A Torah scroll and silver pointer (yad) used in reading.

The appropriate parashah is chanted publicly by a designated reader (ba’al koreh) in Jewish prayer services, starting with a partial reading on the afternoon of Shabbat(Saturday, the Jewish Sabbath), again during the Monday and Thursday morning services, and ending with a full reading during the following Shabbat morning services. The weekly reading is pre-empted by a special reading on major religious holidays. The Saturday morning and holiday readings are followed by an often similarly themed reading (Haftarah) from the Book of Prophets (Nevi’im).

The custom dates to the time of the Babylonian captivity (6th century BCE). The origin of the first public Torah readings is found in the Book of Nehemiah, where Ezra the scribe writes about wanting to find a way to ensure the Israelites would not go astray again. This led to the creation of a weekly system to read the portions of the Torah at synagogues.^[2]

In ancient times some Jewish communities practiced a triennial cycle of readings. In the 19th and 20th centuries, many congregations in the Reform and Conservative Jewish movements implemented an alternative triennial cycle in which only one-third of each weekly parashah was read in a given year; and this pattern continues. The parashot read are still consistent with the annual cycle but the entire Torah is completed over three years. Orthodox Judaism does not follow this practice.

Due to different lengths of holidays in Israel and the Diaspora, the portion that is read on a particular week will sometimes not be the same inside and outside Israel.

Division into weekly parashot

The division of parashiot found in the modern-day Torah scrolls of all Ashkenazic, Sephardic, and Yemenite communities is based upon the systematic list provided by Maimonides in Mishneh Torah, Laws of Tefillin, Mezuzah and Torah Scrolls, Chapter 8. Maimonides based his division of the parashot for the Torah on the Masoretic text of the Aleppo Codex.^[3]

Table of weekly readings

In the table, a portion that may be combined with the following portion to compensate for the changing number of weeks in the lunisolar year, is marked with an asterisk. The following chart will show the weekly readings.

References