My Name Is Natah
"Ya'amod!" Traditional Jewish men know that when this word is sung in your
direction in Shul you're supposed to fill in the blank, then say your blessing over the Torah.
The moment when you tell the gabai your name for an aliya has always been awkward for me because my name is Natah. That's nun-tet-ayin.
Natah sounds like Natan, which is a more common name spelled nun-taf-nun. But it's a word of a different feather. If Carnegie was right that the sweetest sound to anyone's ears is their own name (and I intuit that he was) then the reverse is true, that the sourest sound to anyone's ears would be the mangling of their name.
I was thirteen when I first heard a gabai mispronounce my name as Nasan (Ashkenazic for Natan). I got in the habit of pronouncing the last sound of my name in a hard guttural way, as Sfardim do. But mostly gabaim still heard Natan. So I started doing it spelling bee style, "Natah, nun-tet-ayin, Natah..." "Yamod Nasan!"
To Be Continued...
posted by rabbi neil fleischmann @ 3:55 PM
2 Comments:
My second name in Hebrew is the Yiddish "Chah-nah", ches-nun-aleph with 2 kamatz's. Since it sounds so much like the Hebrew female name Chana, in those rare occasions where I am asked my name, I pronounce it with a 2 very strong kamatz's. Never-the-less, the gabbai usually says "Chanan". This is compounded by the fact that my father's second name is same as yours - Nata. So, when the gabbai here's both of these, it often gets turned into M- Chanan, ben Y- Natan. Of course, the fact that I usually speak ashkanzis does not stop them from thinking I said NaTan.
Thank you mk for relating and sharing.
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