university degrees
April 27th, 2008 by AriThe seal of Columbia University contains the Hebrew name of god, and the seal of Dartmouth college contains the phrase “el shadai” (also in Hebrew). Does this mean that a degree from either of these colleges is considered shamot and cannot be thrown away? The same goes for T-shirts and other college related paraphernalia that are emblazoned with the seal. In other words, does intent matter when creating the words, or only the resultant text? Has anyone encountered this before?
Since I’m on the subject, the Wash U seal is incredibly boring by comparison. It also doesn’t seem to exist anywhere online – I had to go find my diploma in order to see what it looked like, although a brief description is on the commencement page. It’s a simple open book with the Latin name of the university (Universitas Washingtoniana) printed circularly around it.
April 28th, 2008 at 10:36 am
I remember in high school, our non-Jewish computer teacher was creating a logo for the school, which was a Torah scroll and the initials CTA. He generated the parchment and rollers in Adobe, and used a Hebrew font to type a page of characters that he shrunk down and pasted into a small, unrolled portion of the scroll. First, though, he had to print it out and have one of the rabbis read it, to make sure there were no real words that had accidentally appeared.