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Related blessings precede and follow the haftara reading. The origin of haftara reading is lost to history, and several theories have been proposed to explain its role in Jewish practice, suggesting it arose in response to the persecution of the Jews under Antiochus IV Epiphanes which preceded the Maccabean Revolt, wherein Torah reading was ...
Each Torah portion consists of two to six chapters to be read during the week. There are 54 weekly portions or parashot.Torah reading mostly follows an annual cycle beginning and ending on the Jewish holiday of Simchat Torah, with the divisions corresponding to the lunisolar Hebrew calendar, which contains up to 55 weeks, the exact number varying between leap years and regular years.
Torah reading (Hebrew: קריאת התורה, K'riat haTorah, "Reading [of] the Torah"; Ashkenazic pronunciation: Kriyas haTorah) is a Jewish religious tradition that involves the public reading of a set of passages from a Torah scroll.
The Torah reading of the week contains the Song of the Sea (Book of Exodus 15:1–18). This was the song by the Israelites after crossing the Red Sea. There is no special Torah reading. The haftarah includes the Song of Deborah. There is an Ashkenazi custom to feed wild birds on this Shabbat, in recognition of their help to Moses in the Desert.
Typically, the Torah reading platform, which Sephardim generally call Teva/Teba, is traditionally not in the front of the sanctuary but in the center or back of it. In Middle Eastern communities, the Torah is read on a horizontal box also called the Teva/Teba rather than a slanted table as the Ashkenazic or Western Sephardic tradition.
Maftir (Hebrew: מפטיר, lit. 'concluder') is the last person called up to the Torah on Shabbat and holiday mornings: this person also reads (or at least recites the blessings over) the haftarah portion from a related section of the Nevi'im (prophetic books).
Furthermore, there are communities who have the practice to read this special Haftarah only when the Sabbath falls on the day before Passover and otherwise they read the regular Haftarah, [60] and the practice of the Vilna Gaon is to do just the opposite and to read this Haftarah every year except when the Sabbath falls on the day before Passover.
In Talmudic times, readings from the Torah within the synagogues were rendered, verse-by-verse, into an Aramaic translation. To this day, the oldest surviving custom with respect to the Yemenite Jewish prayer-rite is the reading of the Torah and the Haftara with the Aramaic translation (in this case, Targum Onkelos for the Torah and Targum Jonathan ben 'Uzziel for the Haftarah).