With a love of the Hebrew language, an engaging sense of humor, and a creative imagination, physician, scholar, and author Dr. Norman Bloom recently completed his comprehensive study of the governing principles and rules for the proper reading of the Hebrew word: The Way of the Word: An Everyman’s Guide to Hebrew Word Structure.
For more than 30 years, Norman immersed himself in the world of the 22 letters of the aleph bet and their accompanying nekudot, the markings that convey the varied sounds they represent. The Way of the Word, a series of 44 lessons, illuminates the proper way of reading Leshon Hakodesh, God’s holy words.
His attention to detail and precision is reflected in the core meaning of the Hebrew word for grammar, dikduk. The root dak (dk) carries the meaning of “fine” or “thin,” and the verb dikdek means “to grind or to make fine.” In this way, it signifies his rendering of the rules of Hebrew word structure into a finely detailed, exact, meticulous analysis.
A native of New York City, Norman received a BA from Yeshiva University in Hebrew literature. A graduate of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, he completed his training in urology at Yale University School of Medicine and is a Fellow of the American College of Surgeons.
From 1968 to 1970, he served as a medical officer with the rank of major in the US Air Force. Afterward, he and his wife, Naomi, and their two children moved to North Miami Beach, where the couple expanded their family with two more children. Naomi served as director of an early childhood education program, and Norman practiced medicine for 50 years. He also wrote articles that were published in Tradition and The Journal of Jewish Music and Liturgy.
In 2018, the pair made aliyah and settled in Beit Shemesh.
“I am undoubtedly here now because of my first experience in Israel in 1957,” Norman says. “I studied at Machon Chaim Greenberg for teachers in Baka, Jerusalem. I was 19 when I traveled for 12 days by ship, the SS Israel, from New York to Haifa.”
He reminisces about his studies. Prof. Nechama Leibowitz taught the Book of Genesis. David Benvenisti gave classes on geography and culture, and conducted tours of the Land of Israel with his son Meron. And poet Haim Gouri instilled an appreciation of poetry and literature.
“A fire was lit in me and remained aflame for over 50 years until I made aliyah, and the fire found its longed-for goal,” says Norman.
During the 1967 Six Day War, he returned to Israel for a month to serve as a volunteer doctor at Shaare Zedek Medical Center. Two weeks after the war ended, he walked with thousands of others through barbed wire and rubble to the Western Wall to pray.
While living in Miami, Norman was asked by a friend to prepare his son, a gifted yeshiva student, for his bar mitzvah. He soon realized that the boy had no solid grounding in the proper reading of Hebrew and that, in fact, many educators were not equipped with the requisite training in reading and teaching the language. The subject did not make it past the lower grades.
He comments that often in the synagogue, as the Torah is being read, many congregants are not aware when words are being mispronounced.
“We need to accord the same respect to the Hebrew language as we do to any other language,” Norman says. “I thought, ‘How can I broaden knowledge of the basic elements of reading? How can I make it accessible and even interesting?”
Innovative approach for learning Hebrew grammar
His wit for plays on words draws you into his innovative approach to learning Hebrew grammar. In his book The Way of the Word, he writes as if speaking personally to the reader, face to face, teacher to student.
He cautions the reader that when encountering a word in which the letter nun is immediately followed by another nun, it should not be summarily dismissed as a “nun-sequitur.”
In another lesson, he pays tribute to his favorite childhood story about the determined Little Engine That Could. Naming the lesson “The little kamatz that CAN,” he differentiates the specific Hebrew vowel markings of a kamatz katan from a kamatz gadol.
He states, “Using CAN as an acronym for ‘closed and not-accented,’ a kamatz katan will only be found in a syllable that is both closed and not-accented. Otherwise, that kamatz can only be a kamatz gadol.”
Other intriguing lessons include “Sample a Simple Syllable Syllabus,” “The Trap of the Troublesome Trop” (also referred to as “Trip Not into a Trick Trop Trap”), “Ascent and Descent of Accent,” and “Whence the Sense of Tense.”
“Because ancient Hebrew was written without vowels, a system of pointed and linear markings to accompany the letters, known as nikkud, was developed by Masoretic scholars,” Norman explains. “The first such markings appeared in 1000 CE.”
With regard to accenting, he says, “80% of Hebrew words are accented on the last syllable, and 20% on the one next to last. Cantillation marks, known as ta’amei hamikrah or trop, a form of oral punctuation, are therefore placed in the texts to give direction to which syllable should be accented and to the melody to be chanted.”
He emphasizes, “But it goes significantly beyond just sounding words correctly. The very meaning of a word is a direct function of its pronunciation.”
Unlike other areas of dikduk that are mastered purely by rote, “there does exist in the Hebrew word construct a system of several interlocking and far more easily mastered principles from which all else logically flows,” he says.
“The analogy would be to that of a chemical formula in which the word itself may be viewed as a molecule, and its components, consonants, and vowels are the atoms that coexist in a dynamic, forever changing equilibrium with one another.
In the process, new entities emerge.”
Meeting on Zoom, Norman leads a group called Dead Piyyut Society, which studies medieval, liturgical poetry. He suggests they call themselves The White Band Society to give honor to the pristine white edges of the section of the siddur that indicate the unopened, unexplored territory of piyyutim (“liturgical poetry”).
“Periodically, I teach bar mitzvah lessons, and I am grateful that at 87, I can still easily connect one-to-one with 12-year-olds,” Norman says. “Of course, sharing dikduk particulars with students from The Way of the Word comes as part of the learning package. Writing this book, which addresses both a practical and a spiritual need in the community, gives me great joy and inspiration. Our ancient language, Leshon Ivrit, spoken and read, is alive and well.”
The Way of the Word: An Everyman’s Guide to Hebrew Word Structure is due to be published as an eBook.
DR. NORMAN BLOOM
FROM NORTH MIAMI BEACH
TO BEIT SHEMESH, 2018