cellio | JWC Shabbat service

This morning I participated in the annual Shabbat service held by the (Pittsburgh) Jewish Women's Center. I'm not really a member of the group (been to a couple functions, on the mailing list, don't pay dues), but several women in my congregation are and they recruited some of the rest of us.

I chanted torah, and it was the longest portion I've done to date (about three-quarters of a column in the scroll). I was a little worried about that, but apparently I wasn't the only one so they told us "do as much as you can and we'll fill in from a chumash as necessary". However, I really wanted to meet this challenge.

It went pretty well. I had told Aya (who was acting as checker) in advance that I was confident of the text -- but that this didn't mean I had it right. What it meant is that if I made a mistake I would make it with confidence and she would have to interrupt me. There were a few places where I was a little uncertain of the trope, however, and I warned her that if I paused she should give me a moment before assuming it was a text failure. (It didn't occur to me to ask her to name the trope symbol if that happened.) As it turned out, though, I did make a couple text errors that she corrected, and I didn't have to pause and contemplate the trope. I don't think I made any trope errors, actually. Oh, and that spiffy section I mentioned a while back, part of the motivation for learning the whole thing? That went off splendidly; I got compliments.

I was a little nervous, but this didn't really show until I got to the end of the portion and noticed that my hand was shaking while I was pointing to the end of the portion. I think this was not actually caused by the reading per se; when I got up there I found that the calligraphy on this sefer torah was much smaller and sloppier than I'm used to, and there were cases where I would not have known what a letter was or where a word boundary was if I hadn't practiced this a gazillion times. If I do this again, I should ask if they have access to a different scroll. Oh, and next time I'll know to ask to see the scroll before the service starts if it's an unfamiliar one. :-) (I know the two scrolls most likely to be used in my congregation's morning minyan, and the one used for weekdays at the other congregation I visit. I have read from all of those without incident.)

There were seven assigned readers. One did not show (!) and was replaced by someone reading from a chumash on very little notice. (Even the one person I know to be fluent couldn't read directly from the scroll cold.) One chanted half and read half, two read but not the whole thing, and four of us chanted the whole thing. (Actually, now that I think about it, one of those might have chanted most but not all of her part. I'm not sure now.) As I predicted, I think I was solidly middle-of-the-pack in terms of skill.

The service overall went pretty well. There was a lot of singing, and I knew about two-thirds of the melodies (but picked up most of the others trivially). They handed out percussion instruments; next time I will do predatory choosing and take the large loud tambourine to keep it out of the hands of someone sitting next to me. :-) The song leader was very good (she's a pro) and the service leaders in general were good.

We used what I gather is the latest draft of Mishkan T'filah, the forthcoming Reform siddur. (Y'know, the economics of publishing have really changed. They've published a bunch of draft editions; I don't think that would have been feasible a generation ago.) They were on loan from URJ so I couldn't borrow one for a few days to look it over more closely; oh well. They've fixed some of the things I considered to be bugs in earlier drafts, but they've introduced some things that really annoy me. Oh well; I guess that's an inevitable consequence of committee-produced products.

The service was long (almost three hours, without musaf), and also started late. It was funny -- at 9:30 (the scheduled start time) the organizers were huddling in the front of the room, and all of the people from my congregation were exchanging glances. We start on time, always (barring something really unusual). Others present made comments about "Jewish standard time" and thought nothing of starting (ultimately) 15-20 minutes late.

Some semi-random notes on the liturgical details:

Music was used very well in the opening sections of the service. The "service proper" really begins with Barchu, the call to worship, but that's about an hour into a traditional service. The stuff up to that point is preparation to get yourself in an appropriate state for prayer. I find that music really, really helps me with that.
One of the leaders always feminized the blessings (that is, made God female), and I found that this really, really grates on my nerves. I suspect I'm in a minority among those likely to attend a women's service.
There is a style I have encountered a few times (once from a visiting scholar, once at HUC, here) that I find disconcerting: chanting a blessing half in Hebrew and half in English (bracha formula -- the opening six words -- in Hebrew and the rest in English). Some congregations do this for accessibility (not everyone can read Hebrew), but that's not a factor when everything is transliterated.
Ok, almost everything is transliterated in this siddur. They did not transliterate Ashrei, which is conventionally done responsively. When my congregation test-drove an earlier draft, we actually pasted the transliteration in over top of the English "alternate reading" (which is really, really lame). In a siddur that is 90% (or more) transliterated, it is unconscionable that they didn't do it for this. I raised that point two years ago, but obviously it didn't help. Bah.
As long as I'm ripping on the siddur: they still have some deliberate mistranslations. This is dishonest, especially in a book where 95% of the translation is accurate. Give me the real translation and footnote it if you have commentary! But don't lie to me!
Right before the Sh'ma, they paused and asked us to study some commentary with a partner for a couple minutes. It was an interesting idea, though I'm not sure how well it worked. But I did learn some interesting explanations for why two letters in the Sh'ma are written larger than the rest in the prayer book.
We chanted the v'ahavta (almost) correctly according to the trope symbols, which is not how most people do it. Basically, the melody used for this has been affected by the folk process, and a lot of siddurim don't print the trope symbols so even if you know what they mean you can't necessarily do it. (I should mention in passing that there are a couple dozen systems of trope out there, so there is not one right way to do this. But the common chanting is not self-consistent, and that's a no-no in all of them.)
We did the Amidah (central prayer) thus: the first three blesisngs together (through Kedusha), and then silently to the end (coming together for the singing of Oseh Shalom). I find I like this better than all-together or all-silent.
The leaders were a mix of Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist. We did not do a chazan's repetition of the Amidah, nor did we do musaf. So we followed Reform practice, mostly. Except for the part about running almost three hours.
In an early draft of Mishkan T'filah they did something daring: they (mostly) restored the traditional text of the g'vurot (second blessing of the Amidah), specifically the part about resurrection of the dead. (The Reform movement removed that early on, replacing "ha-meitim" with "ha-kol" from the holiday Amidah.) This set off something of a firestorm, and when we got to it today I noticed that it was back to "ha-kol". Well, until I glanced at the facing page and saw the other version offered as an option. No, no, no! The point of this siddur is to provide one service (with lots of flexibility). If you're going to make a change, stand by it. If you're not ready to stand by it, don't offer it as an alternative -- the current siddur doesn't, so you're not taking anything away. If the Reform movement is not ready for resurrection, that's fine -- just skip it. But the "include both" reasoning leads to, for example, three different versions of Aleinu in this siddur, when there should be one. If these things are important enough to justify alternate texts, then what else is? Don't open that can of worms! (This fight is lost, I'm sure, but I'm going to send mail to the editors anyway.)
They did something interesting with the aliyot during the torah reading. Before each reading, the leader summarized the contents of that particular section and then invited "all who feel moved" to come up for an aliya based on some link to that text. For example, in the part about treatment of slaves, she invited people up who feel that they are enslaved by some circumstance (family, routine, job, whatever). I usually hate this sort of "all who will" approach to aliyot, because an aliya is something you're offered, not something you take IMO, but tying it to the torah portion made it more attractive. Alas, most of the criteria were more negative than positive, which meant that going up could be seen as embarrassing, which I do not think was their intent. Actually, this may have worked better in an existing congregation (like our Shabbat morning minyan) where everyone knows everyone else and is more likely to open up; it didn't work so well in an insta-congregation like we had today.
I think a 20-minute d'var torah was longer than I would have done were I organizing this, especially when the person reading haftarah was separately doing commentary (only about 5 minutes that time, though).
The kavanah (intention, mindfulness) was pretty strong in the room. This is harder when people don't know each other and the liturgy has unfamiliar bits, so the leaders deserve a lot of credit.

All in all, it was a pretty good service, with some things I liked and some I didn't care for. People were very friendly and everyone was working together, which made a big difference.

If they ask me to participate in a future service I'm not sure what I'll say. On the one hand it was fun, but on the other, it was a lot of work to learn the portion and I didn't get to put that work to use for the benefit of my own congregation. Maybe that means I should focus on chanting torah in my own congregation and ask to lead a part of the service if JWC invites me again. Leading doesn't require nearly the preparation that chanting torah does.

After I got home Dani and I headed out to an SCA event. More about that later, but I will mention the Jewish tie-in here. Halacha holds that if a negative consequence of keeping Shabbat is merely financial (and not of the will-be-out-on-the-street-if-this-goes-wrong variety), you keep Shabbat. This is one of the reasons that we don't conduct business on Shabbat even though you could make more money by keeping your store open on Saturday. More personally, it was the basis for my agreeing to let Dani drive my car -- with its previously-pristine clutch -- to the event, though Dani normally drives an automatic. Ouchy ouchy ouchy. :-)

JWC Shabbat service

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