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The weekly Torah portion (Hebrew: פָּרָשַׁת הַשָּׁבוּעַ Parashat ha-Shavua), popularly just parashah (or parshah /pɑːrʃə/ or parsha) and also known as a Sidra (or Sedra /sɛdrə/) is a section of the Torah (Five Books of Moses) used in Jewish liturgy during a single week. It is chanted publicly and aloud 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 a reading (Haftarah) from the Book of Prophets (Nevi'im). There are 54 weekly parashiyot (plural) or parshahs (anglicized pluralization) in Judaism, and the full cycle is read over the course of one Jewish year.
Contents
Each weekly Torah portion takes its name from the first distinctive word in the Hebrew text of the portion in question, often from the first verse. Dating back to the time of the Babylonian captivity (6th century BCE), public Torah reading mostly followed 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.
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.
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.