What follows is an excerpt from a Friday night lay-led service I led at Congregation Betenu on 11Oct96.
The Rabbi usually talks about a Jewish custom at this point in the service, and I'd like to tell you about a Jewish custom that is becoming nearer and dearer to my heart, chanting Torah, which I plan to do in a while. A long, long time ago, most people were unable to read and reading material was scarce; this was before the Gideon Bible could be found in any motel room! So the educated person was expected to memorize the Torah in case there wasn't a copy around. The easiest way to do so was to give it a tune. This is how you learned the alphabet, right? Some orthodox guys I know start humming when they try to recall a particular passage, so I guess the technique still works; I suppose I almost have the sections I've been chanting recently memorized too. Now why do we do it when we're together? Back in the Babylonian days, there were a few generations who had to go without religious school, and knowledge of Torah and law became scarce. Our leaders set up public Torah readings as a way to let everybody refamiliarize themselves with Torah, for all its legal, historic, poetic, ethical and allegoric value. It is, in a way, a nice liberal arts education in one neat, sacred package.
The object of our chanting Torah is to give our community the chance to hear it, to appreciate its beauty and its lessons. In that spirit, tonight I will chant so you can hear the beauty of the Hebrew and I will read you the English so you can understand it as a starting point of the discussion, because that's the most important use of the Torah in this generation. I should also note that the tune I use is different from that most often used here. In addition to the consonants written on the scrolls and the vowels and punctuation omitted from the scrolls, the Torah has musical (or cantillation) marks, called tropes, which are also omitted from the scrolls. It's all those omissions that cause me to have almost memorized this section.
The tropes are a very early system for representing music. They usually occur one per word, so they each represent more than one musical note. Just like the words, the tropes are best viewed in phrases. There are standard tunes for each trope phrase. But just as Hebrew pronunciations varied as Jews spread out across the world, so did the musical phrases vary, but even more diversely. In addition to regional variation, there are different tunes for the same trope phrase for different holidays and different portions of the bible. It is so diversified that I think of them like fonts in relation to the text. So long as the tunes are self-consistant and the text is clear, that's the important thing. Out of necessity I've developed my own cantillation as a hybrid of a Torah reading book from United Synagogue and a cantillation sheet from Temple Beth El because they were different, and neither included all the phrases I needed. So while I claim no pedigree to "Doug trope", I hope you find it clear and suitably beautiful to do justice to our amazing Torah.