Soferet's arcane skill-set aids and angers Jews

By Anne Koppel Conway

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Aviel Barclay is not the first woman sofer, Jewish ritual Torah scribe. You haven't heard of any others? No names of soferets popped up at dinner parties? That's because the last time a woman ? prior to Aviel Barclay ? had a profession of writing sefer Torahs was 200 years ago, said Barclay, a soferet from Vancouver, B.C.
According to her research, at least 10 Jewish women have used a feather quill or bamboo or a reed to calligraph aleph-bets on parchment before this 21st century female scribe entered the scene.
Certified in 2003, Barclay believes she is the only certified soferet alive today.
She said she's perfectly happy not being "the vanguard. ? It's better for everyone if I'm not the first. Halakhah depends so much on precedent."
Barclay, 37, was at P'nai Or to check the congregation's Torah.

Rabbi Aryeh Hirschfield said, "We don't have a resident sofer in our community, so it's a big deal to have one come. It's our intention to raise money for needed repairs." He encourages people to sponsor letters requiring repair.
Mateh Esther/Linda Brownstein said P'nai Or hopes to have Barclay return to do repairs at the end of August. "We would love to have other communities, who need their Torahs repaired, to split the cost of bringing her down here." Brownstein can be contacted by e-mail, shalom@teleport.com.
Totally at ease with the Torah, Barclay multitasked. She scrutinized each section of the Torah, consulted with the rabbi, typed notes on her laptop, offered suggestions, answered a barrage of questions and interspersed all that with a running commentary about the Torah.
It doesn't take much to have a Torah declared passul, invalid.
"If just a single letter has a tiny crack in the ink, it's enough to make a sefer Torah not kosher," Barclay said.
"I love doing this, because every time I see something new in a sefer Torah," she said. "Maybe part of the Torah was written by a different sofer later on," though having one scribe write an entire Torah "is more common."
She also has seen beloved Torahs that had been damaged and pieced together with other Torahs to make one kosher one.
"There's a big black-market for stolen Torahs," she cautioned. Barclay has seen them posted on eBay. "For a Torah this size, the materials alone would run $4,000, if it had to be replaced."
Barclay's interest in becoming a scribe began at age 3, when watching "Fiddler on the Roof" "a 100 times" at her father's theatre in Victoria, B.C. "It was the first time I saw the letters of the Aleph-Bet; they stayed with me."
Male sofers simply purchase their supplies from sofer supply outlets. Since these stores will not sell to women, her mentor ships her the needed materials. And she is learning to make those supplies herself, "So, if God forbid" her supply is cut off, she will be able to create her own materials to continue her work.
She has learned how to make the special Torah ink. "There are a few recipes in the Talmud. You first have to boil the ingredients and then let the mixture steep like tea for six months to a year."
She is also trying her hand at making parchment. Since scraping deerskin gets "gory," she wears "industrial strength gloves and large garbage bags."
Getting turkey feathers to make quills is an easier task.
It has not been easy for the 21st century woman scribe. Barclay was a gemologist, when God "sent me a message." Her hand had been badly crushed in a bike accident. Someone opened a car door without looking, jamming her writing hand between the door and her handlebars. She called it "a door-prize. I knew I wasn't following the right path then. I'm stubborn. Sometimes God has to yell at me."
After regaining use of her hand, at age 26, she began her studies with two soferim in Jerusalem. One was Dov Laimon, a Bostoner Chasidic Rabbi, now deceased. The other sofer chooses to remain anonymous ? and for good reason.
During this time she also was studying at a yeshiva. When the school found out she was learning sofrut, school officials demanded to know the name of the sofer who dared to instruct a woman, where he lived and what car he drove. She refused to reveal that information and was summarily shown the door to the yeshiva.
"It was creepy," she said. "The school wasn't right for me anyway. After that I went to others that were good."
One piece of advice from her mentor sofer: "Don't make skinny strokes." In the long term the thin strokes will crack faster. "Be kind to your clients so they won't have to make repairs again in five years," is the lesson he taught her.
The certified soferet continues to get hate e-mail. "It's mostly boring." Some tell her she will go to hell if she continues to practice sofrut. "It's just cursing; something Jerry Falwell could have written. You can't engage them in [intelligent] dialog."
On the Jewish continuum,"I'm user-friendly Orthodox," she quipped. Actually, she sees herself as centrist Orthodox. "The only thing weird about me is that I'm doing sofrut."
Rabbi Tzvi Fischer, an ordained Orthodox rabbi, who is the director of the Kollel Jewish educational learning center in Portland, said that whether a woman can be a sofer, according to Halakhah, is discussed in Shulhan Arukh (Set Table) law codifier, written by Rabbi Joseph Caro in 17th century Israel, which states women cannot write Torah. This opinion is followed by the "standard Orthodox community" today, Fischer said, and most, therefore, would not use the services of a soferet. However, he continued, this opinion "is not absolute." In Rabbi Falk Katz's responsum he disagrees with Rabbi Caro saying that it's OK, no problem for a woman to write Torah. "Both [positions] are standard Halakhic codifiers," Fischer said.