Stringing the Pearls: How to Read the Weekly Torah Portion

4. Hearing the Humash

45 4. Hearing the Humash What does it mean to hear the Torah? How do we do this? One way, of course, is to hear the text chanted by the Torah reader during the services on Shabbat morning and other designated times. Each word has its own distinctive melody or trope based on a chanting, or cantillation, system that goes back farther than any other aspect of reading the Torah. The medieval Jewish sources ascribe a Divine origin to cantillation. They taught that Moses heard the voice of God chanting the Torah at Sinai, and Moses began the process of orally transmitting that tradition through the generations until it was finally put into writing.7 More historically, Avenary notes that in the practices of reading scripture in every Asiatic tradition, from Vedic recitation in India to Buddhist recitation in Japan, none is spoken, none is sung: all are cantillated in a system resembling that of the Jews.8 The trope for each word, then, is very old, much older than the cantillation markings, called in Hebrew te ’amim, that were in time devised to be placed over or under each word of the Pentateuch to denote the specific melody for that particular word. During the late Rabbinic period and in the early Middle Ages there were, apparently , several different ways in which the te’amin could be marked, just as there were several different ways in which an individual trope could be sung. The former were finally fixed by the 46 READING AND HEARING Masoretes (see p. 47), most particularly by Rabbi Aharon ben Asher and his school in the 10th century. Ben Asher developed a clear set of visual signifiers for the te’amin to indicate how each word would be chanted and accented. This is known as the Tiberian notation system. It became the standard for Jews the world over and is in use to this day. In printed editions of the Humash these Masoretic te’amim symbols are visible over each and every word. The Masoretes placed them at the point of accentuation of the word, an important fact that many Torah readers seem to overlook. The symbols are absent from the script of the Torah scroll itself (as are all Masoretic notes) and have to be memorized by the baal korei. Such memorization constitutes the lion’s share of what a bar or bat mitzvah must accomplish for the performative aspect of the big event.9 Generally, the te’amim follow the sense of the words and the Hebrew syntax, and so if one is familiar with them and their patterns, they provide steady direction to the construction of each verse. But not always; sometimes, as the Rabbis in the Talmud already noticed, the trope is at variance with how we break up a verse. Now while the trope sign for each word was fixed, the actual melodies by which they were chanted were not. The trope we hear in synagogues that follow Ashkenazic (north European) rite sounds different from trope we hear in Sephardic (SpanishMediterranean ) congregations. Even within these broad categories there are regional variations. Polish and German trope are not quite same, though both are Ashkenazic, and Iraqi and Moroccan Torah chanting are unmistakably different, though both are Sephardic. And the trope of Yemenite communities is something else again. But hearing the Bible is different from reading it in another way. To understand this way we must look to Martin Buber (1878–1965) and Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929), two of the most eminent Jewish thinkers of the 20th century. In the great flowering of serious Jewish adult learning that took place in pre-Holocaust Germany, Buber and Rosenzweig wanted to bring to the fore the original oral/aural nature of the Bible. They did this by striving to craft a German translation of the Bible that they hoped would enable modern readers to experience the text auditorily and not only visually .10 My discussion here follows their main ideas. 47 HEARING THE HUMASH WHO WERE THE MASORETES? By the end of the 9th century the need was recognized to definitively fix the text of the TANAKH as it had come down from preceding centuries so that future generations would possess a correct and authoritative version. The Ben Asher family, working in Tiberias, on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, instituted a scribal school that, in the 10th century, accomplished these important...