A customer comes to me with a problem in ribuah (squarness) of his battim. They are off by more than a millimeter which is enough to make them posel. There are two ways to fix the problem. One way is to remove a little bit from each of the sides of the bayis that have the shins on them, but not to actually remake the shins. The problem with this is that the walls of the bayis that are in-between the shins will be wider than the outer part of the walls. The Mishna Brurah is machmir (strict) about this, which would mean that the tefillin are only kosher b’dieved (after the fact). The other way to fix the bayis is to work even in-between the shins, effectivly redoing the entire wall, including the shins. This is an expensive process, costing as much as $250. With a good set of new battim costing $425, if the old bayis is not exceptionally good, it probably does not pay to redo it. This customer has a bayis from his grandfather o”h which he gave me. I was going to put his parshios in his grandfather’s bayis, but upon opening them, it was clear that his parshios would not fit into his grandfather’s battim, as the compartments for the parshios of the shel rosh are not nice clean rectangles, and not big enough. On the other hand, the compartments in his battim are nice and rectangle, making it easy to put the parshios in, but the battim are not square. After I explained all this to the customer, he told me that he had a shila in parshas shema. There was an endakof (kof sofit) that had a nifsak (break) between the gag (roof 0f the letter) and the regel (leg of the letter), and he went to a rov, and asked if it was kosher. The rov wasn’t sure and sent him to another rov who told him it was kosher the way it was. The break was not a simple break as there was a little bit of dio (ink) semi-attached (apparently part of the klaf was cut, or something like that), and if that ink would be removed it might become posel in such a way that it wouldn’t be able to be fixed, therefore he should leave it alone. So now the customer is wondering if he should use the parshios altogether, and on top of that he has two battim neither of which are good. I told him that if he asked a shaila, he should listen to the psak (decision). After all, that is the system that we follow. If the rov said it is kosher, we believe that that means it is kosher in shamayim. He is bothered by the fact that the first rov wasn’t sure, but I think that lack of clarity is irrelevant. The second rov (whom the first rov sent him to) was sure! In the end the customer decided to have his bayis fixed.
