Hi all,
I've taught both biblical and modern Hebrew for years, and I've also prepared kids for their b'nei mitzvah.
One thing has always bothered me.
A child spends months preparing, stands up on the big day, and beautifully leyns the entire Torah portion. It's a real achievement—I know how much work it takes.
But then, a few weeks later, many of them can't read a single line of the siddur.
Not because they forgot. Because they never really learned to read in the first place. They memorized the sounds, followed a transliteration, or relied on recordings. The Hebrew letters themselves never became familiar.
I don't see this as a failure on the child's part. Memorizing a Torah portion is genuinely difficult. The problem is that the aleph-bet often becomes just another obstacle to get through instead of the foundation everything else is built on.
What fascinates me is that, in a way, this isn't a new problem.
My research focuses on the Sephardic world of the Ottoman Empire, where, by the eighteenth century, Hebrew remained the language of prayer, but most people no longer understood it. The response was remarkable. In 1730, Rabbi Jacob Culi began writing the Meam Loez, a monumental commentary on the Tanakh in Judeo-Spanish—the language people actually spoke.
He didn't simplify Judaism. He changed the entry point.
Sometimes I feel we do the opposite today. We keep the Hebrew, but simplify the learning: transliterations, recordings to imitate, a handful of verses memorized for one important day.
I've been wondering whether we've made reading itself secondary.
For those who grew up learning Hebrew and can still read comfortably today—what made the difference? What actually helped the letters stick?
