torah reading (and translation)

I chanted torah this morning (fifth aliya of B'reishit, the first parsha in the torah). Last night I decided to translate from the scroll instead of reading from a chumash; I knew most of these words and practice took care of the ones I'd had to look up. The morning minyan is forgiving and encouraging, so what better time to try something new?

While my practice runs at home (from the tikkun) were smooth, doing it in front of people is different. So I was kind of nervous and I suspect it showed, and I accidentally skipped a line in the scroll and had to go back for it, but overall, I think it was a decent first effort. One person commented favorably to me; no one else said anything.

Here, then, is my translation of this passage. I'm writing this now from the Hebrew; I didn't memorize so this is probably a little different from what I said this morning. Because I am a beginner, I try not to take some of the liberties that professional translations can take; I try to stick to literal (but coherent) without smoothing out nuance, because I don't have a good feel for when to do that. That said, in a few cases I don't really know enough to translate, so I just took others' word for it in a couple places (marked with "[?]").

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Lemech (B'reishit)

( d'var torah )