(Meant to post this last week, sorry.)

Leviticus 19:23–And when ye shall come into the land, and shall have planted all manner of trees for food, then ye shall count the fruit thereof as forbidden; three years shall it be as forbidden unto you; it shall not be eaten.

Except in our sefer it’s more like this:

Kind of as if the text read …plAnted…, or:

I just like that.

That kind of ayin doesn’t always indicate growing, I don’t think; later in the same paragraph (19.28) we have Do not put soul-cuts in your flesh, and do not make tattoo-writing in yourselves…:

and I don’t think that’s talking about growing. Unless it’s hinting at a meaning which involves growing, i.e. scarification rather than tattooing, but that is most unscientific, so don’t quote that.

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Something you do not need to see when you open tefillin: BUGS.

The vacated exoskeletons of bugs, I grant you (note the hole in the centre one where the bug burst its way out), but still, ick. At least a dozen of them.

Perhaps surprisingly, the klafim were ok, once I’d brushed the crumbled bugs out of the folds (ick).

I’m swapping out the batim, though. Ick.

Fortunately this was a donated set so I have no idea whose head was wearing all those bugs. Not something I would want to know.

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We reached a halfway point this week; 122.5 columns of 245.

As it happens, 245 is also the number of words in the Shema (full text here). The Shema is the cornerstone of the liturgy; the Torah is the cornerstone of the religion. The Shema says, bring God into all your doings; the Torah is the guide as to how. The Shema declares faith in God; the Torah symbolises God’s presence. 245 words; 245 columns.

We could leave it there, and that would be very nice. However, the Shema in liturgy has an interesting peculiarity, thus: when praying as individuals, we precede it with the three words אל מלך נאמן, God truthful King. When as a community, three words are added after its silent recitation – the last two words ה’ אלהיכם the-Lord your-God are repeated aloud, and the word אמת, emet, true added.

Why’s this?

Well, 245+3=248, and 248 in the rabbinic narrative corresponds to the number of pertinent parts of the human body. Proverbs 3 says of the Law It shall be health to thy navel, and marrow to thy bones; how better to map the fundamentals of the Law onto the fundamentals of the body than by reference to the Shema? One word for each body part, says Rav Nehori,** and everything will be good above and below.

248 is also the number of positive commandments in the Torah, as it happens. 248 imperatives, 248 vital body parts, and 248 words in the vital liturgical element.

245 columns in the Torah seemed jolly nice a few paragraphs ago, but now it seems we’ve got three bits missing.

Well, the Torah lives on a pair of rollers. Some call them spindles, some call them atzei hayim, trees of life – and some call them amudim, columns.

Recall that the three words added to the 245 in the Shema are אל מלך נאמן, God truthful King or ה’ אלהיכם אמת the-Lord your-God [is] true. Both times, it’s two words and emet, truth. With our Torah, we’ve got 245 columns of words, 2 wooden columns, and…and something.

What is it, this final something?

Our clue comes from another “column,” the amud, the desk from which the Torah is read. Torah reading is, after all, the link between the scroll and the life of the community, both now and in all the generations before. The Torah does not mean much if it is not part of people. The Shema is only 247 mumbled words without the emet. The 248 body parts aren’t much without the spark of life.

* Not all Torahs have 245 columns. Column height and width can vary, and therefore so can the total number of columns. People are often surprised to learn this.

** Midrash Ne-elam (Zohar Chadash to Ruth), via the Mishnah Berurah on this aspect of Kriat Shema (61:6), see also Virtual Beit Midrash.

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Here’s a section of parashat Shemini, from Leviticus 10:16: וְאֵת שְׂעִיר הַחַטָּאת דָּרֹשׁ דָּרַשׁ מֹשֶׁה וְהִנֵּה שֹׂרָף – And Moses he inquired diligently concerning the goat of the sin offering, and, behold, it was burnt. See how the scribe has stretched out the first words of the verse so dramatically? What’s going on there?

An early masoretic note, preserved in the Talmud (Kiddushin 30a) says that the words דרש דרש, he inquired diligently, are the middle words of the Torah.

By the time of the 1525 Mikraot Gedolot, we see the masoretic note in the form חצי התורה בתיבות דרש מכא ודרש מכא – Half of the Torah in words. Darosh from here, and Darash from here. You might well see this version in your printed chumash. The Masoretes are concerned with arithmetical questions: what’s the middle letter, the middle verse, the middle word? This note makes it plain that דרש finishes one half of the Torah, and דרש starts the second half.

In Masechet Sofrim, we see this note listed in chapter 9. Chapter 9 concerns itself with layout ideas—big and small letters, tagin, line breaks. It’s not a chapter about arithmetical concerns at all, so what is our arithmetical masoretic note doing here? It seems that the editor of Sofrim interpreted the masoretic note not arithmetically but spatially; Half of the Torah in words; Darosh from here [the end of the line], and Darash from here [the beginning of the new line].

Sofrim’s words are דרש דרש חצי תיבות של תורה, דרש בסוף שיטה דרש בראש שיטה– Darosh darash are the half[way point] of the words in the Torah; Darosh at the end of a line, and Darash at the beginning of a line. The verse must contain a line break! A layout rule has been created by interpretation.
This rule is not authoritative. Many Torah scrolls do not have a line break between דרש and דרש. But many do, and some scribes will stretch their letters, as above, to accomplish it.

But this is not the end of the story. After being interpreted arithmetically and spatially, our idea undergoes another transformation and is interpreted homiletically, by the 18th-century polymath R’ Hayyim Joseph David Azulai. He says:

Darosh at the end of a line, and Darash at the beginning of a line

This means – when you have expounded (darosh) the Torah to the point that you think you have exhausted all its meaning, and you think that you are at the very end of the “line” – not the line of layout, but the line of enquiry and scholarship – you should realize that you are really only “expounding the beginning of the line”.

Our sefer has something extra–both instances of דרש look like this:

With profuse thanks to Gabriel Wasserman.

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Following on a bit from last week’s post, here are a few of the other things this sefer contains. Descriptions are mine, not hallowed by tradition.

Nuns pointing their feet backwards

Samekhs with tails and crowns

Letters with all kinds of tagin, top and bottom

Winged reishes

Vavs growing leaves and tendrils

Exuberant ayins and tzaddis

Mini peh-inside-a-pehs

Pehs with beards

Nuns trailing scarves

Lameds flying banners

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When we look at words in the Torah scroll, we notice unusual decorations on the letters.

What are they? Why are they there? A very few seconds’ thought tells us that they are not vowels or cantillation, the more usual “decorations” of Hebrew letters.

The fourth-generation amora Rava states [Men 29b]: There are seven letters that each have three zayins: Shaatnez Gatz.

One of the places in Torah where the seven crowned letters cluster together:

As interpreted today, the “zayins” come in all sorts of forms, sometimes several forms in the same sefer:

Some choose to connect these zayins to kabbalah. Part of the kabbalistic apparatus is the set of sefirot, sort-of divine levels of understanding. The ultimate one is Infinity, the utterly-unknowable-unless-you’re-God, then you get revelation and understanding (the intellectual realm, apparently), then a bunch of things like mercy and grace (the emotive realm), but this is a very bald rendering and properly it is terribly nuanced and subtle. And there are ten altogether.

Zayin is the seventh letter in the alef-bet, and it has three taggin. That makes ten sefirot! So one interpretation of a zayin is that the seven part, underneath, corresponds to the seven sefirot in the emotive realm, and the three part, the three higher.

In which case, the three taggin correspond to Keter (Infinity), Hokhmah (Wisdom), and Binah (Love). The middle one is the tallest, and represents Keter, which is the highest possible state of being; Hokhmah is the next tallest and the next most important so it sits on the right, and Binah is the shortest and sits on the left (Understanding the Alef-Beis, Dovid Leitner).

There is a famous story about tagin, told of the third-generation tanna Rabbi Akiva.

When Moses ascended Mount Sinai to receive the Torah, he found God tying crowns onto the letters.

“God,” said Moses, “surely you don’t need those?”*

God replied: “After many generations, there will be a sage named R’ Akiva, who will derive heaps and heaps of halakhot from them.”

Because in some Torah-writing traditions, letters other than שעטנ”ז ג”ץ have adornments. For instance, Exodus 6:2-3 saysוַיְדַבֵּ֥ר אֱלֹהִ֖ים אֶל־מֹשֶׁ֑ה וַיֹּ֥אמֶר אֵלָ֖יו אֲנִ֥י יְהוָֽה׃ וָֽאֵרָ֗א אֶל־אַבְרָהָ֛ם אֶל־יִצְחָ֥ק וְאֶֽל־יַעֲקֹ֖ב בְּאֵ֣ל שַׁדָּ֑י וּשְׁמִ֣י יְהוָ֔ה לֹ֥א נוֹדַ֖עְתִּי לָהֶֽם — God spoke to Moses, and said to him, I am YHVH. I appeared to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob as El-Shaddai, but by my name YHVH I was not known to them.

That second YHVH looks like this, in some traditions:

Three tagin per hey, see? This doesn’t happen on all heys, nor yet on all instances of YHVH–just on certain ones. Why?

One scholar explains: There are tagin on the Name to indicate that this is the crowned, distinguished Name, the superior, explicit Name. And why on the heys specifically? Twice hey is ten, and ten are the modes of existence: (1) Utter height, (2) utter lowness, (3) utter east, (4) utter west, (5) utter north, (6) utter south, (7) utter good, (8) utter bad, (9) utter firstness, (10) utter lastness.**

These tagin are altogether more obscure than the straightforward שעטנ”ז ג”ץ. It is probably these the midrash alludes to.

The sefer I am writing for CBH is following one of these traditions of special tagin. I am copying from a sefer owned by my synagogue in Washington Heights. I don’t know much about that sefer, except that it is old, beautiful, and part of my community, and I think the tradition of adorned letters it represents is probably worth preserving.

* Only You can understand them, God, so why give them to me? alternatively, isn’t the Torah already perfect with just its letters?
** G. Wasserman, trans.

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The main thing about Torah ink is that it has to be black and it has to stay black. If it changes colour within fifty years, it wasn’t kosher to begin with.

Generally, Torah ink (דיו, in Hebrew, like dye) is what’s called an iron gall ink. Iron gall inks have been used in a great many places during a great many periods in history. They last a long, long time (think Dead Sea Scrolls kind of longevity). They have an unusual property among pigments in that they form chemical bonds with the parchment, which makes them symbolically very appropriate for use on Torahs. They are lightfast, the ingredients are cheap, and they are very indelible.

I don’t make my own; making good ink is hard, and I don’t have anyone willing to share their recipe. Anyway, it’s supposedly rather a pain, so I buy it in bottles, as shown. I don’t know if it’s also available in cake form – cake is much easier to transport, of course, and lasts longer, and is entirely traditional. I suspect perhaps not, because I have a feeling that buying ink like this is kind of For Dummies, and real hardcorers, the kind who would want cake ink, probably do make their own.

As you might expect, there are hundreds of different recipes for this kind of ink. However, they have some things in common, viz.: gallnuts, iron (II) in solution, something runny, and something sticky. The following descriptions are indebted to an excellent article by Cyntia Karnes.

Gall nuts

See the Wikipedia entry, but basically gallnuts (also called oak-apples) are a sort of arboreal tumour. A gall wasp comes along and lays its egg on the tree, and the tree goes “whoa” and swells up around the egg, into this little hard ball. The larva sits inside the swelling, munching away, and when it grows up it eats its way out and leaves the ball on the tree.

The balls have to be turned into a gloopy solution. This basically involves grinding, dissolving, and fermenting, and there are about a zillion ways of accomplishing this. Depending how it’s done, what you end up with is a liquid containing tannic acid, gallotannic acid, or gallic acid.

Iron (II) sulphate</p>

This is where the iron comes from. It tends to be known as copperas, or coppervasser if you are the Mishnah Berurah, because iron sulphate and copper sulphate tended to come out of the ground together, but the copper isn’t important and the iron is.

This is why some recipes call for boiling up nails with the gallnuts. In an acidic solution, you get the right sorts of reactions. It’s apparently quite dangerous if you do it properly.

( More about that...and lots else... )

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Exodus 28:36, a verse from this week’s parsha; ועשית ציץ זהב טהור… “Make a tzitz of pure gold…” Go look it up.

In some sifrei Torah, the final tzaddi of the word ציץ is writ large, including in the sefer I’m presently writing:

Here’s another one, from a different sefer (presently in Berlin; my last congregation but one donated the sefer to a community in need when they got their new sefer written by me; isn’t that beautiful?):

Here, note particularly the little fractal zayins on the word זהב.

I’m not writing about why all this, this week. Have a think about it for now. When I come to CBH in a few weeks’ time, we’ll be learning more about these. Look out for the schedule.

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