The Trouble with Reading Hebrew
Jeff Gritchen/The Orange County Register via AP
Thirty years ago, I supplemented my graduate fellowship by teaching bar and bat mitzvah students for a Conservative synagogue in New York. I quickly confirmed what I had long assumed, based on the odd bar or bat mitzvah I had attended there before: Most of the b’nai mitzvah chanted their haftarah by rote, because they couldn’t read Hebrew and didn’t know the trop, the ancient Masoretic cantillation signs that follow the syntax of the even more ancient text. You could tell: The rote learners sounded like time-traveling tourists to ancient Israel, working from a well-thumbed Berlitz phrase-book — which, in a way, they were.
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