Questions to Ask Your Rabbi

As families prepare for their bnei mitzvah, there are many details to work out. As a tutor, I focus on my field of expertise, Hebrew. But I’ve come to recognize and have mapped out a set of questions that are outside of the scope of Hebrew. Please be sure to ask these of your synagogue or rabbi:

Portion

• What is our student’s Torah portion called? What is the story it tells?
• Will our student perform a traditional/full aliyah? How many verses is that, in total? (Most verses read as long, unpunctuated, run-on sentences; a few are brief.)
• Will our student be sharing the bima (or floor) with other bnei mitzvah?
• Will there be another person nearby on the bima to cue to our student, should they get stuck midway?
• How many minutes is the reading part of the event? How long is the service in total? At what point does the reading of the portion occur?
• Beside the Torah portion, what else should our student prepare?

Reading

I will answer this question group, but it never hurts to check with more than one resource.

• When our student performs/reads, would the text include vowel and cantillation markings?
  • When we read from a printed or online resource, then yes. The Torah scroll features letters, spaces, minimal punctuation—that’s it.
• How long does it take to get our student reading Hebrew at a level that gets them through their portion?
  • Bnei mitzvah should read Hebrew fluently enough to quickly decode a word as soon as they encounter it in the line of text.
  • Decoding is learned over time, and in stages. We begin by learning the abgad (alphabet) and the relationship between consonants (letters) and movements (vowels).
  • We progress to reading words, then sentences, stories, etc. If our student regularly attends their organization’s group Hebrew class, or goes for private lessons, coupled with 45 minutes of reading weekly (3×15 min), you’d be surprised how quickly this is achieved. I recommend 30-45 minutes of weekly reading to all my beginning students. And for bnei mitzvah students I recommend double that. History has taught me that few students practice reading as recommended. For this reason, I find it hard to provide an accurate estimate of how long it takes. What I can say is that, in a group class, I can easily see which students have done their reading assignments. They are miles ahead of their peers.

Cantillation

• Is our student expected to cantillate their portion? If not, may they simply read aloud?
• Can you recommend a cantillation tutor, or two?
  • Tip: For shorter portions, it is safe to opt out of formal cantillation training. Our student can memorize the melody—in much the same way as we learn a song from the radio: through repetition.

If you choose to go this route, the first step is to let me know which specific verses our student would be presenting. Next, we drill, drill, drill the reading of the verses, the student achieving fluency, control, and confidence.

At the same time, I locate for you a quality cantillated reading of that portion, and upload it to the student’s practice page (have a look at what’s up currently). It’s up to the student whether to work on the melody in class with me, or with a study partner at home. The student learns the melody (by playing-pausing-practicing-repeating, repeating, repeating…). The study partner is their sounding board. Our job is to let them know whether they sounded like the cantor.