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To-rah
Torah scribe
"And God said to Moshe: Write down these commandments, for in accordance with these commandments I make a covenant with you and with Israel."
Shemot 34:27

Torah Trivia

  • It takes about 2,000 hours to write a Torah scroll. That's a full-time job for one year!
  • The oldest Torah we have dates back to the Second Temple period. That makes it over 2,000 years old!
  • Proud of his Jewish identity, Ilan Ramon, the Israeli astronaut who flew aboard the space shuttle Columbia, brought a small Torah into space.

    Letter Perfect

    Only a specially trained scribe, called a sofer, can write a sefer Torah, and there are many rules the sofer must follow. For example, each letter of the Torah must be drawn in its own unique way. To ensure that every word is clear, no two letters or words may touch. The sofer may not write from memory, but must copy each word from another Torah scroll. The sofer writes slowly and carefully to avoid errors.

    But even the most experienced sofer will make mistakes, and that's why a sefer Torah is examined before it is used. While sofrim (scribes) once relied only on their eyes to find mistakes, they can now get help from another source- computers.

    The Digital Connection

    After a sefer Torah is written, it is placed on a special scanner to capture the images of the text and save the information to a computer file. The scanner uses a process known as optical character recognition or OCR, which converts a picture of each Torah column to a text file.

    When the Torah scroll is scanned, a light inside the scanner illuminates the text, and a mirror reflects the image onto a lens (similar to when light falls on the lens of the human eye). The lens in the scanner focuses the image onto a device that converts photons (light) into electrical charges (just as the retina does in our eyes). Finally, the scanner converts the electrical charges into a digital format that the computer can read (like the optic nerve sending a message to the brain). A unique software program analyzes the files for spelling errors, missing words, or other subtle mistakes that the human eye missed. So far, these high-tech scanners have examined 30,000 Torah scrolls, detecting errors missed by the human eye in 72 percent of them.

  • Divine Dialogue
    Learning Torah, which we do all night on Shavuot, is like establishing a wireless connection to God. Each Hebrew letter that we sound out, and each holy word that we read has been rigorously checked and double-checked by To rah scribes and computers to ensure that it is an accurate record of the conversation that God started with the Jewish people on Mount Sinai. As soon as the text from the page comes alive in our minds or on our lips, we become a part of the divine dialogue with God.

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