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chanting torah
We're having a visit from a guest cantor at the end of April. Shabbat morning the chair of the worship committee asked me if I'd like to chant torah that morning. Twist my arm! :-) We had both assumed that the visitor would do so, but apparently not. It occurred to me after the fact that I did this the last time we had a guest cantor too; I hope that doesn't look bad. I did offer to defer to a (specific) other person, but he wanted me. That's pleasant.
I'm not sure which is doing more to speed up my learning of portions, practice or comprehension, but I'm not complaining. For my current portion (I'm reading next Shabbat), I spent about six hours in the course of one week and had it in pretty good shape. This was an experiment; I wanted to see if I could learn a portion in a week and the answer seems to be yes. (Portion = one aliya, not the entire parsha. In this case it's about 20 lines in the scroll.) And I understand a lot of the text -- not necessarily every verb or noun (which is largely a vocabulary issue), but enough grammar and basic vocabulary to tie the bits together and know who is acting upon whom, and stuff like that.
This coming Shabbat is Shabbat HaGadol, the Shabbat before Pesach. While these days rabbis -- or at least the ones I'm familiar with -- give sermons almost every week, historically there were only two times a year when rabbis preached, and this Shabbat is one of them. (The other is Shabbat Shuva, during the high holy days.) I'm not so presumptuous to step into that role full-force, but I am planning to do a little extra preparation for my talk that morning, actually writing out the text instead of just outlining it and speaking from notes. So it'll be a little more formal than the norm for that group, which seems reasonable. I'm going to tie the portion together with Pesach and talk about the transformative effect of ritual. Or at least it sounds like a good idea in my head; we'll see what happens when I write it down. :-) (Yes, I'll post -- after I deliver it.)
I'm not sure which is doing more to speed up my learning of portions, practice or comprehension, but I'm not complaining. For my current portion (I'm reading next Shabbat), I spent about six hours in the course of one week and had it in pretty good shape. This was an experiment; I wanted to see if I could learn a portion in a week and the answer seems to be yes. (Portion = one aliya, not the entire parsha. In this case it's about 20 lines in the scroll.) And I understand a lot of the text -- not necessarily every verb or noun (which is largely a vocabulary issue), but enough grammar and basic vocabulary to tie the bits together and know who is acting upon whom, and stuff like that.
This coming Shabbat is Shabbat HaGadol, the Shabbat before Pesach. While these days rabbis -- or at least the ones I'm familiar with -- give sermons almost every week, historically there were only two times a year when rabbis preached, and this Shabbat is one of them. (The other is Shabbat Shuva, during the high holy days.) I'm not so presumptuous to step into that role full-force, but I am planning to do a little extra preparation for my talk that morning, actually writing out the text instead of just outlining it and speaking from notes. So it'll be a little more formal than the norm for that group, which seems reasonable. I'm going to tie the portion together with Pesach and talk about the transformative effect of ritual. Or at least it sounds like a good idea in my head; we'll see what happens when I write it down. :-) (Yes, I'll post -- after I deliver it.)