In the summer of 1977, a year and a half before I was born, my father made a decision. He was a young professor of religion who wanted to brush up on his Hebrew language skills, which he thought would help his research studying ancient texts. He committed to reading Hebrew for 30 minutes daily.
The streak is still going, 39 years later. There was one day in the 1980s when he read about 10 minutes and got interrupted and didn’t return, but other than that, the streak is perfect. He read despite the distractions of small children, his various professional obligations, and volunteer commitments. More incredibly, he read his required minutes of Hebrew on the two days he had detached retina surgeries. “I handled them by starting to read just after midnight before the early morning operations,” he tells me. “It has not always been convenient, but it has worked out.”
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