Illustration Credit: Elad Lifshitz, Dov Abramson Studio
Send us your thoughts or questions from learning the parashah. We’ll write back to you, and some will get published in future issues of Devash! Write to us at [email protected].
Hi Hadas, great question!
This is actually a case where different communities have different traditions about where to end the aliyah. Some humashim end the fifth aliyah on pasuk 23, while others continue until pasuk 26.
The reason this happened here is because there is a debate about how to read the ending phrase of verse 26, אָז הוּחַל לִקְרֹא בְּשֵׁם יהוה (then they began to call on the name of God). Some people read this positively, as a reference to the first prayers to God. Others read it negatively, as referring to when idol worship began. Someone in this last group felt that the aliyah shouldn’t end on such a negative note (which is one of the rules of making an aliyah!), and so decided to shorten it and begin the sixth aliyah early.
This is a long way of saying: according to some people, pasuk 25 is in this aliyah, while according to others it isn’t!
In this week’s parashah, Shemot, you can see another example of not wanting to end an aliyah on a negative note. The first aliyah ends in the middle of the story about the midwives. The story really ends with Pharaoh decreeing that the baby boys should be drowned (Shemot 1:22).
Why don’t we just end the aliyah at the end of the story, and then start the next aliyah with the birth of Moshe? It’s because we don’t want the story to end with such bad news. So instead, we stop in the middle of the story, at the good part about the midwives’ heroism.
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