cellio | Shabbat

You know, I never noticed this detail about the story of Noah before: he doesn't take isolated pairs of anything. He takes seven pairs of each kosher species (which I already knew), and he takes two pairs of each non-kosher species. Not one pair. Somehow I had always read this as "two, one male and one female", but that's not what it says.

Another detail: as a kid I wondered why doves hadn't died out, given that Noah sent one out and it never returned. But, of course, he had backups. Did we just not read very carefully in CCD, I wonder?

Of course, this doesn't take into account any animal births that occurred on the ark. They were in there for close to a year, not just the 40 days of the flood, so who knows how many bunnies came out? I wonder if this is addressed in the talmud somewhere.

Comment from someone Friday: he hadn't been able to really envision anything as big as the mabul (flood) until this week's news from California. I hadn't thought about it in those terms before.

Friday night I somehow managed to walk into services, walk right past someone I know (who was visiting for the first time) without noticing, and sit down. Oops. Didn't notice he was there until the oneg. Fortunately, he had a native guide sitting next to him, and I think he's got decent survival skills for following unfamiliar liturgy anyway, so it all worked out. I would have helped had I noticed.

There were glitches with the morning Torah reading. Apparently the reader did not have a tikkun to practice from, but I thought he said he did, and he hadn't actually been able to practice sans vowels. This makes an enormous difference, and he won't make that mistake again. So he stumbled, but he got through it. And I need to make sure that there is always a designated "corrector", rather than assuming each torah reader will make his own arrangements. (There are only a few of us who are good enough to follow at speed and correct errors. I am not yet one of them, though I can prompt if the reader stops and wants it.)

I'm facing my first scheduling challenge: I'm having trouble finding a torah reader for the first Shabbat in December. I guess by default I get the ones no one else can do, though I'm reading in two weeks and was hoping to not do this more often than about every 6 weeks. I don't want them to get sick of me, and anyway I'm not yet good enough to be able to work on multiple portions simultaneously. So I wouldn't even start that one until after I do the other one. We'll see. I can probably manage.

A few of the members of the morning minyan go, once a month, to a local retirement home (is that the appropriate term these days?) to conduct a Shabbat service for the Jewish residents. (It's not a Jewish facility.) The organizer asked me to go with her this week (she was having trouble getting people and didn't want to go alone). I was just supposed to be another voice; she was supposed to be in charge of deciding what to do. (I knew it would be an abbreviated service, but as I haven't been there I didn't think I should do the abbreviating.)

Then she got sick, but she had recruited two other people, but she wanted me to go anyway because she sees me as more of an expert. Ok... but the other two kept deferring to me even though I didn't want them to. They'd been there before, I said; they should call the shots.

Now I'm pretty comfortable leading services. I can lead a Shabbat-ish service that takes 30 minutes or two hours, and probably anything in between, if I know what the constraints are up front. But the other two turned to me for all decisions, and I didn't know the constraints, and there was much more winging of things than I'm really comfortable with. Like, I would have cut out more of the introductory prayers to allow a complete Amidah, had I known that we were going to be stopped 15 minutes earlier than I thought we were. Stuff like that. Sigh.

This place was also really depressing. The facility is run-down and ugly, and it's obvious that a lot of the staff don't really care about the residents, and some of the residents have picked up on that and are either cranky or withdrawn. Add in a generous dose of residents who can't hear, don't wear hearing aids, and then get mad at you for shouting too quietly, and it's bad.

(I also found myself praying along the lines of "if a place like this is my only choice, please just kill me before it gets to that point". Ugh. Fortunately, I know there are much better places than this out there.)

There were two residents who seemed to care about having a Shabbat service and who were capable of participating. I know we should do what we can for the sake of those two and despite the others, but I don't think I will personally go again. Bikkur cholim (visiting the sick) is important, but I'm just not up for this one. Maybe someday.

Shabbat

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