As they learn to engage with religious Hebrew, the children of a liberal Talmud Torah class in Luxembourg encounter new possibilities for reading as a practice, text as written, oral, and material object, and meaning making with text. This paper will explore this transformative process and its sometimes unpredictable outcomes.
When the children of the liberal Talmud Torah of Luxembourg come to class, they bring along particular experiences and ideas about literacy, texts, and how to engage with them. They are already able to speak and read in at least one language, many are learning a ‘foreign language’ at school, and they have developed certain understandings about these processes. However, they quickly find that these assumptions do not fit well over religious Hebrew. While there is meaning to be sought and found at the level of the word or sentence in certain contexts, it is not the primary source of meaning as the children anticipate. Instead, they learn that meaning is inhered in the presence of certain diacritic marks, the arrangement of text on the page, the context in which the text is recited, the practices of which it is a part, the materiality of the written word, and the collective history and Jewish world within which it is situated and to which it is understood to point. Even the act of reading, which the children feel they know well, comes to be something different – rather than the private and individual act of finding sentence-level meaning in a text, the children learn that to read religious Hebrew is to engage in a kind of shared speech act. Beyond the classroom, these new ways of reading and encountering text continue to build and shift as the children are increasingly able and called upon to participate in ritual life, both in the synagogue and at home. This paper will explore how these changes unfold and the ways in which the process of learning to engage with religious Hebrew opens up the potential of text and creates new ways of learning and knowing for these children.
