On a recent Shabbat morning, Scott Horwitz finished the Torah.
Over the course of 20 years in the volunteer Torah reading rotation at Congregation Beth Sholom in San Francisco, he has, at one point or another, chanted aloud during services every single one of the nearly 80,000 words in Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.
His community made an occasion out of it.
“I don’t even know how to describe it,” Horwitz, a statistician, told J. a week later. “It felt so warm, and I felt so much of my history and my community.”
In addition to Horwitz’s immediate family, Beth Sholom’s committed corps of Torah readers and other Shabbat morning regulars were there. His aunt, Annette Sondock, who taught him to chant Torah for his bar mitzvah decades ago, also attended, along with the cousin he shared his bar mitzvah with.
“I had this contingent of the people who had instilled this in me as a child who were there with me,” Horwitz, 58, said. “And I’ve been in San Francisco for 30 years, longer than where I grew up, so to have that coming together of this community of people who have fostered this in me as a child and as an adult was pretty amazing.”
It’s not entirely unheard of for a regular Torah reader to have read the entire Torah publicly during services, but typically it’s achieved only by a professional, such as a rabbi who does all or most of the readings in their community or a baal korei, someone employed specifically as a Torah reader.
For Horwitz, it wasn’t a set goal until a few years ago, when his wife, Missy Mastel wondered aloud if he had read the entire Torah.
He confessed that he’d never really thought about it before. In fact, he didn’t think about it much for some time after that — but Mastel did.
“I sort of let it go, but she’s not one to do that,” he said.
So she set about contacting all the Beth Sholom members who had been coordinators of the Torah reading schedule over the last 20 years. Many of them still had records of who read what and when. Based on those notes, Mastel and Horwitz created a list of everything left — every passage of Torah they couldn’t yet verify that he’d read publicly.
And so it was that on Saturday, April 6, Horwitz read the final aliyah on his list, the fifth aliyah of Shemini, that week’s Torah portion — and then the sixth aliyah for good measure.
“He also read the sixth aliyah to show that the cycle is complete,” Beth Sholom Rabbi Amanda Russell said. “Like every year [on Simchat Torah], we start right over as soon as it ends.”
Other parts of that week’s portion were read by Horwitz’s adult son and daughter, who he trained to read Torah for their b’nai mitzvahs.
When Aunt Annette taught Horwitz to chant Torah for his bar mitzvah in 1979 at Houston’s Congregation Beth Yeshurun, it was not an entirely one-on-one pursuit. “She was very involved with the teen education around bar mitzvahs, and she led family services and things like that,” he said. “She had created a community of teenagers who read.”
And it was a community of Torah readers that drew Horwitz to Beth Sholom as an adult. There are about 15 regular adult Torah readers currently, plus occasional appearances from recent b’nai mitzvah kids.
“One of the things that sort of connected me most to Beth Sholom was that, almost immediately upon joining, I became part of that core Torah reading community, and they welcomed me and let me read,” he said. “I think that really solidified my connection.”
Since then, Horwitz has served the Conservative synagogue in a variety of roles, including president, ritual committee chair and, of course, Torah reading tutor for b’nai mitzvah students.
It felt so warm, and I felt so much of my history and my community.
At many Conservative synagogues today, it would likely have taken Horwitz years longer to read the entire Torah. Most Conservative congregations today read Torah on the triennial cycle, which divides each week’s portion into thirds. During the first year of the cycle, the first third of each portion is read. In the second year, the middle third is read. And in the third year, the final third of each weekly Torah portion is read.
But not at Beth Sholom, which is one of the last remaining Conservative synagogues on the West Coast where the entire portion is read each week. It has become a matter of pride and distinction at Beth Sholom.
“We have a breadth of young and experienced and veteran Torah readers,” Russell said. “We’re one of the last Conservative shuls still doing full kriya [reading] every week, so it’s something that people here recognize as a special aspect of our community. People here know the importance of it, and so they really showed up.”
In some brief remarks following the reading, Horwitz spoke “about how impressed he is with the cultivation of readers and the diversity of them,” Russell said. “The community was supportive, of course, but it was almost like it was their own accomplishment. This community is what it is because it can come together and recognize this.”
More basic than that, some congregants were simply glad to have a positive Jewish event to celebrate.
“I heard a lot of people say to me last Shabbat that this was a very Jewish-affirming moment that maybe we don’t get enough of,” Horwitz said.
Russell wanted to mark the moment in a special way, but there is no set ritual for Horwitz’s achievement.
When the final passage of a book of the Torah is chanted publicly each year, the community chants “chazak chazak v’nitchazek,” which roughly means “be strong, be strong, let us be strengthened” — but that didn’t seem quite right. So Russell searched for another line that could be chanted to the same tune.
She settled on “Torat Adonai temimah,” a quote from Psalms 19:8. A direct translation would be, “God’s Torah is pure,” but that’s not quite how Russell meant it.
“Most traditionally, ‘temimah’ means pure or correct, but it also can mean complete,” she said.
And for Scott Horwitz, God’s Torah is, indeed, now complete.