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improvising a torah reading
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.
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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.
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