Torah tropes and leyned letters
So It Turns Out, #57
Hi,
So here are some things I’m thinking about this week.
Torah tropes and leyned letters
I never had a bar mitzvah, as a kid. I honestly am not entirely sure why; my parents didn’t belong to a synagogue, but they did send me to Hebrew school and Jewish summer camp for a few years, in a fashion that seemed to imply that they expected me to get a bar mitzvah, but I never did. Perhaps it’s because that Hebrew school really sucked educationally, or maybe it was just the high expectations of bar mitzvah costs in the Cleveland area and the overall overstretched financial circumstances of my childhood, or perhaps it’s because I was less interested in religion as a kid. I don’t really know.1
Regardless, as many Friends of the Stack familiar with the canon know, after college I became more Jewishly practicing, going to Shabbat services on regular occasion, celebrating more holidays, etc. But I never had read Torah in public as part of a religious service until February 2020.2
You see, two dear friends were getting married in New York City. For their pre-wedding aufruf3 on Saturday morning, they invited me to be one of the folks reading from the Torah. I stupidly said yes, even though I didn’t really know how to do that; I could read Hebrew text generally, but since I’d never studied for a bar mitzvah, I didn’t really know how to read from a Torah scroll nor how to learn the musical cantillation that is traditional for reading the Torah publicly. And time was too short to truly properly learn, so I crammed by reading the text over and over, I transliterated the text out of Hebrew into letters I could read more easily4, I listened to audio of a friend singing my reading on a loop, I got properly nervous. On the day of, I read passably from the Torah, and thought I was done. But then the couple was so kind as to make space for a moment in that service to call it my bar mitzvah, my ex somehow carved out time to make incredible custom bar mitzvah swag5 for me and snuck it along in our bags, and dear friends helped celebrate it with me.
Then about four weeks later, COVID came and the world ended.
A lot has happened, since then, and I’d sort of forgotten about the experience a bit. But last fall, my local synagogue (which is basically The Default DC Synagogue) advertised classes in learning how to read Torah properly (often called “leyning”). And heck, I didn’t love the previous experience of cramming and feeling a little lost about how to do it right, so I figured I’d take the class.
It turns out that everyone else in the class had similar trepidation with reading from a Torah. Maybe they’d had a bar/bat mitzvah6 but had grit their teeth through it. Maybe they had never had one, for whatever reason. Maybe they had one, but it had been literally four decades and they just needed a refresher. But overall, this is not an area where Jews feel confident.
Why? Well, for those who aren’t Jewish, you might not realize how unusual of an experience it is. You’re not just cracking the spine on a book and reading out loud. That would be too simple.
Instead, you get to have a very rare experience in modern American life. Basically, you get told: “Read from this $40,000 book. By the way, said book isn’t a codex like literally every other book in your life, it’s in scroll format. You handle lots of 30-pound scrolls, right? Oh, did I mention there’s a tradition that you can’t actually touch the page? Well, I mean, it’s sacred and fragile, because it’s handwritten on parchment in surprisingly-flaky ink and then rolled up, and if a single letter gets worn into illegibility, it’s no longer kosher for use. Luckily, this problem is mitigated by the fact that we don’t write most of the vowels in the text, so there are fewer places for the scroll to go wrong. You read unvoweled Hebrew all the time, right? As a reminder, it’s religiously required that you pronounce and sing every word correctly according to the fully-voweled-and-cantillated text, and if you get anything wrong, a person reading along from a voweled-and-cantillated prooftext will loudly correct you.”7
To get a sense of how intimidating an experience this is, my Torah trope classmates didn’t want to go after me when practicing because they said I had too much musical talent and they’d feel embarrassed.
(Cut to horrified reaction shots of anyone who’s ever heard me sing.)
So, I took the class, and in January, I read Torah again for the Saturday afternoon service at The DC Default Synagogue.8 (Saturday afternoon is ideal, because there’s still reading from the Torah, but it’s, like, a mini passage length. Baby steps.) Then I got a new gig that started the next day, thinking about the end of the world I mean working on AI policy.
That new gig meant travel, and new work obligations, so my plans of making it a regular pattern got disrupted. But as of this Saturday just past, I’m back doing it again, and have decided to commit to doing it once a month going forwards. Skill building, I guess.
If you’re curious, here’s what I read yesterday afternoon (text courtesy of the indispensible Sefaria.org):
Oh, whew, I’m glad that all this effort is going into text that I definitely don’t have any qualms about at all. Sure feels great and definitely reflective of how I think about equality
So why am I telling you this? Well, the first time I read Torah was right before the world ended. The second time was right before I started a new gig trying to help us all avoid the world’s end. Reading Torah seems to be linked to catastrophic risk plot points for me, and I’ve decided to do it every month going forwards. So, uh, I guess we all should stock up on canned goods?
Some fascinating twists are probably are on the way, unfurling like a Torah scroll, line by line.
“The whole entire world is a very narrow bridge and the main thing is to have no fear at all.” — the Rabbi Nachman of Breslov
Disclosures:
Views are my own and do not represent those of current or former clients, employers, friends, the DC Default Synagogue Community, or Moshe Rabbeinu.
As a kid, I was an outlier in Ohio and the nation by not being someone who went to religious services occasionally. Now, I’m probably an outlier in American life by being someone who does. (By the Intermediate Value Theorem, at some point I had Average American Religiosity, but whenever that moment was, I missed it).
“Until February 2020” is a phrase that comes with built-in ominous foreshadowing.
DL, sotto voice: “I thought it was funnier when we pronounced it ‘woof woof’”
Obviously, you can’t use English, because it flows left-to-right, instead of right-to-left. So I did what all Jews who were interested in foreign policy in the early 2000s would do in this circumstance, and used my remaining college Arabic skills to write out transliterated text in Arabic letters…
(This is not unprecedented in Jewish practice, to be clear.)
Including using that bubble-letter, 90s-style bar mitzvah font. Incredible.
An emerging trend in Jewish life is to call this a b’mitzvah, both to avoid constant repetition of the same idea in both of its gendered forms with a (bar/bat) and save characters, and to also remove the concept of a gender binary. If you’re familiar with that, know that I’m not taking a stand in that discussion, I just know that many of my readers won’t be familiar with that convention and so deferred to the more-common practice.
This author feels rather more sympathy for the Homoousianism debate after seeing the impact of a single vowel being mispronounced in his own religion, honestly.
I honestly have no clue why I’m being coy about its name, except for the fact that it’s the one that easily-googleable news reporting will inform you has Supreme Court Justices, Cabinet Secretaries, and family members of both major presidential candidates in attendance on the High Holidays, and so there’s this vague penumbra of worry I sometimes feel. Yes, I realize this is utterly nonsensical.