Early in my career as sofer, I was also a governor at the local Jewish primary school that my son Aryeh attended. On one particular governors training day, we were studying Talmud with the American educator Joel Lurie Grishaver, someone who I had known about as a cheder teacher and madrich (youth leader) and I had often sported one of his ‘Be Torah’ badges in class and at camp, like the one shown here.
Diary 18
Diary 18 - barbers and scribes.
In the roundabout way that Talmud
works, though we were learning about leadership we were focusing on what one can or can’t do in a public courtyard (all those where an improper thought just crossed their mind go to the back of the class).
But why am I telling you this? Apart from the fact that study is very important in sofrut, it transpires that according to an un-attributed baraita (a statement from Mishnaic times which isn’t in the Mishna) in Bava Batra 21a that ‘if a person has a room in a courtyard, he must not rent it to a mohel, a blood-letter, a weaver, a SOFER or a non-Jewish teacher’.
I knew a mohel
at the time - we used to go to the cinema together - and I suspect he would have been fairly surprised to be classed alongside a blood-letter, and I was also a bit miffed. Why shouldn’t a sofer
be allowed to work in a room in a courtyard?
It was Rashi who first leapt to my defense. According to him, sofer
in this context didn't mean scribe, as is usual, but referred instead to a Jewish teacher. Indeed Rava said it was actually the head teacher and the prohibition was to prevent staff meetings, which would have too many teachers coming and going and so annoy the residents.
‘Wrong!’ says Tosfot (a motley collection of Rashi’s descendants who enjoyed nothing better than proving their ancestor wrong) sofer does mean the town scribe who would have lots of visitors making orders and bringing scrolls, mezuzot and tefillin for repair, so I was banned again!
But it was Rabbi Gershom who turned out to be the hero of the day. ‘Wrong!’ he says, ‘here the word is actually SAPAR (same consonants, different vowels), meaning a barber, and not a scribe!’
It was more or less at this point that I started giggling - probably not the usual thing with Talmud
study.
Joel looked at me strangely. You see, I explained, my grandfather Jack Michaels z"l
had been a barber, who cut my hair as I grew up. Within a couple of sentences of the Talmud, a scribe had become a barber, and, as my father then piped up, within a couple of generations, a barber had become a scribe!
Below: Jack the barber - apparently cutting the hair of some notorious East End villain!
Isn't Torah
study wonderful and a touch random. BE TORAH
everyone.
Mordechai Pinchas
GO TO DIARY 19
Mordechai Pinchas
