One Stroke at a Time

The afternoons at Mesivta Darchai Menachem have started to take on a different feel, as the boys learn Safrus, taught by Rabbi Shalom Ber Grossbaum.

By Rabbi Eli Sandhaus

The afternoons at Mesivta Darchai Menachem have started to take on a different feel.

One of the ideas behind our afternoon programming is that not every talmid needs to be doing the same thing at the same time. There are boys following a regular academic schedule, while others are taking different courses or learning a trade. It gives us the ability to build an afternoon that works for different boys, with different strengths and interests.

One of the trades we are offering this year is Safrus, taught by Rabbi Shalom Ber Grossbaum.

If you walk into the Safrus class, you will see boys sitting with kulmusim and klaf, practicing again and again. At the beginning, even holding the kulmus correctly and getting comfortable with it takes work. They learn how to sit, how to position their hand, and how to make the different strokes properly.

And then they practice.

There is a lot of practice in Safrus.

What has been especially nice to see is that the boys can already look back at some of their earlier pieces of klaf and see the difference. The strokes are getting cleaner. Their hands are becoming steadier. Things that took a tremendous amount of concentration at the beginning are slowly becoming more natural.

There is something very good for a boy in being able to see that progress with his own eyes. He doesn’t need someone to tell him that he’s improving. He can put today’s klaf next to the one he wrote a month ago and see it for himself. He worked at something, he got better at it, and he has something in his hands to show for it. That kind of success builds a quiet confidence.

At the same time, this isn’t simply a handwriting class.

Rabbi Grossbaum is teaching the boys Keses HaSofer and taking them through the halachos of Safrus. They are learning about klaf and ink, how a kulmus is made, what lishmah means, who is qualified to write Sta”m, and the many halachos that a sofer needs to know before he can actually write.

The boys are also being introduced to things that most of us see all the time but probably don’t think very much about. There are different types of ksav. There are different materials that can be used for a kulmus. There are specific ways a sofer copies from a tikkun. Even the question of which hand a sofer writes with has its own halachos.

Once you start learning Safrus, you realize how much there is to know.

And I think that is part of what makes this particular trade so interesting.

When we began developing more differentiated afternoon programming, the goal wasn’t simply to give boys something else to do instead of academics. The idea was to give them opportunities to learn in different ways.

Some boys come alive when they are working with their hands. Some enjoy learning a skill where they can actually see themselves getting better. Some need the satisfaction of producing something tangible. There is a confidence that comes from discovering, I can do this. And there is something special about doing it together—sitting alongside other boys, learning the same craft, struggling with it, practicing it, and slowly getting better at it.

And some simply discover an interest they didn’t know they had.

Safrus gives them all of that, but it also gives them something more.

A boy can spend an afternoon working on the shape of a letter, and at the same time be learning the halachos behind that letter. He is learning a skill, but he is also beginning to understand the amount of care, knowledge and Yiras Shamayim that goes into a mezuzah, a pair of tefillin or a Sefer Torah.

Maybe some of these boys will eventually become sofrim. Maybe some won’t.

That’s not really the point.

They are learning something real. They are developing a skill that takes patience and discipline. They are seeing their own progress and experiencing the satisfaction that comes from building something with their own hands. And along the way, they are getting a chance to experience another part of Torah from the inside.

For me, that is exactly what we hoped our afternoon program could provide.

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