Parashat Balak: Torah Reading - Trop

Ilustration Credit: Elad Lifshitz, Dov Abramson Studio

Zakeif Katon is the fourth most common note in the whole Torah; it usually appears one or more times in each and every verse. It looks like a colon, and the sound it makes is a higher note dropping down to a lower note. The word zakeif means “standing up,” and katon means “small”—this note looks like it is standing up and it is musically not that big a deal. (We will meet the zakeif gadol, the big zakeif, next week!)

The zakeif katon almost always follows a munah or a pashta, closing out a longer phrase or idea that they started. And though it can be followed by all kinds of other notes, a lot of times it leads back into itself. Here, a mahpakh-pashta-katon is followed by a pashta-munah-katon:

Every now and then, the zakeif katon appears all by itself, with nothing introducing it. One of those is in our parashah:

Having learned zakeif katon, you will now recognize almost every note in the Torah. (We have only a few more to go.) Great job!

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