Shabbat

[cellio]

My rabbi has been in the hospital since Wednesday. (Ok, the congregation has been told; I don't need to keep that secret any more.) The associate rabbi and cantorial soloist covered Friday night just fine, and it was also a committee shabbat so there were a bunch of extra people with parts, so no problems.

Amusing moment: as I've mentioned before, our congregation reads one aliya (out of the seven that make up a full Shabbat torah reading). This year we're reading slishi, the third aliya. Normally we have one aliya, meaning that we don't subdivide the reading, but when there's one of these committee services they usually do three to give more people a chance to participate. So, they assigned those parts, probably weeks ago. Friday morning the rabbi looked at the portion and realized that it's only four verses long. You need three verses (and some other conditions) to make a valid aliya. Oops. So he read part of the previous aliya too. (Yeah, I didn't know there were any that are that short, either! I found out when I asked someone last week if he could read torah this morning, since the rabbi wasn't going to be there. He looked at it and said "yeah, I can do those four verses". :-) )

Normally when my rabbi isn't available the associate rabbi leads the informal morning service. I have the impression that he's not all that comfortable doing that, because this is an established group with established customs and he doesn't usually come to that service (so isn't clued in about those). We talked earlier this week and he said he would be perfectly happy to just be a congregant and let someone else lead the service, so we did that. This went very well, and when I asked him later if that was weird for him he said no, he's happy and he'd like to keep doing that. Sounds good to me. Today I asked my co-chair to lead; for next week we threw it open and got a volunteer. (Today's leader asked me to lead Ashrei for her, which we do responsively (so most people only know half of it). That's also part of the weekday morning service, so I've gotten quite comfortable with it.)

When I studied with my rabbi Monday I asked if I could visit him in the hospital, and he suggested I come Shabbat afternoon. Either the distance from my house to the hospital is closer to three miles than two or I no longer walk a 20-minute mile. I'm inclined to believe the former, because I know the distance to my synagogue and I walk it regularly. :-) Hey, good exercise. Yeah, ok, I spent more time in transit than actually visiting, but it was Shabbat afternoon. What other pressing matters did I have to attend to?

Next Shabbat I'm participating in a women's service (an annual event run by a local group). I'm reading torah, and if I pull this off it'll be the longest reading I've done so far. I think I'll pull it off. There's some weird trope in the last couple verses, but I'll get the words right at least and so far as I know they won't stop me for trope errors that aren't also phrase-boundary errors, so it should be fine. I believe I will be solidly middle-of-the-pack, skill-wise, among the seven torah readers.