“That’s Julie Seltzer! I Invented Her Too!”
Thoughts from scribe-in-residence Julie Seltzer on what she's writing, her process, and the experience of writing a Torah on public view. As I walked from the exhibit hall to the museum lobby, I stopped in my tracks when I saw the man walking up the stairs in the opposite direction. Rav Landes?! Rabbi Daniel Landes is the director of the Pardes Institute for Jewish Studies , the yeshiva 1 I attended in Jerusalem ten years ago. I have seen him a few times since then, on visits to Israel, but he was one of the last people I thought I’d run into in San Francisco, and at the museum no less! It turns out that he was just as surprised to see me. Over coffee, he reported on his experience taking a museum tour. The docent pointed out the Hebrew word פרדס ( Pardes ), which is written out in very large structural letters on the entrance wall of the museum. Pardes means orchard, and represents four different levels of understanding the Torah, from the surface level to the most hidden level.