(4) Hear, O Israel! The Eternal is our God, the Eternal alone. (5) You shall love the Eternal your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might. (6) Take to heart these instructions with which I charge you this day. (7) Impress them upon your children. Recite them when you stay at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you get up. (8) Bind them as a sign on your hand and let them serve as a symbol on your forehead; (9) inscribe them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.
-Trop / Trope
-Ta'amei Hamikra / Te'amim / Neginot
(3) A voice calls out: “Clear in the desert A road for the Eternal! Level in the wilderness A highway for our God!"
(5) You shall love the Eternal your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might.
(37) The Eternal said to Moses as follows: (38) Speak to the Israelite people and instruct them to make for themselves fringes on the corners of their garments throughout the ages; let them attach a cord of blue to the fringe at each corner. (39) That shall be your fringe; look at it and recall all the commandments of the Eternal and observe them, so that you do not follow your heart and eyes in your lustful urge. (40) Thus you shall be reminded to observe all My commandments and to be holy to your God. (41) I the Eternal am your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt to be your God: I, the Eternal your God.
(16) The Israelite people shall keep the sabbath, observing the sabbath throughout the ages as a covenant for all time: (17) it shall be a sign for all time between Me and the people of Israel. For in six days the Eternal made heaven and earth, and on the seventh day He ceased from work and was refreshed.
(8) Remember the sabbath day and keep it holy. (9) Six days you shall labor and do all your work, (10) but the seventh day is a sabbath of the Eternal your God: you shall not do any work—you, your son or daughter, your male or female slave, or your cattle, or the stranger who is within your settlements. (11) For in six days the Eternal made heaven and earth and sea, and all that is in them, and God rested on the seventh day; therefore the Eternal blessed the sabbath day and hallowed it.
by SIÂN GIBBY
Historically, there are a couple of reasons women have not had aliyot, gone up to the bimah to either say the blessing for the Torah reading or chant it themselves. One reason involves kavod ha tzibbur, or honor of the congregation. Put (very, very) simply, kavod ha tzibbur posits that a situation in which anyone other than a serious and thoughtful man, a pillar of the community, standing at the bimah and engaging in a ceremonial way with the Torah runs a risk of imperiling the dignity of the congregation (this is particularly true if the person at the bimah can be said in any sense to represent the congregation before God). This would seem to argue for having individual synagogues make their own decisions about who is and is not grave and decorous enough to be at the bimah. It also makes a good case that those who are at the bimah should take being up there extremely seriously.
But as Leora Tannenbaum, an Orthodox woman writing for Tikkun, has argued, there’s no reason to believe that women would take this any less seriously than men—and indeed much to suggest the opposite. “When I am learning and practicing my leyning, I feel as though the Torah is inside my head, heart, and body. It is an organic part of me,” she wrote. “Why would anyone want to deny this experience to girls and women?