thoughts on worship

[cellio]

This entry is brought to you by some worship-related classes from last week, in combination with some ideas that have come up in my congregation.

But first, a short story from a class handout:

The Sacred Cat
(from The Art of Public Prayer)

Once upon a time, there was a guru in the mountains of Asia who gathered around him a band of monks dedicated to prayer. The guru owned a cat, which he loved deeply. He took the cat with him everywhere, even to morning prayer. When the disciples complained that the cat's prowling distracted them, the guru bought a leash and tied the cat to a post at the entrance to the prayer room. Years later, when the guru died, his disciples continued to care for the cat. But as they say, cats have nine lives, so the cat outlived even the disciples. By then the disciples had their own disciples, who began caring for the cat, but without recalling anymore why the cat was present during prayer. When the cat's leash wore out, they knitted another one in the scared colors of the sky and the earth, and when the post wore down, they built a beautiful new one that they began calling the sacred cat stand. During this third generation of disciples the cat died, and the disciples wasted no time in buying another sacred cat to accompany them in prayer. Their worship was eventually expanded to include the sacred actions of tying the cat to the leash and affixing the leash to the sacred cat stand.

---

One of the worship classes stressed the idea of plotting out a service, much the way that you would plot out a performance. It's not that services are performances per se; nothing that crass. But what you do on the bima, what content you choose (readings, music), how you balance various factors -- all that can have an effect on the mood of the service and, ultimately, what the worshipper takes away from it.

So if you just go through the siddur saying "we'll read this in Hebrew, that in English responsively, sing this together, have the cantor sing this solo" and so on, you've only done part of the work, and not the most important part at that. Before you do any of that, you need to think about the mood and shape of the service. Where are we in the liturgical year? What's happening in the community and the world? What is the parsha and what will the sermon be about? Where do you want the high points, and where do you want the quiet meditation?

We tried to apply this thinking to our group service. We had some readings that one of the members wanted to include that were roughly around the theme of commitment to Judaism, so I said we should have high points during kri'at sh'ma, the part of the service that's about revelation and redemption (accepting the covenant). Given that, we needed to have easily-singable music for the Sh'ma itself and for Mi Chamocha, the song at the sea. Given that, we needed to transition into it from the lower-key part of the service that preceeded it -- that's where using "Open Up Our Eyes", a song that builds up to a very full-hearted Sh'ma, came from. And similarly, the transition from Mi Chamocha to the t'filah couldn't be too harsh, but we had to lower the outward intensity to allow people to focus that intensity more privately for the most important part of the service, direct prayer to God. So I used the traditional melody for Tzur Yisrael but slightly up-beat (in keeping with what came before), slowing it down at the end and going into the traditional (slower) melody for "sefatai" before t'filah.

My point isn't to catalogue our service bit by bit (I could do that, but I'll bet no one else cares), but to illustrate the reasoning we used. (Well, the reasoning I used, but I think we were all working along similar lines.) I've led services before but never with that early design work, and it does make a difference. (Sadly, the service my committee is leading this week was largely put together before the Sh'liach K'hilah program, so it won't show much benefit from this, but there are some bits and pieces I can influence now, and the next service I organize will be much better planned.)

All of this was in the back of my mind Friday when one of our leaders mentioned to me in passing that there were no announcements that night. (Aside: every week some board member gets up, after the sermon and anthem and before the concluding prayers, to read the announcements. It kind of breaks up the service -- not in a good way -- and it's not really a good use of time, because often there's nothing to say that people don't already know, but someone felt it important to have a board member do this every week. When I was a board member I was told this was a way of honoring board members; I personally thought it was stupid and successfully dodged that bullet during my three-year term.)

So anyway, the assigned person for announcements that night had fallen through and there was nothing to say anyway, so this person was suggesting that maybe we didn't need to have announcements every week anyway. I did my best to encourage that thinking. :-) Then someone else said that we really ought to give congregational leaders some opportunity to participate in the service. I pointed out that you can't take something away from someone else to do it; for example, the bar/bat-mitzvah families "own" candle-lighting and kiddush, and aliyot are deliberately distributed throughout the congregation.

Then it hit me. The Friday-night service, which everyone thinks of as one service, is really two: kabbalat shabbat and then ma'ariv (the evening service). Kabbalat shabbat is "welcoming Shabbat", and consists of songs and psalms. Then you have chatzi kaddish and go into barchu like you would for an ordinary evening service.

In our congregation, kabbalat shabbat is all in English except for the songs, which everyone knows. In other words, the barrier to entry is very low. And it's a part of the service that's logically different anyway.

So when my rabbi gets back from camp and I get back from Pennsic, I'm going to suggest to him that maybe, just maybe, a better way to provide a role for lay people in services would be to offer people the chance to lead kabbalat shabbat. I mentioned this to the people I was talking with on Friday (stressing that I had just thought of it in response to their comments and it was only a partly-baked idea), and they reacted favorably. The more I think about it, the more I think it makes sense.

And it doesn't just have to be synagogue leaders, though it'll be easiest to start there. Eventually, it could be a way for other congregants to become involved, particularly if they're celebrating something special (like, say, a wedding in the family).

Comments

[siderea]

Good one! Thank you.