Yesterday morning four years ago, the fourth day of Hol Hamoed Pesah (the intermediate days of Passover, between the first and second, and seventh and eighth, "holy days"), was the second time I chanted Torah. (The first was that preceding Sunday.) Yesterday morning, this past Tuesday, along with the friend who convinced me to do it in the first place, we both read the same portions as in 2002. It was a pretty low-key anniversary and didn't feel much different from my reading of that aliyah, plus one or two others, last Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Monday. (On Monday we had unusual trouble gathering a minyan and had to enlist an early-morning synagogue security guard, who did not seem at all pleased even when we gave him the honor of holding and lifting the Torah. I don't blame him; it's not like he was invited because we wanted his specific presence. Any tenth Jewish adult would have done.)
I can now recite the Maftir aliyah in my sleep, and feel like I own it. And I hope and pray that the letters on the scroll will, for my next fifty or so anniversaries of reading this aliyah, continue to look as old and familiar as they did this week.
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