Slashdot Mirror
Secret Codes Protect Ancient Torahs
An anonymous reader writes "A story on Wired News reports the problems Jewish synagogues have protecting their Torahs from theft. The Torah scrolls, containing the five books of Moses, are hand lettered over the course of a year, are often hundreds of years old, and can sell for $50,000 or more. But Judaic law "dictates that not one character can be added to the 304,805 letters of the Torah's text", which makes them untraceable and easily sold on the black market. Rabbinic authorities have recently approved two computer-based systems to make the scrolls traceable: one takes a digital fingerprint of a Torah, a second makes microperforations in the parchment that yield a unique identifier."
It doesn't solve the problem of theft. If one is stolen, it might take years to recover it, if at all. Once it is recoevered, it isn't in pristine condition anymore. More attention should be focused on solving the problem itself than making it easier to apprehend the criminals.
Except that a) not all Rabbis will recognize that ruling (in Judaism, there is no pope or other central organizing figure - there are organizations, heirarchies, but in the end none of them is TRULY authoritative, although I've been hearing about a sanhedrin, and if that was established, then it would be pretty authoritative), and b) not all Jews will recognize what those Rabbis rule. In Judaism, you're SUPPOSED to question authority, and not just swallow it down. It'll be awhile (give it a few hundred years) for it to be either globally accepted or rejected. Halachah changes SLOWLY..
. Define sqrt(x) as something really evil like (x / rand()), and bury it deep. Watch your coworkers go nuts.
As an observant Jew, I'd be a little bit skeptical about reading from one...
OK, so I'm entirely too Scando-Anglo in my heritage (considering the topic), and specifically not religious... so this will seem, well, cheeky (at best).
How does any modification to the physical nature of the book/scroll, other than a change that actually alters the words therein, change the message? Meaning, Shakespeare is still Shakespeare whether in paperback, parchement, or HTML. Aren't the (apparently never changing) 300k-some characters in the Torah, well, the same every time? I understand that handling a carefully loved artifact can help put on into an introspective mood, but surely one with invisible changes (microscopic holes) isn't damaging to your spirituality - isn't content king, as it were?
Now, all that being said, how about high-res digital images of a few of the pages? If they're hand made, no two are exactly the same, and matching a high-contrast calligraphic image against a database would surely be no harder than matching digitized finger prints, right?
Anyway, I guess I'm just scratching my head about the "unfit for use" part. Surely the things Moses said and did, for example, aren't any different if the very same words telling the story are on a piece of paper with microscopic holes you can't even see? And, aren't whatever cultural and contemporary spiritual lessons one is supposed to glean from reading those words what really matter? I'd always thougth that "observant Jews" (as you put it) would be more about the message than the medium. But then, I suppose this is really a larger-scale, lukewarm semi-rant about orthodoxy and dogma in general - no need to pick on any particular flavor, but I saw your comment and thus you win my rant-prize for the evening.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.