This morning I realized I hadn't yet posted my Torah poem for this week. (Indeed: I hadn't even written it.) I usually like to spend the whole week working on my Torah poem, but this week other work got in the way of that practice. Life's like that sometimes. Nu, fine, I figured I'd write a poem this morning and post it brand-new. I've written to deadline before. No big deal.

I went to the Hebcal.com site (which is where I usually grab an online link to the Torah portion of the week) and Hebcal told me that the week of September 5 we're reading the portion called Ki Tavo. Which is...fine, except that last week I wrote a poem for parashat Re'eh. So if this week is Ki Tavo, I missed two Torah portions somehow.

That was completely disorienting for me. I was so sure I'd posted a Torah poem every week this summer, even when I was in transit from here to Jerusalem and back; did I really miss two consecutive weeks of Torah portions? I kept looking at my calendar and at my poems in bafflement. I felt like I'd somehow come unstuck in time. How on earth did I miss two weeks of Torah?!

And then I shrugged, wrote a poem for Ki Tavo, and posted it.

Not until Rich posted a comment asking, "hey, aren't we reading Shoftim this week?" did I think to look more closely at my trusted Hebcal page...at which point I realized that the page is already showing readings for 5769. It is true that Ki Tavo will be the reading for September 5 -- in 2009. But this year, on this date, we're in parashat Shoftim. I didn't somehow miss two weeks' worth of Torah portions over the last few weeks; I just didn't look closely enough at the Hebcal site to realize that they'd jumped the gun and were already offering next year's Torah reading dates!

Mea culpa, gang. So...um...the poem I just posted will be seasonally-appropriate in two weeks! And I'll do my best to get a Shoftim poem online soon. Whoops.