honors in the synagogue

[cellio]

Ok. I get it now.

When I had been going to morning services for not very long, I noticed a pattern: people in the congregation were given aliyot (saying the blessings for torah reading; this is an honor) in a very rough rotation, but the guy who led services every day never got one. I think, in the 6+ years I've been going there, I've seen him get one once. (Granted, I only go once a week and there are torah readings twice a week plus a few. But still.) The torah reader almost never gets one either, because he's, well, reading. (While historically the person who said the blessings would also read, that hasn't been routinely true for a very long time. The convention now is that the reader and the blesser are two different people except under special circumstances.)

So anyway, that seemed ironic: the aliya is the usual and customary way of honoring someone just a little bit, even if you know it's going to come around to you eventually because you need three per torah reading and there are only 25 people in the minyan, but it's still an honor. And the people who serve the community so there can be a service at which to hand out aliyot never get that honor themselves. I felt bad for the folks in this situation.

But now I am that person (in small scale). I led the entire service this morning; next week the regular guy is going to sit in the congregation rather than up on the bimah (where he was today just in case I needed him to bail me out). I've been gradually working up to this for months, and now I'm there. The training wheels are off and I'm still vertical.

And y'know what? I haven't had an aliya in months and that's just fine. I feel no lack. Getting to lead the service is also an honor, a huge one in fact, and I don't need to be the person who says those blessings when I say so many others and get to spend the entire torah service in close proximity to the sefer torah every week anyway.

That a community is willing to (collectively) say "we entrust you as our representative in prayer" is a pretty darn big honor in its own right, after all. I won't turn down an aliya should it happen in the future, but I'd be just as happy to see it go to that quiet person in the back row.

Comments

[sanpaku.livejournal.com]

That's just it: you give it to someone who isn't already doing something. Being the prayer leader is a form of "honor" just as much as aliyot are, if not more so.

Congrats on honing your leading skills! There will probably be a time or two when things don't go quite right and you won't feel "vertical," but that's why you get back up on the bike, as it were, until it becomes second nature...