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Jen: Hi, it's Jen Richler. Welcome back to Can We Talk?, the podcast of the Jewish Women's Archive, where gender, history, and Jewish culture meet.

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Ariela Housman sits at her drafting table, a piece of parchment stretched out in front of her. A strong LED bulb adds to the light streaming in from the window of her studio, just outside Chicago. A quill is in her hand, and a shot glass of black ink is beside her. As required, she starts her work with a declaration of intent called a kavanah.

Ariela: [saying declaration in Hebrew] Hareni kotevet l'shem kedushat mezuzah.

Jen: Behold, I am writing this for the sake of the sanctity of the mezuzah. Ariela is a soferet STaM, a woman who scribes sacred Jewish texts. STaM is a Hebrew acronym that stands for sifrei Torah, tefillin, and mezuzot. In addition to the kavanah, Ariela has to say each word out loud before she carefully inscribes it onto the parchment.

Ariela: u'kshartam…. le'ot…al… [sound of Ariela saying each word and of quill on parchment]

Jen: There are many other rules to follow. The ink must be black, and specifically designated for scribing sacred texts. The quill must come from the feather of a kosher bird, or from a reed, and the tip must be cut at a precise angle. The klaf, or parchment, must come from the skin of a kosher animal. And each letter must be formed in a very specific way, and in order—no skipping ahead or going back later to fill something in. Ariela will finish her mezuzah in a day, but a full Torah scroll takes over a year.

Today, Ariela is one of over a dozen women working as scribes: writing sifrei Torah, mezuzot, and tefillin on commission, and repairing damaged scrolls. But until about 20 years ago, sofrut was strictly the work of men.

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Jen: In this episode of Can We Talk?, we trace the history of women writing the Torah, and hear from some of the first sofrot who paved the way for Ariela. They talk about what drew them to this work, and why it matters that women are doing it.

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Jen Taylor Friedman: It's important for women to do this work, because a Torah scroll for a community is symbolic of its hopes and its history and its aspiration—as we say, l’dor vador, from generation to generation. For a community that believes in equality of access and equality of responsibility for men and women, it's important that women do all the same jobs that men do.

Jen: In the early 2000s, when she was in her 20s and living in New York City, Jen Taylor Friedman decided that she wanted to be a soferet STaM. No woman had ever done this before—at least as far as we know. But Jen wasn't trying to be a trailblazer. She just thought she was perfectly suited to the work, which combined her interests in halakha and calligraphy.

As I was putting this episode together, Jen was dealing with an all-consuming work crisis. But she patiently answered my questions by text. When Jen set out to become a Torah scribe, there was just one hitch: Jewish law says that a Torah, mezuzah, or tefillin scribed by a woman is not kosher. The Talmudic reasoning is that only men, who are obligated to put on tefillin, are allowed to write the Torah text that goes inside tefillin boxes. But as an observant and egalitarian Jew, Jen thought women were obligated to perform all the same mitzvot as men, including putting on tefillin, so she reasoned that women could also be scribes.

Here's a fun aside: Around the same time Jen launched her scribing career, she also created Tefillin Barbie, mostly to amuse her friends. She started accessorizing Barbie dolls with tefillin, a tallit, and a volume of Talmud and selling them on Etsy. Tefillin Barbie went viral and elicited strong reactions, both positive and negative. Jen was surprised by all the fuss. As she told me: "People are weird. I thought I'd get notorious for writing a Torah, but actually I got notorious for frumming up a Barbie."

But back to scribing. Jen mostly taught herself to scribe; it was hard to find a sofer who would take a woman as an apprentice. She pored over halakhic books describing the many rules for forming the letters, and learned some techniques from a scribe in Jerusalem and another in New York. Her first commission was a Megillat Esther in 2004. She completed her first Torah scroll in 2007 for a Reform synagogue in St. Louis. It was the first sefer Torah known to have been completed by a woman.

Over the past 20 years, Jen has moved from New York to Montreal to the UK and has written 6 Torah scrolls and many megillot, mezuzot, and tefillin.

Around the same time that Jen started working on her first Torah scroll in New York, an artist named Shoshana Gugenheim was doing the same in Jerusalem. Her interest in becoming a soferet STaM was sparked in the early 90s, while she was studying at Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem. She regularly attended morning prayer services.

Shoshana: And I just remember this moment after Torah reading when they lifted the scroll up and opened it and just like, like my breath, you know, being taken away. And I just was so overwhelmed by the beauty of the scroll, sort of, this moment captured in my mind.

And, and I like, I'm always a little shy to share this because I really feel like it was, it was like sort of one of those bolt-of-lightning moments and it sounds so woo woo, but it was like, oh my God, this—I really felt at that moment called to do that. And that was the beginning of that path sort of set me out. And that was the beginning of that path. And there were many, many, many dead ends along the way.

Jen: Shoshana had started down the path to become a Torah scribe, but like Jen, she had trouble finding a mentor. One teacher she approached checked with his rabbi, who said he couldn't allow it.

Shoshana: He was very concerned about what would happen if a Torah scroll that was written by a woman for a particular congregation, and we don't sign them, and there's no indication that it was written by a woman. What would happen if that scroll got out of the hands someday of that congregation who knew that it had been scribed by a woman and landed in the hands of a congregation that did not accept a scroll written by a woman?

And there were, you know, other responses, like people, another teacher that I met who was so upset by the idea of a woman writing that he, like, burst into tears, like, just from the mere thought that a woman would do such a thing.

Jen: In the year 2000, Shoshana connected with a man named Dov Laimon who was willing to take her on as a student.

A little later that year, Shoshana got a call from a Reconstructionist synagogue in Seattle called Kadima. They'd heard she was studying to become a soferet STaM and wanted to know if she would scribe a Torah scroll for their congregation.

Shoshana: I said, I will write this scroll under the condition that if any other women Torah scribes show up—because I really believe that we are at a tipping point—and if their work is fitting and they are the right person to do this, then I want them also to write for the scroll.

Because for me, the goal is to open up the opportunities for women to write. And the more women that can participate in writing this scroll, the more doors that are going to be opened. And so we ended up being six women on three continents writing.

Jen: The Women's Torah Project, as it was known, started in 2006, and the very last letter of the last word was completed at a celebration in Seattle on October 15, 2010.

As passionate as Shoshana is about doing this work as a woman, she was ambivalent about it when she started.

Shoshana: As someone who was becoming more and more observant, I was struggling with, do I want to be the person to put this out in the world? And it became, over time, became clearer and clearer to me that yes, this was more important than the current practice at the time, that it was more important that women start writing than it was to abide by the halakha as it stood.

You know, for me, the gender piece can't be separated from the work itself because of the history behind it and everything that it took, what all of that meant for me as a woman doing the choreography of scribing in a woman's body and the hours at the table that look exactly the same as they look for any other man who's come before me and has written. I am performing the act of writing in the exact same way that anyone else does, but I am doing it in this female body. And that has meaning.

For me it's about access. There's a particular kind of access that one gains to who they are as a Jew by writing Torah and by scribing.

And so as an artist, as someone who is tactile and the act of making is my spiritual practice, if I can't have access to this—like, the central, the whole text around which our entire religion revolves, all of our rituals and everything—and to be told over and over that I couldn't have that same kind of intimacy with the physical material object just because I was a woman...I just feel that there are so many different points of access for people to grow close to their Judaism and to Torah, and this is one of them.

Jen: Shoshana has been a professional scribe for nearly 20 years. She now works from her home studio in Portland, Oregon.

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Jen: On the other side of the country, Julie Seltzer lives in the Hudson Valley in New York and has been a soferet for over 15 years. She's one of the scribes who took part in the Women's Torah Project that Shoshana started.

Jen: Tell me a bit about the process, your process when you sit down to scribe?

Julie: So we start with, I mean, the most important thing to have is a copy of the text that you're writing, because you can't do anything without the text. So I have a sofer tikkun. It's a scanned copy of a handwritten scroll. And it has all of these notations that help us out. So first of all, it has the line number. So let's say you're writing a Torah scroll with 42 lines per column, it tells you what line you're at and it tells you what parsha you're in. It tells you what column you're in, in the layout of that particular scroll. 

There's notations for a lot of different things.There's notations for when a name of God comes up, because a name of God requires a certain intention out loud that you say before you write the name of God.

Jen: How does it sound in Hebrew?

Julie: Hareni kotevet l'shem kedushat hashem.

Jen: Like Shoshana, Julie's career as a soferet STaM started with an aha moment. It was 2007, not long after she'd learned that her mother had advanced lung cancer.

Julie: I was walking down the street, I was actually visiting Israel, and all of a sudden this thought popped in my head, like, I'm gonna learn how to write the letters the way they're written in the Torah scroll.

I had zero background in calligraphy. I mean, really, just zero. I had no idea what I was doing. I bought a calligraphy pen at the art store with the little metal nib, and I didn't understand that you have to slip the nib into the pen, like there's a little slit. And I was trying to hold the nib on the pen and it was, it was not working [laughs]. But I finally figured it out. 

Looking back on it, my interest was connected to my mother's illness and impending death and wanting to do something that was both kind of solitary and focused and calming, and also do something that has a long reach, both backwards in time and forwards in time.

Jen: When she got back home to Connecticut, she started looking around for a teacher, and like the sofrot who'd come before her, she found it was slim pickings. Eventually, she found Jen Taylor Friedman's name online. Jen had become committed to training other female scribes and fostering a community of sofrot. Julie started coming to New York once a week to train with Jen. She also connected and studied with Shoshana Gugenheim.

Julie isn't strictly observant. She doesn't feel that women need a halakhic justification to do this work. But she takes seriously the myriad rules governing the work itself.

Jen: I can imagine that it's so painstaking and precise that it could become monotonous or tedious. Does it ever feel that way?

Julie: Oh, it definitely becomes monotonous, a hundred percent. The question is, is that a bad thing? Meaning, I think there's this assumption that, you know, scribes writing a Torah scroll or mezuzah, they're kind of in this lofty, like space [laughs quietly]—

Jen: Mm-hmm.

Julie: But the reality is that it's work like anything else. And, you know, you can get in a flow. You're focused and you have your attention on it, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you're floating [laughs quietly].

But it is part of the reason why I've chosen to focus more on repair now that I am 15 years in—just wanting a little more diversity and a little more, you know, some more interesting tasks or tasks that are different or unusual and encountering, every so often, some new things.

Jen: Do you have any stories of, you know, something unexpected or surprising that happened in the course of a project?

Julie: Well, I was approached with a scroll that had been vandalized. It was missing all of Vayikra and some of Bamidbar and two other sheets in various places. And, you know, trying to figure out what was missing and if anything could match it.

In terms of new writing, I can tell you my funniest mistake, which was in a megillah. It's supposed to say, Vayimaleh Haman cheima, "And Haman was filled with wrath," or anger. And instead of cheima, anger, I wrote chem'a, butter [laughs]. 

Jen: [laughs] That's a pretty easy mistake. I can see that.

Julie: They sound the same. And someone said, "Well, that's how we know we eat dairy hamantaschen." [laughs]

Jen: So then what is the process for fixing a mistake that you have made as a scribe?

Julie: Most mistakes are pretty easily fixable. So for changing chem'a to cheima, I just have to scratch off the aleph. And the way I scratch it off is I use a blade and a little bit of very fine sandpaper and a white eraser. And once it's gone, then I would stretch back the hei, remove the right leg of the hei, and stretch the hei back—so extend it, make it a long hei, a wide hei, and then rewrite the leg of the hei.

Jen: What would you say is your favorite part of your work?

Julie: I like going to congregations and you know, chatting with the folks who are just so intrigued by the Torah scroll. I think a lot of them haven't been given access to it. I mean, especially some of the older women. I mean, some of them, you know, they told me, "This is the first time I'm looking at a Torah scroll up close." So it's something that's been pretty inaccessible. And so I think people are really interested and they're intrigued and I feel like, wow, I can share this information. Yeah, so I really love doing that.

Jen: Do you consider your work feminist?

Julie: [pauses] Yeah, I do. We're doing something that, you know, for so many years was not done by women. Certainly wherever I teach, that's one of the things that strikes people. "Someone once asked, "Is this something that men also do or are there only female scribes?"

Jen: [laughs] Oh, I love that.

Julie: And with the kids, that's what they're seeing, right? This is the example of the scribe that they're seeing—a young woman—and I think that act is a feminist act.

This is also a funny story:  At a Q&A session, this guy says to me, "So how do you justify your work?"

Jen: Hm. 

Julie: And I was pretty taken aback until I realized he was talking about the alignment of the columns [laughs] .

Jen: [laughs] Oh my God. Was he, like, a graphic designer? Because most people don't use "justify" in that literal way.

Julie: [laughs] Right. I think he was a calligrapher or a graphic designer or something like that.

Jen: Where do you see the future of women in this work? Like, do you think there will ever be a time where it'll be mainstream or more mainstream for women to be scribes, at least in non-Orthodox movements?

Julie: Yes, a hundred percent. Women and non-binary people, because that's also, you know, pushing the gender boundaries of this craft. I have no doubt that that will happen. It's just a matter of time. And I think as congregations learn that there even are women doing this, they're very excited about employing us. I just don't think there are a ton of people, period, that are drawn to doing this. But within the category of people that are drawn to doing this, I definitely think there'll be more and more folks that are not men.

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Jen: Ariela Housman started her training in 2015. She's part of the second generation of sofrot, women who got their training from those in the first generation, like Jen, Shoshana, and Julie. By the time she started, she was in her 30s. She'd been a professional calligrapher from the age of 17, and she and Jen Taylor Friedman sometimes referred clients to each other for ketubot. But at first, she had no interest in being a soferet STaM.

Ariela: My experience was the opposite of Jen's and the other sofrot of that generation in that the only person saying no throughout the entire time was me. Everyone else was saying, yes, you can do this. And I was the one who was saying, no, no thank you, I don't need to do this now.

I didn't want to be a professional Jew. I wanted my Judaism to be for me and not to be my job.

Jen: But she was persuaded by a persistent mentor—Jen Taylor Friedman.

Ariela: She finally said the magic words, which were, "Getting my first Torah commission is what enabled me to quit my day job." And then I went, "Oh, please tell me more."

Jen: Ariela grew up in what she describes as a "frum Conservative" and "fiercely egalitarian" home. It was her mother who taught her how to put on tefillin. So she wanted to make sure her work as a female scribe fit within a halakhic framework.

Ariela: I could count on, you know, probably my, at this point, maybe ten fingers the number of times I've missed putting on tefillin since my bat mitzvah, and all of them were due to serious illness.

So I do consider myself obligated, but I say, okay, even if you don't consider me obligated from the get-go, I have taken on this obligation. So why, you know, why can I not take on this other obligation as well?

Jen: Do you consider your work feminist?

Ariela: That's an interesting question. I suppose the obvious answer is yes, but that's not what's at the forefront of my mind when I'm working. When I'm working, I'm looking at this as, you know, that I have been charged with a sacred duty by my client to help them fulfill whichever mitzvah it is that they've hired me to help them fulfill, whether it's mezuzah or kriyat Torah.

In that respect, we're coming back to the fact that nobody else in my career told me no. And because I never had to have that struggle as a part of my professional journey, it's not something that occupies much of my mind when I'm working.

Jen: Do you think it's important to have women doing this work?

Ariela: I think it's important to have people of all genders doing this work. Because I think the whole argument of separate spheres is, you know, separate but equal. And that's absolute garbage.

And I think that by barring people by virtue of their assigned gender roles, we're denying full participation to some members of our community. And I think that's a shanda.

Jen: Where do you see the future of women in sofrut?

Ariela: I don't think we're going away. I wonder how long it will be before the left wing of Orthodoxy will kind of open that door a crack such that, you know, maybe it's okay—well, if you're going to be a woman who puts on tefillin, then you should get your tefillin written by a woman. And I think it's possible I might see that in my lifetime—but maybe not.

Jen: And what about in non-Orthodox circles? Do you think there will be, or are we getting to a time where it's mainstream for a woman to scribe a Torah?

Ariela: Yeah. I would say that in non-Orthodox circles, many of the congregations that I've worked with have specifically sought me out because I'm a woman.

I consider this inextricably linked to public prayer, to counting in a minyan, to putting on tefillin, and then writing both tefillin and mezuzot and kriyat Torah.

Jen: Just like women pushed to be included in other Jewish rituals, they’re now leading the way in becoming sofrot. Here's Julie Seltzer again: 

Julie: A lot of times I'll get the question, "When did they start letting women be Torah scribes?" So then I have to kind of, you know, back it up and say, "Okay, so who are the 'they' and what does it mean to 'allow,' right? That's not how it happened, right. No body came and said, "Okay, now women are allowed to do this." No. Women started doing this, and that's the direction it happened.

Jen: The handful of women who first took that bold step are paving the way for more women to pick up the quill and scribe the words of our holiest text.

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Jen: To learn more about Jen Taylor Friedman, Shoshana Gugenheim, Julie Seltzer, and Ariela Housman, check out the links in our show notes. You can also see pictures of them scribing on our website at jwa.org/canwetalk.

Thank you for listening to Can We Talk? Our team includes Nahanni Rous and Judith Rosenbaum. Our theme music is by Girls in Trouble. You also heard “Color Country” by The Balloonist from Blue Dot Sessions.

I'm Jen Richler. Until next time!

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