Ask a Child # 7

The ח in the word חמר is so poorly written it defies explanation as to how it was sold as a kosher set of tefillin. Who checked these and didn’t sound the alarm? What’s wrong with it? It’s two legs are like backwards nuns (actually the right leg looks like a ladie’s boot). This case is so extreme that it wouldn’t even help to ask a child, but just for fun I asked my seven year old daughter what letter it is. She told me, “it’s a backwards something”. In other words, it’s so bad she couldn’t even call it anything! Just to be fair, we don’t normally rely on a child when it comes to a ח because the way they are written in safrus is then what children learn in school. For example, I just showed my daughter the following picture and she read each letter ח as זז, which is exactly why we don’t show them to children  under normal circumstances because we don’t want them to make things possel unnecessarily, but in this case I knew that the letter was posel, but I was curious what she would say. The fact that she couldn’t identify it as any letter pretty much seals the verdict.