This is a marvelous piece about the effect and importance of singing the Torah.
Although obviously from a Jewish context and perspective, it might be enlightening for any of us who think about prayer and liturgy, no matter what tradition.
Wall’s insights and experience are a vital antidote to several aspects of contemporary Catholic life that are, in the end, limiting and even destructive: the presentism, the conviction that tradition and anything in the past (well, before 1965) is an obstacle to authentic faith, the disparagement of memorized prayer as being somehow inimical to mature, free Christian faith. So much what of what I’ve banging on for years, and focused on, particularly, in this book.
And so reading from the Torah stands at the center of Shabbat morning services in all denominations of Judaism. Learning to do this reading – or leyning, as it’s commonly called (from the Yiddish leyenen, “to read”) – has, in its turn, become the central element of bar and bat mitzvah study that lead to Jewish adulthood….
….Leyning is an acquired skill and a time-consuming task, one of the reasons that non-Orthodox denominations no longer read the full Torah portion each week. In Orthodox synagogues, it’s a community effort to read the Torah in part because it has to be: if you want your rabbi to do any of the other tasks associated with the job, he simply can’t cover all the leyning.
This is because, despite its name, the practice doesn’t just involve reading. The text of each week’s Torah portion is chanted according to a precise cantillation system (trop in Yiddish, te’amim in Hebrew). And this isn’t as simple as learning a new song each week, or applying a comfortable melody to new words. The text is prose – and, as contained within a Torah scroll, without either vowels or cantillation markers. Individual te’amim signal not a single note, but a distinct sequence, some easy and some more complex, at times placing a dozen notes on a single syllable. At others, they require you to know variations based on the sequence in which they appear. There are patterns that grow familiar with practice, but there aren’t true melodies.…
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…I’m not good at prayer. My mind wanders; I struggle to maintain the kind of intentionality and awareness that Judaism calls kavana. When the mid-century Modern Orthodox philosopher and rabbi Eliezer Berkovits writes of those whose “lips – apparently guided unconsciously – continue to form the words automatically,” whose heads know when to bow and knees to bend, I recognize myself.
Perhaps my own shortcomings can reveal something about the purpose of the te’amim, as a thing worthy in itself of being passed on. Though far from ideal, Rabbi Berkovits notes, “it is no small achievement to have taught the lips to ‘pray’ on their own, without the conscious participation of the heart and mind … they too represent a form of submission of the organic self to the will to pray.” “The prayer of man,” he writes elsewhere in the same essay, “Law and Morality in Jewish Tradition,” “should be human and not angelic,” physical and embodied and not merely “in one’s heart.”
In other words – and this is my own extrapolation from prayer to leyning – perhaps we sing the Torah because it is a way to involve the fullness of our bodies in reciting and transmitting it. Perhaps, in addition to clarifying grammar, syntax, and meaning, leyning’s very purpose is also to force us to attend to the shape of the words in our mouths, to attune not just our minds but our diaphragms to those moments where the syntax pauses and we can breathe naturally...
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…But the moment of recitative repeats, week in and week out, highlighting the central drama of Jewish life: the question, again and again, in ways both mundane and significant, of whether to fulfill the mitzvot.
This lives in Torah reading, and in learning and teaching others to leyn, we transmit that drama across generations. We’re taught that every Jewish soul was at Sinai – but what, exactly, does that mean? Perhaps it says something about the eternity of that moment, that it can continue to live in every Jewish choice and action.
Leyning transmits that moment from past to present, l’dor v’dor, from generation to generation. But it also prepares us for it from present to future, attuning the body as well as the mind to the words of Torah, in preparation for assent.…
Charlotte was Both 