- The bar and bat mitzvah,
Judaism's coming of age ceremony
is often associated with outlandish parties,
premature adulting.
- I'm a man!
- And wolfy dance routines.
♪ Werewolf Bar Mitzvah ♪
♪ Spooky, scary ♪
- But the heart of the ceremony
is reading the Torah.
Kids spend months or even years
learning how to chant their Torah portion.
It's not just reading Hebrew,
there's an ancient system of music symbols at work
determining how each word is sung.
So where do these symbols come from?
And just how big of a role does this play in Judaism today?
This millennial old system
is called Ta'ameri Hamikra in Hebrew,
but English speakers will usually call it
by the Yiddish term, trope.
Let's take a closer look.
One of the most famous passages in the Torah
is the very first one,
"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth."
Or as it's read in Hebrew-
Bereshit bara Elokim et ha'shamayim v'et ha'aretz.
Here it is with vowels, called nikud.
And here is how it would appear with trope,
which indicates how the word should be chanted.
But since neither trope nor vowels
appear in the Torah scrolls,
the reader needs to memorize the correct tune
for each and every word,
and that can take a while to learn.
For example,
here's the passage recited with the common
Ashkenazi Polish-Lithuanian trope.
[Passage sung in the Polish-Lithuanian tune]
But the Torah didn't always have trope markings,
and it's believed that a proto-trope
began developing around 500 BCE,
right after the Jews returned to Jerusalem
from the Babylonian exile.
The prophet Ezra decreed that the
Torah be read in public weekly,
so that it wouldn't be forgotten.
According to Professor Marsha Edelman
in her book "Discovering Jewish Music",
Ezra differentiated between the beginnings,
middles, and ends of verses,
so it was easy for the public to follow along.
As regular torah reading became more common,
hand and finger signals called chironomy
started to be used to guide the reader.
For a thousand years this system evolved,
passing down orally,
until the Geonic period in Tiberius,
when a group called the Ba'alei Ha'Mesorah
created a system of neumes
to formalize how to sing each line.
This collective of scholars and scribes
also invented the Hebrew vowels, nikud,
that are still used in modern Hebrew
and compiled grammar guides and pronunciation keys,
sometime before the 10th century.
Today, the notations are mostly the same,
but different communities
have different tunes for reading the Torah,
creating unique variations on the same theme.
Many Ashkenazi Jews read the Torah
with the Polish-Lithuanian melody we heard before,
but that's not the only melody, or nusach.
Contrast that with the Yerushalmi nusach,
which is used by some Sephardic and Mizrahi communities.
[Passage sung in the Yerushalmi tune]
There's also Nusach Morocco of Moroccan Jews.
[Passage sung in the Moroccan tune]
And the rhythmic nusach of Yemenite Jews.
[Passage sung in the Yemenite tune]
As well as Italian, German, Algerian, and Iraqi variations.
And even within these distinct systems of chanting,
there are further subdivisions.
Two different melodies are used on every Shabbat,
one for reading the Torah,
and the other for the Haftarah,
these are portions from the books of the Prophets
that are paired with the weekly Torah reading.
[Passage sung in the Moroccan Haftarah tune]
[Passage sung in the Polish-Lithuanian Haftarah tune]
[Passage sung in the Spanish-Portuguese Haftarah tune]
[Passage sung in the Yemenite Haftarah tune]
Ashkenazi Jews have special tunes
specifically for the high holidays.
[Passage sung in the Polish-Lithuanian tune for the High Holidays]
And one more,
the Ashkenazi melody for the Book of Lamentations, or Eicha,
read on Tisha B'Av, which is the saddest day of the Jewish year,
is particularly haunting:
[Passage sung in the Polish-Lithuanian tune for Eicha]
So where does that leave us today?
More than two thousand years after Ezra,
many Jewish teenagers still study trope.
Reading the words of the book
so central to Jews throughout history
affirms their place in the community.
And while blown-out parties,
and carrying I'm an adult energy into the world
are great ways to celebrate the occasion,
nothing marks its importance
like reading the Torah in its millennia-old chant.
When the Bnei Mitzvah
step up to the bimah and start reading,
they mark their arrival in Jewish adulthood
by reading in a tune that stretches all the way back
to the Second Temple.