I created this Shiviti in the lead up to Shavuot 5784 (2024) to use in a Shavuot learning class on the Shiviti. My scalable vector graphic (SVG) Shiviti is based on many traditional ones I’ve seen, and inspired by my love of Judaism, mysticism, art, computers, and coding. Since it was generated for the purpose of study on printed worksheets over Shavuot, the letters of the Tetragrammaton are separated by dashes. (A maqaf may be preferable but was not available in the scribal font “Stam Ashkenaz CLM” I utilized.) Elsewhere in the letter art, the traditional circumlocution for the divine nameא-ל is used. The overarching concern here was to prevent the work from requiring the same treatment given to works in which divine names are explicitly printed. (For a teshuva on this topic, find “YD 276 – On the Exodus (and Genesis) of Shemot” (Avram Israel Reisner, CJLS 2003).) A second version of the Shiviti using the original divine names in unchanged forms is also provided for viewing on screen (not recommended for printing).

The first Shiviti I created was one I made by hand around 2014 at Kol Zimra,^[1] A chant leader’s professional development program led by Rabbi Shefa Gold.  at a craft shiviti making workshop taught by art therapist Judith Dack with Rabbi Shefa Gold. I was later inspired by the Shiviti rendered in vector art (SVG) by Andrew Meit published on Open Siddur. Andrew had converted a Shiviti from a raster image provided by Aharon Varady, that had originally been shared by the sofer, Ba’al haKokhav (a pseudonym of the author of a now inaccessible post of a once popular messaging board online.)

The SVG file was created by hand coding XML in a text editor with Unicode Hebrew and hyperlink sources for texts to Sefaria and Open Siddur (no design tools were used). The open-source vector art application Inkscape was used to render the PNG (raster graphic at 400dpi resolution) and PDF (with embedded font and hyperlinks) directly from the SVG. The only technical requirement should be availability of the font “Stam Ashkenaz CLM”.