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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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it's given me to a couple destinations I've previously tried with
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Then after moving heaven and earth this morning for there to be a minyan, the woman came in (yes, even though it's still shiva) and said thank you again, but did you know that you did it all a little too fast. It kind of annoyed me because a) I did the best I could and don't need the criticism, even constructive -- it's not like I'm going to be in the habit of doing it; b) as you said -- it's awkward, the ones who know do it and the ones who don't just sit there looking embarrassed -- so yeah, I did it fast. It's just not the moment for a spiritual experience. Every shiva minyan I've been to they mumbled through it at 90 mph. Ah well. Let it go...
My geeking question is: does the leader not say tiskabeil in the kaddish, or is it just someone who's a mourner?
About the maariv chatzi kaddish: you're right. And I looked it up one time and the answer was basically "just because." (There's also a long 3rd bracha there after haskiveinu in the traditional amidah that sort of doesn't say anything, which is even more of a break.) But then again hashkiveinu itself is a break between ge'ulah and tfilah.
...SO I suspect, without being sure, that the answer is something like, maariv is of questionable halachic status anyway in that it's unclear whether we need to say an amidah at all. I mean, the requirement to join ge'ulah and tfilah only makes sense if you have to do the tfilah. So various accretions crept in after the shema parts that are obviously mandatory, and then the chatzi kaddish came in as it usually does to signify that we've finished one subsection. I seem to recall reading something about this not long ago and I am curious about the answer.
mostly geeking
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If I may - what do you think your role should be? If it is as a semi-professional provider of liturgical services, then I would think you would finish, accept any thanks offered, and leave. If you wish to be more like a remorseful and supportive visitor, have a bite of something while standing, then leave. If you are a friend of the family, you know what to do....
That's my opinion.
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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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Anything that stresses your scalp can mess up the melanin... Do you carry your head straight or tilted? Does the stress from your bun or ponytail affect one side of your scalp more than the other? Do you always sleep on one side?
"Does she or doesn't she... Only her hairdresser knows for sure."
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Re: mostly geeking
I think that in the past the rabbi or one of our "rabbis on call" that we used last year did the leading. I only got called this time because the rabbi couldn't be three places at once!
Do you mean the titkabeil in kaddish shalem?
Yes. It's not in the mourner's kaddish, but there's still some issue of whether to say it in a mourner's home. If you're a mourner (who also happens to be leading the service and thus saying kaddish shalem), you definitely don't.
what do the assorted variations in the different kaddishes mean?
Okay... here goes. I think all I know is about what you know, but it's worthwhile stepping back and looking at the structure of what's happening. First, there's only one kaddish shalem per service. Second, the hatzi kaddishes all occur in the period between psukei dzimrah (for shacharit)or the start of the service (for the other services) and Aleinu. So they're subdivisions within that longer liturgical unit.
To use the book analogy, it's sort of like the end of a chapter versus the end of a subsection within a chapter. Kaddish shalem, mourner's kaddish, and kaddish d'rabbanan are ends of chapters; hatzi kaddish is the end of a subsection.
In this case the "chapters" are of varying length and content. The main chapter -- the core of any service -- spans the following elements:
a) intro scriptural verses
b) brachot over the shema, if schacharit/mincha
c) amidah/tachanun
d) torah service, if there is one
e) other scriptural verses
Hatzi kaddish separates each subsection; kaddish shalem announces the end of that whole main "chapter."
The core of the kaddish is obviously common to all of them -- the fist paragraph, y'hei shemei etc., and the second paragraph. The remainder depends on what it is that is being "concluded" by the recitation of kaddish. The ostensible rationale for any kaddish is that scriptural verses are being recited; the divisions reflect the purpose of those verses. Kaddish shalem contains the line "titkabeil" which asks that God hear our prayer -- so you can see the core of this is that it follows the amidah.
Aleinu is a late addition to the service as is the recitation of the psalm of the day, psalm for days of awe, etc. Each of them is a distinct "chapter" and provides an opportunity for a kaddish. At the beginning of the service, the introductory psalm before Psukei Dzimrah is also a distinct chapter in this sense.
Kaddish d'rabbanan exists because you've just been reading the passages of study, which include scriptural verses, and so it's also a distinct "chapter."
These would be the rationales offered by the sources. Of course, what is really going on here, which you can plainly see, is that the a)-e) material above is the historical/halachic core of the service and that the hatzi kaddish grew up as an internal set of distinctions within that. Other material was added here and there, and as they came to be regarded as fixed, kaddishes were appended to them to announce that they were done. (I think I explained to you before that one purpose was to provide a lot of places in the service for mourner's kaddish, since originally a different mourner recited each kaddish -- so you needed to "invent" kaddishes to go around.)
Of course this is all just how the Ashkenazic service evolved. Other traditions may handle it differently. But that's what I think is going on.
Once you see the different function of each type of kaddish, it suggests a logic and structure to the thing that never made sense to me before I really started studying the liturgy. I think a big reason Jews are so confused about traditional Judaism is that this kind of stuff is never explained to them.
To return to the original question about maariv: it's the 3rd bracha that has the extraneous scriptural verses. Someone decided along the line that if there are verses, this necessitated a hatzi kaddish (akin to between psukei dzimrah and shacharit proper). And yes, I think it's a late development, particularly because that 3rd bracha is not universal to all rites. ArtScroll even admits as much -- a striking departure from their general "this was all fixed by anshei kneset hagdolah" approach.