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A young man named Rabbi Meir, who would later become one of the defining figures in the Talmud, went to visit the senior Sage, Rabbi Yishmael. The elder rabbi asked him "My son, what is your profession?" "I am a scribe" his young colleague...
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In the Song of the Sea, Moses says "This is my G-d and I will beautify Him..." The rabbis ask "How can we beautify G-d? Beautify Him with Mitzvot! Anything you make for the Divine Service should be beautiful." This is understood in two ways. One...
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We are required to write the Torah and other Holy Writings in "dyo" (ink). The ink must be black, the most changeless color, much like G-d and His Torah are changeless. In ancient times, scribes would prepare their own ink out of soot (usually...
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The scribe is about to write. He has purchased fine parchment. It may be pre-ruled, or he may prefer to rule it himself. Each letter will "hang" from lines scratched into the parchment, except for the letter "lamed", the top of which goes over the...
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We have seen how the Ashkenazi script became very pervasive through the careful documentation of the Beit Yosef. The descendants of German Jewry, as they moved Eastward into Poland, Russia, and other East European countries, took this scrip with...
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Besides the Sephardic and Ashkenazic scripts, several others are used.I have mentioned on several occasions the customs of the Yemenites. The Jews of Yemen are the oldest continuous group in Jewish history. They were in one geographic area since...
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I have described in an earlier series my unbounded admiration for Rabbi Issac Luria (1534-1572), generally known as the ARI (Holy Lion). He was a great Kabbalist, as well as an accomplished scholar in other areas. He would go into the deeper...
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Besides writing Torah Scrolls, the scribe also writes several other holy objects, as I shall describe. The first of these that I shall discuss is the Tefillin. The Tefillin are bound on the arm, opposite the heart, and on the head, symbolizing the...
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The tefillin are a beautiful mitzvah (actually two, as the hand tefillin and head tefillin constitute two separate mitzvot.) Surprisingly, the Talmud puts what would seem to be disproportional emphasis on this precept. "The skull that has not...
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When I lived in Israel, I often got around by hitchhiking (what the Israelis call "tremping"). Once, I got a ride with a man who looked at me and said "Hey, aren't you the tefillin expert? What do you think of the guy with the new kind of...
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