A Torah Scroll

“A Torah scroll, tefillin, or mezuzot that were written by a heretic, a traitor, an idol worshipper, a slave, a woman, a minor, or an apostate, are invalid . . .”

BT Gitin 65b

I am not a heretic who has gone back and pardoned her ways. I am not a traitor who has asked for forgiveness for sins against my God or my people. I am not an idol worshipper who has returned to the One God. I am not a slave who has been freed. I am not a minor, now grown to adulthood. I am not an apostate who has returned to Judaism. I am a woman, whose status in society has not changed, cannot change. And I have written a sefer Torah.

Shoshana Gugenheim

In October 2010 (5771), a Torah scroll commissioned by the Kadima Reconstructionist Community in Seattle, Washington was completed. It is the first Torah known to have been commissioned from a woman scribe in modern times (though not the first to be completed), and the first to be written by a cadre of women scribes. It is also, in the opinion of Shoshana Gugenheim, the organizer and main soferet (female scribe) who worked on it, a Torah written in adherence to strict halakhic ordinance, “with love and careful attention to all detail and regulations.” She declares it a “valid scroll worthy of being read in public, and of the blessings required before and after a reading, of honor and celebration.” This is not, however, the opinion of many Jews around the world.

Although there may have been “Yentls” in ages past who were called to scribe Torah and did so, there is no definitive record of such work. According to material posted by the Kadima Community, the biblical books of Ezra and Nehemiah contain references to Hasoferet. Rashi’s commentary concludes that the person so described was not Jewish, but rather was one of the many devoted descendants of servants to King Solomon who helped the Jews return to the Land of Israel. In all likelihood, this person was a scribe in the more general, secular sense, that is, someone who wrote letters and other documents for the illiterate.

More recently, in a colophon to a Torah from the fifteenth century, a Yemenite woman states, “Do not condemn me for any errors that you may find, for I am a nursing mother, Miriam, the daughter of Benayah the scribe.”¹

Gugenheim was new to the serious practice of Judaism when she began to envision herself as a soferet. She recognizes the years during which she became an observant Jew and feminist as marking the beginning of “meaning making” and “place making.” These were years when she learned what it means to be “an engaged Jew.”

She became, she says:

A Jewish woman who meets Judaism equally, but with a woman’s touch—not a kipah, rather a beautiful head covering; not a black and white tallit, rather a tallit made of elegant fabrics and hand sewn to meet feminine sensibilities; not rushing through tefillah or the Torah reading before the tzibur, rather moving at a woman’s pace—slow, mindful, meditative, connective. Eventually I wanted to equip myself emotionally and intellectually for the commandment—to scribe a Torah scroll.

But in 1996, when Gugenheim began searching for a teacher, there were no known women scribes. She visited rashei yeshivot, heads of scribal training institutes for ultra-Orthodox men, and the homes and studios of scribes and rabbis throughout Jerusalem, without success. One potential teacher went to his rabbi, leader of a modern Orthodox Jerusalem synagogue, who said that he wouldn’t touch the question of whether it was permissible to teach a woman to write a Torah scroll. It was too dangerous, and he didn’t even want to give an opinion on it. His fear: What would happen if a halakhic community were to acquire the scroll without knowing that it was written by a woman—and therefore unfit?² He could not be a part of that. The discussion was closed, although many years later the same rabbi did support Gugenheim’s efforts as a...