Exhilarating Chanting

Please enjoy the above blurry screenshot from the live-streamed video of me leyning in May 2025.

I have been teaching and chanting Torah & Haftarah for almost exactly 7 years. A lucky number in Judaism! It represents completeness, holiness, good fortune, and relates to big Jewish concepts like creation, Shabbat, the branches of the menorah, the encircling in Jewish wedding ceremonies, the seven wedding blessings, and so much more! Here's a helpful AI overview https://tinyurl.com/59ycwcs9

Despite my many years of experience and active toiling in the Torah, I confess it had been a while since I chanted for a service! And what a thrill I was reminded it can be!!! 

The heart pounds, the adrenaline rushes, the mind fogs, the hands shake, the eyes and ears, for some reason, decide to focus on every single distracting sound or peripheral movement in the room...

Oh but then. Suddenly. You hit your stride. 

Words of Torah flow out of you. Each one in the right order and the right pronunciation and sung with the right tune. Like a river, unleashed and ungovernable, rushing forth. Your own mind, body, consciousness, nefesh (soul) are momentarily not yours to manage or even bother to try to control; you find yourself just there, along for the ride.

It's a spiritually, physically, scientifically fascinating experience, truly! 

Then, as the Torah treadmill moves and your eyes and voice glide across it, an area of the text in which you've consistently made the same mistakes over and over during practice, approaches. Will I remember the correct conjugation of this verb "ימתוּ" ("yoom-too" vs. "ya-moo-too")? Among everything else going on in my mind, body and soul, will I somehow manage to recall that in this aliyah alone, the first three instances of this word "הוא" say "hoo" but that the fourth (sneak attack!) says "hee"?? 

Why, yes! Yes I will! *applause break in my own mind!* The crowd of mind-critics cheers! The heart pounds extra with delight! I feel a smile creep across my face as I realize I'm past the minefield--

A gentle voice, "Um, that's 'amam/עמם', not 'amo/עמוֹ'"

Mild panic.

"Sorry? What was that?" 

A finger enters my peripheral vision and without touching the actual parchment, my second reader is reaching over my shoulder to point out the word I must have mispronounced at the end of 2 psukim (verses) back. Not that I noticed having done that, mind you, but my job isn't to dispute him in this moment. It's to fix it and move on. 

"Oh, got it. Thank you." Except I'm two and a half psukim head of that spot now, finally OUT of the minefield....

The silence in this massive sanctuary is deafening. The people are waiting. Did I lock the door when we left this morning? 

The people remain waiting.

What can I do? I do what I have to do. I go back into the mistakes area and revisit the pasuk where I must have made the mistake.

All eyes remain on me. Is my hair still in place?

Cue the crickets.

Rewind the Torah treadmill! 

*crank *crank *crank 

"Ahem," And off I go once again. 

--

I recall a valuable lesson that I've observed from many of my students. When you're learning your portion, you tend to make the same mistakes over and over again, working hard to correct them and remember the correct pronunciations of each word for the next time.

But when you're up there on the day-of, I have to remind myself and my students, you're going to make BRAND NEW mistakes that you never even considered or came close to making before that moment. 

'amam/עמם' and 'amo/עמוֹ' are spelled differently and are very obviously different words! And I DIDN'T EVEN NOTICE MYSELF MAKE THE MISTAKE. But I got through it and, if I do say so myself, I did a bang-up job. 

As I always say to my students, "Brains. Super weird, huh?" 

And they are, to say the least. 

But that's part of the fun! Part of the thrill! 

Part of the inexplicable delightful experience of chanting Torah.