We weren’t looking for it, it just popped out at us.

We were rolling the Torah in preparation for Rosh Hashannah. We were taking the Yeshiva’s sefer torah to Kibbutz Bror Chayil because they did not have a kosher scroll. We were planning to just roll to the place where we would be reading and make sure that that section was fine, because generally you do not look for mistakes in a Torah except in places where you would inevitably find them on Shabbat or Yom Tov when you would have no way of fixing them, and you assume, unless you have reason to think otherwise, that the Torah is kosher.

But when you see a big ass crease in the klaf, you can’t help but see where the roof of the dalet is separated from the leg. Hm, what to do? Well, we had an offer from Moreshet Yisrael to use on of their sifrei torah, so the first thought was to just go ahead and get it from them, but sometime between finding the problem and getting a second opinion from Reb Shmuel (which of course concurred with Reb Hillel’s) Hillel decided to run over to a safrut shop and get supplies to go ahead and fix the Torah instead.

Dude!

So I got to help fix a sefer torah. And by help, I mean that, well, I was there when we found the mistake, and I held the sefer open while Hillel fixed it, and I pointed to it several times and speculated as to whether or not the ink had dried and stuff like that. Oh, and also I yelled for people to come watch Hillel doing his safrut thing, cause I mean, how often do most of us get to see someone working on a sefer torah?

We brought the Torah home that night and rolled it back and forth a couple of times since we had time and supplies to make sure both sections were clean. We found and fixed a couple more mistakes… really minute ones which I would not have caught.