This video shows a sofer writing a sefer Torah. This sofer has a good hand, writes at a nice pace, and can ask a decent price. But one can also tell how the sefer Torah industry has commercialised the process, allowing for better productivity.
Note the following:
1) The sofer is writing on a light table, which means he does not have to worry about planning the spacing and can just trace over the letters. This saves a lot of time. This also minimises mistakes and saves time of repairs.
2) The quill is a plastic kulmos with a repository, which means you need to dip it into the ink every few lines instead of every few letters. Also you do not need to sharpen it and make new quills. Both of these save time.
3) The klaf today is more refined and smooth, easier to write on. Not uneven and rough like the old days. I'm sure lots of "mei klaf" is added. This enhances writing speed and quality of writing.
4) Double sirtut. Again this enhances quality and neatness.
5) The tagin / …
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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