Shabbat dinner

[cellio]

Our congregation has a fairly new "20s / 30s" group, in an effort to make people in that age bracket become more involved and feel more welcome. (Many congregations have problems attracting and keeping people in that bracket.) This is explicitly not a "singles group", so I went to the Shabbat dinner they held Friday night before services.

It was fun. I previously knew only two of the ~25 people who were there, which just emphasized the point to me that we have a mostly-disconnected group of members. There were both couples and individuals.

They asked us to light candles and make kiddush and motzi at our tables, rather than one person leading for the entire group. I'm not sure that worked; we ended up bumping into the singing from each others' tables sometimes. The rest of my table elected me "most likely to know the words and carry a tune" or some such when I wasn't looking, so I ended up doing candles and kiddush before insisting that someone else participate and do motzi. (Someone obliged.) Later the organizer told me that next time maybe she'll ask me to lead for everyone; she likes my voice. Ok, if she wants to give me kiddush that's fine, but she should pick two other people for the two other blessings. (Besides, I cease to be elligible for this group in a year, so she shouldn't get used to me. :-) )

The dinner was very pleasant, though we didn't sing songs the way I thought we would. I don't know how one organizes that. (I've never been able to make it happen when I invite people over for Shabbat, either. I feel self-conscious saying "ok, let's sing now".)

Services were good. The rabbi had, uncharacteristically, announced the topic of his sermon in advance, because people had been asking him when he was going to talk about Iraq and he wanted to let people know that this week would be it. He said lots of good things with which I agree; I'm not going to try to summarize. It was very well-written; maybe he'll publish it.

Comments

Re:

[retrodee.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I think I am better off going to a reform synagogue. Been so long, I mainly forgot a lot of the language and religion. :)

[cellio]

Reform will tend to lead you through the service more, yes. (In some Orthodox congregations, though IIRC PZ is pretty good about this, it's easy to get lost and they don't announce page numbers.)

Tree of Life is also pretty accessible -- mix of Hebrew and English, lots of congregational reading, easy to know where you are, etc. I'll be leading Shabbat evening services there on Nov 1, BTW.

Re:

[retrodee.livejournal.com]

Nice! Do you speak Hebrew fluently? I could use help getting back in the nick of things. :)

If I can make it to Shabbat services, Nov 1, I will try. I kinda miss going to services.

Hebrew

[cellio]

I can pronounce Hebrew correctly but (on a cold reading) slowly. I'm pretty good at the liturgy, due to frequency of use. :-) My non-liturgical comprehension, and grammar, are pretty bad; I can't hold a conversation in Hebrew, for example. I suspect my vocabulary is a few hundred words, most of it grammatically incorrect if I try to construct sentences. :-)

There is a free class on basic Hebrew that comes around a few times a year. It'll teach you pronunciation; it doesn't attempt to do comprehension (which requires much more work, of course). Go to http://www.njop.org, find the page for "Hebrew reading crash course", and search the locations. They update the list about once a week, so keep checking back until you find something nearby.

Re: Hebrew

[retrodee.livejournal.com]

Thank you! :)