Q&A: Tradition
Tradition
Question
Hello, honorable Rabbi!
Is there importance to preserving the pronunciation used in Torah reading as my ancestors practiced, and the melodies they sang? Does the Rabbi see importance in this kind of tradition? Personally, I do not understand why it is important for me to preserve melodies that originally have Muslim influences, and why I need the old pronunciation when I do not understand why it is important to preserve it rather than read the Torah in Hebrew. I am asking this because people always tell me and ask me: what about the tradition?
Answer
This is not a question of importance or lack of importance. It is a halakhic question. There is a Jewish law that custom is binding. The question of what is included in custom is a question that has no clear answer. One is not obligated to wear what our ancestors wore (although the midrash takes great pride in the fact that they did not change their clothing. Perhaps because in a time of religious persecution one must preserve everything, including clothing and even the color of one’s shoelaces).
I think melodies are not a custom that must be preserved. As for pronunciation, that is a more difficult question, and seemingly yes, it is binding (this is what Rabbi Kook writes in his approbation to the responsa Mishpetei Uziel, which argued the opposite). However, when we came to the Land of Israel, there is room to say that one adopts the accent accepted here and not what one’s ancestors had. There is also local custom and not only ancestral custom (originally, local custom is the binding one).
Discussion on Answer
I didn’t understand. What was accepted here was Sephardic pronunciation, because mainly Sephardim lived here. In Rabbi Ovadia’s terminology: the locale of Maran.
Beyond that, the head of the hesder yeshiva where you studied once said that custom is the fossilization of deviation. It begins with a departure from what is accepted, and then an obligation is created to preserve the deviation and not deviate from it. 🙂
One could wonder whether this is even a matter of custom at all. If our forefathers had two pronunciation options before them and in their practice they chose one and rejected the other, then this is a custom. But if they simply did it that way because that is how people spoke at the time, then it is hard to call that a custom, because there is no principled choice here in a certain direction (or if you prefer: the custom is to pray in the natural accent in which you are used to speaking).
That is an interesting point. I’m not sure it would stand the empirical test (that is, when we examine customs, will we find that all of them are the result of choosing one option from several, and not simply because that’s what people did, period?).
I remember that someone from Merkaz HaRav once told me that he asked the rosh yeshiva, Rabbi Avraham Shapira, whether he should try to pray with Ashkenazic pronunciation as was his grandfather’s custom, and Rabbi Avraham answered him that if, when he goes to the grocery store to buy cheese, he asks the seller for “gvino,” then he should go back to Ashkenazic pronunciation; but if he asks for “gvina,” then he should stay with his own pronunciation.
And that fits well with the reasoning I wrote above.
And logic points that way as well. After all, it is the nature of language that its pronunciation changes constantly (in all languages, and Hebrew in particular), and it is not reasonable to assume that there is a need to try to fight nature and resist these processes. The only reason we notice the change at all is that there was a sudden leap here with the move to the Land of Israel and the revival of spoken Hebrew. But even naturally, modes of pronunciation keep changing slowly all the time in a completely transparent way. And as is well known, the Vilna Gaon did not pray in the same pronunciation that Rashi prayed in, not to mention the pronunciation of the Sages, which was very different from the pronunciation in the period of the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), and so on and so forth.
I completely agree, and that is also what I wrote. I will only note that I also wrote that the first rosh yeshiva in the yeshiva of Rabbi Shapira (Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, in his approbation to Mishpetei Uziel) says that pronunciation is indeed binding.
Our pronunciation is not what used to be the accepted custom here. That is, you could say that we are fine, but according to your words our ancestors were not fine—they should have chosen either to remain with their own pronunciation or switch to Sephardic pronunciation.