Y, Z, but I asked the scribes, and here’s what they do.”

Avielah: Right.

Nehemia: And that’s what I refer to as scribal praxis. Meaning, what did they do? In Hebrew we say, “Minhagei sofrim.” What is the act of practical thing done by scribes? And that might not line up with what the legal texts say, and that’s because the people who wrote the legal texts may not have known how to actually write a Torah scroll.

Avielah: They may not have been scribes, and not all scribes are rabbis.

Nehemia: So, there are three professions that required very specialized knowledge that even someone like Maimonides may not have had, which was a scribe, meaning a STaM scribe, specifically of Torah scrolls, tefillin and mezuzas, a mohel, a circumciser, and a shokhet, somebody who slaughters animals. Now, you might read all the books in the world about how you’re supposed to perform circumcision… I’m going to trust the guy who was taught by the other guy who did a thousand of them before he let the new guy do even one, and then supervise him. I’m not going to trust the guy who read a bunch of books. And so, this is kind of a specialized…

Avielah: No. You cannot be self-taught with this. You cannot be self-taught with any of those things.

Nehemia: Right. So, that’s fascinating to me.

Avielah: Because it’s actually not about you. It is about you in that you are bringing this, and you are the vessel, and you are providing it, and you are serving. But you’re not allowed to sign it. Other than that, this is the way that you are serving God and you’re serving your community. So, it’s not about you, it’s about everyone out there.

Nehemia: Talk about you’re not allowed to sign it.

Avielah: Who’s going to be reading it? You have to think about, “Is what I’ve written kosher? So, it’s fine. But is it hard to read? Is it ugly?”

Nehemia: I want to go to that. When you write a Torah scroll, you can’t sign it at the end and say, “This was done by Avielah.”

Avielah: No, no, no! Never. Never ever.

Nehemia: Okay.

Avielah: Not a Torah scroll. That’s another one of those very specific laws. Now, that being said, I did come across… this is one of my many stories. I have a million of them, because I’ve been doing this… in October it’ll be 20 years, since I earned my te’uda, since I officially became a soferet. I started studying Hebrew calligraphy from the ’90’s, and then I’ve been a Judaic artist since 1994, and then from ’97 I started learning sofrut. Because I was living in Canada, I was living in Victoria…

Nehemia: Wow. I’m so sorry for that, that you were living in Canada. I’m just kidding. The Great Northern Wasteland.

Avielah: Yes, yes, you know, some of my ancestors actually emigrated to the United States and fought on the side of the British during the American War of Independence.

Nehemia: Talk about mistakes…

Avielah: Yeah, and now it’s on tape. And obviously, they lost, so… they were given land in Ontario, they were given free farms in Ontario. They negotiated with the local First Nations People, and they were given farms in Ontario as a reward from the king, and they were given titles, and it’s the only title that’s recognized in Canada, “United Empire Loyalist”. I know all this is irrelevant so it’s going to be edited out.

Nehemia: Wow. No, no! We should keep this! This is a fascinating subject.

Avielah: You were the one that made the comment about being sorry that I’m Canadian.

Nehemia: Now you’re a refugee in the United Kingdom. Alright, let’s move on.

Avielah: I’m a U.K. citizen! I’m both.

Nehemia: Alright, so… let’s finish this.

Avielah: We don’t even know what we were talking about now.

Nehemia: No, let’s go back to this. So, you wrote the word “ki.” I think we lost our place. We’re now on page… where were we? Oh, here it is… “ki mashchit.” So, you actually say each word as you’re writing because that’s how you were taught.

Avielah: So then when you come to the end of Mashchit, then…

Nehemia: Presumably you don’t say God’s name.

Avielah: You don’t… well, we don’t know how to say God’s name really, do we? I know there’s a debate about that.

Nehemia: That’s a separate conversation.

Avielah: It is a separate conversation, but…

Nehemia: Let’s move on.

Avielah: What I would say is, I would make a verbal declaration that I am about to write this holy name for the sake of the mitzvah of Sefer Torah and for the sake of the holiness of the name. And that does not give you permission to write it, because really, you still should only ever write any of God’s names in STaM, in ritual items. You’re not supposed to just write them all over the place.

I saw online, someone was printing them on cushions, and I was just like, “Please don’t do that!” You know, you don’t want people sitting on God’s name on cushions. Then you would say Yud-Hey-Vav-Hey.

Nehemia: So, you would pronounce out each of the four letters…

Avielah: I would say the four letters, and I would still look each time. I know how to write this name, right? It’s stamped, like “simeni kachotem al libecha”, right? It’s stamped on my heart, this name. But I still look, and say it, and write, and look, and say it, and write. Because that’s what you do; that’s how you don’t make a mistake. Sometimes you still make a mistake, hopefully not with any of God’s names. You might also notice that the two “Heys” here are written differently.

Nehemia: Mm-hmm, they have crowns on them. Is that what you’re referring to?

Avielah: No… I mean like, see the gag and the regel? Like the roof and the leg here…

Nehemia: Oh, that’s intentional.

Avielah: That one looks like a Dalet, and this one is rounder, like a Resh. And then you see the little Yud, the foot, here, of this Hey is wider, and it’s got like a little foot sticking out, and then this one is really narrow. And every time you see God’s name written by this particular scribe, you’ll see it written like that.

Nehemia: Really?

Avielah: Because there is a tradition… not everyone writes God’s name like this, but there is a tradition that Yud is the dad, the first Hey is the mom, the Vav is the son, and the second Hey is the daughter.

Nehemia: Of what? I’m not trying to be…

Avielah: Life, the universe, everything. Forty-two. And the two Heys are differentiated from each other because mama energy is different than daughter energy. It’s not the same. All mamas are daughters, but they’re not all mamas.

Nehemia: I’m lost here.

Avielah: It’s a family. It’s a nuclear family. Not that that’s the only way to be a family, but…

Nehemia: So, that isn’t implying God is a family, is it?

Avielah: No, but it shows that in this particular tradition there’s this idea that “being,” because we know this; the Tetragrammaton, as the Greeks call it, that that is the verb “to be” in the present tense. Which is why when you’re speaking Hebrew you don’t say the verb “to be” in the present tense; you just skip over it. Right? Like, if you were going to translate it, it would just have that missing. If it was in a different tense…

Nehemia: In most contexts, yeah.

Avielah: Yeah, but you know what I’m talking about. And that is because it’s just “being”. It’s existence. And it’s got both genders here.

Nehemia: In other words, when you say, “the boy is big”, you say “hayeled gadol”, and the word “is” is not expressed in Semitic languages, usually, in the present tense.

Avielah: That’s right. But that’s why. Because “God is”. It’s like it says in the Bible, “I am which I am” or, “I am that I am” or, “I will be that I will be”.

Nehemia: Right, different ways of translating it.

Avielah: Exactly. So, that’s why we don’t say it. So, that is that tradition. Now, this is not part of the tradition that I was taught. I had two teachers. They taught me more in the German tradition. Mark was taught in more of a Polish tradition, although his teacher was Indian, and my teachers were Canadian and American, Turkish and Russian. But their teachers were. So, you teach what your teacher taught you.

So, I teach in the German tradition. There are different ways of writing. When you’ve seen my husband Mark’s writing, that’s very much more Polish. The way I write is like this, and it’s much more square. It’s much more, like, as I like to say, “eins zwei, eins zwei“. It’s very square, it’s very zero degrees, 90 degrees. And his is much more dancy, a bit rounder, because that’s generally how the scripts go. And there are different scripts in different countries, but of course, I’m not German. I’ve never lived in Germany, but that’s the tradition I was taught in.

As you know from looking at manuscripts, you can go, “Oh, well, this could have been written in a particular country, or it wasn’t necessarily written in this particular country of the Diaspora, it might have been written somewhere else by someone who was just trained that way.” Because now, with people moving around so much… I mean people always moved around, but it’s easier now.

Nehemia: We have a big problem with Italian manuscripts in that… So, a lot of manuscripts have what’s called a colophon, which is a section at the end where the scribe says, “It was the third day of the week of such and such month and year, and I wrote this for so-and-so.” But in most manuscripts that hasn’t survived, and in Torah scrolls it never existed. There are actually some exceptions, but that’s a different story.

Avielah: I have a story about an exception.

Nehemia: Ooh, I want to hear that. Well, there are a bunch of exceptions where the colophon is a forgery, but there are actually a bunch of real exceptions where it’s not a forgery. When I say a bunch, I mean a few dozen, maybe, that have ever been found. Maybe less than that.

Avielah: A lot from Megillat Esther.

Nehemia: No, I’m talking about Torah scrolls.

Avielah: I know. But with Megillat Esther also. Like these Italian ones, like these young women, and actually girls, that were writing Megillat Esther, like 200, 300, 400 years ago. Some of these Megillot Esther that have been up for auction in the last several years. And they all have colophons. And some of the sofrot today have colophons attached to their…

Nehemia: They do?

Avielah: …Megillot Esther. Yeah.

Nehemia: Oh, okay. So, the problem with Italian manuscripts where there’s no colophon or it’s a Torah scroll, is that in the instances where we do have a colophon, we will sometimes have the same scribe will write in Ashkenazi style, which is Northern European-German. The same scribe will write in the Sephardic style. The same scribe will write in the Italian style, and it really came down to the patron who bought the manuscript from them. It’s not necessarily a Torah scroll. It could be a book on medicine. He’ll say, “I want this in the Sephardic handwriting.” “I want this in the German handwriting.” And the scribes in Italy, especially Northern Italy, did all three fluidly, without a problem, and whoever ordered it and said, “This is the style I want,” he would write it in that style.

Avielah: Yeah.

Nehemia: So, you’ve got to be really careful. You look at a style and say, “Oh, that’s the writing of Northern Europe,” but it was really written in Venice. So, you’ve got to be careful with that.

Avielah: Yeah. You do, actually, and actually this sofer STaM, the Bukharan sofer STam I mentioned earlier who made this for me, he was askedto write a Torah scroll that Mark actually arranged for him to write for this community, but of course they were Ashkenazi. So, they were like, “Oh, he’s Bucharan? What is it going to look like? We want it to reflect us.” So, he was like, “It’s not a problem. I’ll write in your way.” And he did!

Nehemia: Wow.

Avielah: So, you know, that was a few years ago.

Nehemia: So, tell me about the colophons.

Avielah: The colophon. Well, obviously with Megillot Esther it’s quite common, especially with these young women. There have also been notes left behind. There was a Torah scroll that I checked, it must have been 15 years ago now, and I won’t say the community. I don’t tend to announce communities, because it’s their Torah and their business. So, I was checking it, and I was rolling through, and it obviously was very old. And it was made up of a couple of different scrolls that had sort of been patched together a bit, but it was very nice.

Nehemia: What do you mean it was made up of a bunch of scrolls?

Avielah: Well, sometimes if part of a sefer is damaged, you either will rewrite new and attach to that, or you will have different damaged parts and you amalgamate two other scrolls to get one good usable scroll.

Nehemia: I call that a “Franken-scroll”.

Avielah: Oh, you haven’t seen the Franken-scroll we have at our house! It’s literally a patchwork.

Nehemia: Okay! And I don’t mean that in a negative way.

Avielah: No, we don’t either!

Nehemia: I think Franken scrolls are beautiful because you think you have one scroll, and you realize “this is actually ten scrolls”.

Avielah: So many different traditions, yeah.

Nehemia: Exactly. And different periods and different styles…

Avielah: And it actually takes a lot of skill to be able to piece these together.

Nehemia: Yeah. Unless it’s Yemenite, because every Yemenite scroll is written according to the same tikun, so you could take any column from a Yemenite scroll and insert it into any other scroll.

Avielah: Yeah. Identical, that’s right.

Nehemia: It’s identical at least in terms of what’s in that column, maybe not what’s on each line.

Avielah: They also have more letters in their Torah scroll than the rest of us.

Nehemia: Really?

Avielah: Yes, they do. So, it’s all very well to say the Torah is identical for all Jews and always has been forever, but actually the Yemenites have, I think it’s eleven more letters.

Nehemia: Really?

Avielah: Yeah. But it doesn’t change the meaning of anything, which is important. It’s mostly just Yuds and Vavs, that sort of thing.

Nehemia: Meaning the spelling is slightly different.

Avielah: Yeah, it’s just the spelling. So, just like in Modern Hebrew, they would maybe insert a Vav somewhere that wouldn’t normally have a Vav because there are no vowels used in Modern Hebrew.

Nehemia: It’s worse than that. Two or three years ago, the Academy of the Hebrew Language decided they were going to change the spelling system. So, everything written ten years ago, if it’s reprinted today, is supposed to be updated. The word eema, Alef-Mem-Alef, for the last two thousand years it’s been Alef-Mem-Alef. They decided “No, it should be Alef-Yud-Mem-Alef. Because it’s “E”, and every time we have “E” we should put in a Yud.

Avielah: But we don’t need it.

Nehemia: I don’t need it! But that’s the rule they made.

Avielah: Yeah, yeah, and we don’t make those rules.

Nehemia: So, the spelling has changed in our lifetimes… in the lifetimes of babies! It’s that recent…

Avielah: Yeah, yeah, I know. That’s a good way of putting it, actually. God, it’s almost like the Academie Francaise, isn’t it? “We’ve made a decision, everyone!”

Nehemia: Oh no, it’s much worse.

Avielah: “We didn’t ask any of you, but we’ve made a decision.” So… the end of the story. So, I’m going through this Torah, and I’m taking notes. And, you know, it needs a little repair, but it’s not in too bad a shape because whoever fixed it last did a very good job. And I get to the end, and I go, “Oh, isn’t that interesting? An extra helek, I see.”

So, what that means is, at the end of the Torah, at the very end, where it ends with the word Yisrael, obviously, I noticed there was more stitching and extra parchment before we got to the actual wooden roller. And I thought, “It’s probably just because there hadn’t been enough at the end.” Because you really should have more at the end, because then when you roll…

Nehemia: So, an extra column?

Avielah: Well, there’s an extra piece. It wasn’t just a column. But you need to have more at both ends anyway so that the roller doesn’t damage the letters at either end. That’s just a practical…

Nehemia: Right.

Avielah: Then I opened it up, and I went “Oh!” Someone had written on this extra piece, “tikanti”. “I fixed this.”

Nehemia: Are you serious?

Avielah: I am serious! Very carefully, he wrote, “Tikanti, Eliezer Friedman, Pest, 1947.”

Nehemia: Wow.

Avielah: It gives me chills!

Nehemia: Wow! So, he said, “I fixed it,” so-and-so, and the year… and the place.

Avielah: His name is Eliezer Friedman, and I’m thinking, “1947? What sofer was in Pest in 1947 fixing Torahs? That has got to be the most incredible story!” Obviously, he wrote it all in Hebrew, so…

Nehemia: Wow! So, let’s start with… I’m going to assume he was part of the Neolog movement.

Avielah: I don’t know anything about… I would love to find out who he was.

Nehemia: So, that’s the largest denomination in Hungary. It’s actually one of the oldest denominations in modern Judaism. It’s older than the Reform movement, if I’m not mistaken. Today, it’s still the largest denomination in Hungary. And I’m guessing that in the Neolog movement, it’s okay to put a colophon… And I don’t know, I’m making stuff up. Because I don’t know. You’re right, that’s unbelievable!

Avielah: You don’t know! You’ve got me sitting right here, but you’re making stuff up.

Nehemia: No, meaning, I’m making it up in that I’m trying to hypothesize why would this have happened.

Avielah: Yeah, yeah!

Nehemia: This isn’t supposed to happen!

Avielah: Some say that if you do add an extra… you can’t write anything on the actual Torah scroll. That is adding to Torah. That is a massive no-no, as you know. But if you sew an extra piece on, and maybe write on the back, then it’s not adding to Torah.

Nehemia: Was this on the back?

Avielah: I don’t remember. It was a long time ago. But he did make a point of having extra parchment. Again, 1947, in Pest! Like, where is he getting this beautiful, white, new parchment? It was pristine.

Nehemia: Wow.

Avielah: And he had taken the trouble of sewing it on and then writing this. And I asked the rabbi, “Where did you get this scroll from?” And he’s like, “I don’t know.” So, I thought, “Okay.” I’ve asked around, some of the Hungarian Jews, and the Hungarian rabbinical students that I know here in London, and I don’t even know where to begin. But that…

Nehemia: That’s crazy.

Avielah: That is going to be a really good story. That’s going to be a book, a movie, a miniseries, a podcast. You don’t know this man’s story. It could be amazing.

Nehemia: That is a pretty incredible story. So, the colophons I know about, there are two types. Most of the colophons that are considered authentic are on Karaite Torah scrolls. They’re mostly in the Firkovich collection in St. Petersburg. A bunch of those are forgeries, but some of them are actually real. Some of them are authentic.

Avielah: Really? Are they really authentic?

Nehemia: Well, according to the scholars who studied them in the 19th-century they’re authentic, yeah.

Avielah: I’m sure they know more than I do.

Nehemia: There’s one that’s definitely authentic that is at Trinity College, Cambridge, and that’s also a Karaite scroll. It’s not actually a colophon, it’s a vow inscription. The guy had something that happened in his life, and he made a vow. “If I get through this, I’m going to dedicate a Torah scroll. I’m going to pay for a Torah scroll.” And when he finally has the Torah scroll written, at the end he writes out, “This is what happened…” and there are 10 signatures.

Avielah: Really? That is interesting. So, he was like, “I made this neder, and I have fulfilled my neder.”

Nehemia: That’s exactly right.

Avielah: Wow, 10 signatures; that sounds like maybe he had a big beit din there, like a minyan.

Nehemia: No, it’s kind of like there were ten witnesses. With Boaz, weren’t there 10 people at the Gate of Bethlehem? I don’t remember. Anyway, the other example, which is a mystery, is, there’s a Torah scroll from Otranto, which is Southern Italy, in the early 12th century, which has a colophon with a specific date. As far as we know, there were no Karaites in Italy in the 12th century, so you can’t blame it on the Karaites in this case. So, somebody decided, “Okay, I can write a colophon in the 12th century.” So, that already kind of makes sense, because it’s so long ago it was before some of these rules crystallized. I mean, the rules were there, but maybe they weren’t equally applied everywhere.

Avielah: Right.

Nehemia: But in 1947…

Avielah: Yeah, that’s very modern.

Nehemia: I mean, come on! We’ve got books that have been printed that say what you have to do and what you can’t do.

Avielah: As far as the origin, like, the very beginnings of some of these rules, I literally would have to go and research each one to find out where they came from, and when, and when they started going into larger use. We have definitely gotten stricter and stricter and stricter as we’ve gone on. Which in some ways is helping us write better and is helping us make things that are easier to read, and are very practical as far as, these are the materials and things like that. So, those are good, as I would personally define them.

But then there are others that are just… sometimes their argument seems to be strict for the sake of being strict. “And I can show you how strict I am”, and I don’t have a lot of time for that. I know that if that is meaningful for someone in their particular practice, then obviously, bevakasha, please do, because people have to make decisions for themselves.

Nehemia: What would be an example of that?

Avielah: Well, things to do with, for example, Sefer Tagin, where…

Nehemia: Tell us what that is. I know your husband’s doing a PhD on it.

Avielah: Yes, he is writing a PhD on it. He’s almost done. Yeah, it’s exciting. How do I explain Sefer Tagin? This is where I go, “Oh, that’s a vague question and I have a lot of detailed answers.” You probably have a more concise answer to that.

Nehemia: I’ll give the short answer. It’s a book that says, “You put a little symbol there and another symbol there,” I call them doohickeys. I’m from the Mid-West. You put a little doohickey here and a little doohickey there. So, how are people strict as far as Sefer Tagin?

Avielah: So, when you’re saying doohickeys… So, I’ll elaborate on your doohickeys. That is, there will be certain letters that are written differently in order to convey a different idea, or to act maybe as lecture notes. Which actually the Torah is, as some people will teach, “lecture notes,” referring to other things that we are meant to do, other traditions, to remind us of other ideas.

Nehemia: And some of them we don’t know why they’re there, right? Or do we?

Avielah: Well, the thing is… nowadays, for example… so, one that’s very obvious that a lot of people spot right way is the “Pei milufefet”, or Pei melufa, which is the letter Pei, or Fei, and it’s got a spiral in it. Or it’s got a tiny letter Pei/Fei inside where the normal little tongue is.

Nehemia: So, it doesn’t look like a normal Pei. I call it a curly Pei.

Avielah: Yeah, fine. So, I have come across many sifrei Torah that were written 300 years ago, and I’ve restored those. And I know from a historical point of view that restoring those is not a popular thing, but if you want to keep using something, you have to keep it kosher. And there is obviously a difference between restoration and conservation.

Nehemia: What does it mean that you restored it?

Avielah: Well, so, for example, generally, when people bring me an old Torah scroll, they want me to fix it and make it kosher again. So, that means if there’s missing ink, then I will add ink to the areas where there is missing ink.

Nehemia: So, the ink may have flaked off.

Avielah: It may have flaked off, or it may have corroded, because maybe the original recipe of the ink had an imbalance; it was too acidic so it would have crumbled away. Maybe too much iron, or something, if it happens to be iron gall ink. That sort of thing. Or it could be that it was stored in less-than-ideal conditions. Which most of them are, let’s face it, because most people don’t understand how to treat parchment nowadays because it’s not ubiquitous like it used to be.

Although to be fair, most people weren’t literate either, so they wouldn’t even come across parchment. But maybe it’s cracked; maybe the ink is totally fine but there’s a tiny crack. So, if the second the letter does not have any integrity, then the whole Torah is not kosher.

Nehemia: So, how do you fix a letter that’s cracked?

Avielah: So, for something like that, you would add ink, for example. If you have a torn seam, then obviously, we can sew it together. I have something here called “giddin“, and it is also made from a kosher animal. And generally, it’s made by a couple of families who live in Eretz Yisrael, in Israel, and it’s their parnasa, it’s the way they’ve been supporting themselves financially for generations.

Nehemia: And these are sinews or something, right?

Avielah: It is the sinew from the back end of the animal. Basically, the Achilles tendon and the hamstring area. What they do is they card it. They dry it and card it and spin it into really fine…

Nehemia: Card it?

Avielah: Sorry, I have an agricultural background as well. So, carding. There are these special sort of brushes with metal teeth… and you do the same thing with wool, but machines do it now. People don’t tend to hand-card wool from their sheep. And they’re very flat, and they’ve got these metal teeth. And you basically comb them back and forth like this, and that lines all the fibers up in the same direction. And then that’s when you can spin it, because if the fibers aren’t all aligned in the same direction…

Nehemia: And they do that with these sinews?

Avielah: They do it with the sinews, yes. So, they come out of… so, that is what we sew them together with, the sheets. With a gold-plated or a silver-plated needle; not everybody does that, that’s my tradition.

Nehemia: Why use gold-plated needles? I’ve never heard of that.

Avielah: Some scribes will not use steel or any kind of base metals when they are writing or repairing any of these articles. And I say “repairing” lightly because you can’t always repair them. Others just use normal needles, but I use silver or gold plated, and that way you have a fine metal. And unfortunately… and I say “unfortunately” because it comes down even to when I am using a blade or a knife or something like that. And believe it or not, I can plate silver just by wiping it, that’s a way of doing it. You can basically electroplate, without using electricity, onto the blade. But even just those molecules will make it less sharp, and you can see, you can feel how it’s a different blade.

Nehemia: Really?

Avielah: Yeah. Just by adding a few molecules. Yeah, it’s amazing.

Nehemia: Well, this is really interesting. Hold on a second. So, if you have a mistake in a Torah scroll, and you have to erase a word and it’s not God’s name, how do you erase it?

Avielah: Well, it depends. I have a series of erasers that are okay to use because they are considered kosher or vegan or just neutral. They don’t contain any non-kosher animals, for example. That way it fits the halacha, the Jewish law component, but also, you have to respect the materials. You need to use materials and techniques that are going to respect the materials that you’re trying to fix and not cause any damage and not have any kind of long-term negative consequences.

Nehemia: Do you have one of those erasers here?

Avielah: They’re over there. But I do have a blade. Sometimes we’ll just use a razor blade. It depends.

Nehemia: And that doesn’t have to be silver plated, right?

Avielah: Well, I do.

Nehemia: You do? Really?

Avielah: I do, but a lot of scribes don’t bother with that, and I’m not judging them. And then there’s your regular X-Acto blade knife. So, it depends. Sometimes you need to scratch it out, other times… it depends. Sometimes I will use… this is a bit of lava that I got when I was 12, in Hawaii, on the beach. And you can see there are little bits of parchment caught in the holes of the lava. That’s actually what that is.

Nehemia: So, what do you do with the lava?

Avielah: Oh, you scratch it out. You grind it out. You can use glass. Some scribes use glass. Some, actually,are so skillful with these that they can literally lift out, they can literally take just a layer of skin off, basically, and lift it out basically without making too big of a big hole. I never learned to do that, and I’m too scared to so I don’t do it that way. Instead, what I do is I work from the top. And like I said, I might just use a series of different erasers. I have an erasing shield…

Nehemia: When you say erase, you don’t mean like on the back of a pencil, like rubber?

Avielah: No, not like that.

Nehemia: What do you mean?

Avielah: You can actually use a white plastic eraser, because they…

Nehemia: Really?

Avielah: Yeah, you can.

Nehemia: And that will remove ink?

Avielah: It depends. That’s why I usually start with a blade or something. I use… oh, it’s over there as well… really, really, fine sandpaper. Like really super-fine sandpaper. But you also have to know that the sandpaper is vegan, because you don’t want the adhesive that’s in the paper to not be kosher. I’m not saying that all scribes practice the same way I do, but that’s how I do it.

And it’s the same if you need to do any gluing, like when you’re patching a Torah or anything like that, and you have to use an adhesive. You have to make sure that it’s not made out of non-kosher animals, because then you’ve pasul-ed the whole Torah again. You’ve made it unfit for ritual use.

Nehemia: Talk to me about the balance between… you said… So, some people are upset when you take a two- or three-hundred-year-old Torah scroll and restore it. Talk to me about that. Why would they be upset?

Avielah: Well, some people feel like the moment that, because it’s so old and let’s say it’s never been repaired, then everything about it is from that time and from that tradition and from that person. And that’s all the materials manufacture and it’s… everything. And the moment I come to it, the moment I put one drop of my ink on it, the ink will have a little bit different recipe. It obviously is from modern times. If the ink has faded, if it fades to dark gray or brown or something like that, it’s fine. But if it’s turned red, then it’s never been kosher to begin with.

Nehemia: Why was it never kosher to begin with?

Avielah: Because there are different recipes, but you’re only allowed to use certain ingredients. But that’s just one of the things that we’re taught.

Nehemia: What ingredient would be there that would make it unkosher to begin with?  Because presumably it’s red because of rust.

Avielah: Not necessarily, no. At least in my experience, when I’ve come across iron gall ink that has corroded, it’s actually usually turned greenish black, if that makes sense.

Nehemia: It makes perfect sense.

Avielah: And it’s corroded, and it’s become quite crumbly.

Nehemia: And you mean actually greenish? Because the greenish would indicate there’s copper in there.

Avielah: Sometimes it’s green or sometimes it’s bluish.

Nehemia: That’s also copper.

Avielah: But the thing is, I have to make a caveat, that is that I have tetrachromatic vision.

Nehemia: What’s that?

Avielah: So, I actually see a million more colors than other people because I’ve got a different combination of cones and rods and things like that.

Nehemia: I see.

Avielah: So, I’m not saying that if you looked at it you could see it, I’m just saying that this is what I’m seeing. And then when it comes away, like when it crumbles away and it’s just the parchment left, you can see the kind of staining because it sits on top of the parchment. It doesn’t soak in like with paper. It sits on top of the parchment, which is why you can use a blade to take it off and not make a hole, for example.

You can see the way the parchment’s been stained. Usually, it’s sort of variations of beige or brown or something like that, but even that can tell you the ink content. But it’s like the curly Pei, because we went there, but then we didn’t finish going there.

I’ve fixed many Torahs where they were full of these beautiful letters from Sefer Tagin, which are supposed to make you go, “Ah, I see this dot here,” or, “I see this particular letter there,” and that’s supposed to remind me of the lesson of such-and-such. Or that’s supposed to be more information on how to behave or how to be a better person, or that sort of thing.

So, there was a scribe that had gone through this particular Torah, and several sifrei, several Torahs that I fixed, where they went, “Oh, those aren’t considered kosher anymore,” or “My tradition doesn’t recognize those anymore, or never did.”

Nehemia: Okay, so they removed the curly Pei’s.

Avielah: They didn’t remove them, they just took a really thick quill, and they just went mrrr, mrrr, mrrr, and they just covered up, with a bunch of ink, they just covered up the curl…

Nehemia: Oh, okay.

Avielah: …to make one really big, thick, ugly tongue inside the letter, instead of a proportionate tongue, which would have been nicer. They didn’t take the time to do that. So, to me, that’s a bit like you’re destroying our older tradition, which I don’t think you should do. This is just my personal opinion. But it’s also a bit lazy. But that’s good for me, because by the time I got this Torah, like another hundred years later or whatever, his ink… and I’m saying his because a hundred years ago it was very unlikely that a woman would have been fixing this Torah, but not impossible, his ink had already started to fade. Because obviously he didn’t have very good quality ink so I could see the swirl coming through.

Nehemia: Okay! Did you restore it as a swirl?

Avielah: Yes, I did. And that took a long time.

Nehemia: Wow!

Avielah: Well, the thing is, that’s part of the estimate I gave to the synagogue that owned any of these Torahs, because like I said, I’ve seen it many times. I’ve said, “Okay, there’s this. This is how I think about it, and this is why, but at the end of the day it’s your Torah scroll.” So, if I don’t restore all of them… because they’re not not-kosher either way, really. If it used to be kosher, we should leave it that way. But nowadays, they’re not really considered kosher. But it would be really nice to bring back the tradition, I think. And so do several other scribes, male and female scribes. So, I leave it to them, basically.

Nehemia: You talked before about how there were these innumerable rules, and they’re getting more and more strict, and you mentioned Sefer Tagin. So, now’s a good segue into… you were going to give an example of that from the curly Pei’s. So, what are the strict rules that you think, “Okay, that’s overkill?”

Avielah: Oh, sorry. What I meant was like when someone comes along later and they find something to do with Sefer Tagin and they don’t accept it, so they write over it so that it’s “modern-looking” now and they’ve destroyed the Sefer Tagin element. The curly Pei is one example.

Another example is, there are a couple of letter Kufs. The letter Kuf, that’s where we get the letter ‘Q’ from, eventually, in English, because English actually comes from the same place that Hebrew and Arabic and Greek and everything comes from, now what we see all the time is Kuf has a space between the long descender, the long leg, and its roof. So, there’s a space there. You have to write a space.

There are two instances. It used to be, according to Sefer Tagin, where you would actually have that leg, that descender, touching the roof. And they were for specific reasons, deliberately, and they were to reflect a particular idea. A lot of Torahs I’ve come across, also some other scribe has gone, “Uh, that shouldn’t be touching… scrape.” But now that that’s been done, I’m not really supposed to restore it. So, that’s why I don’t like when… but like I said, I’m just speaking from me. I’m not saying what the rules are. This is where I’m coming from as a scribe.

Nehemia: If it’s any consolation, in the Middle Ages they would restore Torah scrolls every couple of hundred years, or I guess we don’t really know how often, and when they would do that, they would often systematically go through and change the shapes of certain letters. Like, I saw one Torah scroll where in every single Hey, the left leg was originally touching the roof. And every single instance, except a few where he missed, the restorer came and scraped it away. Which is Chok Tochot, so, you’re not supposed to do that, but whatever. Who’s counting? So, it violates a certain obscure rule, which is actually in the Talmud, so it’s not that obscure.

Avielah: Not that obscure. Makes it more universal that way.

Nehemia: Right. But apparently, he figured it was better to do that than to…

Avielah: Leave it as it is.

Nehemia: …than to leave it, and he did it systematically throughout the scroll except for a few places where he missed.

Avielah: You could argue that it was already a letter Hey, and that after he scraped it was still a letter Hey.

Nehemia: Well, he scraped it because I think he thought it was a Chet. Or he knew it wasn’t a Chet, but it would be misinterpreted as a Chet.

Avielah: Right. So, if he thought, “Oh, this person put a Chet where it should be a Hey,” and he turned it into a Hey from being a Chet, then that is Chok Tochot.

Nehemia: Fair enough.

Avielah: But if he thought, “Oh, it’s just one of these old fashioned Hey’s that we don’t consider kosher anymore” because, as you know, Hey and Chet used to look a lot more similar than they do now.

Nehemia: They can still be confused today, but okay. Especially in the old, printed books of the 19th century…

Avielah: Oh, terrible printing!

Nehemia: Sometimes, the printing is so imprecise that they’re indistinguishable sometimes, the Hey and the Chet, because the top does touch there.

Avielah: It’s true. I feel your pain. I’m really into typography as well.

Nehemia: Oh, okay.

Thank you so much for joining us. This has been an amazing conversation. Thank you so much. I didn’t realize I was sitting down with the first certified modern female scribe, and I’m really honored. Thank you.

Avielah: Well, thank you, Nehemia. That’s very kind of you to say, and I appreciate you having me on your podcast. It’s been a lot of fun, hasn’t it? I can imagine we could geek out around a lot of stuff, actually.

Nehemia: And hopefully, we’ll have another opportunity to do this.

Avielah: Yeah!

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