My Name Is Natah

From the archives

TUESDAY, JULY 05, 2005

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...