When we hear the Torah read at synagogue, we rarely think about the dozens of animals whose hides make up that sacred document. Yet every TorahRefers to the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, the Tanakh, also called the Five Books of Moses, Pentateuch or the Hebrew equivalent, Humash. This is also called the Written Torah. The term may also refer to teachings that expound on Jewish tradition. Read more scroll, mezuzah, and pair of tefillin begins as skin from a once-living creature. Attention to ethical sofrut—Jewish scribal arts that take seriously how those animals lived and died—is still rare. But it is growing.
When Scribes Knew Their Animals
For most of Jewish history, the small-scale, communal nature of scribing made that fact inescapable. If you lived in a shtetl or even a Jewish neighborhood in a big city, you might well have eaten the goat whose hide ended up as your mezuzah. You might have endured the stench of hide-processing each time you passed by the scribe’s workshop.
That would never happen today.
Today, the tools of the scribal craft are bound up in industrial supply chains. They make parchment and tefillin much cheaper and prettier. The moral impact on the craft, while invisible to most Jews, has been grave.
In 2012, Sofer Rabbi Shmuel Scheid presented a primer on sofrut to the women of Stern College. Aspiring scribes often watch this comprehensive introduction in preparation for their studies. In it, he noted:
In the old Torahs you will see holes all over the columns. […] Today, that’s never going to make it into a Torah, because we have tons of skins, so we’ll go for something else. Somebody living in a little Polish town, where they kill only one animal a week, that’s the skin that you have, so you’re going to see a sofer [from centuries ago] write around the hole, […] or maybe he’ll arrange the columns so that all the holes wind up being between columns.
In the market’s thirst for uniformity, ethical sofrut, especially when it comes to sourcing, has fallen by the wayside. While learning to make tefillin, I spoke with a batim macher (tefillin maker) in Israel. He proudly told me about his selectivity with the hides he bought by the pallet from China. He used only 4% of them, discarding the rest. When Jews only purchase the most beautiful, unblemished scrolls and tefillin we can find, none of us set out to create this kind of harm. But we have set up a market where formerly-living creatures are dispensable.
Factory Farming and the Sacred Scroll
What’s more, these hides no longer come from your neighborhood butcher or from kosher slaughter. With global supply chains to draw from, scribal parchment today overwhelmingly comes from industrial agro-business, especially fetal calves whose mothers were slaughtered pregnant. These calves get to see the light of day only at the mercy of the globalized market. Rabbi Scheid described this simply. “If the price of grain happens to go up a nickel, it’s sayonara to those cows.”
The product of this exploitation is then meant to serve as a vessel for the living words of Gd. This paradox raises a difficult question. Are we living up to the covenant we bind to our bodies and affix to our doorposts?
My own foray into ethical sofrut emerged from these concerns. I had wanted tefillin and mezuzot for myself, but, as a vegetarian, I could not find any that felt right. One day, as my partner (now spouse) and I bemoaned the lack of humane options, we caught a glint of daring in each other’s eyes. We more or less agreed, “No one is coming to do this for us. We’ll have to do this for ourselves.”
Building Ethical Sofrut
Fortunately for us, the first generation of women scribes had already turned over the apple cart. As the egalitarian community reexamined scribal practices taken for granted, the environment grew ripe for revisiting other questions of scribal ethics.
In recent years, egalitarian practitioners have made significant strides in independently and ethically sourcing tools and supplies. The Kedusha Project, a predominantly-queer scribal collective which I co-founded, makes our own parchment, sinew thread, tefillin, straps, ink, reed pens, and more. That way, we can be sure that every part of the process respects people, animals, and the environment.
Others working in the space include Rabbi Linda Motzkin, whose Community Torah Project works exclusively with hunted deer hides; Shoshanah Guggenheim Kedem, whose Or Hadash applies a set of ethical guidelines to sourcing hides; and workshops such as Leshem Kedushat and Melacha uVracha, which have empowered small-scale parchment makers.
The emerging movement to build ethical sofrut is still small. Most parchment still travels through opaque supply chains. Yet the fact that some scribes and communities are beginning to ask different questions is itself a hopeful sign.
The crux of the scribal arts is that kedusha—holiness—exists in this world and can be accessed through materials as simple as ink and parchment. But kedusha isn’t just a finished product; it carries in its fibers the relationships and the choices that brought it into being.
