The morning after I sang my
Haftorah I woke up covered in fur.
Ervin Landau is a businessman who hosted a weekly
haftorah show on Spectrum Radio, London's multi-ethnic radio station.
Others included Torah and
Haftorah readings, with blessings before and after each aliyah.
Kedar, "The Prophetess Huldah," in Rabbi Elyse Goldstein, ed., The Women's
Haftorah Commentary, (Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights Publ., 2004), 390.
It is the prophetic reading (
haftorah) at the Mincha service on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the Jewish year.
(At one point I felt it necessary to ask if they wanted to hear me recite my
haftorah. I still know it.)
We celebrated Passover each spring more as a cultural rite (waiting impatiently for the matzoh ball soup as Grandpa davenned the Hagadah), wore suits and ties on the High Holy Days in the fall ("out of respect," my mother said, and, boy, was it a scandal in the apartment house when my friend Mitchell was seen heading for the playground on Yom Kippur in dungarees), and the boys suffered through endless early evenings in Cheder, paying dues toward that one Saturday morning when the bar mitzvah boy would be called to read from the
Haftorah (when the congregation would be outnumbered by friends and relatives whose synagogue experiences were usually limited to such occasions).
The article "The Passion According to Isaiah" claims that the weekly recitation of verses from the Prophets (
Haftorah) in synagogues worldwide were specifically designed to avoid a passage in Isaiah which Christians interpret as a reference to Jesus.
Instead, it was followed by a very traditionally Jewish Torah service, complete with readers chanting from a Torah scroll in Hebrew and the reading of the
Haftorah portion, a selection from Isaiah.
Like a long singing from the
Haftorah, the 63-minute-plus "Kaddish" only explodes at the end, shuddering toward a dissolution that, here, is the only way to wholeness.
Continue reading "Is There a Biblical Sperm Donor in the Rosh Hashanah
Haftorah?" at...
The young boy's first school report in 1870 showed that he achieved 'excellent' in only one subject, that of 'Religious Studies (Mosaic).' His grades in other subjects were said to be 'adequate.' He clearly had links with Jewish religious life as a young boy because he celebrated his bar-mitzvah by reciting the maftir and
haftorah of Balak and there are records also that he played the piano at synagogue functions.