By Leyna Krow, Assistant Editor, JTNews
It’s been more than five years since Kadima, Seattle’s only Reconstructionist synagogue, embarked on its Women’s Torah Project, with the goal of commissioning the first Torah in modern history to be written by a woman. Kadima had originally hoped that the Torah would be completed by the end of 2004. But several setbacks have prolonged the project, which supporters now anticipate won’t receive its final touches until 2010 or 2011.
“It’s been a long time,” acknowledged Wendy Graff, director of the Women’s Torah Project. “But I really do believe we will finish this.”
The impetus for Kadima’s Women’s Torah Poject was, first and foremost, a practical one. The congregation, based in Seattle’s Eastlake neighborhood, was in need of a Torah.
But rather than simply buy one, Kadima decided to make history.
“When I found out there never had been a Torah written by a woman, it was jarring,” Graff said. “I though about my daughter, who can parade with the Torah, read from the Torah, but if she wanted to write one, she couldn’t. I couldn’t let that stay.”
Creating a Torah is a slow and intricate process, requiring a scribe to hand-write 79,847 words on 62 panels of dried animal skin. There are some 4,000 rules that a scribe must follow in order to keep the Torah kosher. The role of the scribe is one of the last in Judaism that remains almost exclusively male. Prior to the commissioning of Kadima’s Torah, there was a record of a Torah having been signed by a soferet (a female scribe) in Yemen — approximately 1,500 years ago. But there is no evidence of a woman having written a Torah since then.
In the meantime, when they need one, Kadima borrows Torahs from Hillel at the University of Washington or from Temple De Hirsch Sinai.
Kadima’s Torah may be the first to be started by a woman in modern times, but the honor of the first to be completed goes to another. In 2006, United Hebrew Congregation in St. Louis, Mo. approached Jen Taylor Friedman, a New York-based soferet, about writing a Torah for them. Friedman finished the Torah one year later.
A number of factors have led to the slow progress of Kadima’s Torah, including financial challenges and the difficulty of finding and retaining qualified female scribes.
The first soferet to work on the Torah was Avielah Barclay, a friend of Fern Feldman, Kadima’s former rabbi, who had begun studying sofrut in Jerusalem in the 1990s but had never had a chance to practice her craft.
When Kadima enlisted Barclay for the task in 2003, the project began to garner public attention. Numerous articles were written about Barclay, and Canada’s Reel Time Images, Inc. even made an hour-long documentary about her called Soferet: A Special Scribe.
“She had tons of publicity,” Graff said. “She was a rock star for this.”
But, according to Graff, in the first two years, Barclay finished just three of the 62 panels, with her work slowing over time and eventually stopping all together.
“We knew this would take her a long time to get going, being new to this. But at some point, we realized her progress wasn’t quite as she had anticipated,” Graff said.
The real sticking point between Kadima and Barclay, however, was money. Although Kadima was paying her a monthly wage to write the Torah rather than a lump sum upon completion, Barclay claimed that the funds were insufficient for her to work on the Torah full-time without taking on additional projects to supplement her income.
Eventually, the relationship between the two parties soured and, according to Graff, it became clear that Barclay would not be the one to finish the Torah and Kadima began to look for new scribes.
In 2005, Kadima attempted to enter into mediation with Barclay with the help of Rabbi Daniel Siegel of the Jewish Renewal Movement to recoup some of money they had paid for both the completion of her training and her salary. After more than two years of failed negotiations, Siegel ultimately recommended that Kadima drop the mediation effort.
Attempts by JTNews to locate Barclay proved unsuccessful.
Graff said that although Kadima is in possession of Barclay’s original panels, one of the three contains errors in the spacing and is, most likely, unusable.
Since Barclay’s departure from the project, Kadima has found two new soferot. Jerusalem-based artist and soferet Shoshanna Gugenheim joined on in 2005 and Rachel Reichhardt of Brazil, one of the few soferot to receive training from a seminary rather than from a private tutor, began working on the Torah in 2006.
Even with the addition of the two new scribes, the progress remains slow, however.
Gugenheim, who recently became pregnant, said that she has not done any work on the Torah in the last five months and is unsure of whether or not she’ll make any further headway on the project until after her baby is born in the fall.
The Torah is currently about one third of the way finished.
Kadima has learned from its early mistakes, however, and the Women’s Torah Project now pays its scribes per panel completed, rather than a steady salary regardless of how much work they are actually capable of doing each month.
To purchase a Torah, congregations can pay anywhere from $25,000 to $100,000, depending upon how highly regarded the scribe is.
Graff estimates that all told, the Kadima Torah and its adornments will have cost around $120,000 when completed, about $55,000 of which has yet to be raised.
Funding for the Women’s Torah Project, with the exception of a $1,000 grant from the Women’s Endowment Fund from the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, has come almost exclusively from individual donors, both within the Kadima community and beyond. Graff noted that the largest single contribution came from a woman who, although raised in a Jewish household, is now a Buddhist nun.
Facing the reaction of the larger Jewish community has also, at times, proved challenging for those involved in the Women’s Torah Project.
There is much debate over whether or not a Torah scribed by a woman is kosher. In the past, scholars have looked to the 12th-century sage Maimonides, who stated that women are excused from the obligation of studying Torah, and thus, from writing a Torah. This release from obligation has long been interpreted as a prohibition.
However, today it is common for women in all sects of Judaism to study the Torah, so why, Kadima and their soferot argue, should women not also be free to write one?
Still, it’s a touchy subject, one that sometimes elicits harsh criticisms and even threats toward those who choose to question the conventional understanding of the law.
Graff said that while she’s never heard anything negative about the project from anyone in the Seattle community, she has been contacted by Jews in other parts of the country who are less than pleased by the idea of women writing a Torah.
“We do get e-mails saying its not kosher, it’s terrible, it’s bad,” Graff said.
For the soferot themselves, finding willing teachers was a struggle. Gugenheim said that when she first became interested in sofrut, it took her more than two years to find a scribe to take her on as a student. When Barclay’s teacher wrote to Kadima to confirm Barclay’s certification as a soferet, he insisted that his name be blacked out on the document before it was made public to the larger community.
Even now, after three years of work on the project, Gugenheim said that as a resident of Jerusalem she still chooses at times to conceal her work as a soferet from those she does not know particularly well.
“I don’t tell everybody that I’m writing a Torah,” Gugenheim said. “Some people I just tell I’m an artist — which I am.”
However, Gugenheim noted that of the people in Israel that she has told, the response has, by in large, been positive.
“But even the people who respond positively, there is still a percentage of them who would never read from this Torah,” she said.