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A TREE OF LIFE . . .

The Torah in Practice

It’s early morning, probably a Monday or a Thursday—a market day in ancient Jerusalem—and, although it is autumn, the weather is warm and dry. But then, the weather is usually warm and dry in Jerusalem in the month of Tishri. The year is 444 b.c.e., and most of the Jews gathering near one of the gates of the city have been back in Judah for only a few years. They have returned at last from galut/exile in Babylon at the behest of the great Persian kings: first Cyrus, who conquered Babylonia, and now his successor, Artaxerxes, ruler of the most formidable empire in the Middle East. It was Artaxerxes who sent the priest and scribe Ezra (a direct descendant of Moshe’s brother Aharon) back to Judah “to regulate Judah and Jerusalem according to the Law of your God, which is in your care” (Ezra 7:14). Now Ezra is going to fulfill that pledge.

Someone has erected a wooden tower at the square before Jerusalem’s Water Gate and the people have been gathering for some time, milling about, waiting to hear a man read from a document that they have all heard about but, in all probability, have neither read nor had read to them. Let an eyewitness tell what happens next.

All the people gathered themselves together as one man into the broad place that was before the water gate; and they spoke unto Ezra the scribe to bring the book of the Law of Moses, which the LORD had commanded to Israel. And Ezra the priest brought the Law before the congregation, both men and women, and all that could hear with understanding, upon the first day of the seventh month. And he read therein before the broad place that was before the water gate from early morning until midday, in the presence of the men and the women, and of those that could understand; and the ears of all the people were attentive unto the book of the Law. . . .

And Ezra opened the book in the sight of all the people—for he was above all the people—and when he opened it, all the people stood up. And Ezra blessed the LORD, the great God. And all the people answered: “Amen, Amen,” with the lifting up of their hands; and they bowed their heads, and fell down before the LORD with their faces to the ground. . . . And [the elders] read in the book, in the Law of God, distinctly; and they gave the sense, and caused them to understand the reading.

(Nekhemyah 8:1–3, 5–6, 8; 1917 Jewish Publication Society trans.)

Ezra read from the cool of first light that day into the blistering heat of midday. No one stirred from his place. The next day he did the same and the listeners were as rapt in their attention as before.

And so it began.

What is this book, this Law of Moshe, so powerful that the men and women who listened to it “fell down . . . with their faces to the ground” upon hearing it read aloud?

In a word, it is the Torah.

What Is the Torah?

The Torah, as contemporary Bible scholar James L. Kugel has written, is the “single term that might summon up the very essence of Judaism . . . [yet] it is an idea that defies easy summary.” As Kugel notes, the Hebrew word itself, torah, went through a complex evolution and is used in several quite disparate ways.

The first time the word occurs in the Hebrew Bible is in Shemot 12:49: “There shall be one Torah for [both] you and for the stranger that dwells in your midst.”

Teaching? Law? Each is used by translators. Each fits.

Like almost all Hebrew words, torah has a three-letter root, which it shares with the verb horah (a different word from the familiar circle dance of the same name, which is Roumanian in origin), meaning “teach.” (See “A Quick Introduction to the Hebrew Language,” page 7.) Literally, torah is a teaching.

This theory of the derivation of the word, while consistent with its uses and meanings, is not universally accepted. Philologists have long debated the origins of the word torah. Some have suggested that it is not derived from horah but is, rather, a formation influenced by other ancient Near Eastern words like the Akkadian tertu, meaning “oracle.” Another theory posits torah as a derivation from the Hebrew yarah, meaning “to cast,” as in lots that are used to predict the future.

Faced with this uncertainty, all we can do is focus on how the word’s usage evolved and what it has come to mean to us. As noted above, torah is often used to mean a teaching, law, or precept. For example, the rules governing Nazirites—men and women who dedicated periods of their lives to God by vowing to abstain from cutting their hair and consuming intoxicants, Samson being the most famous example—can be found in a section of B’midbar/6, which is often referred to as the torah of the Nazirite. Colloquially, a teaching by a contemporary rabbi may be called a torah, too.

For our purposes, the most salient meaning of the word torah is the Pentateuch (from the Greek meaning “five pieces”), that is, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. It is the first of the three scriptural divisions whose initials form the acronym that gives the Hebrew Bible its other name, TaNaKh (for Torah, Nevi’im/the Prophets, Ketuvim/the Writings). The Pentateuch is also called the Five Books of Moses for their putative author, and is often referred to as a Khumash, from the Hebrew word for “five.”

This is the meaning of torah that is most often encountered in popular Jewish writing and, for reasons that will become apparent shortly, the meaning with which most Jews are familiar.

The Pentateuch, or Torah, consists of:

1. Genesis/Bereishit, also called Sefer Ha’Yetzirah/the Book of Creation

2. Exodus/Shemot, also called Sefer Ha’Ge’ulah/the Book of Redemption

3. Leviticus/Vayikra, also called Torat Kohanim/Instructions of the Priests

4. Numbers/B’midbar, also called Khumash Ha’Pekudim/the Book of the Censuses

5. Deuteronomy/Devarim, also called Mishneh Torah/the Repetition of the Law

The Hebrew name of each book is derived from the first significant word of each book: Bereishit/Beginning, Shemot/Names, Vayikra/And He Called, B’midbar/In the Wilderness, and Devarim/Words. The commonly used names—Genesis and so on—are derived from Greek and reflect the content of the books. Bereishit recounts the Creation, the origins of humanity, and the origins of the Jewish people; Shemot tells the story of the departure of the Jews from bondage in Egypt, the Revelation on Mount Sinai, and the beginning of the Hebrews’ time in the desert; Vayikra is a compendium of laws; B’midbar continues the story of the Israelite wanderings in the desert, enumerates the twelve tribes, and sets down additional laws; and Devarim repeats the laws mentioned in the previous three books (hence its Greek name Deuteronomy, “second law”), prepares the Israelites for entry into the Promised Land, and ends with the death of Moshe.

As we will see throughout the remainder of this book, the Torah—the Pentateuch—is the heart of Judaism, whether one is Orthodox or Reform or anything in between. The “laws and precepts” on which Judaism—and by extension, Christianity and Islam—is based are to be found in the Torah.

But the meaning of the Torah is not transparent.

It’s actually anything but. The Torah is often frustratingly opaque, and to base one’s conduct on its prescriptions and proscriptions alone would be difficult at best. As time passed, the Jews moved farther away from the origins of this sacred text. Their language underwent the evolutionary changes that are inevitable in a living tongue, and the meaning of original passages of Torah became obscured. In many cases, the laws are presented in the narrative by implication and inference, and must be teased out by various hermeneutic methods. There are also passages that seem infuriatingly incomplete. For example, Moshe tells the Israelites that they can eat meat from animals that have been slaughtered in the manner that God has prescribed. But the description of that slaughtering method is nowhere to be found.

When the Jews of Judah heard Ezra read from the sacred Torat Moshe/Torah of Moses, they were overwhelmed with the desire to follow its teachings, but there were plenty of those teachings they simply couldn’t understand, even with the elders trying to explain them. Ezra, tradition says, convened a great body of scholars (either 85 or 120, depending on the source), called the Knesset Ha’Gedolah/Great Assembly, to interpret and adjudicate matters of Torah. Convened sometime between 539 and 332 b.c.e., Knesset Ha’Gedolah included many men who could read and write (a rarity in those days), and they were entrusted with the task of bringing order out of a chaos of texts, rulings, and customs.

But it was believed that by writing down the rulings of the rabbis, the Great Assembly would be undermining the importance of the Torah, a Written Law that they had been empowered only to clarify. What they developed was, by contrast, an Oral Law. The distinction between Written Torah and Oral Torah has persisted to this day, with the Written Torah, or Torah she’b’ktav, referring to the Pentateuch. The postbiblical books that constitute Oral Torah, Torah she’ba’al peh (literally, “Torah from the mouth”), include such key texts as the Mishnah and the Gemara, collectively known as the Talmud, the centerpiece of Rabbinic Judaism. We’ll examine this distinction at much greater length in Chapter 4.

To contemporary Jews, the Written Torah and the Oral Torah are equal parts of one whole. Although their view of the status of Oral Torah and the halakhah/the body of Jewish religious law that is derived from it, will differ depending on what branch of Judaism they come from, all will tell you that Written Torah and Oral Torah together constitute Torah. And they will go farther and tell you that their teachings, the teachings of their teachers, their teachers’ teachers, and so on, going back in an unbroken chain of tradition that begins at Sinai where God gave Moshe the Tablets of the Law, is all considered to be Torah, the living and constantly evolving body of Jewish knowledge, thought, and practice. Used in that sense, one could say Torah is being made every day.

And so it is.

But for our purposes, we will define Torah a bit more narrowly (or this book could never be completed), focusing on the Five Books of Moses—Torah she’b’ktav—and their central role in Jewish thought and practice.

A QUICK INTRODUCTION TO THE HEBREW LANGUAGE

The Torah is written in Hebrew (Biblical Hebrew, to be exact, but the distinctions between Biblical, Mishnaic, and modern Hebrew, while significant, are irrelevant for our purposes). A certain basic knowledge of the language will prove useful in understanding certain important facts about the Torah.

The Hebrew language has twenty-two letters, a chart of which may be found below. (It should be added that there are five letters that have distinctive forms when they appear at the end of a word.) Each of these letters has a single sound (a few of them appear to have the same sound; the exact sounds of these letters have been lost to history) and functions as a consonant. As we will see later, the “pointing,” called nikudot, that represents vowel sounds was a later addition to the Torah (and is not present in the Torah scrolls). There are no capital letters in Hebrew.

Hebrew is a gendered language, with all nouns categorized as either masculine or feminine. Adjectives, adverbs, verbs, plurals, and possessives all must agree in gender with a given noun, depending on the context.

Each letter of the Hebrew alphabet has a numerical value. In fact, in the Hebrew text of the Torah in almost all Khumashim the chapter and verse numbers are given in Hebrew. There is a form of Bible interpretation based on the numerical values of Hebrew words that is called gematria, and many commentators with their feet planted firmly in Jewish mysticism will talk about these numerical values at length.

Most Hebrew words (verbs in particular) are based on three-letter roots. (There are a very few verbs that are exceptions to this rule, having two or four letters in their root.) As we will see quite frequently, a great deal can be learned about a word’s meaning by examining its root and seeing what other words are derived from that root. For example, consider the words derived from the three-letter root lamed-mem-dalet (l-m-d), the root of the verb lilmod/to study. (The infinitive form in Hebrew always begins with l’/to.) Some of the other words that are derived from that root include talmid/a male student, talmidah/a female student, and a word we will encounter many times, the Talmud, that central work of Rabbinic Judaism, whose name obviously refers to the practice of study that is so dear to Jewish hearts. (In fact, a Hebrew grade school will sometimes be called a talmud Torah, i.e., a place for Torah study.)

The Hebrew Alphabet

a alephj khetµ mem sofit

B bet? tetn nun

b vety yud˜ nun sofit

g gimelK kofs samekh

d daletk khof[ ayin

h hei° khaf sofitP pei

w vavl lamedp fei

z zayinm mem? fei sofit

x tzadi

q kuf

r resh

v shin

c sin

T,t tav

The Torah Scroll

The first time that a Jew encounters the Torah is almost invariably in a synagogue, as a hallowed scroll—a physical object and the subject of a highly specific ritual, Seder Kri’at Ha’Torah/the Service for the Reading of the Torah. Let’s take a closer look at a sefer Torah/Torah scroll.

The Torah scroll is a throwback to an earlier literary epoch; it is literally a scroll, wound onto two long wooden rods at each end. The first question that should pop into anyone’s mind is why, in this age of e-books and hypertext, Jews still read their sacred texts from a scroll. The first answer, of course, is that it is traditional; Jews have been reading from sifrei Torah (plural of sefer Torah) for over two and a half millennia. The Torah scroll has been written by hand by scribes for that same period of time, and still is today. At the same time, reading from a scroll long after the invention of bound books was another way for Jews to distinguish themselves and their religious practices from those of Christians, Muslims, and pagans. Finally, reading from scrolls produced in pretty much the same manner as those read by Jews as far back as the fifth century b.c.e. connects contemporary Jews to the unbroken continuity of their history.

As befits a sacred text and an object used in religious rites, the creation of the sefer Torah is governed by a complex set of regulations, mainly dating from the Mishnaic and Talmudic eras (between the second and sixth centuries c.e.). Every element of the sefer Torah, from its physical dimensions to the parchment on which it is written to the ink and the quill with which it is written, is prescribed by halakhah.

Consider the size of a Torah scroll. In the Talmud tractate Bava Batra of the Babylonian Talmud, it is written:

Our Rabbis have taught: One must not make a Torah scroll either with its length greater than its circumference, or its circumference greater than its length. They inquired of Rabbi [as Yehudah Ha’Nasi was known]: The dimensions of a Torah scroll are how much? He replied: When using gevil-parchment, six handbreadths; when using klaf-parchment, I do not know the dimensions.1

A minor tractate of the post-Talmudic period, called Sefer Torah, adds that the height and circumference of the scroll “must be exactly alike.” Tractate Sefer Torah gives the scribe considerable leeway in how he writes the text on a panel of parchment; the panel “must contain not less than three columns nor more than eight,” so the size of a finished Torah scroll may vary somewhat. Most sifrei Torah are between eighteen and twenty-two inches high. The basis for this is post-Talmudic. The Shulkhan Arukh/ Prepared Table, Rabbi Joseph Caro’s medieval codification of halakhah, states that each of the Tablets of the Law that Moshe brought down from Sinai was six tefakhim high and six wide; a tefakh is a measurement equivalent to the width of a man’s palm, estimated at about three and a half inches, giving a total of approximately twenty-one inches.

Each panel of parchment will contain forty-two lines of text, with a three-inch margin at the top, a four-inch margin at the bottom, and two-inch margins on the left and right (leaving ample room for the scribe to sew the panels together with sinew or animal hair). Most modern Torah scrolls are written in 245 columns of forty-two lines each. It takes an expert scribe about a year on average to complete a single Torah scroll, although some scribes write faster than others.

Paper, Pen, and Ink

One does not write the words of sacred texts on just any paper lying around, with whatever media come to hand. The rules governing the parchment on which a sefer Torah is written, and the pen and ink with which it is written, are many and very specific. Within the parameters set by the rabbis, though, an interesting process of evolution has taken place, allowing for a certain degree of change over the past two millennia in both the materials and the processes by which they are prepared.

The k’laf/parchment on which the Torah scroll is written, the hair or sinew with which the panels of parchment are sewn together, and the quill pen with which the text is written all must come from ritually clean—that is, kosher—animals. Thus, the skin from which the parchment is derived must come from an animal that chews its own cud and has cloven hooves—a cow, ox, lamb, or goat are all acceptable. And the bird whose feather provides the sofer/scribe with a kulmus/quill pen must also be kosher—a chicken, goose, duck, pigeon, or turkey. A scribe may never use tools made of “base metals,” for these are associated with implements of war.

That much hasn’t changed in two thousand years.

However, some of the materials have changed to meet changed circumstances in the Diaspora or new technologies.2

For example, in Talmudic times (a bit less than two thousand years ago) animal hides designated for use in producing parchment for sifrei Torah were treated with salt and barley flour and then soaked in the juice of gallnuts. Today, however, a more effective method of treating the hides has been devised. After two days of soaking in clear water, the hides are immersed for seven days in limewater, which separates the hair from the skin and makes the skin more pliable. The old method produced a parchment having one usable side; with the new method, either side can be used. However, tradition dictates that the inner side be the one written upon. To determine which is the inner side, a sofer will wet the skin and allow it to curl; the side that bends backward is the correct side. (A single sheet of parchment is called a yeriah; the average Torah scroll will be made of fifty yeriot, with between three and eight columns of writing on each.) One thing has not changed: the scribe must choose the hides carefully, using only the finest quality available. After all, this is a sefer Torah, and it should last two hundred years or more.

In Talmudic times, soferim would write with reed or willow pens. The reed had a symbolic significance that resonated powerfully in an age in which the great rabbis urged Jews to be “soft like the reed rather than stiff like the cedar.” The willow pens were derived from willows that had been used as part of the Arbah Minim/Four Species that are held and shaken as part of the rituals of the festival of Sukkot; when the festival was over, soferim would separate out the willow branches and turn them into pens for writing Torah scrolls. But reeds and willows are not readily available throughout the world, and as the Jews were scattered across the globe, other, more accessible alternatives had to be found. Hence the use today of quill pens. (Sephardic scribes still use reeds whenever possible.)

Like the other components of a sefer Torah, the d’yo/ink, too, has undergone changes over time, while still conforming to basic strictures. The ink with which a Torah scroll is written must be solid black, very durable, and not indelible. Two thousand years ago a sofer would hold a container over a flame of olive oil and then scrape the accumulated carbon from the surface of the vessel, mix it with honey, oil, and gallnuts (used for their tannic acid) to create his writing fluid. Today, however, the ink used is a compound of gallnuts, gum arabic, and copper sulfate, to which some scribes add vinegar and alcohol. The mixture is boiled and then strained.

Here’s one recipe for kosher ink given in a manual for soferim called Khasdei David (as reported by Mordechai Pinchas, an English scribe, on his excellent Web site at http://www.bayit02.freeserve.co.uk/index.html):

Ingredients:

3 grammes of gumy rabik (gum arabic)

3 grammes of afatsim (gallnuts)

1 gramme of kankantum (vitriol—i.e. iron or copper sulphate)

Quarter of a litre of water

Crush the gallnuts into a fine powder (basically this is tannic acid). Mix all the ingredients together. Cook on an open flame until the residue is left. Strain out the larger lumps of gallnut. Leave for 6 months to turn black. Use as ink!

Before the sofer can begin the laborious task of copying the sacred text, there is one final bit of physical preparation to be done. Taking a ruler and a sargel, a stylus that looks like a small carpenter’s awl (but that has a reed point—no base metals, remember), he will score the individual sheet of parchment to be used with forty-three thin parallel lines that stretch nearly the width of the sheet, and two vertical lines that demarcate the left and right margins. In this way the scribe ensures that the lines of text will be straight and equally spaced, and that they will begin and end at the same point on each line.

COMMANDMENT 613: TO WRITE A SEFER TORAH

The final mitzvah prescribed in the Torah is that every Jew should write a Torah scroll. In practice this is not feasible, and completing a letter of a newly written scroll as part of a siyum is considered the fulfillment of this mitzvah (see page 21). But where in the Torah is this injunction stated?

In Devarim 31:19, Adonai tells Moshe, “Now write for yourselves this Song and teach it to B’nei Yisrael that they might recite it, so that this Song will serve as My witness for [them].” Of course, the plain-sense meaning of this sentence is that Moshe is to write down and teach to the Israelites one small part of Sefer Devarim, and that the commandment to write it down was directed to Moshe (and possibly also to Yehoshua as his successor, as Maimonides interprets it).

However, the Talmud says otherwise. In Tractate Sanhedrin, Rabbah says, “Even though a person may have inherited a scroll of the Torah from his ancestors, it is nevertheless a commandment for one to write his own, as the verse states, ‘Now, write for yourselves this Song.’ ” In Tractate Menakhot, this ruling is further amplified, closing with Rav Sheshet’s statement, “[O]ne who corrects even a single letter in a defective scroll is likened to one who has written the entire scroll.” Later sages, chief among them Maimonides, will elaborate on this theme, but it is clearly the intent of the rabbis that every Jew should put quill pen to k’laf at least once.

The Work Begins

The physical preparations are virtually complete. But this is not an ordinary copying job, and there are spiritual preparations to be made as well. Before his workday begins, the sofer will immerse himself in the mikveh/ritual bath. Just before he goes to his worktable, he will perform the ritual of handwashing. At last the writing itself may begin. The sofer sharpens his quills, cutting a writing point that will allow him to move smoothly between broad and narrow lines. Then he tests the quill and ink by writing the name Amalek, and then crossing it out. The original Amalekites were a Sinaitic tribe who treacherously attacked B’nei Yisrael/ the Children of Israel in the desert, after the Exodus from Egypt. In Devarim 25:19, God instructs B’nei Yisrael to blot out their name for- ever (but also to remember the terrible sins of the Amalekites). Since that time, Amalek has been the traditional name applied to the most deadly and ferocious of the enemies of the Jewish people, from Haman to Hitler.

Then the scribe murmurs, “I am writing the Torah for the holiness of the Torah and the name of Ha’Shem for the holiness of God’s name,” and the work begins.

What that work consists of is the most painstaking copying. One does not sit down to write a Torah scroll casually. Not a single letter—not even a yud, the smallest letter in the Hebrew alphabet, barely more than half a pen stroke—can be written from memory. As he writes, the scribe will read each word aloud to double-check the accuracy of his work. The sofer works from a tikkun, a special copy of the Khumash, from which he copies the text onto his sheets of parchment. Like the scroll itself, the tikkun has 248 pages (corresponding to the sheets of parchment in the average sefer Torah) with forty-two lines per page. And like the scroll that the sofer is creating, the tikkun has neither vowel markings, punctuation, nor paragraph breaks.

Like the materials that go into a sefer Torah, the lettering also is governed by certain rules. Each letter stands alone, with blank space on all four sides. The space between letters of a word is prescribed (a hair’s breadth); likewise the space between words (the width of a small letter). Between lines there must be the space of the height of a line, and between each of the Five Books there must be the space of four lines.

There are three styles of script in which a sefer Torah may be written: the Beit Yosef/House of Joseph, used by Ashkenazic scribes; the Ari, used by most Hasidic scribes and named for the great sixteenth-century mystic, Isaac Luria, known as the Ari/Lion; and the Vellish, generally used by Sephardic scribes. Each of these three is a version of ketav Ashuri/ Assyrian writing, a script that developed from Aramaic writing and was picked up by the Jews during the Babylonian exile in the sixth century b.c.e. The primary difference between the Sephardic and Ashkenazic scripts is that the latter is somewhat thicker and may therefore require an extra penstroke or two to execute a letter; the Vellish is also somewhat more rounded. (And there are even variations within the three main styles. For example, scribes who are Lubavitcher Hasidim use a slightly different form of the Ari.) Whatever script is used, letters must be clearly, crisply formed so that there is no confusion between them; with letters that closely resemble one another—dalet and resh, for example—this is a real concern. Traditionally, the test for recognizability is that a child of average intelligence can tell what the letter is.

Tradition dictates many other elements in the writing of a Torah scroll. For example, soferim will begin almost every column of a sefer Torah with a word that begins with the letter vav. The basis of this custom is rather unusual. In Shemot there is a description of the curtains that adorned the Mishkan/Tabernacle that the Israelites built to house the tablets on which the Ten Commandments were written; these curtains were held up by twenty amudim/pillars, each topped with a silver band with vavim/hooks (sing., vav). At some point a sofer saw the reference to the vavim ha’amudim/ hooks on the pillars and took it as a sign that each column—amud—of the Torah should be topped by a hook, a vav.

It is also traditional that the scribe arrange his writing so that six specific words from the Torah appear within the first line at the top of a column of text: Bereishit/Beginning (from Bereishit 1:1), Yehudah/Judah (from Bereishit 49:8), Ha’Ba’im/the One who comes (from Shemot 14:28), Sh’mor/Observe (from Shemot 34:11), Mah/How (from B’midbar 24:5) and Ve’a’ida/I will call forth as witnesses (from Devarim 31:28). Each of these words represents a significant concept in Judaism. Bereishit, the word that opens the Torah, establishes God as the Creator, the First Cause of all things. Yehudah indicates that the tribe of Judah will be the root of the Davidic line of kings of Israel. Ha’Ba’im refers to God’s role as the Protector of B’nei Yisrael. Sh’mor, an order to the Israelites from God to “observe” the commandments, refers to the renewal of God’s Covenant with the Israelites as Moshe descends from Sinai with the second set of tablets. Mah is the first word of the passage, Mah tovu ohalekha Ya’akov/ How lovely are your tents, Jacob, words of praise spoken by the Gentile prophet Balaam, instead of the curse he was supposed to place upon the Israelites (it is also one of the opening passages of the morning service). Ve’a’ida is the word by which Moshe calls forth heaven and earth as witnesses to the eternal nature of the Covenant.

Shirat Ha’Yam/the Song at the Sea, the passage in Shemot 15 in which Miriam and the Israelite women sing of God’s great miracle of the parting and closing of Yam Suf/the Sea of Reeds and destruction of Pharoah/ Pharaoh and the Egyptian army, is another passage that receives special treatment in sifrei Torah. Because the waters formed two “walls” protecting the Israelites as they crossed over, the Song itself is written in a pattern that looks like a brick wall. Shirat Ha’Yam occupies exactly thirty lines of text; the first line is full, but the next line is divided in thirds with two open spaces, followed by a line divided in two with an open space, which is followed by a line in thirds, a line in two, and so on. (Similarly, Moshe’s final speech to the Israelites, known as the Song of Moshe and found in Devarim 32, is written in a unique style, covering seventy lines, each with a space in the middle.)

Sometime in the ninth century c.e., scribes decided that the Torah’s text would be more attractive to the eye if it were justified on both the left and right margins. The result was one more peculiarity of Torah calligraphy, the extending of some letters horizontally to fill out a line. The letters that most frequently receive this treatment are tav, resh, he, dalet, lamed, and the final mem. Apparently these letters were selected because they are the easiest to widen laterally.

There is another feature of the lettering for a sefer Torah that is found nowhere else in Hebrew, a kind of ornamentation called taggin (from the Aramaic word tag, meaning crown). Taggin are found on seven of the letters (shin, zayin, tet, ayin, tzadi, gimel, and nun). A tag looks a little like the letter zayin, a thin line extending vertically upward with a thickening at the top; on the seven letters that sport them, they are found atop the left-hand side of the letter in threes, with the middle one slightly taller than the others, creating a stylized crown. The first letter of the Torah, the bet in Bereishit, is uniquely decorated with four taggin.