By Jon Prestage
Editor
4/17/08
For many thousands of years scholars and scribes known as “sofers,” in Hebrew, have painstakingly repaired the sometimes-ancient Torah scrolls that stand at the heart of the Jewish faith and the cornerstone of every congregation of Jews.
No synagogue could exist without at least one scroll. Temple Shalom has eight, several of them more than 100 years old, and all of them deemed sacred.
The sofer’s tools are simple, a special ink made from an ancient brew of oils and dyes, a quill made from a kosher fowl and an exquisitely steady hand. Using monumental patience derived from centuries of tradition, the sofer studies every symbol and mark on a scroll, which could unroll to the height of an 18-story building or about 180 feet, and corrects each chipped character and flaw.
A noted sofer, Rabbi Gedaliah Druin, recently spent several days at Temple Shalom repairing one of the temple’s oldest and most revered Torah scrolls. A former university professor, head of a children’s museum and farmer, Druin, originally from Brooklyn, approaches a scroll as though it were a living thing, and, in this sense, he is a physician on a house call healing an ailing patient.
He sits hunched over the partially unrolled scroll, which is made from the skin of ritually killed animals, and scans row after row of Hebrew symbols. He makes a careful mark from time to time with his quill.
“I bring the letters back to life,” he says, as he continues his work. “We sing it (the Torah). We chant it. Because of it, we are known as the people of the book.”
Having a sofer at the synagogue is a special and rare occasion, Rabbi Alfred Benjamin explains, because of the importance of the Torah scroll, the exactness of the repairs and the requirement that it be in absolutely perfect condition. He reads from it during the Sabbath, as does his congregation, and if he sees broken or faded characters or other imperfections, it can no longer be used. When not in use the scrolls are stored in the holiest part of the synagogue.
Jews see these scrolls, known as Sefer Torah as the literal word of God as told to Moses. It contains more than 600 laws or commandments that Jews follow from moral dictates to dietary restrictions, and the five books of Moses, which would be familiar to others as the Old Testament.
Sefer Torah’s have been produced in exactly the same manner with precisely the same Hebrew symbols for thousands of years. Modern scrolls are unchanged from copies made millennia ago, although Druin can pick out small differences in the portrayal of the Hebrew symbols, enabling him to identify the Temple Shalom Torah he’s working on as having been made in Northern Europe more than 150 years ago. According to Jewish tradition, the text of the Torah was given to Moses on Mount Sinai with no vowels or punctuation and the Sefer Torahs carry on that tradition even today.
Benjamin explains that the reason for such care is because it is believed that every word, every mark, has a divine meaning, and if one mark is inadvertently changed or obscured with age, misinterpretations of the text are possible.
“Most of the information is in the letters. The meaning is made from the letters,” Druin says of the Torah scroll. “We do not read it. The surface is just the tip of the iceberg. We interpret it and study it. Everyone sees it with his or her own eyes, and there is so much yet to learn from it.”
The Torah scroll being repaired was given to the temple nearly 60 years ago and was dedicated to a congregant, a woman whose son, Joe Levitan, is sponsoring the repairs in her honor.
Rabbi Benjamin says synagogues are generally presented with the Torah scrolls as loans or gifts. His congregation currently has two out on loan and is considering giving away another.