Why Mendel Can’t Read

Understanding Why Students Struggle With Hebrew Reading

By Eyal Rav-Noy

KNOWING IS HALF THE BATTLE

As students settle into another school year, it is an opportune time to reflect on an inconvenient truth: Too many children struggle to read Hebrew. Much to teacher’s and principals’ dismay and parents’ frustrations, about 20 to 30 percent of children are not reading on grade level. Schools must invest heavily in an always occupied resource room, and parents are forced to hire tutors, an unwelcome addition to an already high tuition cost. Some of these children will be labeled with colorful acronyms such as ADD, ADHD, or LD, while others will be given medications as they keep getting into trouble by displaying at-risk behavior. Success in Chumash and Gemara will be out of the question, and one need not look far into the future to understand the predicament these children will face. The inability to give children the Hebrew reading skills they need not only damages their self-esteem, it threatens their future involvement in Jewish life. Imagine the terror and panic that seizes a young man who is called up to recite during prayer service before the entire community, or a father who stumbles through Kiddush before his wife and children.

To solve this reading problem, we must have an honest discussion about its origins. It is my contention children are not reading fluently because of a fundamental misunderstanding of what is usually referred to as the “Mesorah Method” (“MM”) , also known as the “Kamatz Aleph UH” method. The Mesora Method that was espoused by all religious rabbis in the past — including the Rebbe and his predecessors — has been distorted to mean the exact opposite of what it originally meant, and influential educators have propagated these mistaken theories and convinced a generation or two that their approach was the only acceptable, kosher, and Chassidishe way to teach children. For years these educators have backed their claims by pointing to various sources. I contend that these educators have misunderstood all the sources, letters, and talks regarding the issue, and have sentenced thousands of students to undue hardship and confusion.

Before setting the record straight on the MM, a little introduction into the Aleph-Bais is in order. We must first understands the basics of our written code before we understand its reading methods.

UNDERSTANDING THE Aleph-BAIS

The Aleph-Bais is a difficult, but efficient reading and writing system.

Primitive writing systems are easy because they use pictographs, pictures for words, like a picture of a hand to signify the word “Stop!” The Aleph-Bais is difficult because it forces people to do two things that are unnatural: consciously split the words of speech into their smallest sounds, and imagine that these sounds have shapes (e.g. T = תּ). Thus, a word like Torah (תּוֹרָה) is split into tiny sounds, T + OH + R + UH. These sounds get their own corresponding symbols and some symbols are blended together: T is blended with OH, R is blended with UH (the final HEH is silent). The upshot is that the Aleph-Bais is efficient because once you have memorized the various sounds and their corresponding symbols — the shapes of the letters and vowels — you can theoretically read and write an infinite number of words. This is a much more efficient method than memorizing different pictographs for each and every word.

This brings us to a startling conclusion: Sounds came first; letters are merely their symbolic representations. Therefore, most students are incorrectly taught how to read. They are introduced to letters first, and are told that these letters have sounds. But this is backwards. Letters don’t exist in nature. Letters don’t have sounds. Sounds of speech do exist in nature, and we symbolically represented them with letters. Only later did we name the letters Aleph, Bais, Gimmel, etc. One thing is clear: when it comes to reading, a letter’s “sound” is more important than its name.

(Letters and vowels are known for possessing three things: Names, Sounds (Hav’arah), and Shapes. Click here and wait for 1:50 and to hear the Lubavitcher Rebbe mention that all three were given at Sinai.)

HOW THE “MESORAH” BECAME THE MESORAH

With this knowledge in mind we can reconstruct how reading was once taught by teachers and parents. A teacher would open a Siddur, or any other book that they were lucky enough to possess. They would point to a letter and teach its sound. The teacher would then repeat the process with other letters, and possibly some vowels, teaching the student how to blend sounds together. They would repeat this process with all the letters and vowels until the student grasped the information completely, at which time the student would be an independent reader. Whether or not the teacher would teach the letter’s names is irrelevant at this point, as will be made clear below.

The method can be summed up as follows: First teach the student a letter then teach him a vowel, and finally teach him how to blend the two together: “Kamatz Aleph UH!”

All was well until a new trend was introduced by certain educators. These educators got teachers to change the way they taught children how to read Hebrew. Here was their idea in a nutshell. Educators made the following observation: Hebrew can be read without vowels. So they concluded that they did not need to teach vowels. Then they went further: Why should we teach the letters, why not simply teach whole words instead? For example, show a student the word “Abba” and tell him that this word says Abba. We can skip teaching letters and vowels if we can just teach entire words. Out of convenience I will refer to this approach as “Whole Language.”

It is unsurprising that the rabbis were horrified by this development. It sounded absurd! Hebrew was always taught by first teaching the student the small sounds of language and showing him how to blend them together: Kamatz + Aleph = UH. Suddenly they were told to skip the “details” and teach students to memorize “whole” words. No wonder that the rabbis fought this tooth and nail. They argued that their traditional (Mesorah) approach was superior to the new one. Decades of the “Whole Language” experience has proved them right!

The rabbis added another argument for preserving what became known as the Mesorah Method: If we do not teach students letters and the vowels, they will never learn them! This means that students will not know letters’ and vowels’ names, shapes, numerical values, and so forth. The rabbis were right about this, too.

Over decades, the Mesorah Method’s original intent was lost, distorted, and misapplied. How did this happen? Answer: It was taken literally! I will refer to this approach by the name: “Literalist MM.”

THE “MESORAH METHOD” TAKEN LITERALLY

Whole Language never took off within the Frum world, so most Frum people forgot what the “reading war” was about. All that remained was the term “Mesorah Method” or “Kamatz Aleph UH Method,” but most people forgot why this method was developed to begin with. The disaster soon followed: People took the words literally. “Kamatz Aleph UH” no longer meant “teach the student the individual letter sounds and vowel sounds, and then teach him how to blend them together”; instead it was understood to mean “only teach the student the name Kamatz, and only teach the student the name Aleph, make him say the names: Kamatz, Aleph; and only afterwards must the student say: UH!”

So instead of fighting against Whole Language, the MM was misunderstood to mean the following:

When teaching to read, we must follow this order: First the student needs to see and say the Kamatz, then he needs to see and say the Aleph, and only afterwards does he conclude: “UH.”
The letter and vowel “names” are the most important piece of knowledge the student needs to know, as opposed to the letter and vowel “sounds” which are not as vital.
Only a Kamatz and an Aleph together can make the sound UH. Meaning: Letters and vowels on their own have no sounds. Only when they are joined together do they make a sound.

This distorted approach to the MM’s original intent hinders the student’s ability to read properly by artificially creating four problems:

Students read upside down.
Teachers teach the letter names and not the actual sounds the letters and vowels make.
Students have to memorize far more information than they would otherwise need to.
Some educators have taken an even more extreme approach by altogether denying that letters and vowels have sounds.

The above four points are interconnected and, taken together, they are the main reason that so many of our children cannot read on grade level.

I would elaborate on these points in detail.

Problem 1

reading Upside-Down

After working with Moshe, age 6, for less than 5 minutes at my CAP IT!® Learning Center, I knew that I had my hands full. Moshe was reading upside-down! To my amazement, Moshe would articulate a bottom-vowel before he would articulate the letter sitting right on top of it. He was puzzled by my explanation that Hebrew should be read from top to bottom, first the letter then the vowel. “But you are contradicting my Cheder teacher. He told me that I have to read from the bottom to the top,” he told me with a troubled look on this face.

Did Moshe’s teacher really tell him that? Why? The explanation is as follows: The first and most obvious problem caused by the Literalist MM is that the student is taught to read “upside-down.” When a student is taught “Kamatz Aleph UH,” they take it literally: First they look at the Kamatz, then the Aleph, and then they say them together: “UH.” This sounds simple enough, except that it does not work. I would illustrate by substituting the generic “Kamatz Aleph UH,” and instead using the more practical “Patach Bais BAH.” Taken literally, the student must identify the lower symbol, i.e. the vowel named Patach (which makes the sound: AH). Afterwards, the student looks at the higher symbol, i.e. the letter named Bais (which makes the sound: B). Once this is done, the student is expected to integrate the two symbols together, and create the sound: BAH. Taken together, this should sound as follows: “Patach + Bais = BAH”. But why BAH? It is a lot more logical to conclude that “Patach + Bais = AHB” (Fig. 1).

The reason for this is that Hebrew is supposed to be read from top to bottom and right to left! The “Kamatz Aleph UH” approach reverses the order and forces the student to read upside-down, from the bottom (Kamatz or Patach) to the top (Aleph or Bais). But this is impossible to do. As all Hebrew readers know, every Hebrew sound begins with a consonant (a letter) and ends with a vowel (Fig. 2). Sometimes these vowels are under the letter, and sometimes to their left, as in a case of the Cholam. There is one main exception to this rule: the “AHCH” at the end of a word.

This leaves the student in a quandary: Does he read from top to bottom, or bottom to top? Most students discover the answer on their own: Hebrew is read from top to bottom. This means that the teacher’s implied direction of “bottom to top reading” must be ignored by the student. While some students figure out that they should be bypassing the teacher’s explicit instructions and read Hebrew “top to bottom,” too many students cannot “reverse engineer” the teacher’s instructions. Any student who fails to do so will end up totally confused by this contradiction.

I would point out that it is only the “Ashkenazy Literalist MM” that suffers from “dyslexia” as it teachers its students to read upside-down. The “Sephardi Mesorah” has it right: “Aleph Kamatz AH,” Aleph before the Kamatz, top to bottom. Could there really be two different traditions here? Of course not! The Mesorah of teaching students to read “Kamatz Aleph AH” was never meant to be taken literally. It originally meant: Teach the students the individual parts of the code before you teach them how to blend these parts together.

Problem 2

what’s in a name?

Recently, at a training seminar I conducted at a local day school, I began by introducing myself and then asked the teachers to do the same. But there was a catch. I introduced myself as Eyal, but I instructed everyone in the room to refer to me as Shimon. I then asked the other teachers to introduce themselves by name, but I interrupted them by explaining that we should refer to them by another name. So Shira would be called Chaya, Shmuel would be called Refael, Baruch would be called Shmaryahu, etc. It should come as no surprise that no one knew who had what name or who should be called what. It did not take long for the teachers to understand the point behind the mess I had purposely created: It is difficult enough to remember one actual name. It is almost impossible if one is then told not to use it, and that a totally different name should be used.

The Literalist MM insists that teachers must first teach the letter names, and only after the student knows the names can they proceed to learn the sounds that correspond with them. This works for some students, but not all. While students seem to grasp a symbol’s name, many don’t seem to hold on to their corresponding sound. Parents and teachers phrase the problem like this: “The child seems to know their Aleph-Bais, but for some reason they can’t read.” Why is this so?

The explanation is as follows: Reading is a rational process consisting of identifying symbols and corresponding them to sounds which will later be grouped into syllables, words, and concepts. This means that the first task a student is faced with is identifying the symbols on the page and corresponding them to their associated sounds. The fact that these symbols also have a “name” is irrelevant to the reading process, a process establishing correspondences between symbols and sounds. When it comes to reading, the names of the letters and vowels are a hindrance. Take for example the word “Siddur.” It is unimportant that the “S” sound is called “Samech” and that the vowel underneath it is called a “Chirik.” What matters are the “S” and “EE” sounds, and that together they say “See,” and that they form the first diphone (i.e. consonant + vowel) of the word “Siddur.” The names Samech and Chirik are completely beside the point. One can be a perfect Hebrew reader and never learn the symbols’ names.

Most students can hold on to multiple associations. They can remember that a ס is called a Samech, and that it also makes the sound: “S.” But for too many students these multiple associations are a source of confusion. Many students end up thinking that a Patach says “PAH,” a Kamatz says “KUH,” a Tzere makes a “Tz” sound, etc. The same confusion applies to some consonants. For example: many children think that Aleph and Ahyeen say “AH.”

In summary, the Literalist MM subverts the natural and intuitive reading process, and substitutes it with an unnatural and artificial process. What should be a “First Level Association” — the symbol’s sound — becomes a “Second Level Association.” And what should be a “Second Level Association” — the symbol’s name — is turned into a “First Level Association” (Fig. 3).

This subversion slows students’ ability to decode words, hinders their fluency, and cripples their confidence.

To be sure, students can and should master the letter’s and vowel’s names. The letters are especially necessary for page numbers and Biblical chapter and verse demarcations. But teaching students the symbols’ names before teaching them the sounds burdens them with information they do not need, and hinders their ability to read.

Those upholding the Literalist MM argue that the names should be learned first, because they fear that if students are not first taught the letters’ names they might never get around to learning them. But this is an example of how ideology can lead people to “fight the previous war.” Remember that the MM was developed to fight those who argued that letters and vowels should not be taught at all, and that words should be taught as a whole. But once the MM is understood in context, there is no issue with teaching the students the sounds first, and only later teaching them the names of all the letters and vowels.

Still, there will be parents and teachers who insist — for spiritual reasons

— that letter names be taught before the letter sounds. I would have them keep in mind the following points:

Both parents and teachers should be aware of the potential problem this can cause, and be ever vigilant regarding any negative consequences to the student’s ability to read.
This entire process should take place outside of and before the “K’riah” class. Once a child begins to learn to read, the names of the letters should be dropped, and the sounds should take their place. After the reading class is over, the names can be reintroduced.

problem 3

INFORMATION Overload

Rivky, a fifth grader, is an excellent English reader, but to her parents’ frustration, she can’t read Hebrew without mistakes. “How can it be?” they asked me. “English is so much harder than Hebrew!” After evaluating Rivky, the answer was clear: Rivky had an excellent visual memory and was therefore able to memorize words without any difficulty. She navigated English through sight reading. When it came to Hebrew, Rivky was confused by the “hundreds of little symbols” and decided to memorize words instead — a strategy that backfired.

How did Rivky come to the preposterous conclusion that Hebrew has “hundreds of little symbols”? Doesn’t Hebrew have only 22 letters and about a dozen vowels? How did she come to see them as “hundreds”? The explanation is as follows: The reading process is the identification of symbols and their correspondence with sounds that make up language. This cognitive ability is made difficult by the arbitrary relationships between any given symbol and its corresponding sound. There is no reason for anyone to assume that a Bais has a B sound, or that a Gimmel has a G sound. There is no B-ness in the shape of the letter Bais, and there is no
G-ness in the shape of the letter Gimmel. This means that in order to read, one must memorize many arbitrary associations between sounds and symbols.

It is self-evident that the fewer arbitrary symbols one needs to memorize, the easier it will be to learn to read and to become fluent. It is easier to learn to read a language with 26 letters than one with characters and symbols numbering in the hundreds.

Hebrew contains 33 consonants and 12 vowels (depending on how you count them). All Hebrew words are combinations of these letters and vowels. The Hebrew reading process consists of three steps: Identify-Identify-Blend. First the student must “identify” the first sound (the consonant), then they must “identify” the second sound (the vowel), and then they must “blend” the two sounds together. For example, first the student would identify the B, then identify the AH underneath, and then “Blend” the two to make: BAH (Fig. 4).

The Literalist MM drastically changes this process. When a student is taught that a בַּ is “Patach Bais BAH,” the student is forced to memorize the entire combination together. There is a reason for this: Patach + Bais cannot equal “BAH.” It doesn’t even sound like BAH. A Patach contains the following sounds: P, T and CH. Where is the P sound, the T sound, the CH sound in BAH? Furthermore, a Bais contains a S sound. But, there is no S sound in BAH either. So the student knows that he must skip the “Patach” & “Bais” sounds and only retain the “BAH.” To repeat: B + AH = BAH. But under no circumstances does BAIS + Patach = BAH.

The Literalist MM engages in what I refer to as “Single Step Reading,” because it turns the aforementioned three steps (Identify-Identify-Blend) into one giant step. A Bais and a Patach would be recognized as BAH, ignoring the three steps necessary to come to that conclusion. In other words, the student is not taught to break each word to its smallest components, but rather to recognize consonants with their vowels simultaneously.

There is a significant difference between the two methods. Instead of teaching students to decode from individual sounds to blending sounds, the Literalist MM forces them to rely on sight recognition of already blended sounds. Instead of the student having to identify 33 consonants and 12 vowels and blend them together, they now need to identity and memorize hundreds of different combinations. This means that students must memorize almost a dozen times more information to be able to read accurately. This problem is further compounded by those many “dots and lines” that make up the Hebrew vowel system. These vowels look quite similar, and are therefore easily confused.

The Literalist MM multiplies the number of arbitrary associations the student must memorize, making the reading process cumbersome and, for some students, unmanageable. The irony is that those who advocate for the MM are unknowingly subverting it! The original MM had students learn the parts of speech, letters and vowels, as opposed to the Whole Language approach which had students memorize complete words. Yet nowadays the Literalist MM makes a similar demand on students by forcing them to memorize hundreds of combinations when they can simply get away with memorizing a few dozen.

Lastly, according to the Literalist MM, Hebrew does not have one Patach, but actually over 20 different Patachs: a Patach under an Aleph, a Patach under a Bais, etc. The same would apply to all the vowels. In the same vein, the Literalist MM has more than one Aleph. It has over 10 Alephs: one over a Patach, one over a Kamatz etc.

If you are confused, imagine the confusion going on in the mind of a five year-old trying to learn to read according the Literalist MM.

problem 4

IDENTITY CRISIS: 0+0=1

The most extreme claim made by the Literalist MM advocates is that the Hebrew letters and vowels do not possess any sound at all, but only when they are joined together, letter + vowel, do they make an audible sound. This conclusion is a natural byproduct of the literalist approach. After all, if only a Kamatz + Bais = BAH, then Kamatz alone must not say anything, and a Bais alone must not say anything. This idea — that letters alone have no sound — was presented in various articles, postings, and seminars for Chabad educators and is believed by most I have spoken with. These educators have come up with an explanation to back their theory: Letters are like a body, and vowels are like a soul. Therefore only when the body and the soul are united can they make an audible sound. But independently they make no sound at all. Accordingly — these educators argue — teachers may not point out to students that Bais is like Baruch or Bais Chabad, because a Bais has no sound. A Bais is only a Bais. That is all. It has no “B” sound! It is a body without a soul

I would make the following points:

A teacher who claims that letters and vowels do not have corresponding sounds must not be allowed to teach K’riah (Hebrew reading). There is nothing more damaging to a student’s ability to read than telling them that letters and vowels do NOT have corresponding sounds. While these teaches may be endowed with strengths in many fields, they do not possess the basic understanding of the Hebrew language and how it should be taught. They have no business teaching our children how to read.
The argument that letters and vowels do not have sounds is demonstrably false: Almost every Hebrew word ends with a letter that possesses no vowel, and yet we have no problem hearing its sound.
This argument is directly contradicted by Gemara Shabbos 104a, which lists every letter and matches it with words that begin with the same sound (the most famous being d and s which are associated with ohks kund — “Be Benevolent to the Poor”).
This extreme approach is based on a talk of the Rebbe that was taken completely out of context.

This approach that letters and vowels have no sounds was always, and will always be ignored by every single Chabad institution! Any parent who has, or had, a child in a Chabad school, saw with his own eyes the scrapbook that the child created when learning how to read: Bais is Bais Chabad, Gimmel is Geula, etc. Would these educators argue that all these scrapbooks that use letter-to-word-associations must be stopped? They actually do advocate that these scrapbooks should not be made. But as day follows night they will be ignored!

Even the most experienced educator should know their limits: K’riah teachers are not linguists. Other peoples’ children should not be used for spiritual experimentation.

conclusions

Hebrew is a phonetic language that can be mastered by everyone, yet we find so many struggling Hebrew readers. This issue can be avoided if those running our school systems realize that there is a flaw in their teaching method. They have misinterpreted the Mesorah by taking it literally, and consequently developed a completely new and unworkable reading method for the four reasons detailed above.

The reason why educators misunderstand the Mesorah is that many instructors do not grasp the reading process. They know next to nothing about language acquisition or epistemology (which is the acquisition of knowledge), nor do they know the history of the reading wars. Institutions hire teachers based on other qualifications. But everything comes with a price.

Admittedly, not every educator consciously forces all of the above mentioned four problems on their students. But this is irrelevant for the following three reasons:

Even one of these problems would suffice to confuse students.
The Literalist MM’s instructions are inherently confusing and contradictory, so the student is likely to get confused. Whether this is a conscious act by teachers or not is irrelevant.
These four problems are inherently interconnected. So one mistake could — in the student’s mind — lead to the others as a direct consequence.

An examination of the sources will bear this out. I urge the reader to go back to the letters and talks that discuss this issue and take a second look, now that they understand what the issue is really about.

The good news is that these problems can be avoided. We can stop confusing students with conflicting instructions, information overload, and illogical postulates. We can make learning to read Hebrew simple, easy, and fun. With a little effort, we can minimize the number of children who struggle with Hebrew. For this to happen, we must embrace the original and authentic Mesorah, which always was and will be: Teach your children how to read Hebrew!

Eyal Rav-Noy is a Chabad Shaliach and director of JLA (Jewish Learning Academy), specializing in adult education and outreach. He is the author of the book “Who Really Wrote the Bible? And Why it Should be Taken Seriously Again.” He has lectured on the topic of Biblical Literature and Archeology, and made radio appearances all over the US. Together with his wife Tzippy, he founded CAP IT, Inc., a company that offers complete Hebrew reading solutions through its unique curriculums and educational methods. Their reading kits are being implemented in schools around the US and Canada. They offer their services at the CAP IT!® Learning Center, where they evaluate and treat students with learning disabilities and special needs. For feedback regarding this article, he can be reached on his site: www.CAPITLEARNING.com