![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Shabbat
Between unpacking (not complete yet, of course), tiredness, feline demands for attention, and a heavy storm that came through around 6:30 that didn't seem to be ending, I decided not to go to evening services. I needed the decompression time more. So I didn't find out until I showed up Saturday morning that my rabbi has been in the hospital for the last several days -- he's ok now, and apparently was discharged today (I tried to call him there but failed), but he obviously wasn't available to lead services. The director knew that I was out of town, so she called my very-capable vice-chair, who lined up people to lead services, read torah, and give a sermon. It sounds like they did a great job. I wish I'd seen it.
The effect on me, though, was that when I walked in at 8:20 or so this morning, the director met me and said I needed to lead the service and torah study. The service was not a problem at all (and I got a bunch of compliments, though the sopranos were unhappy with my taste in keys :-) ), but my lack of preparation was blatantly obvious at torah study. And to make matters worse, we were in that long stretch of Numbers 7 that describes offerings from each and every tribe, in painstaking detail, and they're all the same. What can you do with that? I tried to get people to talk about why the torah would go to that much trouble instead of saying "each tribe brought the following stuff", but I didn't have a clever answer myself so the conversation rambled quite a bit. Oh well; when my rabbi comes back next week, if he doesn't like the fact that we covered about 80 verses in one week, he's free to backtrack. :-) I just feel a little bad that we probably didn't give a good impression to the young couple that was visiting us for the first time today. (They left immediately after the service, so I didn't get a chance to talk with them.)
We have an associate rabbi, whose plane returning from military training was delayed by those storms. At 8:20 they hoped he would be there for the 10:30 bat-mitzvah service; that no one raided our minyan at 10:25 for a leader led me to conclude that he had made it. I saw the director on the way out and she confirmed this, though she also said that she would have called the cantorial soloist, who is out on maternity leave, before raiding us. We don't dress formally for the early minyan, so that's probably right, though I also told her that I can do Shabbat services on basically no notice (sans torah :-) ) should this be needed in the future.
I came home to find that Dani was home from Pennsic, which surprised me. He told me that they had gotten major storms all night, much of the nearby land was swamp, cars were getting stuck in the mud, all the canvas was soaked, and camp tear-down is now tomorrow instead. Sounds wise. Fortunately, he'd eaten before getting home, so the fact that I hadn't factored him into my lunch plans was not a problem.