Both the Shulchan Aruch Harav and the Mishnah Brurah use similar terminology when describing the importance of the shin being "pointy" on the bottom and all three branches of the letter shin meeting at a point or "chad" at the bottom of the letter. There is a strong foundation in Halacha for this and for the bottom of the shin to be flat like a moshav (base) is considered questionable (Pri Megadim) and definitely not Kosher Lechatchillah. It is worse if the moshav is very wide, but it is still questionable if it is lechatchillah if there is a thick noticeable base rather than a chad. Even for Sephardim, who lechatchillah make an angular base, it is still important that the base is indeed on a (significant) angle. If the base is flat, even if all three branches of the shin come out of the base connected , as in the top picture, it is problematic. It is worse in the bottom picture below where the right head/ branch comes out of the right part of the base and the m
When was the custom in chabad to finish Shema [of RT] till the end?
ReplyDeleteIt was never official custom but it seems it was the norm for a period of time. Many Chabad sofrim seemed to write the R"T parsha of vehoya ki yeviecha like rashi (so more than nine osiyos gedolos - ie distincltly Chabad) and shema went until the end of the line. So these were definitely minhag Chabad parshiyos. (Vehoya Im was done in the same way its done today.)
ReplyDeleteSo that was the spacing a lot of chabad chassidim seem to have in their rabbeinu tams from a particular vintage when this spacing was popular, I'm guessing around the 1960's.
Although by parshas shema makes no difference halachically (by R"T) how much space if any is left at the end of shema, yet for some reason, today, virtually all Chabad sofrim write uniformly with a space of 9 large letters, (like Rashi).
What Yosef is asking is what caused this change - of what seemed to be a common practice.
Rabbi Landau (Bnei Brak) says in his fathers name (R. Yacov Landau) that RT should finish shma till the end, so maybe the sofrim mentioned wrote according to this shita.
ReplyDeletesee what I wrote http://hebrewstam.blogspot.co.il/2013/12/blog-post_18.html,
http://hebrewstam.blogspot.co.il/2012/06/blog-post_8471.html (end)
Thank you, perhaps a Shiur on that tshuva?
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