In the Jewish imagination, 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 scrolls have been made in the same manner for thousands of years. We picture a white-bearded sofer (scribe) hunched over parchment, copying the same letters with the same quills, generation after generation. But what if I told you the heart of sofrut—the scribal arts, with its materiality, its values, its relationships—have been eroding for decades?
The people pulling us back towards tradition are exactly the opposite of who you might think. Many of them are women, queer, and egalitarian.
No matter who you are, you could become one of them.
Jewish Scribes in Their Communities
As recently as a hundred years ago, the methods of scribal production around the Jewish world were tremendously diverse. A scribe in a European shtetl might use iron gall ink and a feather quill to write a mezuzah on white parchment. A scribe in the Middle East or North Africa would use carbon ink and a reed pen on reddish-brown, tanned parchment.
But the most important component of scribal work was the same: community.
Scribes often made their own ink and parchment, and they had a close relationship with the butcher who provided them with hides. They also had relationships with the people who bought their products. Jews knew who scribed their tefillin, mezuzot, and Torah scrolls. Scribes, together with an entire ecosystem of local Jewish professionals, took pride in producing kosher work for their communities, and communities took pride in their scribes.
The closest relationship was between student and master. In his treatise Kol Sofrim (the Voice of Scribes), the 19th century Hungarian rabbi Shlomo Ganzfried wrote:
The scribal student should never leave his master’s house, to witness every aspect of the scribal arts: blackening tefillin, sewing, making the ink, separating touching letters, erasing invalid letters, processing hides, and cutting tefillin straps; each of these is its own subject of study. And the student must never leave the master’s house until he knows everything related to scribing.
This depth of study and these deep personal relationships were essential to the profession. And then they were upended—by modernity, antisemitic persecution, and the melting pot of Jewish migration to Israel and the Americas.
The Scribal Industrial Complex
Today’s market optimizes for scale, streamlining production by separating the Jew from their scribe.
Instead of making tefillin, parchment, and ink themselves, scribes buy their materials from industrial manufacturers. The result is a marketplace of products that are more uniform in dimensions and finish, but lacking soul.
Questionable scribal certificates have replaced communal accountability. Diverse traditions have given way to a cookie-cutter market that cranks out cheap kedusha (scribal products) written almost exclusively with standardized Ashkenazi-type parchment, quills, ink, and scripts. The communal scribal culture of our ancestors is now the rare exception, not the rule.
As with much of modern capitalism, this traditional craft has been subsumed into an industrial complex.
The New Face of Sofrut
For the past two decades, a cadre of Jewish women have been fighting to reclaim our people’s traditions. Men have traditionally barred women from scribing, so they could not work through middlemen in a commercial scribal shop. Instead, they had to reimagine the models of modern scribing. These women were forced (and privileged) to work directly with their clients, recreating a more authentic scribal practice than most. They paved the way for a return to a more vintage Judaism that’s truer to the traditional role of the scribe than the scribal industrial complex.
Since Jen Taylor Friedman wrote her first Torah in 2007, she and many other women—my teachers—have been scribing passionately and transparently for the egalitarian Jewish community. A group of them formed the StamScribes collective. You can see their faces; you can read their stories; you can email them, and they’ll write back. They have a sense of humor.
They are bringing relationships back to sofrut.
If this model of communal scribing appeals to you, know that you have a place in it. You can start by inviting a soferet to teach in your community. You could choose to source your kedusha from someone whose face and story you know. If you feel the calling, you can dabble in a class or two, attend a workshop, or study sofrut in any configuration you can imagine.
The work doesn’t have to be bookish. I’ve met plenty of Jewish youth and adults who don’t connect to prayer or study, who finally found their connection to Torah and mitzvot by bashing sinew into thread or scraping blood and goop off a hide to make parchment. If you have a personal connection to livestock or game, you can learn how to put spare hides to sacred use. This work is not beyond any of us, and the distance between Jew and scribe is not inevitable.
The landscape is more open than ever. Whether or not you’re the kind of Jew an Orthodox scribe would take on as an apprentice, there is a place for you in this work of rebuilding communal scribing in modern Jewish life!
