Robot Writes Complete Torah Scroll – Could It Be Kosher For Ritual Use?

The artist group Robotlab has found a way to to make a robot write a Torah scroll. The working robot and its Torah scroll will be on display at Jewish Museum in Berlin, Germany beginning later this month.

Above and above right: The robot at work (© robotlab)

Biblical Archaeology Review reports:

The artist group Robotlab has recently developed a method for creating a “handwritten” Torah robotically! Their work will be displayed through January 11, 2015, at the Jewish Museum in Berlin, Germany, in an exhibit titled “The Creation of the World.”

While a printed copy of the Torah (the Pentateuch) may be used in study, halakhah (Jewish religious law) dictates that only a handwritten Torah scroll may be used in synagogue readings and rituals. This means that all Torah scrolls used in synagogues are carefully and prayerfully written by human hand—letter by letter.

Outfitted with a pen nib and ink, the new robot has been programmed to mimic a human hand. Stroke by stroke, it writes like a scribe. Whereas it takes a human scribe close to a year or longer to write a Torah, the robot can complete one in three months because the robot does not have to rest—although it is no faster than the human hand it imitates.…

The particular scroll written by the robot was written on paper, not animal skin, and a pen was used to write it rather than a quill made from  bird feather, so this particular scroll would not be kosher for synagogue ritual use.

But what if the robot wrote on kosher animal hide and used a kosher quill – would the Torah scroll written by the robot then be kosher for ritual use?

A Sefardi rabbi-scribe (sofer) quoted by BAR appears to imply it would not be fit for ritual use, because a scribe must have the proper pure intent when writing each individual letter, and a computer can never have that.

But while BAR does not report it, the issue should not be the intent of the robot – it should be (and likely is) the intent of the person who operates it, who fills it with the tanned animal hide commonly referred to as partchment (clath, in Hebrew), adjusts its settings and turns it on and off.

In other words, according to the strict letter of the halakha (religious Jewish law), such a Torah scroll would likely be kosher for synagogue ritual use. But it is unlikely Orthodox and especially haredi rabbis would ever allow it to serve that purpose.