TAGIN

QUESTION:

I have acquired a Megillah in which there are marks on certain letters besides the tagin on the usual letters. Some of these tagin are quite elaborate. Is this covered by any rule? asked by Dr. Abraham J. Karp, Rochester, New York.)

ANSWER:

I have just returned from Florida and I am able now to discuss your interesting and important enquiry as to the decorations on the letters of the Megillah which you had recently bought. These decorations, sometimes called zayin (because many of them are in the shape of the letter zayin) are more frequently called ketarim because they are “crowns” to the letters (this is the phrase that the Talmud uses in Menahot 29b) or more generally called tagin (which, of course, is the Aramaic for ” crown”).

The Gospel in Matthew 5:18 calls the tituli (meaning “title” or ” inscription”). When Jesus declares that not even the slightest element in the Torah will be abolished, he picked the smallest letter “yad” and then these decorations as a verbal evidence and said, “not one jot or tittle shall pass away,” i.e., not the smallest letter in the alphabet (yad) or the decorations on the letters. (Tell this to your minister friends. I am sure they had no idea what “jot and tittle” meant.)

The practice of adding these tagin (crowns) on the top of the letters is very old. The Talmud in Menahot 29b speaks of them and says that when Moses came up to heaven, he saw God making these crowns on the letters of the Torah. The passage and the commentaries are especially interesting. The Tosfot to the passage gives a description and pictures of various tagin on certain of the letters.

All the details of the various tagin were collected and organized in a book called Sefer Ha – Tagin,a book which I unfortunately do not possess. An edition of it was printed in Paris in 1860.

What was the purpose of the tagin? Clearly they are the product of the same adoring reverence which scribes had for the Sefer Torah which led the centuries later to arrange the Torah under the vav columns, etc. the letters which generally have them are shin, ayn, tet, nun, zayin, gimerl, zadiq. These are specifically mentioned in Menahot 29b. Other letters, as in your manuscript, the heh has tagin to distinguish it from the het, the final mem would have it to distinguish it from the samekh, etc.

Are these lovingly added decorations deemed halakhically indispensable? The Rambam in his Hilkhot Tefillah, 11:9, and especially in his responsa Pe-er Hador #68, indicates that they are just a beautification of the mitzvah (hiddur mitzvah) and if omitted would not make the Sefer Torah invalid for public reading. However, Joseph Caro, in the Shulhan Aruldi Yore Deah 274:6, indicates that they are indispensable.

There is a fine article by Judah Eisenstein in his Otzar Yisrael, under the heading tagin (Vol. 10) in which he gives all the variations that you will find in your Megillah. There is a shorter form of his article, also by him, in the Jewish Encyclopedia, Art, tagin.