Local Woman Bucks Jewish Law, Handwrites Religious TextDoes the Talmud actually say that? Does someone have the reference?
by Bay City News
October 25, 2010 11:53 AM
In a dimly lit alcove on the second floor of San Francisco's Contemporary Jewish Museum, a young woman has spent the last year performing a task for which the process has barely changed since about 500 A.D.
Five and a half centuries after the printing press was invented and decades after word processors came to dominate offices, 35-year-old Julie Seltzer is nearing completion of one of the few handwritten ritual Torah scrolls ever to be commissioned from a woman.
Seltzer's work is the centerpiece of "As It is Written," a museum exhibit that gives patrons an intimate experience with the 62 sheets, 248 columns, 10,416 lines, and 304,805 letters of the ritual, or Sifrei, Torah.
The museum estimates that more than 86,000 visitors have watched Seltzer deliberately form the letters of the Sifrei Torah with hand-made turkey quills and kosher ink. She writes on parchment made of cow hide and sharpens the quills every five lines or so.
Jews call themselves the People of the Book, and that book is the Torah. It's comprised of the five the books of Moses, which are also the first five books of the Old Testament in the Bible.
Printed copies of the Torah are used for study, but only a Torah scroll written by a trained scribe, or sofer, is permitted for holidays and other ritual use.
Seltzer is a female scribe, or soferet, and while Jewish law traditionally permits women to write wedding contracts and do decorative work on scriptures, the Talmud, an important 6th Century Jewish text, specifically says Torahs written by women are not kosher.
Museum Director Connie Wolf decided she wanted to hire a woman anyway.
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For more on female scribes, including Jen Taylor Friedman, who trained Ms. Seltzer (and who also created Tefillin Barbie), go here and follow the links.
