What I Would Tell Someone Starting Out in This Today
The Question Behind the Question People who ask me how to start rarely mean the practical steps. They mean something closer to: how do I know if I have the patience for this. That is a fair question, because patience is the actual job. The calligraphy, the restoration, the painting, all of it sits on […]
The Mistake I See New Students of Hebrew Calligraphy Make
Starting With the Letter Instead of the Line Almost everyone who sits down to learn Hebrew calligraphy for the first time makes the same mistake. They open a page, pick a letter, and try to copy its shape. It looks reasonable. It is also backward. A letter is not a shape you memorize. It is […]
A Question I Get Asked Constantly About Restoring Old Torah Scrolls
The Question Behind The Question Almost every time I sit down with a scroll that has traveled with a family for generations, someone asks me the same thing. Not directly. They dance around it first. Then it comes out: “Is it worth fixing, or should we just replace it?” I understand why they ask. A […]
What Is Changing in How Torah Scrolls Get Checked, and What I Am Doing About It
The Old Way Still Works, but the World Around It Doesn’t For most of Jewish history, checking a Torah scroll, a mezuzah, or tefilin meant one thing: a scribe sits down with a magnifying glass and reads every letter by hand. That has not changed. It still has to happen that way, because a machine […]