What is a Parashah?

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A parashah (פָּרָשָׁה "portion," plural: parashot or parashiyyot) formally means a section of a biblical book in the Masoretic text of the Tanakh. In the Masoretic text, parashah sections are designated by various types of spacing between them, as found in Torah scrolls, scrolls of the books of Nevi'im or Ketuvim (especially megillot), Masoretic codices from the Middle Ages and printed editions of the Masoretic text.

The division of the text into parashot is independent of chapter and verse numbers, which are not part of the Masoretic tradition. Parashot are not numbered, but some have special titles. According to Maimonides Laws of Tefillin, Mezuzah and Torah Scrolls 10:1), incorrect division of the text into parashot, either by indicating a parashah in the wrong place or by using the wrong spacing technique, halakhically invalidates a Torah scroll according to Maimonides.

The division of parashot found in the modern-day Torah scrolls of all Jewish communities (Ashkenazic, Sephardic, and Yemenite) 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 Aleppo Codex - http://www.aleppocodex.org/.

The order

A parashah break creates a textual pause, roughly analogous to a modern paragraph break. Such a pause usually has one of the following purposes:

- In most cases, a new parashah begins where a new topic or a new thought is clearly indicated in the text.

- In many places, however, the parashah divisions are used even in places where it is clear that no new topic begins, in order to highlight a special verse by creating a textual pause before it or after it (or both).

- A special example of #2 is for lists: The individual elements in many biblical lists are separated by parashah spacing of one type or another.

- To decide exactly where a new topic or thought begins within a biblical text involves a degree of subjectivity on the part of the reader. This subjective element may help explain differences amongst the various masoretic codices in some details of the section divisions (however, their degree of conformity is high). It may also sometimes explain why certain verses that might seem like introductions to a new topic lack a section division, or why such divisions appear in places where no new topic is indicated.

In most modern Torah scrolls and Jewish editions of the Tanakh, there are two types of parashot: "open portion" (parashah petuhah), often abbreviated with the Hebrew letter "פ" (respectively “P”, in English) – roughly similar to a modern paragraph - and a "closed portion" (parashah setumah), abbreviated with the Hebrew letter "ס" (samekh), respectively “S”, in English. A "closed portion” leaves a space in the middle of the line of text, where the previous portion ends before the space, and the next portion starts after it, towards the end of the line of text.

When a section of the Torah is read in public from a scroll as part of the synagogue service, the sections are often divided in ways that take the parashah divisions into account, but there is no hard and fast rule for this.

One basic halakhic rule for public reading is that no fewer than three verses at a time be read. As a corollary to this, there is a specific rule regarding parashot: One may not leave off reading less than three verses before the end of a parashah, nor may one end off reading by starting a new parashah but leaving off less than three verses from its beginning.

The sections from Nevi'im that are read as haftarot are based on custom. At times, some of these customs choose the exact beginning or end of a haftarah because it coincides with a parashah division.

What is Masorah

It refers to the system of critical notes on the external form of the Tanakh. This system of notes represents the literary labors of innumerable scholars, of which the beginning falls probably in pre-Maccabean times and the end reaches to the year 1425. The language of the Masoretic notes is partly Hebrew and partly Aramaic and it took centuries to produce a tolerable uniformity among all the circulating copies. The history of the Masorah may be divided into three periods: (1) creative period, from its beginning to the introduction of vowel-signs; (2) reproductive period, from the introduction of vowel-signs to the printing of the Masorah (1425); (3) critical period, from 1425 to the present time.

Sources:

http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/view.jsp?artid=246&letter=M