The UN writer will run a robot that can write several books together • Think of the idea: "The venture will allow a Torah scroll at a cheap price"

• Writer Writer // Photo: Yuri Yalon

In a precedent step, if a real revolution is to take place in the Jewish world, Rabbi Menachem Perl, the head of the Junction Institute - a halachic technological institute, proposes examining the possibility of writing Torah scrolls by a robot, which will be run by a writer of the Bible.

According to custom for thousands of years, the Torah scribe must write the Torah scrolls letter by letter, having dipped in the mikvah and intending for the sake of a mitzvah. The development of technology in recent centuries, such as the invention of printing, has not changed the custom, and other methods have been disqualified for use by Halachic rulers.

Now, in an article to be published in a Sabbath newsletter called "Shabbat on Shabbat," Rabbi Pearl calls for a change of situation. As matzahs ​​are made in the machine rather than manually, he says, so Torah scrolls can be written using machines. While Rabbi Perl points out, rabbis in the past disqualified the use of printed books for reading the Torah, today technologies may not be used by those arbiters, and the reasons previously used for prohibition are apparently not valid in contemporary technology.

Rabbi Pearl's suggestion is that a scribe would use a multi-arm robot, which would allow him to write several Torah scrolls at a time. The author's name would be written in his handwriting. This is also a first-rate social act, he notes, as the new venture will dramatically reduce The books, which now cost hundreds of thousands of shekels, "the beauty of the letters and their integrity in the computer printed book may be of a higher standard," he writes. "A kosher Torah book will be much more available today and small communities will be able to afford an elegant Torah book."

Speaking to "Israel Today", he also explains that today many Scripture writers do not do their work for the sake of the mitzvah only for a living, which lowers the quality of handwriting. "There is no reason why people should not receive a well-written and halachic Torah scroll at an equal cost to everyone. ".

If Rabbi Pearl's proposal is indeed accepted, it will be a tremendous revolution in the domain of sacred objects. For thousands of years it has been customary to write handwritten Torah scrolls. "In my humble opinion there is no real barrier to writing a scribe with a robot, especially if the writer types each letter individually, provided that the writer's names are written by himself," concludes Rabbi Pearl.