I can't be entirely certain, but it sounds like our current cantor, Lauren Bandman, on the audio. She is indeed excellent.
Knowing Torah in detail, so that you can quote from it, refer to it, and find your way around its provisions, with fluency, is the highest of Jewish scholarly virtues. But memorizing it per se, the way one would memorize a poem, is not something that, as far as I know, is urged upon students. The same on both counts applies to Talmud, which is enormously longer than all of Scripture put together, so nobody would try to memorize much of that. I suspect your friend memorizing Torah parts was doing it either as mental exercise or to get comfortable with the portions she was reading for bat mitzvah, the same way that I did.
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Date: 2013-09-16 12:46 am (UTC)Knowing Torah in detail, so that you can quote from it, refer to it, and find your way around its provisions, with fluency, is the highest of Jewish scholarly virtues. But memorizing it per se, the way one would memorize a poem, is not something that, as far as I know, is urged upon students. The same on both counts applies to Talmud, which is enormously longer than all of Scripture put together, so nobody would try to memorize much of that. I suspect your friend memorizing Torah parts was doing it either as mental exercise or to get comfortable with the portions she was reading for bat mitzvah, the same way that I did.