Why does a kid pick Hebrew Calligraphy?!

 When I was five years old, I started drawing calligraphy. 

Letters were all around me. Our apartment was covered in bookshelves. In the center of my mom’s room, we had an old, noisy typewriter with a sticker reminding her to finish her PhD. And to me, letters were found on milk packages, cars, shop windows, t-shirts, advertising pillars, the TV shows I wasn’t allowed but still watched. Letters were omnipresent.

But the letters around me were functional. They existed in order to convey messages. I, on the other hand, wasn’t a functional kid. I wanted to play music and draw. I didn’t care about words and structures. I cared about making things beautiful. I saw pictures in texts and wanted to let them out. 

Judaism isn’t traditionally overly enthusiastic about creativity, especially when it comes to letters. Conservation is the name of the game and letters are to be written exactly the way they were written before. One mistaken stroke in a letter can make a whole Torah scroll pasul. 

So despite my love for letters and my soon discovered talent for them, I found myself at odds with scribes and other Hebrew writers. In the world surrounding me, there was no space to let letters dance. Much less were there any dancing classes.

It took years for me to start taking Hebrew calligraphy and lettering seriously. I studied music and had a career as a musician. Only later in my 20s, when I managed to free myself from those limitations I had accepted, I found what really let me feel at peace: letting letters dance.