Simchat Torah 5767

Well, I did it. I read from the Torah for the first time ever.

I've read megillah quite a few times at Purim in Oberlin,OH, Vancouver, BC and New Jersey.

But even though I came to the women's reading last year, I hadn't read Torah before.

I almost didn't do it at all. I knew that if I were to do it, I would be assigned to r'vi'i (the 4th section), but I thought that would be r'vi'i of Breishit (Genesis), not of V'Zos Habrachah (the last section of Deuteronomy). There was an enormous difference in length between the two. As it was, I learned how to do it on the phone with someone within 20 minutes. Then it was just a matter of practicing throughout the week and having U. check my work.

For those of you who don't know, reading from the Torah means 1. reading the Hebrew, 2. reading the Hebrew in a text that doesn't contain the Hebrew equivalent of vowels and 3. reading the Hebrew without vowels and doing it according to musical markings that ALSO aren't in the actual text you're reading from. In short, it involves a lot of practice and memorization.

Because so many women volunteered to read this year, more than one was assigned to each section. My section in particular had the most with four. We actually had four readers. What happened was we reread all of the sections again and again until each woman in the room (who wanted) was called up to the Torah. We made it through four and a half cycles. I was struck by how differently each of us read, and I don't know if one of us was more "right" than the others because none of us reads "trope" (the Torah melody) regularly at all.

When I wrote about reading megillah at Purim this year, I touched on the awe I think many of us feel as we do something so rarely that men do all year long. Today I was struck by that same feeling, but especially by how much we just didn't know! This doesn't mean we were ignorant or did it wrong. It means we were very very careful and most of us quite nervous, even those who had done this before. There was very little ego in the room.

A highlight for me was receiving a special misheberach (a kind of blessing) after my aliyah (going up to the Torah) because I'm pregnant. There is a particular misheberach for when a woman is pregnant, but we didn't know how to do it, so we settled for what was in the siddur which wishes some general wonderful things for the person who receives it.

That was just fine for me.