Morning sun streamed across the long table in the Temple Emanuel library, causing the white parchment scroll on the table to gleam in the light.

Neil Yerman leaned in closely, rubbing softly with a sponge. He was wiping away a white powder - created as the scroll was rolled and unrolled over the years - that had begun to obscure the black letters.

"Look at that," he exclaimed in obvious delight as the complex graphics that are Hebrew letters suddenly seemed to rise from the parchment.

"Just as you need to get to the doctor every so often, so a Torah needs to be seen by a 'doctor' occasionally."

Yerman is such a doctor - a sofer, or Torah scribe - an expert at creating the traditional handwritten scrolls of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible.

He was visiting Roanoke's congregation of Reform Judaism this week to give two of its Torahs a checkup - cleaning, a little restorative surgery and replacing the "atzei chaim," or wooden spindles on which the scrolls are wound.

"Atzei chaim" literally means "trees of life," explained Temple Emanuel's rabbi, Kathy Cohen. One of them had cracked on the tem-ple's young scroll, which is only 75 years old. The set on the congregation's oldest Torah scroll - saved from the Holocaust and estimated to be 260 years old - was unwieldy to handle, risking accidental damage every time it was used.

It would have been simple enough for the congregation to send the scrolls to Yerman's New York workshop for repairs, Cohen said. But the members fell in love with him when he was here in 1998 to do major restoration of the Holocaust scroll.

"We felt strongly we wanted him to come down and teach us" again, she said.

"He is, in my opinion, somewhat of an unusual scribe. In addition to being a highly gifted artist and scribe, he's a tremendous teacher. ... He brings another level of spirituality and a deeper level of knowledge, which really inspires the congregation tremendously."

As he worked Wednesday, Yerman taught a series of short classes to children ranging from preschoolers to high school students.

"Everything we use to write a Torah is from nature," Yerman explained.

That starts with the parchment, made only from the skins of kosher animals - in this case, calf, sheep, goat or deer. The thread to sew the pages together is made from animal sinew. Pumice is used to smooth the parchment and remove errant ink. A goose or turkey feather provides the quill for creating the letters.

And the ink ... well, it's a long story but it involves tree bark, gum arabic, copper sulfate crystals and the larvae of the gall wasp. It's all combined into a stew that is cooked, cooled, mashed and recooked, over and over for a year or so. The result is a jet-black ink that sticks to the parchment and can last 1,000 years, Yerman said.

And nothing is wasted. Scraps of parchment, string, even the dust created by use of the pumice is saved and later boiled down into glue to be used on other projects.

While there are hundreds of rules and traditions for creating a Torah scroll, getting started as a sofer is pretty straightforward, Yerman said.

"If you want to learn to be a scribe, here's what you do. Sit in a chair, take a feather in hand and write. Write 100,000 letters, then 100,000 more letters, then 100,000 more letters, then 4,805 letters."

That's how many letters are in the Torah. You keep that up for five years, Yerman said, and you will have written 1.6 million letters and be almost ready to start.

"You never stop learning."

There's more to his job than that, however. He has to be an expert at repairs that are totally organic and don't damage or defile a scroll.

Those can range from patching little holes that can develop - as he did on the Holocaust scroll on this visit - to repairing letters where ink has cracked or peeled, to binding a scroll onto a new set of atzei chaim.

And for Yerman, it includes being a teacher and motivator.

"How many commandments are in the Bible?" A frequent answer is 10. That would be wrong.

"There are 613 commandments - called 'mitzvoth' in Hebrew." The first, spoken by God to the animals on the fifth day of creation, according to Genesis: "Be fruitful and multiply."

"Do we love the Torah?" he asked a group of preschoolers. "Yes, and if we love it we will take care of it."

But later he reminded older students that there is more to Torah than the scroll.

"Knowledge is the part of the Torah that cannot be destroyed as long as there are people of faith," he said.