transliteration, cantorial stuff

[cellio]

We ended up talking a little bit about the Hebrew/English balance at services and the use of transliteration in the siddur. Some rabbis apparently hold the view that transliteration is a crutch that keeps people from actually learning Hebrew. I suspect that's not quite right.

I dislike reading from transliteration, and avoid it except when urgent even if it means I won't be able to say every word (due to being slow). On the other hand, when I was just starting to attend services and didn't know anything yet, I was really grateful to have it. I was able to use it to jump-start my participation, yet I did not lose my motivation to learn to read for real. I commented on this to my rabbi, who said something like "yeah, but you taught yourself trope too -- you're not typical". Actually, though, I suspect I am typical among that subset of the population that will learn to read anyway. It's just that most people will apparently settle for transliteration -- but if it weren't there they'd sit in silence, not say "gee, I'm not getting any help here; I better learn the language". Or so I theorize. (Data welcome.)

The real issue there, I guess, is that most people don't want to learn to read a foreign alphabet at speed. I'd rather give them some tools for participation than write them off. (And just to clarify, I'm pretty sure my rabbi shares that view. He's not the one who said transliteration should be eliminated.)

But I'd also be thrilled if I, personally, never had to rely on transliteration again. :-)

- - - - - - - -

In other news, I met with our cantorial soloist last night to discuss that service at the end of July. She is quite happy to have me doing most of the music, with other committee members doing some, and she said she would like to see more of this. So we'll be sort of a test case or something, to see how the congregation reacts. The subs are already mostly lined up for her maternity leave (which is going to be very short, because she wants to be back before the high holy days), but she pointed out that next summer there will be an opportunity to do more. No, she's not planning another kid (or if she is, she didn't share that information), but the congregation has managed to clear next summer of b'nei mitzvot, so services during the summer can be less formal and more experimental. (Next year's class is small, so we are taking the opportunity to do some sanctuary renovations.) I'd love to see more lay people being more involved in things like this.

We also talked about the trope class I want us to have in the fall or winter, and she's going to do what she can to make it happen. The lines of responsibility are a little fuzzy here, and we both want to make sure it doesn't fall through the cracks.

Comments

[mishtaneh.livejournal.com]

I'm still relying on transliteration for some things (notably kaddish — I'm developing a feel for reading Hebrew a word at a time (instead of a letter) so I can read at speed, but that feel doesn't work with Aramaic) during services, but whenever possible I'm sticking to the actual Hebrew. Then again, I've started poking at trope a bit as well ("so I've figured out what some of those marks around the Sh'ma mean; how about the rest?") so I'm presumably not "typical" either. :)

On the other hand, I agree that those who aren't interested in learning to read Hebrew won't suddenly decide to learn it if the transliterations are eliminated.

[cellio]

("so I've figured out what some of those marks around the Sh'ma mean; how about the rest?")

A word of warning there: people mostly learn to chant the Sh'ma by ear, rather than by reading the trope, and there tends to be some drift as that happens. There are also several different trope systems (that is, sets of melodies that go with the symbols). I haven't figured out which trope system, if any, the typical-for-Pittsburgh Sh'ma chanting matches, but it's not exactly the one I've been learning.

If you want the cheat sheet from the trope book I'm using, just let me know. 40 trope phrases written out in modern musical notation -- very handy.

Trope Music?

[caryabend.livejournal.com]

I'm interested in the book itself. What's the title, and which tropes does it cover?

I ask because I started learning some torah trope to read a section of Parasha Noach for our aufruf and our Rabbi was very clear to me that torah trope differs from haftorah trope. We didn't get into the actual differences. Unfortunately, time constraints led a shift in the learning process - I learned the section by mimicry rather than knowledge of the trope itself. So I still can't chant. :(

While you're at it, you can send the "cheat sheet" as well. :)

Re: Trope Music?

[gnomi.livejournal.com]

There's a website that actually might be of help to you - Navigating the Bible (http://bible.ort.org/intro1.asp?lang=1) from the folks at ORT. On the right-hand side, there is a link to Torah. This links to text - both cantillated and non (what I think of as "Tikkun text" and Torah text") - of each Torah portion, and next to every verse is a link for audio of the text being lained.

From a halachic perspective, I'm really not sure how I feel about this. But from the perspective of someone who has had to learn and teach many a Torah and Haftara portion, I think it's an excellent resource.

Re: Trope Music?

[cellio]

That site is helpful, yes. I've used it too. It can be hard to practice from if you're learning a portion, because you only see it two or three verses at a time, but it's a handy aid to learning.

Note to caryabend: this site and the book I mentioned do not use the same trope system.

I have found Trope Trainer (software -- PC only, I think) to be really, really helpful. It knows about a bunch of trope systems and will give you Ashkenazi or Sephardi pronunciation (in your choice of vocal range), and it shows you the music notation for the phrases as it's playing. You can view the text with or without the trope marks and with or without vowels/punctuation, and you can have it highlight trope phrases with colors. Handy learning/practice aid! There are also tutorials on the CD, which I haven't looked at yet.

Re: Trope Music?

[cellio]

The book is The Art of Torah Cantillation by Marshall Portnoy and Josee Wolff. It teaches the trope system that I have since learned is called "Binder"; it's the one that seems to be prevalent in Reform congregations. (It's not that different from the one I hear at a local Conservative congregation, though.) The book is divided into sections to teach each phrase, with texts to practice on, and comes with a CD. There is a two-page spread in the back that shows all the trope phrases in modern musical notation; my biggest complaint about the book is that they don't show those in the sections where they teach the phrases too. So you'll be reading along and it'll say "this symbol sounds like this: [play track 8 on CD]" or something -- would it have been so much trouble to also include the music there? What if it's not convenient to play the CD at the time (like, because it's Shabbat, or because you're studying on the bus, or whatever)? You can flip to the back of the book, of course, but that's a pain. I guess they figure that most people don't read music, but for those who do, this would be a real help.

(Hmm. Having said that, I should apply photocopying, scissors, and glue-sticks to the problem for my own copy of the book.)

While you're at it, you can send the "cheat sheet" as well. :)

Sure. Send me a physical address.

Re: Trope Music?

[cellio]

Oh, and yes -- torah and haftarah trope are different. I don't know exactly how, as I have been carefully avoiding the latter until I completely learn the former. No sense confusing myself with that. :-)

Noach isn't for a while -- you could relearn the section for real and chant it this year, assuming your congregation allows that sort of thing "just because" rather than because you have a specific occasion like an aufruf or bar mitzvah.

Re: Trope Music?

[jonbaker.livejournal.com]

"It's called Binder": Well, Rabbi Binder (Reform) wrote a well-regarded (in Orthodox circles as well) book on tropes, including music for all the various modes in general use, at least for Ashkenazic, and I think some Sephardic styles: Torah, Haftorah, High Holidays Torah, Esther, Eichah, Other Three Megillas. It goes in & out of print.

I taught myself to read Ruth (one of the Other Three Megillas) from the musical examples in Idelsohn's "Jewish Music in its Historical Development" one Shavuot when we didn't have anyone who knew how to do it. Germans have a system that's a little different from Eastern European Ashkenazic, whose Torah trope sounds a bit like our Esther.

I spent a year and a half learning my bar-mitzva parsha (Lech Lecha), first learning the tropes themselves with flash cards, then applying them to the text. I cut it kind of close, but learned the haftarah in the last week-and-a-half. Once I was used to the cadences of Tanach text from the Torah, learning a new set of notes was all but trivial.

Rabbi Binder

[cellio]

Thanks for the information. I only had the name "Binder", which I got from Trope Trainer. (Trope Trainer has a couple dozen trope systems, and I cycled through them until I found the one I recognized.)

[mishtaneh.livejournal.com]

Noticed that; there are places where Temple Sinai and Rodef Shalom don't match either each other or the trope reference I was using (http://www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~elsegal/Cantillation/Cantillation.html (http://www.acs.ucalgary.ca/~elsegal/Cantillation/Cantillation.html)) — there was another site I looked at last year which had three different trope systems, but it 404s now). And I'd not be terribly surprised if no two synagogues (of any variety) quite match each other. :)

I'd be interested in the "cheat sheet", I think.

[siderea]

I agree that removing the crutch will not cure the patient of lameness. :)

[cellio]

Brutal, but correct. :-)

P.S.

[siderea]

But I disagree that they'd sit there in silence. They'd stop showing up.

Re: P.S.

[mishtaneh.livejournal.com]

I would would suspect they're more likely to be showing up for the community to begin with. They won't sit in silence; they'll learn to mumble something that sounds vaguely right and continue to concentrate on the community aspect.

(This is ignoring the folks who only showed up at the Friday evening service because of a baby naming, or the participation of the next day's bar/bat mitzvah; they probably won't be back next week regardless.)

Re: P.S.

[cellio]

I agree with this assessment.

Re: P.S.

[jducoeur]

They won't sit in silence; they'll learn to mumble something that sounds vaguely right and continue to concentrate on the community aspect.

Some probably would, but I'd also expect some to feel more awkward about it. I'm not sure what the balance would be, but I would expect at least some people to feel marginalized by the change, and decrease their involvement.

This is speaking from a viewpoint of knowing little about the shul dynamics in particular, mind -- this is just an observation about how organizations tend to work. Even the people who are there mainly for the community usually like to feel a bit involved in the formal work of the organization, and usually feel somewhat awkward if they really can't participate at that level...

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

As someone who went and learned a foreign character set, I feel I should have something significant to say to that point.

Perhaps it is this: a year of steady use will make it possible to read it reasonably. Especially if you repeat the same things over and over, then it shoudn't be too bad.

On the other hand, for real speed you need to be reading the words, not just the phonetics, and that would seem to necessitate study of the language.

[dvarin.livejournal.com]

a year of steady use will make it possible to read it reasonably.

I should qualify this with "for phonetic systems." Chinese characters, Egyptian hieroglyphs, and other ideographic systems are much different.

[eub.livejournal.com]

Cyrillic was maybe a week or two at the beginning of Russian, but then, Cyrillic is pretty closely related to the Latin alphabet.

[ichur72.livejournal.com]

FWIW, it's based on the Greek alphabet for the most part. But Cyrillic has more letters in it than Greek since Slavic languages use many sounds that aren't present in Greek. (There are even a couple of Cyrillic characters based on Hebrew -- specifically, the letters for the "ts" and "sh" sounds.) OK, I'll stop being pedantic now. (I'm a bit of a language geek.)

[eub.livejournal.com]

Huh, "sh" is a ש, isn't it. Cool! (Also: my goodness, I'd never tried navigating Mozilla's mixed-direction text editing before.)

St. Cyril and his brother were Greek themselves, so one wonders whether they may have, in standardizing Old Church Slavonic (or was it Glagolitic they did?), have tilted towards the letterforms they knew.

[cellio]

How did you do that?

[eub.livejournal.com]

The shin? Copy-and-pasted it from here (http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/hebrew.html), or I guess I could have done "ש". (Sorry that can't be any cleaner than whatever technique you're now using.)

[ichur72.livejournal.com]

I'm sure that the creator of the Cyrillic alphabet (who was, I believe, actually Methodius and not Cyril) did stick to familiar letter forms. The creator of the Glagolitic alphabet, however, went quite a bit further from home. I can't read Glagolitic, but the few samples I've seen of it remind me a bit of the alphabet used for Amharic, one of the languages spoken in Ethiopia. (Incidentally, the root of the word "glagolitic" is a Slavic word meaning "vowel".)

In any case, the Cyrillic alphabet was, IIRC, created to represent the Slavic dialect spoken in a part of what's now the Czech Republic. The religious works written in that dialect served as the literary basis for old church Slavonic.

[cellio]

On the other hand, for real speed you need to be reading the words, not just the phonetics, and that would seem to necessitate study of the language.

If you're doing the same text repeatedly you can get to the point of recognizing words even if you don't comprehend them at the individual-word level. That's not as good as actually learning the language, of course, but it's a start. And if you try to learn what those specific words mean (even absent formally learning the language, grammar, etc), you'll be ahead when you encounter the same roots in other forms. I can't yet look at an arbitrary Hebrew word and strip off the prefixes and suffixes to get to the guts, but for some roots I'm pretty good at this by now. :-)

[ichur72.livejournal.com]

I have always felt like I was cheating a little b/c I learned to read Hebrew years before I ever started learning for conversion. (I took 2 semesters of Israeli Hebrew in college, more or less on a whim.) I say "cheating" b/c I know so many people, JITs and born Jews alike, who struggled to learn Hebrew, whereas I didn't have much of a problem following in the siddur from the beginning. Don't mean to sound like I'm bragging -- I just got lucky since foreign languages are relatively easy for me.

[cellio]

Hey, take your advantages wherever you can get them. Some people thought I was "cheating" because I had already learned a lot of the stuff taught in the course by the time I got there (stuff about liturgy, holidays, life-cycle, Shabbat, etc), but I never felt bad about that. It allowed me to focus on the things I didn't know much about.

[debka-notion.livejournal.com]

(Having taught Hebrew school for a handful of years, the last few using siddurim that had both Hebrew and the transliterations) Trnasliterations are a wonderful tool for including people who otherwise wouldn't know what to say because they're unable to read the text. The problem comes when someone is already learning to read Hebrew, but it takes a long time, and it's slow- so they stick to the transliterations, and often don't get the practice reading Hebrew that would get them to be able to read more quickly, because people's lives are busy, and setting up time to practice reading Hebrew can be dull. Transliteration may even motivate people to start to learn to read Hebrew, since they can see it right there, and they Know that they're only faking. But once they do- there needs to be some way to eventually take it away so the temptation doesn't get to them. And with 7th graders- it Needs to not be there, when you're trying to teach them to read Hebrew: most of them will peak and cheat.

[cellio]

Ooh, I hadn't thought about kids and the temptation to cheat. Good point.

Ultimately, you'll only learn the language if you're motivated to do so, including following along in the Hebrew to learn to associate the sounds you're hearing with the character you're seeing. Adults presumably have enough self-discipline to do this even if there's translit sitting there that they could cheat with, because adults realize that cheating won't actually help them. Kids are different, though; if they're just there because Mom and Dad are making them and they don't really care, you're right that the translit will let them fake it instead of forcing them to tackle the Hebrew. (I'm not saying all kids are like this.)

It sounds kind of backwards to say "adult siddurim can have translit; kids' siddurim can't", but that might be an answer if you've got parents or teachers at services who can monitor this. :-)

[debka-notion.livejournal.com]

My best suggestion would be to have siddurim with and without transliterations available at regular services, although that might leave people who use them open to stigma. Not sure what to do about that. But having siddurim without transliterations for the students works much better, in general. Sometimes even the one who don't want to cheat will just have a low day, and look over without trying to be a bad student- just one too many stresses when the easy way out is available.

[murmur311.livejournal.com]

I also dislike reading from the transliteration now that I can read the Hebrew- it really messes me up. I can follow all the prayers in Hebrew, and say probably 75% of them with the congregation (sometimes we move a little to fast and I have to either follow with my eyes and not my mouth or skip to the transliteration). I'm not really sure how many people in the congregation rely on the transliteration vs. people who can read Hebrew vs. people who have simply memorized the prayers over the years.

There are a number of people in Adult Hebrew at my temple who are there simply to be able to follow along during services (especially during the prayers where no transliteration is given), but that is their extent of wanting to know Hebrew. There've been disagreements in my own class with the rabbi about learning grammar and meanings; he wants us to be able to read the Torah and study Midrash, some just want the prayers and don't care what they are saying.

I think taking the transliteration would leave a lot of people disengaged with the service. I'm not sure having the transliteration discourages people from actually learning Hebrew; I think if they really want to learn they will. But there are some people who honestly don't want to. The service has to be welcoming to everyone, not just those fluent in Hebrew. Which is not to say that we should cater to the lowest common denominator, it's finding a middle ground that is important.

[mamadeb.livejournal.com]

When it comes to things like this, everyone is different. As soon as I could sound out the Hebrew words, I stopped using transliterations. However, when I daavened, I daavened in English. At that point, it was more important to me that I knew what I was saying than I used the "right" language. (Also, of course, I didn't lead daavening and that one is permitted to pray in any language one understands as well as Hebrew.)

Eventually, I found the English to be a crutch, so I started praying out of an all-Hebrew siddur. I'm not saying I understand each word, but I'm now familiar enough with the prayers that I know what I am saying.

But that's *my* developement and needs. There is no one right way in this case.

[ichur72.livejournal.com]

>> When it comes to things like this, everyone is different.

I've got to agree with you there. You got me thinking about the fact that everybody seems to have their own taste in terms of siddur format. I know plenty of people who adore Metsudah and have met people who like the older Birnbaum siddurim. My husband likes the GR"A siddur. I happen to be quite fond of Artscroll -- the regular kind, not the transliterated stuff. (I started out using Hebrew/English and have now switched to an all-Hebrew format.) I know people who appreciate/enjoy the transliteration, but I find it very hard on the eyes, very distracting.

[jonbaker.livejournal.com]

Which GR"A siddur? There are several. The new Eizor Eliyohu is nice, and has good textual comments. The old one with the commentaries from the Gra's students is, well, awkward, in the old "don't print any prayer more than once" school. Lots of flipping back and forth. The commentaries are good, but I find it awkward for actual davening.

[ichur72.livejournal.com]

Not sure -- it just says "Siddur Vilna" on the spine and the title page. He's told me he likes it partly b/c the pages were typeset digitally or somesuch -- he says the font is very clear. Me, I like my Artscroll.

[hopeness.livejournal.com]

I had already started to learn to read Hebrew before I began studying with my Rabbi. The first time I went to shul the president was all excited because they had just gotten these like, uber-transliteration siddurs in. My Rabbi said I wasn't "allowed" to have one, and I have to thank him for that, because I think it made my Hebrew reading skills stronger. I'm not fast enough out loud yet, but "in-loud" I can usually keep up with the cantor.
Now I find transliteration slightly frustrating because usually it isn't very good (in my opinion, anyways). However, in a pinch, it can help me find my place if I get lost.

I'm not sure how I would feel if I wasn't so determined to learn Hebrew. I'd probably appreciate the transliterations. I had a lot in my favour for learning to read; I like languages, I like learning, and I love singing in other languages. Adon Olam was the first thing I learned to read and sing. Actually, the first thing I learned to sing was Shalom Aleichem, but that was by rote.

[goljerp]

Hmm... Transliteration...

I'm lousy at fern languages[1]. I can sound out unfamiliar hebrew words, very slowly. Sloowwwlly. My vocabulary is very limited. Calling myself functionally illiterate in Hebrew would be generous.

However, as lousy as I am at languages, my brain remembers songs. So if you were sitting next to me at my shul, you might not realize my hebrew is so bad, because I'd be singing with the congregation and participating. I use the Hebrew in the siddur, but mainly as a reminder - I'm not reading the words so much as using them to remember what I've already memorized. So I can pick up a different siddur and not get totally lost.

I can use tranliterations in the same way. I also find the transliterations helpful for things which I don't say often enough to have memorized (like the holiday additions to benching, for example). So I'm in favor of 'em.

[1] I don't include things like Java, FORTRAN, Basic, SQL, etc. as foreign languages. I'm good at using those, but that's really a different skill.