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MEGILLAT HASHOAH - A NEW TIKKUN
Thus far, I have said little about the English of the text but it was that that led to the next idea. 5:17 reads “...and for all the world's beauty whose rainbow of colours was lost, replaced by only brown and gray and black.” The Hebrew 'tsiv'oniyuto' just means 'it's colours'. But the translation 'rainbow' led to the consideration of including a rainbow shaped tag on the word, that I had seen elsewhere. Rabbi Meyer - equating the idea of the rainbow with the story of Noah and the fact that this was a God would not destroy the earth ever again and as the Shoah was in many ways a destruction of humanity - felt that we should aim for a kind of 'broken' rainbow, and again several options were considered before settling on one final depiction.
Finally, in the Shema in T’fillin or M’ezuzot there is also a tradition of writing an oddly expanded or spread 'chet' in 'charah' (anger). I had to go to Stamford Hill to get to the bottom of this one but it is found in a very negative context of God destroying the land if we don't keep the commandments. One sofer I know felt that the ‘chet’ should be spread so that the 'charon af' should apply on the ‘resha'im’ (wicked ones) and bases this on Ba'al Haturim but I couldn't find any such reference. Another scribe I contacted through the web informed me that the Da'at K'doshim says it spread so that it in some way reduces God's potential anger.
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