Torah oddity
Dec. 16th, 2010 07:17 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhuLast night after Arvit I stuck around to help roll one of our smaller Torah scrolls to be brought to a shiva house, and I saw something I'd never seen before.
Some background: There are two kinds of what you might call "paragraph breaks" in the way a Torah scroll is written. "Open breaks" are similar to what's typical in English --- the last line ends wherever it ends, the rest of that line is blank (open), and the next verse starts at the beginning of the next line. "Closed breaks" are a horizontal gap of about six em-quads, with the first words of the next section starting on the same line. (There are also three blank lines left between books.)
Some more background: We read through the entire Torah text in one year, dividing it into 54 portions, one or two of which are read each week. These boundaries portions invariably align with the "paragraph breaks" I describe above, with one exception --- this week's portion, Vayechi, starts in the middle of a paragraph.
One last bit of explanation: Every synagogue has some Torah scrolls that get used more than others. This particular one is small and lightweight, so it's good for bringing to people's houses when necessary, but the stitching isn't in great shape and the writing is not as clear as on some of the newer scrolls, so we don't generally use this one in synagogue on a regular basis.
So there we were, rolling the Torah scroll from Numbers back to Genesis, looking for the start of this week's portion, and when we found it, we were amazed to see that the scribe had used a double word space to mark the beginning of the portion.
Crazy, huh?
Some background: There are two kinds of what you might call "paragraph breaks" in the way a Torah scroll is written. "Open breaks" are similar to what's typical in English --- the last line ends wherever it ends, the rest of that line is blank (open), and the next verse starts at the beginning of the next line. "Closed breaks" are a horizontal gap of about six em-quads, with the first words of the next section starting on the same line. (There are also three blank lines left between books.)
Some more background: We read through the entire Torah text in one year, dividing it into 54 portions, one or two of which are read each week. These boundaries portions invariably align with the "paragraph breaks" I describe above, with one exception --- this week's portion, Vayechi, starts in the middle of a paragraph.
One last bit of explanation: Every synagogue has some Torah scrolls that get used more than others. This particular one is small and lightweight, so it's good for bringing to people's houses when necessary, but the stitching isn't in great shape and the writing is not as clear as on some of the newer scrolls, so we don't generally use this one in synagogue on a regular basis.
So there we were, rolling the Torah scroll from Numbers back to Genesis, looking for the start of this week's portion, and when we found it, we were amazed to see that the scribe had used a double word space to mark the beginning of the portion.
Crazy, huh?