Ki Tavo

( this morning's d'var torah )

On a different note: the fourth aliya begins "Moshe and the elders of Israel commanded...", and later we get "Moshe and the kohanim said...". I haven't verified with a concordance, but I think those are both singletons. Most of the time it's just "Moshe said..."; occasionally "Moshe and Aharon", and I'm not actually sure if we ever get "Moshe and Eleazar" or "Moshe and Yehoshua". I wonder what adding the elders and the kohanim at this point in D'varim means. I speculate that it is part of legitimizing the next generation, the ones who'll be running things after Moshe is gone. It's one thing for him to ceremonially invest Yehoshua and Eleazar with authority; it's perhaps a stronger statement to have them actually up there with him when giving final instructions. Just a thought. (Aside: is Yehoshua one of the ziknei Yisrael, the elders? I guess I've been assuming he is.)

duh, I knew that...

I read torah this morning, and my checker (who is fluent) caught a couple errors. One of them is that I read "v'samachta" -- with a shin, not a samech -- as "v'shamachta". That letter is usually "sh" (shin), not "s" (sin). She pointed out to me later that I know that root and maybe I shouldn't have made that mistake. She's right. Shin/sin-mem-chet is a root lots of people know -- sameach, simcha, yism'chu... all the same root. (These are all variations on "rejoice" or "joy".)

(I should clarify that this person has explicit permission to point these kinds of things out to me; it's part of how I will, I hope, get better at Hebrew. She didn't do anything wrong here, so don't get mad at her for picking on me or anything like that.)

Now when I am sitting down and slowly reading some Hebrew text, I can (usually) spot the roots and interpret them. (More often than not I can't in spoken Hebrew, alas.) When I was first looking at this portion I certainly recognized "v'samachta" as "you will rejoice"; I now always try to do ny own translation before consulting a correct one. Of course, I had the vowels and other marks then, including the dot that turns "shin" into "sin". But I've seen some of these words without vowels before (like in "simchat torah", the name of an upcoming holiday). I don't think I needed the vowels so much as I needed to be paying more attention while reading at speed.

So I think the problem is me -- my reading style, or my level of attentiveness. At times I'll be reading text (usually during services) and a word will jump out at me, completely unsolicited, because I recognized the root without thinking about it; I've commented before about how sometimes the subprocess that produces that outcome is a distraction. :-) And yeah, I don't want distractions during a torah reading, but if it had happened during any of the dozens of times I practiced this passage sans vowels at home, it probably would have stuck. So I'm left wondering what changes I need to make in my reading, learning, or leining practices to increase the likelihood that I'll make these kinds of connections earlier.

It's one thing to not know a word because I don't yet have the vocabulary. It's quite another -- and frustrating -- to know a word and not recognize it in the wild.