It's not my fault.

The problem surfaced two weeks ago. The Rabbi and her assistant Sherri had placed Ben in a small trope* class with just two other boys, both from Solomon Schechter, the all day religious school. When I pick Ben up he gets in the back of the car and slumps deeply into the seat. "Those other kids are miles ahead of me," he says with absolute dejection. "I can't even read Hebrew. They already know how to sing trope. It's not fair. I'm quitting." Is it possible, I wonder driving home. Would they have done that? What were they thinking putting him in this group?

When we get home I go to the computer and open the hebrew sing-song trope his teacher Howard had e-mailed us. Ben begins to read. I'm shocked. My 12-year-old son who has been attending hebrew school every Wednesday and Sunday for seven years now, can hardly read. He's faltering over each letter, painfully stringing together the words, going so slowly that at this rate his Bar Mitzvah would spill over to Sunday.

I tell myself it's not my fault, but still, how did I not notice this. I'm a bad mother,

not to mention a bad Jewish mother. My son can't read the language, and I was too busy to notice. I give a quick stir to my Italian mother-in-law's thick Bolognese sauce, grab the Manishewitz and begin typing off an e-mail to the JLC (Jewish Learning Center).

"Hi Sherri, today Ben came home from trope class and was so upset. He's being taught with Zach and Kalman, both of whom are at Solomon Schechter and legions ahead in terms of hebrew, trope, etc. This I believe was either poor planning on the Jewish Learning Center's part or simply just not thought through. It was just wrong to put Ben in class with these kids who are so far ahead. To make matter worse, he told me he can't really read hebrew. I thought he must be kidding, but sure enough, it's true. I think I could read better when I was a third grader learning in the 60's in Bradley Beach, NJ. I spoke to other parents in his class and was told, they too, feel this way. It seems everyone is getting tutors to catch up, or in one case, switching to another temple where apparently their child is two years behind the other kids his age.

It's not going to work with the current arrangement. Sadly the reality is that his education at JLC is sorely lacking- and this just highlighted it. I just felt my heart sinking tonight when I asked him to read hebrew. I felted duped and also a bit of the neglectful mom, in that I just assumed his hebrew learning would be taken care of at the JLC. I now see I was wrong. I will need to get a tutor. I had put my head in the sand, shame on me, but shame on the JLC for not teaching Ben and apparently other children in his class to read hebrew.

Not a bad letter. The problem being, I actually sent it. As usual, I didn't wait the requisite 24 hours, or even five minutes before pushing the send button.

*a musical embellishment of prose, a notation for musical reading of the Jewish Torah