Torah Reading

Mapach pashtah zakef katon...

I'm back to my Bar Mitzvah days. About a month ago, I agreed to read torah at my cousin Kenny's aufruf. His wedding to Lauren is coming up next Sunday, August 27th in Seattle. Although I used to read torah back when I was around Bar Mitzvah age, I had forgotten how much was actually involved with this. For the past 2 weeks, I've been practicing daily. There have been some advances in technology since those days that are helping me along. For example, all my studying is being done on the internet. I found a website that has recordings of the torah trup in case I can't remember the notes. There's a site where I can listen to someone do the readings, and read along with the trup and vowels. The bottom of the page has the words as they look in the Torah, without trup or vowels. My strategy is take a section, learn it well enough so I can record myself doing it, and then read from the Torah section, using the tape as a reference. Then I take the tape, along with a printout of what I've learned so far on the Subway with me in the morning and coming home in the afternoon. It's been working pretty well. I have about half of it learned. I'm finding that it gets harder as you go, because I have to learn more but remember all the parts I've already learned. I'm finding all of this a pretty interesting challenge, albeit very time consuming. The benefits of my wisdom and the advances in technology since the Bar Mitzvah days are pretty much cancelled out by my lessened ability to learn and memorize things. But, hey - my cousin only gets married once...or so we hope. :)