The CJM Blog

Thoughts from scribe-in-residence Julie Seltzer on what she's writing, her process, and the experience of writing a Torah on public view. “Is it ever boring, writing all day?” boring: “Dull, tiresome, tedious.” “Mind-numbing, monotonous." [also: “The act or process of making or enlarging a hole.”] When I was training with Jen Taylor Friedman , I happened to be working at her studio when a local reporter visited. He asked what her favorite and least favorite sections of Torah were. At the time, I was writing a certain extremely repetitive panel of torah. When I say repetitive, I mean, repetitive. I mean when I say repetitive, I mean, repetitive. The section is Numbers 7:12-7:83. It consists of the same paragraph repeated twelve times over, but with the names of different people inserted at the beginning and end of each paragraph. Given that this was the panel I was currently writing, I immediately knew how I’d answer the question (I can’t remember how Jen responded. Jen?). I wo...

Thoughts from scribe-in-residence Julie Seltzer on what she's writing, her process, and the experience of writing a Torah on public view. When I first started this Torah project, the question shocked me each and every time. At one point I was keeping track of how often it was asked, as well as what percentage of the questioners were women and what percentage were men. When the count was high but about evenly-split between men and women, I stopped caring and simply lost track. The question: "Can you write the Torah when you’re menstruating?” I have a question, too. What is up with everyone’s obsession with blood?! And when did my bleeding cycle become public interest law? Maybe that’s unfair. The Torah itself is a little obsessed with blood. Recently, I was writing a section of Leviticus that deals with a woman’s state of impurity following birth and the associative blood. She is considered in a state of tum’ah (generally translated as “impurity,” though Everett Fox in his inf...

In the second Museum LINK talk, Estee Solomon Gray threw down the gauntlet early: “The link, not the book, is (and always has been) the core of Judaism.” Mashing together educational theory, Talmudic dialogue and social technology, Estee spun out an integrated vision of Jewish community innovation evolving rapidly from a focus on “covenant and commandedness” to one of “community, commentary and conversation.” But even in olden times, she reminded us, Jews “evolved radically linked architectures” of text and community. Crossing the Talmud and the Internet is an inevitability, not a joke. Web 2.0 is an opportunity to experience the next generation of Jewish creativity in real time.

Thoughts from scribe-in-residence Julie Seltzer on what she's writing, her process, and the experience of writing a Torah on public view. Well, folks – I have reached the halfway mark. Since I’m not writing the Torah entirely in order, I actually wrote the “halfway mark” some time ago. Of course, there are multiple ways of counting “half.” By the verse. By the words. The letters. By time. Effort. While a computer count would give us different halfway points, the Talmud names דרש דרש “And Moses did inquire” (Lev. 10:16) as the Torah’s middle words, and the letter “vav” in the word גחון “belly” (Lev. 11:42) as the middle letter. This middle “vav” is enlarged in the torah, depicted here in the form of matzah. Both are beautiful mythic midway points. The two middle words are the same word, meaning “interpret.” And the “vav” is a connector letter, meaning “and.” “Halfway” is a way of marking time and space. In some ways, marking “half” is mechanical, like the way * we mark time accord...

Stanford’s Steven Zipperstein put Mein Kampf in its place during the May 6th program Difficult Books , describing it as a phenomenally boring book despite its outsized impact on world history. Surprisingly, he explained that Hitler’s autobiography–the central text of the Museum’s exhibition Our Struggle: Responding to Mein Kampf –is dramatically less popular worldwide than it’s elder cousin, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion , a Russian manifesto describing a plan for world Jewish domination. His prediction: In an age dominated by talk radio and Internet sound bites, The Protocols , which is written in repetitive chunks, and coyly presented as if it were a transcript of secret Jewish meetings, would continue to speak to people looking in the wrong places for answers to global complexities and chaos.

Thoughts from scribe-in-residence Julie Seltzer on what she's writing, her process, and the experience of writing a Torah on public view. When I read the article in the J Weekly entitled “Leave me Alone! And Other Tales from the Torah Scribe,” I was pretty taken aback. Were my work habits so interesting to people that this reporter wanted to give them the “inside “scoop”? And where was everything I said about loving the opportunity to share Torah with people in such an unusual way? Hmmm. But, like everything else, I realized there must be some Torah here. And that’s when it hit me: "Scribe Realizes She is a Final Chaf .” Fair enough: that title probably isn’t catchy enough for the newspaper, but that’s what blogs are for. Allow me to explain. All letters in the Torah must be whole and unbroken (except for one purposely broken letter), and they cannot be touching each other. They must be entirely surrounded by parchment, separating them as individual letters. Letters combin...

Thoughts from scribe-in-residence Julie Seltzer on what she's writing, her process, and the experience of writing a Torah on public view. One of the fascinating rules of sacred writing is the principle that a letter cannot be formed by an erasure. How could a letter be formed by erasure? Funny you should ask! I ran into the very possibility just today. Here is a picture of (what is supposed to be) the Hebrew word עד, meaning “until.” As you can see, there is an ink drip to the left of the letter dalet . Of course, I want to remove this ink drip, but I can’t just scratch it off. Here’s why. The ink drip, located as it is in relation to the dalet , resembles the left leg of the letter hey. So, what we have here is not actually a dalet with an ink drop next to it, but an accidental hey . If I simply scratch off the ink drip, I form the letter dalet by carving out part of the letter hey. This would make not only the letter, but the Torah invalid. Follow the steps below to find out wha...