congregational doings

[cellio]

Question to me this morning: people scheduled my rabbi to be in two places at once this Shabbat; can I learn three verses of this week's parsha before Saturday morning? Sadly, I suspect the answer is "no", even if I get to pick the verses. (I think sometime this year the time will come when the answer would be "yes".) This illustrates a problem we're going to need to address, though -- people get sick, after all, and we don't have people who can read nearly-cold (yet). So either we cultivate some or we admit that there might be weeks when we don't have a torah service. I wonder what other congregations do when their torah readers are suddenly unavailable. (We ended up deciding to punt this week. We'll read the portion from a chumash, without the torah service proper.)

Some members of the worship commitee saw my subversive side for the first time last night. (I thought everyone knew already. :-) ) Once a week we have a weekday service (evening). We just don't have support for every day, but this is an attempt to do something. The folks who set this up chose a night when there's often other stuff going on in the building that dove-tail with this (7:30 service and 8:00 meetings), but it hasn't worked. We rarely have a minyan. Someone lamented the fact that even board members tend not to come a little early on meeting night, even though as leaders of the congregation they really ought to do so at least occasionally (IMO).

Board meetings are preceeded by a mailing (minutes, agenda, financial statements). This mailing has a cover sheet that specifies the meeting time (among other details). So, I said, change that cover sheet: "service 7:30 chapel; business meeting 8:00 library". See how many people will just show up to the first place/time listed. :-) (I think, actually, that we are going to do this.)

Comments

[estherchaya.livejournal.com]

My former congregation does that. They word things as nebulously as possible. If minyan is at 7:30, and the meeting follows, they say:

"The board meeting will be after minyan at 7:30" Now, technically, what they should say is "The meeting will take place after the 7:30 minyan" or "The meeting will take place at approximately 8pm, after the 7:30 minyan" or some such thing.

But wording it as they do, most people can't figure out whether it's the MEETING or the DAVENING that begins at 7:30. So they end up showing up for davening. I always thought it was a sneaky trick and it always somewhat annoyed me. But now I'm wondering if they did it on purpose.

Re:

[cellio]

"The board meeting will be after minyan at 7:30"

Ah, the fine art of misdirection. It's not actually a lie as written; it's just ambiguous. Such things tend to cause my inner word nerd to simultaneously cringe at the sloppiness and admire the craftsmanship. :-)

There might be another effect. If meetings occasionally start "early" (say, 7:55) because the davening is faster that night, people may show up early. This means that even if they didn't come for davening, you can grab them for mourners' kaddish if necessary.