shabbaton

[cellio]

This year's shabbaton was wonderful. The sense of connection and completeness that it provides is just so much stronger than a "regular" Shabbat. I want more of that! :-)

We had 24 people this year, and went back to the site we used before the one we've been using for the last few years. This site is a longer drive and is a little more primitive in some ways, but it's in a more pleasant location (lake, trees, privacy) than the other, and the communal space is more comfortable. I also found the staff we encountered to be more friendly. And it doesn't have crosses and stuff all over the place like the Lutheran camp. I hope we keep going to this one.

One of the best things about a retreat like this is that you're not time-constrained. You don't have to worry about the folks who are getting antsy because the service is running long and they want to get their kids in bed, or the rabbi isn't getting ready to run upstairs for the second service, and stuff like that. Things take as long as they take and no one cares. So we took some things slower, and did stuff we sometimes skip, and experimented with some things. (Like an actual individual Amidah -- this congregation is mostly used to saying it together, and I've been hoping we would try cutting people loose to go at their own pace. That seemed to work, so I hope we do it more.)

Friday night, after the service and dinner and before the singing that goes into the wee hours, is usually kind of quiet and meditative (niggunim, storytelling, focusing on breathing, and so on). That worked really well this year. I think my rabbi was fairly relaxed by then, maybe more relaxed than in past years.

I found myself being my rabbi's "right-hand man" in assorted things. It was very natural for both of us. I mostly did a good job with the things he asked me to do, and I think he noticed some of the things he didn't ask me to do that just happened. One thing he asked me to do is to be the "checker" during his torah reading; usually he doesn't have a checker, so this came as a bit of a surprise, but I think he's trying to introduce the idea. (In particular, our lay torah readers usually get checkers -- usually someone who's actually fluent, me if she's not there -- and perhaps he's trying to be consistent while reinforcing that idea.)

I led birkat hamazon (grace after meals) after lunch, and tripped over some minor wording tweaks the Reform movement makes in the name of egalitarianism. Oops -- should have read ahead. So I bungled the melody on one part, but recovered.

Currently, I think a lot of this assistance has to do with me being worship chair. By the time I'm no longer worship chair I'll be almost a year into the Sh'liach K'hilah program, so I hope I still get to do some things. (Obviously we will have to avoid stepping on the toes of the next worship chair, but the heir apparent is a friend and we can probably roll with whatever happens.)

This afernoon during the study session we talked about middot, which are, basically, self-improvement techniques. (The text we had referred to this as "tikkun middot", analogous to "tikkun olam" but focused inward rather than outward.) I've encountered many of the ideas before, of course, but not all neatly packaged up under a single heading. Some of them are things I've been working on for years; others are things I should work on more; still others are things that I think I mostly have a reasonable grasp of.

I spent some time this afternoon with one of our newer torah readers, who will be reading in a few weeks (Bamidbar). She asked if I could chant some of her portion for her (she wanted to check some things). I said "I'm not very good at sight-reading, but let me look at it". I did, and it was all standard trope with no surprises, and the text was very easy (and repetitive), so as it turned out, I could chant it for her. Nifty! I'm glad a new person got this portion; we assign portions based on dates, mostly, not based on any sort of evaluation of difficulty.

Odd encounter: Friday when we arrived I noticed that one of the staff members seemed to be staring at me, but I shrugged it off. A bit later he came up to me and said "I think I know you but I don't know why". So we started comparing notes; it turns out that his brother was fringe SCA at CMU when I was there, and he recognized me from visits to his brother's fraternity house (where the SCA hung out and a RuneQuest! game I was in was held). Small world. He's now working for AOL in Virginia, but he works at this camp on some weekends. (Am I just incredibly bad at things like this, or is this a fluke? I would not know by sight any of my sister's friends from 20+ years ago; heck, I probably wouldn't recognize most of my own college classmates, if we weren't otherwise close.)

The only problem we had the entire time was in following the directions to get there. For my (and maybe your) amusement, here follow the directions with my annotations in italics:

• Take turnpike to Exit 9, Donegal. (Exit 91. Glad the name was right.)
• Make left onto Route 31 East and proceed 11.7 miles. (12+ miles. Don't use decimals if you don't mean it.)
• Just outside Bakersville, make a right at the road just past the Ashland gas station. (We saw the word "Bakersville" on one building; I guess this was "just past Bakersville". Also, nothing labelled "Ashland"; we assumed the Exxon station was the referrant.) (There are signs pointing to Seven Springs (no) and Pioneer Park.) (There are signs for Seven Springs when coming the *other* direction. Ask me how we know. :-) )
• Proceed 3.7 miles to the end of the road and make a left. (Roads appear to be unnamed out here.)
• Follow this road 16 miles, via New Centerville and Rockwood. There will be 2 Deer Valley signs in Rockwood to guide you. (Ok, hands up if you read this as "Rockwood is close to the end of those 16 miles and near the next step in the directions". Thought so. As it turns out, Rockwood is about 8 miles down the road, there is *one* sign for Deer Valley, and the actual turn is 9.2 miles farther down the road. In the future in would be better to just leave Rockwood out of it.)
• At the end of the road, turn right and go 3.3 miles.
• Make a right to the end of this road and make another right. (Those two rights are about 2 miles apart, as it turns out.)
• Proceed 3.7 miles to entrance.

When we arrived, I told the person who had distributed these directions (which came from the site, not from her, just to be clear) "I write precise instructions for a living, and I have some corrections for next time". :-)

As we were going down that penultimate 2-mile stretch, wondering if we were in the right place, the driver made some comment like "what else could go wrong?" We were running somewhat late at this point. We rounded a bend and she pointed down the road and said "what's that?", pointing to the back of a buggy with a large orange triangle on it. I said "a speed reduction for us"; it was an Amish horse-drawn buggy. He turned onto a side road before too much longer, but we got a good laugh out of it.

Comments

[dagonell.livejournal.com]

"(Am I just incredibly bad at things like this, or is this a fluke? I would not know by sight any of my sister's friends from 20+ years ago; heck, I probably wouldn't recognize most of my own college classmates, if we weren't otherwise close.)"

It's a fluke. I'm amused because a woman I used to date in college joined the SCA a few years back and doesn't remember me. One of these days, I'm going to surprize the hell out of her. :D
-- Dagonell