Reflections on Hebrew: Pronunciation, a guide to technique

My first meeting with the scholar who taught me to pay close attention to biblical Hebrew did not go well. In the spring of 2003 I visited the Jewish Theological Seminary, and approached Rabbi Miles Cohen to discuss my plan to write about Torah reading from the perspective of a Torah reader. I was chutzpadik enough to recite a passage, hoping to impress with a lyrical reading, and was devastated when Rabbi Cohen dismissed my recitation as “sloppy.”

R. Cohen was referring to my carelessness over the rules of pronunciation of biblical Hebrew, and to be honest, I was ignorant of some. What determines whether a sheva is voiced or unvoiced, for example? I am still grateful for the bluntness that shocked me out of complacency. Once I had recovered from a sense of outrage, a measure of humility was restored. Under R. Cohen’s tutelage, correct pronunciation became an arduous project over the next months. Like changing a tennis stroke, it seemed at first that I would never get the hang of it. But over time, doing things right began to feel natural. When I listen to readers around the world, I am struck by how attention to only a few details would make their pronunciation accurate enough to satisfy Professor Cohen.

• Sheva – I am still waiting for R. Cohen to write an article about his greatly simplified system for determining whether this vowel is voiced (roughly like an unaccented “i” in English, as in “halibut”) or silent (“halbut”). The issue is treated with greater complexity in Joshua Jacobson’s Chanting the Hebrew Bible. Anyone not wishing to study the grammar has only to consult Tikun Simanim, which uses larger dots for the voiced sheva. The rules become more or less second hand after practice.
• Which syllable to accent on a word – this is indicated by the trop accent in most situations. A few trop are fixed in position before or after a word and don’t indicate the accented syllable. The newer Tikunim will indicate with a double accent the correct placement in these cases (pashta, telisha, zarka, segol). Note that often the accent placement is different than it might be in Modern Hebrew, and even different in the same word in different verses.
• Separating words – when the ending of one word and the beginning of the next are the same letter, in normal speech, one merges the two. In biblical chant, each word should be separate (i.e., al levavecha, not alevavecha)
• When a kamatz is little (“ah”), and when it is big (“aw”). This too is indicated by size in Tikun Simanim

This is of course a partial list. Jacobson’s section on pronunciation is eighty pages long, and he admits that is just a beginning. How far should one go for the sake of correctness? Well, most of us readers make compromises. I don’t generally attend to dagesh hazak, a dot intended to double the sound of a letter (Jacobson compares the double “n” in unnecessary). I can’t make the sound of the guttural ayin, and like most handicapped Ashkenazim, pronounce it no different from aleph. I do voice the “h” sound at the end of the word if the final heh has a mapik (dot), but Rabbi Cohen suggests that this may not be audible beyond the fifth row, and is perhaps not so important. It would appear that eyn ladavar sof – there is no end to the thing.

Attention to the details of pronunciation is essential for a good recitation, but how much is enough? When is it OK to make punctilious grammar subservient to the need for a flowing, powerful musical/dramatic experience? At what point have you gone so far in separating chant from everyday speech, that it now sounds foreign? I do not claim to have the answers to these questions. On the time scale of Jewish history, these are new questions, arising from the resurrection of Hebrew as a living tongue in the last hundred years. I would invite comments from readers. It is our dialogue and our performances that will set standards in a new age for this ancient art.