Page 127 - WhyAsInY

noitacude suoigileR yM
• But fear not, because there are various combinations of dots and other signs that are placed beneath the letters and thereby serve as vowels so that the words can actually be pronounced.
• But, unfortunately, it will later be presumed that you know all of the words; accordingly, all of your vowels will disappear.
• And to make reading even more fun for you, the words will all be written from right to left. (Hence, I had one real advantage in Hebrew School; righties smeared their ink, while I did not have the problem. On the other hand, as it were, all of the desks were set up for right-handed students.)
• When you have your bar mitzvah and present your very own part (your “parshah,” or your “haftarah,” which everyone, it seemed, pro- nounced “haftorah”) from the Prophets, you will not just read, you will chant.
• But, again, fear not, because the words that you will chant will have the vowels below the consonants, and, not only that, to help you chant properly, other marks will be found atop each syllable, and these marks are cantillation signs (or tropes), which will tell you how to chant the words, once you’ve figured out how to combine the letters and the other marks below them, the vowels.
• Best of all, when you read from the five Books of Moses, the Penta- teuch, at your bar mitzvah, you will actually be chanting words from the Torah (which is not, as you might have calculated, twice what we all referred to as the haftorah; it is the sacred scroll upon which are written all of the words of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy), and your chant will have to be in a tune that is particular to the meaning of the text. To make it easier for you, these words will appear, as usual, from right to left, but, to show your
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