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

[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.