cellio | shiva minyan, short takes

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shiva minyan, short takes

I led a shiva minyan tonight for the family of a congregant. He was 90 years old and his wife and two siblings (all comparable in age, or so I understand) are still alive. I know people are living longer than ever now, but that's still pretty impressive.

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.

From 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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Wow, you and I lead parallel lives. I led a shiva minyan for the first time yesterday. It was kinda weird. They were all milling around and half of them seemed totally disinterested. I just said that it was my honor to be there, etc. I boogied pretty much as soon as I gave my regrets to the woman who was sitting shiva and asked her plans for the minyans. That worked for the "decent interval" thing. (This stuff is not my strong suit -- a good reason not to be a rabbi.)

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.

I understand what you mean about the uneven silvering. I have the beginnings of a silver streak on one side of my head but not the other. It's not noticeable yet, but sheesh :-)

I spotted my first gray hairs (well, actually, a friend spotted them for me) when I was 25. I have quite a few more now, and they are all on the right side of my head. The silvery patch starts about an inch diagonally backwards from my widow's peak, to be precise. I don't mind it all that much -- one of the nice things about being a redhead is that it takes a while to notice the gray. My husband is adamant that I'm just going blonde in that spot, and it does look rather like a light streak if I part my hair around there. The weird thing is that I started going gray in exactly the same spot and at the exactly the same age as my mother (also a redhead).

With me, the silvering is assymetric along a different axis. I'm getting loads of grey in my beard, but none on my head. It has made me think about Grecian Formula for Men!

You said: "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."

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.

It comes down to a question of what my role is supposed to be -- I've never asked, but I need to. (The only shiva minyanim I've attended that I didn't lead were ones where both the rabbi and I knew the families well. He stuck around a while, but that doesn't tell me what to do in the general case.)

I felt like leaving right away would be rude or make the family think they'd inconvenienced me or something. That may be more pronounced for a lay person than a professional, actually -- they might expect the pro to leave but see me more like a visitor. Dunno. On the other hand, staying and visiting would have been very awkward. I wish I were better at reading people.

Before the service I had spoken for a few minutes with the son whose house this was in. Afterwards he thanked me rather profusely for coming and leading, so I chatted with him for a few minutes about his father (well, he chatted; I listened) before I said goodbye.

Wow, you and I lead parallel lives.

And then there's the part about you starting to study Tractate B'rachot. :-)

I led a shiva minyan for the first time yesterday.

Really? Your first time? Wow, I guess I just assumed that you'd done bunches of these in your stint as worship chair at an older congregation.

(This stuff is not my strong suit -- a good reason not to be a rabbi.)

I so wish I had a better handle on comforting the mourner (and visiting the sick, for that matter). If I know the person then we have a common basis already, but what about when I don't? I'm hoping we get a little more into this next summer during the Sh'liach K'hilah program; the couple of relevant sessionas last summer weren't very helpful.

Speed: yeah, it's always hard to judge these things. My analogs were: (1) how much Hebrew? (2) chant or read? (3) speed. I ended up doing more in English than I'd originally planned after they didn't join me in the beginning of the t'filah (with the standard melodies people know from Shabbat services (weekday nusach wasn't even on the docket; we rarely do it)).

Ah well. Let it go...

Yup, that's all you can do. If you were going to be back the next night to lead again it would make sense for her to ask you to slow down, but for a one-shot? Every case is different, so don't let it get to you.

My geeking question is: does the leader not say tiskabeil in the kaddish, or is it just someone who's a mourner?

Do you mean the titkabeil in kaddish shalem? Unless I'm misunderstanding you, that paragraph is not in the mourners' kaddish. (By the way, I would happily follow you down the tangent of "what do the assorted variations in the different kaddishes mean?" if you feel inclined. D'rabbanan and shalem each have a unique paragraph, and then there's mourners', and then there's chatzi kaddish which is a proper subset of the others. There's no "uber-kaddish" from which all others are derived, and I'm a little puzzled about the differences.)

...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.

That much is in B'rachot, and is given as the justification for hashkiveinu and v'shamru. Thus far I haven't seen word one about chatzi kaddish, which makes me wonder if it's a post-talmudic addition to the liturgy.

I mean, the requirement to join ge'ulah and tfilah only makes sense if you have to do the tfilah.

While that's what tradition says, technically that's not true. After all, the argument could have been that if you say t'filah then you must join ge'ulah to it. But that's not how it turned out.

I'm a brunette, but I don't especially mind either. A friend of mine had a good take on this when talking to a third friend who began graying in his 20s and angsted about it: "You are going gray; I am going silver". :-) So hey, whatever. As long as I get to keep my hair, I'm not going to fuss much over hue.

I've never noticed your silver streak. (Is Louie accelerating it? :-) )

I've seen that on several men. I have no idea why that happens, but at least a salt-and-pepper beard doesn't look bad. Style it right and you can pull off "wise". :-)

Yep, I agree.

Also, I take a perverse sort of pride in the gray. It showed up at a time in my life when my stress levels had reached surreal heights. Seeing the gray hair felt oddly like validation that yes, this stress was *real*.

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.

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.

my hair turning silver [...] 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?

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."

I've never led a shiva minyan, but have been to several in the last few years. In my shul, it is assumed that the community will provide at least ten people for a shiva minyan, so even when I didn't know the family well (or at all), there were at least a couple of people from shul whom I knew well enough to be able to shmooze with. In my community, the trend is for people to stay for at least a little while afterwards. Sometimes a family member will say something to the whole room after the minyan; sometimes people will talk in groups... but usually people stay at least 5-10 minutes after the davening. Of course, this is different at morning minyan (which I've been to less often), when people have to get off to work. Also, this is in Manhattan, and most often there are 12-20 people there, of whom only 1-5 are family members... so it's a different dynamic than a house full of family with a leader from the shul coming in.

Really? Your first time?

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.

In my shul, it is assumed that the community will provide at least ten people for a shiva minyan, so even when I didn't know the family well (or at all), there were at least a couple of people from shul whom I knew well enough to be able to shmooze with.

Our congregation does its best to make sure there will be a minyan, but if the family is large enough then people usually only go if they have some connection to the family. I once went to a shiva minyan where the family was very small and the people from the congregation outnumbered the mourners, but that was the exception.

Of course, this is different at morning minyan (which I've been to less often), when people have to get off to work.

Good point. I've never been to a morning shiva minyan.

so it's a different dynamic than a house full of family with a leader from the shul coming in.

That's got to be a little weird for the family, I would think. I hope it's a long time before I'm in that position, of course, but I currently suspect that, if I needed to hold a shiva minyan and neither my rabbi nor someone I already know from shul were available, I'd rather just lead it myself than have a stranger come in for that purpose. But maybe I'm weird. (And yes, I know that I wouldn't be halachically allowed to lead; I'm talking about feelings, not proposed actions.)

Variations among communities: good point!

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.

Anything that stresses your scalp can mess up the melanin...

Wow, I had no idea. Interesting.

I'm not aware of any asymmetries in what I do to my hair. I wear it loose except for SCA events (which represent few-enough days in a year to be irrelevant, I suspect). I used to wear a ponytail (back in college). I don't knowingly favor one side when sleeping. Hmm.

Or maybe my body's just weird. :-)

Well, you could ask if there are time pressures for the service, which puts the possibility of varying service lengths out there...

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shiva minyan, short takes

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mostly geeking

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Re: mostly geeking

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