[Avodah] And so the game continued

[Jay F. Shachter]

> 
> Not an answer to the question but a related story. A shul received a
> set of clafs for haftorot and decided that they should be used every
> Shabbat. But since most people couldn't say a haftorah from a claf,
> the procedure was to call up the oleh, he would make the brachot for
> the haftorah, the ba`al koreh would read the haftorah from the claf,
> and then the oleh would say the ending brachot. 
> 
> Sounds like a good compromise. Yes, except the ba`al koreh didn't
> know all the haftorot from the claf so he had a Chumash on the side
> which he would use, a bit (but only a bit) surreptitiously, to read
> many of the haftorot. And so the game continued for many years. 
> 

Why?  Why didn't the ba`al qri'ah just write in the vowels?  We are
obliged to read the book of Esther from a parchment (which is,
parenthetically, a better term than "qlaf"; books of the Bible aren't
supposed to be written on qlaf, although they can be, they're supposed
to be written on gvil) and yet we are allowed, lkhatxilla, to write in
the vowels if we need to.  A fortiori, we are not obliged to read,
e.g., the book of `Ovadya from a parchment, so if we do we should
certainly be permitted to write in the vowels.  Am I missing something?
I haven't studied these laws (just enough to make that pedantic
correction about "qlaf" and "gvil"), does it say anywhere that it's
forbidden?

By the way, as long as I am making pedantic corrections, because we
are Jews and we enjoy pedantic corrections, please don't call him the
"ba`al koreh".  Call him the "ba`al qri'ah" or the "qoreh", but a
"ba`al qoreh" is a to`evah, even though it is now legal in all 50
states.

               Jay F. ("Yaakov") Shachter
               6424 North Whipple Street
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                       jay at m5.chicago.il.us
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               When Martin Buber was a schoolboy, it must have been
               no fun at all playing tag with him during recess.