04 Becoming Torah Literate: My Reading Deficiencies
Sixty-eight years ago, my mother took me by the hand and walked me fourteen city blocks to my first day of school, and she returned to school with me when I graduated from high school in 1964. My mother loved me with all her heart, she raised me in tough times, and she saw to it that I had food, shelter, and clothing, despite what she had or endured. However, I did not grow up with many nursery rhymes or bedtime stories. My first encounter with the world of literature began in the school classroom, and it was both enjoyable and horrifying. Whatever reading training or experience that I received came in the school.
Aside from my lack of reading experience, I was troubled by some focal problems that seriously distracted me when I commenced reading. To keep my focus on the text, I had to keep my finger placed upon the book, which was unacceptable. The first reader group was out of the question, and the second reader group was a long time coming. After you have read the same sentence several times due to being mentally distracted, you suddenly become fearful of how long it is going to take to understand the composition. Then a massive wave of thoughts overtakes you. To this very day, I do not publicly read more than a sentence or two, even though I have no problem with public speaking.
Despite those shortcomings, as I progressed along, I found that I fared well when it came to reading comprehension. When I reached the seventh grade, I learned the jewel that has been my crutch. I have always been one who must take things apart to understand them, and I have ruined many things over the years because of damage or the inability to put them back to factory standards. My seventh-grade teacher taught me how to diagram a sentence so that I could clearly understand its parts. It took a sentence comprehension strategy to help me to focus on the text. Comprehension is the goal of reading.
Well, if I still struggle with these distractions in English, imagine studying another language. Perhaps, one might ask why the Creator chose a person with limited linguistic skills to share the numerical structure. That is a good question, and I think the answer is related to the crutch of reading comprehension.
I first learned about the numerical structure from the Hebrew alphabet. About five years ago, after many failed attempts to learn rote Hebrew, I decided to approach the Torah by the process of immersion using whatever linguistic skills I possessed. I further decided that I would only learn Hebrew from the Torah, and only resort to an outside source as a last resort. Therefore, I had to learn what an aleph was solely from the text. I developed several strategies about aleph, and I wrote about forty-plus pages of notes on the aleph. I was elated about what I could learn about the aleph, but then that inner voice convinced me that I should not have started my research with the aleph but with the beit. After sixty-plus pages of notes on the beit, I began to understand why the Creator commenced the Torah with the numeral two (2). Twenty letters later, I was ready to write a primer on the Hebrew alphabet, but again that inner voice beckoned me further out in the deep waters of the Torah.
Thousands of more qualified men have preceded me, and I am humbled and anxious concerning the task at hand. The Hebrew skills demonstrated throughout this website reflect what I lovingly refer to as “my Father’s Hebrew.”