When was the last time you made your mark on something important — literally?
For members of Congregation Etz Chayim in Palo Alto, it was on Sunday, March 9, when hundreds of celebrants were on hand to dedicate the synagogue’s new sefer Torah, and to repair their old scroll, letter by letter — by hand. At this service, the worshippers didn’t just read the words of Torah, they actually wrote them on the parchment, using a quill pen and gum ink, just as scribes have been doing for thousands of years.
At the brief Shacharit morning service, Rabbi Ari Cartun and others stood under a chuppah because, he said, “the congregation is symbolically marrying the new Torah. The Chanukat haTorah (Torah dedication) began with the words, “Sweeten the words of your Torah in our mouths.”
Michael Vinson, one of the founders and first president of Etz Chayim, told the story of the old scroll and its role in the life of the independent, liberal congregation.
Founded in 1995 by six families in search of a small, community-oriented place of worship, Etz Chayim needed a Torah, and the rabbi of Reform Temple Emanu-El in San Jose offered to lend one, which the congregation has been using for eight years.
“This Torah has become a living, breathing entity, a source of memories for all the families in Etz Chayim,” Vinson reminisced, “including ours. My wife, Trish, read from it at her bat mitzvah.”
Also, he said, the scroll is longer and heavier than the usual Torah, and “lifting it at services, and as I drove it from place to place in my car, was the beginning of all my back problems.”
Because Jews roll and unroll a Torah for study week after week, it can become worn over the years, and the pages can tear or break, even in careful hands.
Eventually the borrowed Torah was so brittle it ripped in several places and needed to be restored before it could be returned to San Jose. Torah scribe Rabbi David Rue of Los Angeles repaired the tears in the Torah’s parchment and rewrote some portions of text.
Cartun noted that Rue “did not fill in the words,” but merely outlined them. “This symbolizes that the Torah is nothing but a book until the letters are filled in and we make the words a part of our lives.” To highlight the dedication ceremony, he invited Rue to tell the congregation about the creation of a Torah.
Etz Chayim’s “new” Torah was hand-written in Ukraine around World War I. It was smuggled out and sold, as so many scrolls were during the Soviet regime. The borrowed Torah is 150 years old.
The parchment on which both scrolls are written is made from the belly of a kosher animal. Most scrolls are cowhide, while some are of deer or sheepskin. It takes 54 skins to complete a standard Torah.
Each letter is hand-drawn and usually filled in as they are written. But for the Etz Chayim ceremony, Rue left them in outline form so they could be filled in at the service.
The ink and the quill, like the parchment, are made from only kosher materials. The ink is made from a recipe that is thousands of years old. It starts with gall, a sappy growth from oak trees. The syrup is boiled in wine vinegar for several days; after adding burnt olive oil and other ingredients, the gummy brew is strained.
Quills, made from turkey or goose feathers, are difficult to write with. The cuts to shape the tips must be perfect. If the tip is too wide, a “watermelon” blot of ink results; if the end is not sharp enough, it won’t allow enough ink to flow onto the page.
If a scribe makes a mistake, he must be careful to note the words that need to be changed. If any of the seven names of God is written incorrectly, it cannot be erased; the scribe must replace the whole piece of parchment. If individual letters or words need to be corrected, a curved-blade scalpel is used to scrape the ink off the page (ink sits on the parchment, so it is not absorbed). Long passages are replaced in sections.
After a Torah is written, it must be completely checked twice, first to make sure that the letters and words are exact, and second to verify that the lines are shaped and aligned correctly. Two people work together to review the text letter by letter, column by column.
While the process involves craftsmanship and attention to detail, it is also a worshipful act. Before the writing began at Etz Chayim, the scribe uttered the words, “Behold! I write for the sanctity of the Torah.”
With those words of intention, each man, woman and child above third-grade age was invited to take quill in hand and fill in some of the words of the scroll. The activity was accompanied by a guitar and drum, and singing and dancing.
When each congregant approached the table where the scroll was unrolled, Rue gave suggestions for filling in the next letter and how to move the pen. Making a wrong move could shatter the quill or splatter the ink. A total of 80 letters needed to be filled in, and it took more than an hour to do them all.
The Torah dedication ceremony touched participants in myriad ways. Julie Kohl called writing on the old Torah “a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for my family.”
A recent bat mitzvah, Naomi Shachter summed up many of her fellow students’ emotions:
“I felt powerful, like I was part of the past and part of the future. Many people have done this over the years, and now I’m following in their footsteps. someone else will read the word I wrote on this Torah long after I’m gone.”
Etz Chaim, which is currently using a school and a church in Palo Alto, is now raising funds for a home of its own.