Chanting ‘Goodnight Moon’ to the Torah’s trope

Simmy Cohen has not chanted much from the Torah since his bar mitzvah. During the current lockdown, when he’s not working at his marketing job from his home in Queens, he spends a lot of time reading children’s books to his 13-month old daughter.

But with a spark of comedic genius and perhaps a little quarantine-induced imagination, he put the two together in a video of himself reading — no, chanting — the classic “Goodnight Moon” book set to the Torah trope — “for those missing the sound of leyning,” he wrote in his post of the video to Twitter.

He hoped the video would resonate with other Orthodox Jews whose access to live Torah readings ended when their shuls closed because of the coronavirus pandemic. 

But the video quickly found a broader audience with over 40,000 views and several hundred retweets, including one from the actor Joshua Malina, who shared the video with his 281,000 followers. Inspired by the original video, another Twitter user created his own version using the Sephardic and Moroccan vocalizations.

Cohen said he was surprised by positive reactions from Jews spanning the religious and cultural spectrum. But in retrospect, he said, it’s not shocking.

“I actually think people do miss the sound of leyning,” Cohen said.

He followed his original production with a chanting of “Chicka Chicka Boom Boom,” the classic story of an anthropomorphic alphabet’s nighttime adventure. A friend from Twitter, Avi Schwartz, wrote the trope but insisted that Cohen chant it because people already recognized his voice.

“Someone shared with me a YouTube video of a rabbi giving a speech,” said Cohen as he recounted his project’s origin story. “The whole thing was in Yiddish, so I didn’t understand a word of it, but the gist was that he was telling a mundane story but he was leyning it. I understood enough to appreciate it, so I guess the concept was in the back of my head. And I have my kid and I’m reading her books and at some point I decided to do it and thought, oh “Goodnight Moon,” everybody knows that. I had no idea it would be popular, but it seemed to kind of resonate with people.”

JTA asked Cohen how he wrote the trope.

“It’s kind of an art, there’s not really a science to it, it’s more what feels right and sounds right based on what you’ve heard. In terms of actually writing it down, it’s harder because this is in English, so it’s backwards [from how the trope marks would be denoted in Hebrew].”

In the second video, Schwartz’s trope marks are visible, “so you can see it in the video and I think that added a lot,” Cohen said. “It could be like a tutorial for people who are learning it, though it could be more confusing than helpful because of the way it’s inverted in English.”

Cohen continued that Schwartz “wanted me to do the ‘shalsheles’ in the part right before ‘chicka chicka’ to emphasize that — I’m breaking it down for you as though this is some important thing — I think there’s only three or four of them in the whole Torah. They’re for real, real emphasis and there’s all kinds of opinions on why they appear and what does it mean, they’re not picked randomly. Whereas I’m sort of just picking what sounds right.”

He said he wants to do a haftarah next “to mix it up, definitely some more kids’ books. Maybe it’ll be something else, a famous speech or something.”