chanting torah this week

[cellio]

I'm chanting torah tomorrow night and Shabbat morning at my synagogue. Chanting Friday night is kind of a big deal, because lay people almost never get that opportunity. (I last did this two years ago when both rabbis were away.) Yes, most Reform congregations read torah on Friday nights, because for many folks that's the main service. Some congregations only have a morning service if there's a bar mitzvah, and the community as a whole doesn't go to those. I'm glad that we have a regular morning service every Shabbat.

So anyway, my rabbi had said he was open to me chanting on Fridays occasionally, because he knows I'm good enough, so I asked if the next week for which I was already signed up to read on Saturday would do. :-) The portion is long and we'd discussed me not reading the whole thing; I'll read some and he'll read some. The part I am reading -- and remember that this is one aliya, not all seven -- runs over four minutes, and is about half of the aliya. (Eikev slishi.) Division into portions, and aliyot within them, is not what you'd call uniform. I'm reading almost an entire column in the scroll, which is the longest portion I've chanted so far.

He asked me how I felt about chanting a few verses, then having him translate them, chanting a few more, and so on. The congregation is used to "inline" translation, so almost no one follows the reading in a chumash, so asking them to sit and listen to Hebrew in a vacuum for four minutes might not go over well. I said "let's try it" and it ended up working fine when we practiced it. (And I even held pitch through the pauses, which matters to my inner musician.) Tonight I got to practice from the scroll, which is always different from practicing with the tikkun. This is also not the scroll I'm used to reading from on Shabbat mornings.

I'm looking forward to tomorrow night; I think it'll go well. Hmm, I better come up with something to say about the portion for Saturday morning, when the reader traditionally talks for a couple minutes.

Comments

aliya length

[chaos-wrangler.livejournal.com]

I was thinking about you on shabbat morning when my dad was given the seventh aliya. I couldn't remember which aliya you said you'd be reading but I noticed that 1-6 were all long and then 7 was short. I'm pretty sure that's why they gave my dad that one, since it meant he had to spend the least amount of time standing (he used a walker to get from his seat to the bimah and for standing at the bimah as well as at his seat, and he was wearing a knee/leg brace over his suit leg).