Torah Reading Hiatus

Once a month or so our congregation's Ritual VP needs to solicit volunteers, usually men, to chant a Torah portions for a shabbos when our hired reader will be away.  We get by, though not by much.  As an experienced reader, one able to prepare a little more than a column of text over about three or four weeks' time, I usually end up on the list of men invited to do this, one of the few things there that I am regularly invited to do.  Last year, my snub list got a little too bothersome, so I took myself out of the cadre of readers for a few months, then returned with a few strings attached.  I would not accept a portion that I had done before.  Recycling the easy and familiar destroys capacity and growth.  Yes, it takes less work, but less work and gets the slots filled with less hassle for the VP but at a high future price. And I would only take Aliyot that challenged my capacity.  I did this by not picking one out but letting everyone else select theirs.  The easy ones went first, usually leaving me with the longest single Aliyah.  It worked well.  Starting with the story of Er and Onan last fall, each portion of mine was a little over a column, many with unfamiliar vocabulary.  Starting with Bereshit, now entering the Book of Devarim, and the most challenging Pesach portion as well.

To do this, I need to photocopy the portion within a few days of its assignment. My home printer won't do the job.  Since the assignment usually exceeds a full column, I will have either two or three pages to photocopy from my Tikkun at Staples.  Usually  I mess up a few sheets.  The employee really doesn't do any better, either from Staples or the UPS Store, using larger sheets at a higher price, cutting off ends of columns.  Just copy it myself and expect some do-overs and a price of just over a dollar each time.

I think of the assignment as a column, most people count verses, and for planning to learn and rehearse this, so do I.  I strive to learn four verses each night.  Since typically my portion runs about thirty verses, this would take just over a week to get through.  The actual time is about two weeks, as there is a good deal of repetition, even rote, to mastering it.  The final week before the shabbos reading goes to achieving fluency, which always arrives about 5–7 days before.  While I nominally count verses, mostly divided into two sections by the text paragraphs themselves, in reality I work with a timer.  Practice occurs most often after supper with the timer set for either 18 or 22 minutes, virtually every night starting with the night after the photocopying took place.  And it's fluent by performance time, though rarely entirely flawless.  Yet I feel that I challenged myself when most of the others sought the minimum.

Having done this for most of the current annual cycle, I felt the need for a break.  I will sit out the next Parsha.  I don't want to devote every night after supper to learning an unfamiliar column of Torah, or even a familiar one.  We have vacations partly as a reward for diligence at work and partly so we can work more effectively when our break concludes.  It is time for my break.