Reflections on Hebrew: Living Words

Two illustrations:

• In 1959, my father z’l got off the plane from America and landed with his family in Tel Aviv.It was his first time in Israel.He knew Hebrew from study of ancient texts, and from prayers.He immediately began conversing with people on the street as if he had been there all his life.
• Last summer my son was a counselor at a Jewish camp. Having trouble with a verse in the Torah, he turned to a visiting fourth grader from Israel, who immediately gave him the correct interpretation.

Torah is unique among the ancient works in the Western canon in that it is written in a living language. By contrast, a reader in Greece needs a translation to read the Iliad just as an English speaker does. Even going back 2500 years to the first documented public reading of Torah, at the time of Ezra and the rebuilding of the Temple, the people needed translation into Aramaic to understand the words.

For the Torah reader, the ability to read an ancient work in living words is an opportunity and a challenge. The ba’al keriyah can reach the listener with an unprecedented immediacy. That is why there needs to be a call to perform in an artful way, bringing letters to life, and giving voice to the full power of the text in a way pleasing to heart and mind.