Vayeitze

I chanted torah Saturday morning and it went pretty well -- despite my forgetting to do my "lucky" read-through right before leaving for services. I can't believe I forgot to chant it once at home on Shabbat morning; that's the first time I've failed to do that final sanity check. So I was a little nervous, but it went ok. Made a couple mistakes, but that's what the checker is for and Bruce is a very good checker. (There is an art to delivering a correction without throwing the reader.)

When I got there someone had already rolled the scroll, but it wasn't in the right place. He got the aliya starting point from Hertz. I made a similar mistake a month or so ago, and assumed that I had somehow misread the chumash. Once I was willing to attribute to human error; twice makes me suspicious. So far Eitz Chayim, Trope Trainer, and the K'tav tikkun all seem to agree on where the aliyot begin, and the couple of times we've consulted Hertz we've gone wrong. I conclude that Hertz is using a different system, though I don't know what. I'll warn the other readers to steer clear until we find out what's going on.

( d'var torah )