By Rick Muller, Feb 15, 2025
G’Shabbes. Thank you to Rachel Rubin Green, for letting me do this before the Torah reading. My goal is to Enlighten you about the musical notes of the Torah- Ta-amei haMikrah, the accents, tropes.
And then I hope you’ll appreciate them a little more as they go by.
When I first started reading Torah at Beth El in San Diego, 50 yrs ago I noticed that before the 10 Commandments, the words kol ha-shofar, “the sound of the ram’s horn,” ch 19, verse 19, had the trope Munach under the kol and a Zakef-Katon on top of the word ha-shofar.
At the time, being young and care-free, I thought it might be fun to extend the sound of the Munach to make it sound like a shofar–
And I saw those same two words appeared again, in ch 20:15, with the same two tropes. So I did it in both places, just to entertain myself and the congregation of my youth. They liked it, so I kept doing it.
Then I found that the words Moshe y’daber, “Moses spoke,” in v. 19, also had the same two tropes on them, and it came to me that the tropes linked the two phrases. That Moses’ words went out like the sound of a shofar, C’Shofar, you might say- my first TropeDrash.
Moses proclaimed “Freedom from Pharaoh! Don’t be slave to him! and “Take a day off, Rest on Shabbat, Have some cholent…”
Some time after that, I began to think there was more to it.
Just like those two tropes appeared on kol ha-shofar before and after the 10 Cs, like bookends, framing the message in between, so did they appear on the words atem r’eetem “you’ve seen in 19:4 and 20:19. The 10Cs themselves, also started with va-y’daber Elohim, God spoke/sang with the same verb and the same tropes as Moses-(or Moses spoke/sang with the same verb and tropes God did).
So I played with that for a while, not knowing if my idea had any merit wondering if I would ever find some kind of rabbinic validation…
Then in Oct 2013, I bought a new car, and the Dept. of Motor Vehicles sent me a new license plate in the mail, as they do.
You know there’s numbers and letters, the “system” picks them for you.
They sent me 7CSH047 [Show the plate] seven front, seven back, with the message in between. C’Shofar! I did not pay extra for that!
It just came that way . Cosmic Confirmation?
Then, over the years, I found out more. Rabbi Aharon ben Asher, our last and greatest Masoretic Rabbi, preserving our Masorah/Tradition, with his scribe Shlomo ben Bouya’a, set down all the tropes we have today, in his Sefer Diqduqei ha-T’amim, the Book of the Grammar of the Accents, and their crowning achievement, the Keter, pun intended a volume of the TaNaCh, dated 933 CE, now 1092 years ago, that Rambam used when he wrote his own Torah scroll.
I learned that Ben Asher’s original name for Munach was Shofar Holeich, “a shofar goes out,” and the original name of Mapach [looks like an arrowhead, pointing from right to left, like our language goes] was Shofar M’hupach “shofar reversed.” If you take a Munach and reverse it, you get a Mapach. [Show all quadrants]
Now I’m thinking that Ben Asher named this accent Shofar Holeich because of those two times the words kol ha-shofar appear.
Today, I also want to tell you about Yitro — my favorite non-Jew in the Torah. Not many parashot are named for people- there’s only six. The other five are — Noah, Chayei Sarah, Korach, Balak, Pinchas
When we first see Yitro, he hears about the Israelites leaving Egypt, and so he brings his daughter Zipporah and his two grandsons, Gershom and Eliezer to Moses. He could’ve kept one of them, saying he only had daughters, wanting one of them to become High Priest in Midian-
But no, Yitro was a good father-in-law and grandfather and brought all three.
“Eliezer’s a good kid,” Yitro said to Moses, “but keep your eye on Gershom, he’s a little strange.”
[to Larry Herman: “You see, “Ger” means “strange” Larry: “I get it!”]
Another thing I like about Yitro, is he uses the same two tropes, Munach and Zakef-Katon: 18:19 Vayichad Yitro, “Yitro rejoiced” and verse 10 Baruch Adonai no other non-Jew blesses God like that!
In 18:11 Yitro sings Atah Yadati “Now I know”…the truth of things.
Then, 18:12, Yitro sets out a nice meal for Aaron and the Elders of the tribes of Israel. I want you to see the tropes there, page 433.
[Pause for a second, until you hear someone turning a page]
V’chol ziknei Yisrael. There’s a line there (called a meteg) between the words v’chol and ziknei. There’s a Munach L’garmei [sing it] under v’chol and then the line, then another Munach under ziknei.
If you use your imagination, and I want you to– That’s the table where Yitro put out the food, in the middle, with the Elders getting their food from both sides.
[At this point, I wanted to thank R. Gordon Bernat-Kunin, for his article in the Jewish Journal, where he wrote, “A Pardes teacher told me something I have not forgotten: ‘The drama of the lesson is learning within the spaces between the words of the text.’ ”
And I was going to link that to the detail of the tropes…
But I felt rushed for time, and I left it out, but I shouldn’t have… argh]
The next day, Yitro saw Moses judging the people, “from morning to evening” Moses sitting by himself, the people lined up single-file.
Yitro sings to Moses in verse 14, Mah ha-davar hazeh “What is this thing?” that you’re doing to the people, making them line up like that, all day? In v.18, he sings Navol Tibol “You’re wearing yourself out!”
[I wanted to add a joke here I blanked, and totally forgot argh
Yitro says to Moses, “You see the table I put up yesterday? I didn’t just put it up against the mountain, so the elders would have to go down the line single-file. I put it in their midst, so they could go down both sides. With 2 spoons for the cholent. You can’t put the cholent with just 1 spoon! That’s mishuga!”]
My favorite thing about Yitro: he knew that if you put Instruction to Music, it’s just the Best! A small example of this is “Whistle while you work,” from the movie Snow White but what I really want to tell you is that right outside the chapel, down the hallway there, most every Tuesday morning, between 9:30 and 10 am, the ECC teachers bring their students from the Education building down that corridor, and they sing to them, “Put your finger on the wall, on the wall– Put your finger on the wall, on the wall– Put your finger on the wall, when we’re walking down the hall– Put your finger on the wall, on the wall”
Why do they sing that? So the little kids don’t get trampled down the middle of the hallway by the bigger kids running to their classes!
[Again I rushed myself and got nervous, and forgot to say:
The ECC teachers use a melody the kids already know otherwise–
“If you’re happy and you know it, clap your hands (stomp your feet…)”
that engages their brains with singing, and their body parts for hand-eye coordination, all that music helps teach…]
When I told Angie Bass, the director of the ECC, that I wanted to tell you about the teachers and the kids and their fingers in the hallway, she said, “Yes, and it teaches them to follow instruction, too.”
I told her I would use that in my drash, and almost did, but I forgot:
The kids are so cute! If you don’t have enough cuteness in your life, if your grandkids live too far away, or if you don’t have them, I asked Angie and the teachers, if it’d be ok if people came to the lobby and watched the preschool kids as they walked down the hall, and they all said Yes!
Then I was going to add that the only thing comparably cute is the zoo in Edinburgh, Scotland, where they let out their penguins from their enclosure and let them walk around the zoo for a while, and then they lead them back to their enclosure… wait a beat…
Maybe we could put little tuxedos on the kids? but I didn’t do it]
I wanted to re-connect to Yitro, how he added Music to Instruction– how in 18:20 Yitro sang “v’Hizarta Et-hem” “Enlighten” the Israelites about judges and laws and how to live together…
Then in 18:21 he sang to Moses “Sarei alafim, sarei meiot, sarei chamishim, v’sarei asarot.” using basic simple tropes…
[And the Israelites didn’t know from Hebrew numbers, I was going to joke: They only knew Egyptian numbers–18th Dynasty,19th Dynasty-to Larry: “You see, the joke is those aren’t really Egyptian numbers, and Larry would’ve said, “I get it, I get it!” but I didn’t do it sigh]
Moses listened to Yitro, and when he instructed the people what to do, he sang the same 8 words with the same eight tropes! “Sarei alafim, sarei meiot, sarei chamishim, v’sarei asarot.”
[Then I intended to awkardly switch to the Reading- success there!]