Using Old, Long-Dormant Skills
Apr. 26th, 2010 04:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gnomiThis past Shabbat, I did something I haven't done in 22 years: I had the Maftir aliyah and read haftarah in front of a minyan.
On three and a half days' notice
And people said I did it very well. :-)
Let me explain...
(I'm not sure from which end to tell this story; I think I'll tell it from the end to the beginning)
A couple of weeks ago, we had lunch with a bunch of friends, one of whom is on the organizing committee of Minyan Kol Rinah.mabfan mentioned that the committee should ask me to do a haftarah some day. I mentioned in the course of the conversation that I can learn a haftarah (even one I haven't seen before) in a very short amount of time. They didn't need me for the minyan meeting on 24 April, but I would be kept in mind for a future minyan.
On Tuesday night, I got a phone call while I was nursing Muffin to sleep. When I returned to where Michael was in the living room, he had a message: the woman who was supposed to be doing haftarah had come down with pneumonia, and our friend wanted to know if I meant it when I said I could learn a haftarah on short notice. Three and a half days? No problem, I said.
Of course, I'd forgotten some important details. And here's where the beginning of the story comes in:
When I was a kid, my parents belonged to a Conservative shul in Lexington, MA. At some point, my father became a member of the Religious Committee, and at some further point he won the task of handing out haftarot to readers. Since I had learned to do haftarah for my bat mitzvah (as is traditional in Conservative shuls), I became part of my father's standard haftarah crew. And, since I was right there in the house with him, I also became the emergency backup haftarah reader. Thus, I ended up doing certain haftarot very often when my father couldn't find someone else (I did 8th day Pesach's haftarah at least three times) and got called upon when for some reason the previously designated reader didn't show up. For this reason, I got very good at doing the haftarah on short notice, sometimes *very* short notice.
But I hadn't read any haftarah publically in over 20 years, and at all since I put one on tape for someone when I was a senior in college in 1993. And I work full time, and I have two nine-month-olds, neither of which was true when I was in high school. So learning time was scarce. But I got lucky with this one: it was only nine pesukim (verses), so I could learn it very quickly and with minimal practice.
And people told me at kiddush on Shabbat that I had done it very well. And for that I credit the man from whom I learned haftarah for my bat mitzvah: he taught me to slow down, read each word deliberately, and to focus on the nikkudot (vowels) and where the accents fell in the words. In fact, the nicest compliment I got on the reading was from a friend who said she could understand the reading from hearing me read it, not from looking at the words in the chumash.
On three and a half days' notice
And people said I did it very well. :-)
Let me explain...
(I'm not sure from which end to tell this story; I think I'll tell it from the end to the beginning)
A couple of weeks ago, we had lunch with a bunch of friends, one of whom is on the organizing committee of Minyan Kol Rinah.
mabfan mentioned that the committee should ask me to do a haftarah some day. I mentioned in the course of the conversation that I can learn a haftarah (even one I haven't seen before) in a very short amount of time. They didn't need me for the minyan meeting on 24 April, but I would be kept in mind for a future minyan.On Tuesday night, I got a phone call while I was nursing Muffin to sleep. When I returned to where Michael was in the living room, he had a message: the woman who was supposed to be doing haftarah had come down with pneumonia, and our friend wanted to know if I meant it when I said I could learn a haftarah on short notice. Three and a half days? No problem, I said.
Of course, I'd forgotten some important details. And here's where the beginning of the story comes in:
When I was a kid, my parents belonged to a Conservative shul in Lexington, MA. At some point, my father became a member of the Religious Committee, and at some further point he won the task of handing out haftarot to readers. Since I had learned to do haftarah for my bat mitzvah (as is traditional in Conservative shuls), I became part of my father's standard haftarah crew. And, since I was right there in the house with him, I also became the emergency backup haftarah reader. Thus, I ended up doing certain haftarot very often when my father couldn't find someone else (I did 8th day Pesach's haftarah at least three times) and got called upon when for some reason the previously designated reader didn't show up. For this reason, I got very good at doing the haftarah on short notice, sometimes *very* short notice.
But I hadn't read any haftarah publically in over 20 years, and at all since I put one on tape for someone when I was a senior in college in 1993. And I work full time, and I have two nine-month-olds, neither of which was true when I was in high school. So learning time was scarce. But I got lucky with this one: it was only nine pesukim (verses), so I could learn it very quickly and with minimal practice.
And people told me at kiddush on Shabbat that I had done it very well. And for that I credit the man from whom I learned haftarah for my bat mitzvah: he taught me to slow down, read each word deliberately, and to focus on the nikkudot (vowels) and where the accents fell in the words. In fact, the nicest compliment I got on the reading was from a friend who said she could understand the reading from hearing me read it, not from looking at the words in the chumash.
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