Hard on the Ba’al K’ri’ah – Naso
The sidra this week is exceedingly long and it is hard on the Ba’al K’ri’ah (Torah reader), though the words are not nearly as difficult to read as Tazri’a/M’tzora in the middle of the Book of Vayikra.
The sidrot vary in length. Some are much shorter and are completed more quickly. Others take longer and if there happen to be two or three readings on a Shabbat morning it makes the reader’s task very onerous. The advantage of being a ba’al k’ri’ah is however that one gets to know the text well.
I had a teacher who wanted to illustrate a Hebrew grammatical phenomenon and chanted a whole sidra to the class until he got to the word he wanted. That teacher told us that each year he studied the weekly sidra through the eyes of a different commentator.
Sometimes he had a Rashi year, sometimes an Ibn Ezra year, sometimes a Sforno year. When he prepared the leining (the weekly reading) he looked not only at the words but the ideas.
