Flashback 1992: A man of letters

Photo for the Sun-Times by Robert A. Davis

     In Monday's column, I mentioned finding the subject of this article in the Yellow Pages under "Currency Engraving." But I've never shared the story. Let's remedy that. 

     Yochanan Nathan's world might at first seem cramped between the nib of a turkey feather pen and a square centimeter of parchment, but to him it encompasses mankind and beyond, to the entire universe, and God Himself.
     "It's a very mystical experience, writing the letters," said Nathan, Chicago's only full-time sofer, or Hebrew scribe. "The letters are mystical in their nature. When God spoke, he created the Word; the Torah is the blueprint of the world, the force of the world."
     Jewish law requires that a Torah - the first five books of the Bible in Hebrew - be written by hand. The scrolls of scripture within mezuzahs, the narrow boxes found on the doorposts in homes of observant Jews, and within tefilin, the prayer boxes worn by Orthodox Jews, must also be hand-lettered.
     A good part of Nathan's business involves laboriously checking over other scribes' scrolls to make sure they meet the strictest standards.
     "There are little problems, a word left out, a letter may not be perfect," he says, displaying an Israeli tefilin scroll that looks like a flawless strip of carefully-rendered Hebrew letters.
     "This raysh may be too square," he says, indicating a letter that looks like an "L" flipped upside down. "I'll ask the question to someone more learned than I, whether it's too square or not."
     If the letter is not sufficiently rounded, Nathan says, the scroll, which took a scribe 10 hours to copy, will have to be discarded.
     While mezuzah and tefilin scrolls are his bread and butter, Nathan also sometimes gets commissions for the massive, eight-month job of copying a Torah scroll (less than a dozen are produced each year in this country).
     "Not too many Torah orders come in," he sighs. "Sometimes it takes some active solicitation."
     Written on parchment, with quills cut from turkey feathers and ink made from the smoke of burning olive oil, a Torah is created by a process unchanged for millennia.
     As required by law, Nathan utters each word, quietly, before he copies it. Nathan, who can copy letters for 2 1/2 hours without a break, says that keeping focused on the job is important.
     "You try to concentrate on what you are doing, so you don't make mistakes," he says. "But a person's a human being." For relaxation, Nathan says he likes to "get out a little bit and walk around."
      Nathan recently finished up a new scroll for the Chicago branch of the Lubavitcher sect of Hasidic Jews.
     In contrast to his work on the bulk of the scroll, which he copied in solitude in his small, debris-strewn office on California Avenue, near Devon, Nathan penned the last 10 lines of the scroll in public splendor under the soaring, gold-leaf ceilings and rocco sculptures of the Gold Room at the Congress Hotel, with a brass band playing and some 400 Orthodox Jews praying and looking on in a special ceremony.
     Afterward, Nathan took the scroll — now no longer the work of his hands, but the handiwork of God — and led the procession that danced down LaSalle Street, celebrating the addition of one new Torah in the world.
                —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Sept. 27, 1992