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shiva minyan, short takes
I think I've finally, without really thinking about it, derived the appropriate response to the family either thanking me or praising me: "I'm glad I could help". I mean, you don't want to say "happy to help", given the circumstances, but it feels like I need to say something.
There is a dynamic of cues, some subtle and some overt, when leading a service, to clue people in about when to read together, stand/sit, and so on. Must remember: nothing subtle applies to mourners. They're pre-occupied; do not make them expend cycles on the mechanics of prayer. The ones who pray regularly will know anyway; the ones who don't need the direction.
Must remember to ask my rabbi #1: does our congregation have any conventions about what to do after the service? Leave immediately, accept the offers of food, hang around for 5-10 minutes and then slip out? Not sure. I tend to do the last unless I actually know the family.
<geek> Must remember to ask my rabbi #2: why is there a chatzi kaddish between hashkiveinu and t'filah? I'm so used to skipping over it -- because we almost never get a minyan for weekday evening and it's not there (in Gates of Prayer, anyway) in the Shabbat evening service -- that it took me by surprise tonight in the special siddur for a house of mourning (which I've rarely used). On the one hand, as long as there are interruptions between ga'al yisrael and t'filah anyway (hashkiveinu, v'shamru on Shabbat) what's the harm?, but on the other hand, we don't generally use that as an excuse to compound problems. Hmm. My rabbi and I studied that passage in B'rachot not long ago (well, maybe we'll yet return to the thread) and the sages raised hashkiveinu but said nothing of kaddish. Later addition? </geek>
Short takes:
I don't really care about my hair turning silver -- I actually think it can look striking under the right circumstances -- but is it too much to ask my body for symmetry? Why is the right side of my head so much more melanin-challenged than the left side? One of life's little mysteries, I guess.
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cahwyguy: Google
Maps is live. So far, I'm liking it a lot better than
Mapquest. (Haven't given it any tough cases yet, but the directions
it's given me to a couple destinations I've previously tried with
MapQuest are much better.)
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Not always true - there are a lot of subtle and not-so-subtle variations in the "rules" between different congregations and minhagim. Most regular daveners will clue in and follow "minhag ha-makom", whatever the local custom is - but what do you do when you're at a small Bar Mitzva and a third of the room, not including the hosts, stands up for the Kaddish? Stand up while the ones standing sit down embarassed?
At a shiva house you sometimes have people thrown together from different congregations, in addition to all the usual stresses that folks are under.
I've seen a lot of the "90-mph davening", and I really hate it, but there are a lot of people who just want a minyan to be the minimum necessary to fulfill the requirement. (For that matter, I've seen my father speed-daven by himself when there was a pressing time constraint.) After all, a lot of people feel that a shiva minyan is just an excuse to force the community to visit and comfort the mourners, and the food/conversation afterwards is a better way to accomplish that.
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Speed-davening: I guess there's no diplomatic way to ask someone from the family "do you want me to just fulfill the obligation, or are we really trying to pray here?". :-) Later in the week the pattern might become clear, of course (if it's the same leader each time or they talk to each other); in this case I was doing the second shiva service and the only advance information I had about liturgical choices was that the sons were good with Hebrew but the rest of the family (including the wife) seemed to do better with English. So I did Hebrew for the parts I thought would be most familiar (first three blessings of the amidah, v'ahavta, a couple others) and used English for most of the rest.
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