upcoming torah portions

[cellio]

I am reading torah this Shabbat. The portion, Behar, is part of the double portion that is arguably "my" portion -- the week I acquired a Hebrew birthday we read both Behar and B'chukotai, which are sometimes doubled up and sometimes not. So to the extent that I have a designated portion, it's either Behar, B'chukotai, or the combination. This year they are not combined, and since I was semi-randomly picking a week to read anyway, I picked one of those.

Today I was asked to read the other one next Friday night. Clean sweep. :-) I'm glad to finally be at a level where my reaction to "can you read in 8 days?" is not "aiiieeeee!" but "sure". (My congregation only reads one aliyah -- the sixth, this year -- so we are usually talking about 10-30 verses, not several chapters. Both of these ones are short, so that when they're doubled up the reading is not burdensome. I can read or chant, but, honestly, the chanting is easier for me to learn.)

I won't actually start learning it until Sunday, probably -- don't want to distract myself from this week's, and there's an SCA event on Saturday. But that still gives me six days.

This grew out of something more general: I'll be helping to lead services next Friday night. So we knew I'd be involved, but we didn't actually talk about division of labor until today. (Yay! I get to lead services again!)

Comments

[tashabear.livejournal.com]

I swear, I just glanced quickly at your subject line, and I thought it said "upcoming torah parties." And I thought, "Well, gee, there's an aspect of Judaism they don't tell you about..."

[530nm330hz.livejournal.com]

The upcoming Torah party is in 3 weeks and 3 days (and counting....)

Not to be confused with the "up-and-coming Torah Party" (which hopes to increase their number of seats in the Knesset).

[tashabear.livejournal.com]

I just had a picture in my head of some sort of a Judaic rave. (You don't want to know what that looked like in my head...)

[cellio]

*laugh* When I was young(er) and kind of clueless, I had heard about the tradition of all-night torah study on Shavuot (called a "tikkun", short for "tikkun leil shavuot"), and that sounded really cool, but I didn't know how to find one. (I'd called a couple synagogues without much luck, but hadn't called the right ones.) Eventually I posted to a local newsgroup, simply asking if anyone knew of a tikkun that was happening that Saturday night (when the holiday fell that year). The first reply was "is that like a rave?"! (I was, err, trying to be discreet. So much for that.)

[cellio]

True, but the really big torah party is in the fall. I think of Shavuot as the engagement announcement and Simchat Torah as the all-out wedding celebration. (Ok, the metaphor doesn't completely work, but it's not completely wrong either.)