cellio | Shabbat (mostly)

Wednesday I studied with my rabbi. Later I hope to write more about that -- in particular, the theology behind what the talmud calls "affliction of love". (Briefly, the idea that God gives you challenges because they'll make you better.) I have complicated feelings about this.

A few days ago I received email from a local gentile who's interested in converting to Judaism. (She found me via a mailing list.) She's been reading for a while but hadn't been to services and was nervous about doing that (this sounds familiar), so I invited her to join me for services and dinner.

She's a very nice person. Sounds like a seeker -- she's been thinking about this for years and isn't doing it because of a dating situation or the like. The more she learns the more it resonates for her. She got a lot out of the service, and I think she'll be back. I pointed her at other congregations in the area, too. Sounds like she really likes what she's seen of my rabbi, though; I wouldn't be surprised if she ends up with us.

Dinner was pleasant, and she and Dani also get along well. I'd like to invite her for a holiday -- maybe Sukkot, as she probably isn't ready to build her own sukkah yet. She's been to a few Pesach seders with friends, as it turns out. And if she decides to give our Shabbat morning service a try (she sounded interested, but not this week), I can also invite her back for lunch.

Yesterday there was no bar mitzvah, so we got to have a torah service and the rabbi didn't have to leave partway through study. After the service and study, some of us stuck around to discuss the new format, particularly implementation details. The plan is to do torah study first, so we can guarantee half an hour of the rabbi's time, and then do the service. The rabbi will leave partway through the service (if there's a later service for a bar mitzvah), right around the time the torah service would start. So we need minyan members to be able to complete the service, including reading torah. We have enough volunteers to get this off the ground, and I'm hoping we'll be able to get more, including supporting those who want to learn but aren't ready to just jump in.

We decided to switch in two weeks; we have someone who can learn a short torah portion in that amount of time. (We're not going to do the entire portion.) By virtue of having the foresight to bring a list of dates and torah portions, with room to add names next to them, I seem to have ended up as the person who keeps track of these things. :-) We're doing some delegation, though; the person reading torah in a given week is responsible for leading that part of the service (not just doing the reading itself) or recruiting someone, and also for assigning honors (aliya, hagbah...). That way I don't have to keep track of a bunch of different people for each week and worry about what happens on weeks when I'm not there. I call it distributed problem-solving; one of them called it "making my life easy". These are not contradictory. :-)