Friday, July 25, 2014

Robot Enlisted to Write Torah Scrolls, But Are They Kosher?


Now we've seen everything. Robots are routinely used in medicine and in manufacturing, but for writing a Torah scroll? That's the latest application that robots have been enlisted for.

As Steve Lipman wrote in The Jewish Week,
While the exhibition closes Aug. 3, the robot, reprogrammed with the help of an Israeli graphic designer, will be on display the rest of the year. The robot writes the sefer Torah exactingly slowly, from right to left, 10 hours a day.

A human scribe takes a year or more to complete a scroll.

“While the Sofer [Torah scribe] guarantees the sanctity of the Scripture, the installation highlights its industrial reproducibility,” the website of the Jewish Museum (jmberlin.de) states.

The finished product of the robot, fashioned by a writing arm attached to a small nib, will not be kosher according to traditional Jewish law; it will not be acceptable for use in a synagogue, since it is not being penned by a human hand, and is on a 260-foot-long roll of paper, not on parchment.
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2 comments:

  1. If we could make so much progress w/ world peace. For all our wonderful inventions, & they are spectacular, the one thing we seem unable to manufacture is peace among mankind.

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  2. Dear Anonymous,
    That's the beauty & pain of 'Being Created in G-d's Image.' We have free choice to do good or the opposite. We are not robots. Were someone to ask: " Why cannot a robot written 'Torah' be 'Kosher,' 'Acceptable?' It seems silly to say it's not 'Fitting.'" My answer is that how would you like a convicted violent, repeat, felon give you moral advice on how to live your life? He's reading from a great book by a famous, peace-loving physician & author, and this felon's English is superb.

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