improvising a torah reading

[cellio]

Friday night I learned that there was a bar mitzvah scheduled for this morning. Our rabbi was scheduled to read torah in the informal minyan, which he couldn't do if he was conducting a bar mitzvah. (The associate rabbi is away.) Oops. Where'd that come from?

The new worship chair asked me how I'd dealt with this problem in the past, but it's a new problem. No one in our group who would answer a phone on Shabbat is up for preparing a reading with that little notice, but the new chair had a good idea that would allow us to not just skip that part of the service entirely. He asked one of the Hebrew-fluent regulars (who was there Friday night) to read out of a chumash; concurrently, he said he would, as an educational effort, follow the reading in the scroll with everyone gathered around so they could see. He asked me if that would be ok and I said "no blessings and it's just study, not a torah service, right? If so, fine by me". So we did that and it worked well.

(For those interested in minutiae: I led the group in singing Al Sh'losha D'varim as we took the scroll out and Eitz Chayim as we put it away, but no hakafah, no hagbahah/g'lilah, and no other bits of the torah service except the general misheberach of healing and the rosh chodesh insertion. Wasn't sure if I should do the latter; decided on the fly.)

Two thoughts occurred to me too late to do anything about them. First, during Roman rule public torah readings were outlawed and that's when the custom of haftarah readings arose; we could conceivably have read haftarah and not torah, hearkening back to that. If I'd thought of it Friday night we could have asked the rabbi, but I wasn't going to try to make that call this morning.

The other thought came when I realized that we had a larger-than-usual crowd this morning and there'd be no way everyone would be able to see while crowded around the table. A couple weeks ago at HUC I saw a videotape showing some unusual worship ideas; in one segment two people held a torah scroll vertically for the reader, with the text facing the congregation, so people could see from their seats. Neat idea, and if I'd thought of it earlier I would have suggested it as a solution.

Comments

[chaos-wrangler.livejournal.com]

A couple weeks ago at HUC I saw a videotape showing some unusual worship ideas; in one segment two people held a torah scroll vertically for the reader, with the text facing the congregation, so people could see from their seats. Neat idea, and if I'd thought of it earlier I would have suggested it as a solution.

Sounds neat indeed, but is it really practical to hold a scroll vertically at a read-able and congregationally see-able height for that length of time? (Or are you & I working in different systems of readings? I can't remember - sorry.)

[cellio]

In our case, we read one aliya (not all seven) and get about 30 people. A full Shabbat reading for hundreds of people would certainly pose the difficulties you raise.

(The video only showed a brief clip, but it looked like they were standing in front of a reading desk -- so they might have been able to set it down between aliyot, or even swap in different holders if needed. We didn't get that level of detail, unfortunately.)

By the way, I'm told that for Simchat Torah many congregations unroll the entire scroll, holding it vertically (using many people, obviously) to do the last and first portions. Sometimes they'll have someone give a guided tour of some of the distinctive parts (shirat hayam, ha'azinu, the two upside-down nuns, etc) and key bits (sh'ma, aseret b'divrot, etc). This would mean holding the scroll for a while -- though maybe at a more comfortable height. I've never been present for such a thing, but it sounds like a nifty teaching opportunity.

[chaos-wrangler.livejournal.com]

Okay, so you were thinking of a much shorter reading time. One aliyah, unless it's one of the really long ones, is probably not too long to hold a Torah open vertically, especially if it's not open too far.

I've also heard of (but never seen) the unrolling of the whole scroll at Simchat Torah. It strikes me as a good teaching opportunity for people who aren't used to reading from a chumash that shows these things*, studying Torah on their own, etc, but I wonder how they deal with the problem of holding it up safely (no ripping from uneven pulling, no hitting the floor from not enough support) and without actually touching the parchment.

*I hadn't thought much about how the visually odd parts are shown in English translations. I know some make an effort to show the parts that have odd line splits (like shirat hayam), but I don't remember seeing things like the upside-down nuns represented. One of the things I like about my mini-tanach (besides the fact that it's mini and split into 3 volumns so each one is even mini-er) is that they do a good job of representing the partial and whole white space breaks in the English as well as the Hebrew.

[magid.livejournal.com]

Side note: some Sephardi sifrei Torah are in sort of cylindrical cases that open vertically, and are always read vertically; there's a flat bottom that rests on a flat shulchan (table).

[chaos-wrangler.livejournal.com]

True, I'd forgotten about that set-up. I wonder how visible the text is from a distance though (i.e. for people who aren't standing right there to read it), especially when there is a reader standing in front of it.

[cellio]

Unrolling the whole scroll: I wonder about some of the same things. My congregation has unrolled the scroll once (for the religious school), and they did it by lining up a bunch of tables and laying it out -- so no one was touching it except for the (adult) people at each end holding the rollers. The kids got close enough to see clearly but didn't touch.

[gingicat]

A congregation I belonged to some years ago did that, with a Torah that was pasul so there was less worry of accidental desecration. (It had been rescued in the aftermath of the Holocaust, IIRC, making it particularly special.) It was an amazing experience; I was one of the holders. Matter of fact, I think nearly everyone tall enough was a holder... the Torah is *long*! And it was neat to look around and see unique and recognizable blocks of textm like Miriam's Song and the Ten Commandments.

[cellio]

(It had been rescued in the aftermath of the Holocaust, IIRC, making it particularly special.)

One year for Shavuot evening I attended a congregation with a Holocaust scroll. They began the tikkun leil shavuot by having one of the confirmation students read the ten commandmnets from that scroll, and the rest of us gathered around it. It felt special.