KEEPER OF THE WORD
RABBINICAL SCRIBE PRACTICES A TRADITION OF THE FAITH

By Ron Grossman, Chicago Tribune Staff Writer.
Published: Tuesday, September 27, 1994
Section: TEMPO
Page: 1

After car-pooling home, Rabbi Moishe Shaingarten went down to the rec room of his West Rogers Park bungalow and, children swirling under foot, took a handmade pen to a parchment scroll according to "an oral prescription delivered to Moses at Sinai," as the Talmud says.

"Yehuda, why don't you and your sister go outside to play?" Shaingarten said one day recently, trying to sell that proposal with a big smile.

His 4-year-old son stood his ground. Or rather, he sat on it. He was cutting scraps of paper into make-believe scrolls on the basement floor.

The rabbi tried again, touting the beauty of the autumn weather and the back yard's virtues. The boy was unmoved.

Admitting defeat with a shrug, Shaingarten found theological virtue in parental necessity.

"OK, maybe it's better you stay," he said. "The ancient rabbis taught that the test of a properly written scroll is if a young boy, who can't yet read, can distinguish one letter from the next, just by their shape."

Shaingarten dipped his pen into ritually prepared ink and went back to the task of touching up a handwritten copy of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible. Spread out on a desk in front of him was a long swath of parchment, an age-old writing material made of bleached animal hides. The parchment, which was several feet wide, was covered with the angular letters of the Hebrew alphabet and suspended between two stocky wooden rollers.

Once, other peoples also made their books this way, painstakingly copying one scroll after another. Then some clever ancient scribe reasoned that, if the parchment were cut into individual pages and those sewed together at one end, readers could be spared the awkward task of rolling and unrolling their way through a book. In the 15th Century, Johann Gutenberg perfected printing, an invention that reduced the book scribe's trade to a historical curiosity.

Indeed, Jews no less than Christians welcomed Gutenberg's breakthrough, and Jewish prayer books and the later portions of the Hebrew Bible soon were issued in printed and bound volumes. But not the Torah, at least not in the form that makes it the centerpiece of a synagogue's Sabbath service.

Saturday after Saturday through the year, Jewish congregations progressively read their way through the Books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. This Wednesday, on the festival of Simhat Torah ("Rejoicing of the Torah"), that ritual will finish with the description of Moses' death in Deuteronomy's final chapter. Then the cycle will begin again with a reading of the account of creation with which Genesis opens.

Those weekly Torah readings must be done from a handmade scroll, just like the one over which Shaingarten was bent. On Simhat Torah, in synagogues the world over, honored members of the congregation will twist a scroll's wood rollers, rapidly running the parchment backward from Deuteronomy to Genesis, so a cantor can once again chant:

B'reshit bara elohim et ha-shamayim v'et ha-aretz-In the beginning, God created the heavens and the Earth.

Secular scholars are at a loss to explain why the Jews hung on to the custom of reading from handwritten scrolls. University professors wonder why, if prayers can be chanted from a printed siddur, or prayer book, the Jews of the 15th Century didn't abandon the Torah scroll for mass-produced versions of the Books of Moses? Or of the book of Esther, which is also read from a scroll on the spring holiday of Purim?

"The ancient sages taught that, for some things, we can give a logical explanation," said Shaingarten, 42. "For others, we simply say: `We do it this way because our fathers did so and their fathers before them.' "

A key part of the faith

Shaingarten is a sofer, or rabbinical scribe, an artisan whose skills are an absolute necessity to a Jewish community. A synagogue can function without a rabbi. A learned layman can take the cantor's place at the bimah, or platform, where a Torah scroll is chanted. But without a sofer's trained hand to repair scrolls and produce replacements for older ones too faded to read, Jews would be unable to worship as their ancestors did.

According to Joshua ben Levi, a 3rd Century author, the rabbinical sages of ancient times so highly valued the sofer that they observed 24 fast days in their scribes' honor. Those hungry rabbis prayed, Levi reported, that scribes would not become rich and therefore unwilling to stick with the laborious task of writing scrolls.

Those prayers must have been heard. Taking up the sofer's profession is the functional equivalent of a vow of poverty. Chicago's Jewish community is served by about half a dozen scribes, only one of whom earns his living by his craft.

To feed his family (he and his wife, Elin, have four of their seven children still at home), Shaingarten is a 5th-grade teacher in a Jewish day school on Chicago's Far North Side. His school duties begin at 7:30 a.m., when he joins his students for morning prayers. They end with a 2:30 p.m. car pool.

Being a sofer is a part-time job for Shaingarten-and, as he and other scribes understand their calling, a full-time blessing.

More than just writing

A sofer is a custodian of God's words. It could be argued that so, too, is the printer who sets a Bible into type. But according to Orthodox Judaism, the words of the Torah have a power that goes beyond the logical force of their dictionary meanings. Bound up with them is God's creative energy, a rational force that a worshiper can sense by reading from a Torah written by a human hand guided by the intelligence of a man's mind and the piety of his heart.

"With every perfectly formed letter he writes, a scribe brings a bit of the shekhinah, the divine presence, to a scroll," said Shaingarten, pausing to trim the point of his pen. "It requires a man thinking and taking the decision to act to infuse a Torah with kedushah, holiness. This is something a computer can't do. A machine doesn't think, not even a clever laptop."

A scribe works in constant awe of his pen's accomplishments, Shaingarten added, explaining a mystical doctrine that runs through a sofer's mind as he writes. In Hebrew, the letters of the alphabet also serve as numbers, so that aleph, the first letter, is 1, beth, the second letter, is 2, and so on. During his apprenticeship, every scribe is taught by his master to form letters out of a series of pen strokes, which themselves are the simplest letters of the alphabet.

An aleph, for example, is made of a yod (the 10th letter of the alphabet), a vav (the 6th letter) and another yod, which add up to 26, or exactly the value of the letters of God's name. The constituent pen strokes of many other Hebrew letters have the same value.

So as he sets down the words of the Torah, a sofer's hand is constantly tracing the numerical formula for God's name, a word so holy that, in their whole lifetimes, observant Jews never pronounce. In a scroll or printed book, God's name is indicated by Hebrew letters whose vocal equivalent is roughly similar to the English word Jehovah. Seeing those letters, though, Jews say Adonai (Lord), a word spelled differently.

Humbled that their pens accomplish what is forbidden to the mouth, scribes take great pains to ensure the ritual purity of their scrolls. One pious old Israeli sofer, Shaingarten recalled, would cleanse himself in a mikvah, a ritual bathhouse, every time he was about to write God's name.

And he makes housecalls

A scroll made by such a holy man might sell for as much as $85,000, Shaingarten estimated. Scrolls of a less-celebrated sofer, who might devote a whole year to producing just one, are priced from $18,000.

A scribe's net profit is reduced by the several thousand dollars worth of parchment it takes to make a single scroll. So many scribes devote their energies less to the production of new Torahs than to correcting older ones, which have to be inspected and relettered on a prescribed schedule.

A sofer also produces and inspects tefillin, small leather boxes fastened to leather straps and containing Torah passages, which observant Jews wrap around their arms and heads during morning prayers. A scribe gets other work writing and checking the biblical verses enclosed in a mezuza, a small container Jews place on the doorposts of their homes, according to a biblical injunction.

Shaingarten advertises his services via posters in the widows of Jewish bookstores and food shops on nearby Devon Avenue. A mezuza, his posters assert, is the best possible home-security system because it comes with a divine guarantee.

"I set up a number code with the bookstores," Shaingarten said, tapping a beeper hanging from his belt next to the fringes of the ritual overgarment he wears while at work. "A customer calls a store needing a mezuza or tefillin inspection, they beep me. I don't charge extra for house calls."

Following destiny

Shaingarten was trained in Israel, where he went at age 18 in response to some vague personal calling. His father ran a noted yeshiva, a theological academy, in Brooklyn. But Shaingarten knew that, while wanting a religious vocation, he didn't relish the administrative responsibilities of a pulpit rabbi, who has to massage the egos of his congregation.

On impulse, he presented himself at the Jerusalem synagogue of the Gerer Hasidim, a branch of Judaism's pietistical and mystic movement. The Baal Shem Tov, the 18th Century founder of Hasidism, taught that the most humble of men could serve God just as well as a learned scholar.

"I immediately felt at home with the Ger," Shaingarten said. "I liked the `equalism' of the Hasidim."

After theological studies, Shaingarten became a grade-school teacher, then apprenticed himself to an Israeli sofer, almost by accident. But as Shaingarten sees things, there are no accidents, all of us having a prescribed place in God's plan.

During the years of his training, Shaingarten learned the ritual prescriptions for producing a Torah scroll. It must be written with a lampblack ink, produced by scraping the smoke off a glass inverted over burning grasses, preferably in the fields of Israel. A scribe's pen has to be carved from a turkey's tail feather. Parchment for a scroll can come only from a kosher animal.

After 17 years in Israel where he and his wife met, Shaingarten took a teaching job in Australia. He and his family later moved to Los Angeles and, two years ago, to Chicago. Each of those moves was prompted by meeting principals needing teachers or friends hearing about school openings, the kind of encounters others might ascribe to chance.

"Everyone is pulled in the direction of his destiny," Shaingarten said. "You do your part, God will do the rest."

He looked down to see that a number was registering on his beeper. He excused himself to return the call, pausing as the left the room to settle a squabble among the children.

"A rush job," he explained upon returning. "This time of year, everything's a rush. Kids, play nice."

With a fatherly smile, he made another try at restoring peace to the rec room while dipping a sharpened turkey feather into ink made from the burnt grasses of Israel. Then he bent over the scroll, forming letters out of yods and vavs, the scraping sounds of his pen adding up to the unutterable syllables of God's name.

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