Torah, Torah, Torah: A Crash Course in Hebrew

Learn how to read a 5,000-year-old language in “five easy lessons”? Five lessons of 90 minutes duration each? Sure.

“Sure,” says Sheila Bailey, one of the West Coast coordinators of the National Jewish Outreach Program. “Remember, you’re not learning to understand Hebrew, just to read it, to pronounce it right.” So, for example, this Hanukkah you can recite the blessings that accompany the lighting of the menorah.

The learning process is simple, Bailey insists, though it helps to understand the history of the Torah. First handed down orally, the Torah eventually was written, but without vowels.

(Still not that complicated: Try “TH DG CM N TH HS” and you’ve got a fair approximation.)

Later, vowel sounds were added to the letters in the form of little dots and dashes. “It’s like English,” says Bailey. “You know what a B sounds like, but you don’t know whether the syllable is ba or bo until you add the vowel.”

In any case, the free lessons, (call (800) 44-HEBREW for one of 20 Southland locations), are in essence just a hook. “At the end of the program people should be able to read prayers and blessings, not fluently but comfortably,” Bailey says. “Then, hopefully, they’ll want to go on from there, to understand the language, to re-establish connections.”

But aren’t most Jews somewhat familiar with the liturgy, at least from childhood? “We’ve stopped presuming,” Bailey says. “In L.A. alone there’s a tremendous number of Jews unaffiliated with a temple--I think about 700,000--and they’re not reading Hebrew. It’s a sign of the times.

“It’s analogous, I think, to Catholics who know longer know the liturgy in Latin. . . .”

Touche, shalom and pax vobiscum.