[Avodah] Question

[Micha Berger]

On Sun, Jan 19, 2020 at 03:53:49PM -0500, Cantor Wolberg via Avodah wrote:
> A colleague asked me the following question and I had
> no answer.
> If the ba'al kore is reading the Torah and either has a 
> nose bleed or a finger cut which causes blood to transfer
> to the Sefer Torah, what is the halachic response?

RJR focused on the leining. But I saw the question as being more
about the kashrus of the Torah with the blood on it.

Ink spills, which are actually black, do not invalidate a sefer Torah --
as long as the letters remain intact. Now that I think of it, although
I do not remember this case in the AhS -- maybe also as long as the ink
itself doesn't look like an inserted letter?

Blood that is red or brown could invalidate a letter too. Or so I am
deducing from the case of black letters that had gold painted on top
of them (eg in an attempt to glorify Hashem's name) -- the gold has to
be removed. So it seems you have to see the black ink.

But I do not think any of my speculation about added letters would
apply.

And in any case, it should be cleaned up simply out of respect for
the Torah.

----


I also had thoughts about tum'ah. And so I wrote the below. But I don't
think the blood in either scenario (nose bleed or paper cut) is tamei
even to begin with. Struck me after I wrote it, in comparison to dam
niddah.

Still, I invested time, and there are things in it that might inform,
so I didn't delete.


There is a derabbanan to treat a seifer Torah as if it were tamei.
This was to prevent a practice that became commonplace, that of
storing all the holy things together. But rodents would come to
eat the terumah, and naw on any scrolls nearby. But once they
told the masses that the seifer Torah is not only tamei, but can
be metamai one's hands too much for handling terumah, that ended.

However, a seifer Torah cannot really become tamei. All of this
is about treating it as though tamei.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger                 I have great faith in optimism as a philosophy,
http://www.aishdas.org/asp   if only because it offers us the opportunity of
Author: Widen Your Tent      self-fulfilling prophecy.
- https://amzn.to/2JRxnDF                            - Arthur C. Clarke