BS"D

REPAIR

I was fixing an old Sefer for a local shul in the Vancouver area recently. Such beautiful letters! They practically *danced* off the parchment with joy! His spacing & layout were just so skillfully executed! I look forward to when I am no longer a novice & can give a Sefer the honour it deserves by making it gorgeous, not just kosher.
I could tell by the script that the sofer who had written it had been a Chasid. I wondered what he might think of me re-inking his letters where they'd cracked & peeled with time. I thought to myself: what can I learn from this mysterious sofer by retracing his strokes made hundreds of years ago?
I tried to look at the work I'd done on top of his with *my* sofer's critical eye. What would he do? How would he judge this?

Sometimes when I'm filling in a tiny crack in a letter, it's so fragile that as I add the tiniest drop of ink to seal the crack, the whole letter will stick to the dyo on my quill & come away from its home on the qlaf, leaving a pale gold imprint behind on it's former bed. So I re-write the entire letter, beginning to end, in the original sofer's own script, filling in the gold.

But what do I do with the homeless letters?

They were written with such great care & kavanah & generations of Jews have chanted them in awe. They've been the vehicle of mitzvot performance - I couldn't just throw them away.

So I drop each one into my inkwell, that they may rejoin the liquid ink & one day be transformed into more holy letters in a Sefer Torah.

B'ezrat HaShem.