At 78 years old, Grandma Moses became an accomplished primitivist folk painter. From that advanced age until her death at 101, she famously chronicled the American rural experience with an unparalleled eye for color and simplicity, derived from her memories of her life as a farmer, wife and mother. She was neither a trained artist nor a scholar of art, but that did not impede her from sharing her extraordinary talent with the world.
At 78 years old, my mother recently achieved her own kind of artistic accomplishment. After seven years of gradually honing her skills of chanting and memorization, she read an entire weekly Sabbath portion from the traditional scroll of the Torah, the biblical five books of the original Moses that are sacred to Jews. She is not a scholar of Judaism, but that has not impeded her from learning this extraordinary skill.
The scroll records what Westerners call the world’s greatest story, from the Creation of the universe to the Israelites’ entering the promised- land after Moses’ death. It contains some of the most important narratives known to humanity, not to mention the Ten Commandments. A Torah scroll is hand written on animal parchment by a trained calligraphic scribe. It contains well over 600,000 Hebrew letters, all of which are unvocalized and unpunctuated, and which contain none of the traditional musical notations. Every letter must be written perfectly. A person chanting from the scroll on a Saturday morning in the synagogue must memorize the pronunciation and singing of every Hebrew word, and must try to do so without mistakes. A Torah chanter can be corrected or can self-correct; however, like a great artist or opera singer, he or she strives for perfection.
After a lifetime of working as a nurse, and being an active family member and participant in the Jewish community, my mother made the decision to learn how to chant from the Torah. Beginning eight years ago in honor of a cousin’s bar mitzvah ceremony, she learned one of the seven sections into which that week’s portion was divided. Each ensuing year, she learned another section of the same portion, until she mastered all of it. The portion on which she has worked for all of this time narrates Joseph’s reunion with his brothers and father after they were convinced that he was dead. The story delves into issues of family dysfunction, reconciliation, and forgiveness with such artistic refinement, it inspired Thomas Mann’s majestic novel, Joseph and His Brothers.
Like a high school student cramming before the big exam, my mother reviewed the chanting of the entire portion the night before. Practicing with an unrelenting, almost obsessive fixation on the tiniest details, she refused to put down her practice book until she had no choice but to get some sleep. The next morning, during worship in my parent’s synagogue, she walked slowly to the readers’ table, took hold of the special pointer readers use to keep their place in the text, and chanted with flawless beauty.
As a long time Torah reader, I was duly impressed and proud of my mother. This 78 year old woman defied age stereotypes; she also transcended her traditional childhood in which Jewish women’s options for public religious and liturgical expression were almost non-existent. Her chanting reflected the empowerment of Jewish women of all ages in the modern world. However, when I asked her what most motivated her to hone this skill, she said, “When I chant these stories, I feel as if I am there, watching Joseph and his family reunite.”
Similar to Grandma Moses, my mother chants from the Torah because she loves to paint the scenes drawn from our Jewish and human families’ deepest memories, with the vivid freshness that places her and us right in those scenes. May she continue to chant the sacred word and fill the world with its complicated beauty for many years to come.
Dan Ornstein is rabbi at Congregation Ohav Shalom and a writer living in Albany, NY.
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