Shabbat III

[cellio]

(After lunch she commented that she felt outclassed by me, but I hastened to point out that everyone in this program is going to have stronger and weaker areas. I, for instance, do not know squat about teaching. I also wonder where she got this impression in the first place; we didn't really talk torah much at lunch, and I haven't talked too much about my own background with her, aside from describing our congregation and how I've learned about leading services. I suspect she leads services more than I do, actually, because we have rabbis. It will be interesting to learn about the backgrounds of everyone else in the program; I hope the orientation session includes these kinds of introductions.)

Another ten students or so drifted in over the course of the afternoon and evening. All but one of them had trouble slogging through Back to the Sources. Good; it's not just me. :-) (Some of my classmates had trouble with the talmud chapter, which I found to be intuitive -- but they completely grocked the bible-seen-through-literary-criticism part, which had me saying "yeah sure, if you say so" quite a bit.)

After havdalah some of us went out to an Indian restaurant for dinner. We have a mix of backgrounds (not surprising). The biggest surprise was when we were talking about the sizes of our congregations and one person said "nine". Nine families? No, nine people. They are a very old congregation (organizationally, but also member age in many cases) and used to be much much bigger. Wow. Nine. (At the other extreme, someone in our group comes from a 2000-family congregation.)

I've met one person I knew (of) previously: a woman named Suzanne with whom I've exchanged email. (We're both on the URJ worship mailing list.) Everyone else (so far) is new to me, but easy to talk with.

The people who are here so far are a fun group, and I think it will be easy for us to fall into long rambling conversations. Between that and the 13-hour days (shacharit at 8AM; ma'ariv starting at 8:30PM), I predict limited sleep. But that's quite all right, for something like this. (I do intend to write notes each night, as part of gathering my thoughts. When I'll get to post them remains to be seen -- probably the following night.)