The Torah tradition

Dianne and Anthony Medina wanted to replace Chabad Jewish Center’s Torah, which came from Eastern Europe and is more than 50 years old. The letters in the scroll containing the first five books of the Hebrew Scriptures were fading, and repairing them is difficult to do according to the letter of the law.

They shopped for a Torah on eBay, but the scrolls there were old, too, and in need of repair. So, Dianne says, “I asked the rabbi how much it would cost to buy a new Torah, and he said about $20,000.”

The Medinas — along with Dianne’s brother — immediately pledged the $20,000 to commission a new Torah that would be hand-lettered by a scribe, or sofer. “To the best of my knowledge,” says Chabad Rabbi Berel Levertov, “this is the first time the Jewish community of Santa Fe has ever commissioned a Torah.”

Levertov first went to a dealer, who hires and works with sofers. But the rabbi realized that he needed to know the sofer directly, so he contacted a cousin in Israel who recommended one. “I had to find a pious man, who fears the heavens and goes to the mikvah (ritual bath). His character is very important,” Levertov explains.

There were other decisions to make, such as which font among the many different traditions to choose from and what extras to buy — like the Torah crown, breastplate, cover and checking of the text to make sure it is perfect.

Because he had never commissioned a Torah before, Levertov greatly underestimated the total cost. The actual price will be about $40,000.

The congregation is now raising the additional money by seeking sponsorships. Donors can contribute in the names of a family member, a friend or even themselves .

Imagine, for example, that you donate a single letter. Rabbi Levertov carefully writes down your name and sends it to the scribe who is crafting the Torah in Israel. When he writes your letter, the scribe looks at your name. And, to Jewish people, the very soul of a person is signified by his name, which is what makes it so important.

“The Torah encapsulates God’s message to the universe, to his creation,” Levertov says. “It has a lot of codes, and it is said that everything that happens in the world is embedded in the Torah.” He goes on to add that “God’s wisdom and will are compressed into the 304,805 letters in the words. If one of these letters is changed or missing or touching another letter, the whole Torah isn’t kosher because the combination isn’t precise.”

A Torah is written with a quill pen (from a goose or turkey), and the ink is composed of lamp black (soot), gum Arabic (to thicken it) and gall nuts (parasites that grow on oak trees).

According to Shaya Billowitz, a sofer who has been attending a yeshiva in Israel since 1992, the pressure is great. During a recent visit to Santa Fe, he described the challenges faced by the sofer, who is not permitted to work on the Sabbath or holidays.

“There are 245 columns (or pages) in the Torah,” says Billowitz, “and each has 42 lines. There are only about 300 days in a year that a sofer is permitted to work, so it comes out to about a column a day that a sofer has to produce.”

The job itself is physically taxing. A sofer writes on a table that is at chest level, and most of the time he is hunched over, working on an unwieldy piece of parchment (made from cow hide) that is 6 to 8 inches from his eyes, perfectly inscribing the raised Hebrew letters, Billowitz says.

The sofer must carefully check every letter he forms against a Tikku — a corrected form of the Torah. It is extremely exacting work, and “the job doesn’t have a long lifespan because of the difficulty,” Billowitz says. If a mistake is made in one of the letters in the holy text, a microscopic layer of ink and parchment has to be scratched off with a razor. If a line is skipped, the whole page has to be erased and it can take many hours.

No two Torahs are ever exactly alike, “because the quality of the writing changes depending on how much sleep you get, how many hours a day you lift and hold your children and how peaceful your mind is,” Billowitz says.

Billowitz, who spent his infancy on the Zuni reservation where his father was in the Public Health Service, moved to Pecos and became an Orthodox Jew after meeting an inspirational rabbi in Santa Fe when he was l6 years old. He hasn’t yet had a Torah commission , but he perfects his skills several hours a day. “It’s a way to express my natural skills in a religious framework,” he explains.

Work on the new Torah began March 14, as part of the celebration of the holiday of Purim. The sofer in Israel had outlined the first six letters with a quill and sent the parchment to Santa Fe where Levertov carefully filled in the letters. Then he presented the quill to Dianne Medina, who wrapped it up and is going to have it framed. The Torah parchment was sent back to Israel. The Medinas have decided to dedicate the new scroll to Dianne’s father, Michael Roth, who passed away two years ago. A concentration-camp survivor, he had been very active in Chabad and served on the board of the Rabbinical College of America. “If anybody deserved the honor of a Torah dedication, it was my father,” she says. The Santa Fe scroll will take about a year to finish and will be completed about the time of Roth’s birthday next February. Contact Judith Fein at Judith@GlobalAdventure .us. HOW TO HELP Per letter (there are 304,805 in the Torah) — $18 Per word (out of 79, 976) — $36 Per verse (out of 5,845) — $100. It is also possible to endow a whole chapter or even one of the Five Books of Moses. There are still ten months left to purchase a sponsorship. For more information, go to www.chabadsantafe .com/Torah.