small victories

[cellio]

I just, for the first time, correctly chanted my little chunk of Parsha Behar from the text as it appears in the Torah scroll -- no punctuation, no vowel pointing, no cantillation marks, tiny calligraphy. Yay!

Granted, it's one aliya of the weekday Torah reading, and in this parsha that's pretty darn short, but still -- it's as much as I did for the "adult bat mitzvah", and I learned it a heck of a lot more quickly this time and with much less help. I've got a month and a half to go; I bet I could learn the next aliya in that time. (I'm not sure I will, because it might look weird to do 2 out of the 3 and I don't think I can learn the third, but it's an interesting idea nonetheless.)

And yes, I know I have to practice it periodically between now and then so it doesn't rot, but maintenance is easier than acquisition.

Comments

[indigodove.livejournal.com]

I think that's a victory, plain and cool :-)

[fiannaharpar.livejournal.com]

I hope that you took a moment to be *really* proud of yourself :-)

[goljerp]

Cool! Pretty soon you'll be one of those people who can do torah reading with 5 minutes advance notice! :-)

[cellio]

:-) Well, I'm still learning too darn much from rote rather than from understanding, so it'll be a while. I'm starting to get, by observation, what melodic snippets go with a couple of the trope symbols, but I have yet to actually learn the system.

The System

[goljerp]

I'm still learning too darn much from rote rather than from understanding

Well, you have to start somewhere, and it's great that you're putting your effort into this rather than zoning out in front of the TV.

I suspect (but am not sure, since I have long since forgotten the torah trope that I learned for my bar mitzvah) that many of the "5 minutes prep time for torah reading" people are actually faking most of the trope. (This is not meant as a criticism!)

There are also some hand signals for trope. It works like this: the torah reader practices, of course, but gets a lot of the trope from one of the gabbis, through the use of hand signals. Since a lot of the trope is in predictable patterns - mapach, pashtah, munach katan (gosh, I do remember something!) - if you get the start of the pattern you're set.

Re: The System

[cellio]

Hand signals: Ooh, sneaky! I never thought of that. Next time I get an aliya, instead of following the text (or at least the yad) I'm going to watch the gabbaim. :-)

Re: The System

[goljerp]

Oh, I didn't mean to imply that they're common; quite the contrary, I have rarely seen them used. Sometimes I've seen a gabbai try to signal the end of a sentance or parsha by hand, but it's often akin to someone in the back seat using their imaginary brakes. (When I was learning to drive, my mom had an imaginary brake. When I heard her thumping the floor, I knew that she wanted me to stop for some reason. I think my dad had an imaginary hand brake, which was much quieter...)