[Avodah] haftarah

[Micha Berger]

On Thu, Jan 10, 2019 at 03:12:37AM +0000, Rich, Joel via Avodah wrote:
: I recently was in a Shul in Aretz where they said the haftara from
: a Chumash yet the baal korei read it for the oleh. Apparently this is
: standard practice in this Shul - has anyone seen this done elsewhere?

There are a number of shuls in Passaic where this is done. My own shul
shul has a ba'al qeri'ah reading from a printed Tanakh codex every week.

I prefer it, as I feel so nervous about how my slow meticulous reading
is going to annoy mispallelim who would prefer more haste.

The whole idea of having a baal qeriah to begin with was to level the
playing field so that no one is too embarrassed when he is given an
aliyah. In todays world, there are many men who lack the Jewish education
to know haftara trop, so that original rationale should extend to cover
haftarah from a printed and fully pointed book too.

For that matter, my father reads the berakhos out of a siddur (or the
sheet on the shulchan, if there is one), for the same reason as having
the ba'al qeri'ah. Why should people who dont know the berakhos by heart
feel uncomfortable by being the only ones who need to look at the text?

(I wonder if Passaic's high percentage of baalei teshuvah, people with
less practice reading with trop, is why it's more common in my neck
of the woods. That is the population my father is concerned about WRT
the berakhos.)


Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             I have great faith in optimism as a philosophy,
micha at aishdas.org        if only because it offers us the opportunity of
http://www.aishdas.org   self-fulfilling prophecy.
Fax: (270) 514-1507                              - Arthur C. Clarke