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shiva minyan, and community versus personal needs
I hesitated. He heard the pause. I said I try not to drive on Shabbat. He said I was pretty far down on the list of people he could call. I hesitated a bit and then said yes, I'd do it.
I then apologized for my reaction; if my rabbi asks me to do something that is within my power to do, the answer should be "yes of course". The needs of the community trump the needs of the individual, after all. I do not want it to be difficult for my rabbi to call on me for assistance, especially when, as recently as Thursday, I told him that he should call on me for help when he needs it. He said there was no need to apologize and I obviously had to work through that. I think everything is fine, but I still feel a little bad that it happened that way.
It made me realize that the tension between personal observance and community expectations is probably pretty strong for Reform rabbis -- and, by extension, para-rabbinic folks. In the Conservative movement the question would not have even been raised, because there is a presumption that we all share an observance level. Not so in the Reform movement, and as a result the understanding is not there if the rabbi tries to tell a mourning family "we can't do this". So we may try to gently steer things in the preferred direction, but when push comes to shove we do what helps the family to grieve.
So for the first time in years I drove on Shabbat. I thought this would distress me, but because I was doing it to perform a mitzvah it did not overly bother me. (No, I don't plan to make a habit of this.) And the family was certainly appreciative. (I know one of the children of the man who died.)
Now in addition to the transportation issue, there is something more fundamental here: we don't (publicly) mourn on Shabbat. One is supposed to suspend shiva for Shabbat and then resume it after. So a shiva minyan on Shabbat is not covered in the liturgy.
We have special prayer books for shiva houses. As a sign of the times, they don't include a morning service -- that seems to be very rare in the Reform movement. (Pity; I get regular practice in leading morning services. :-) ) The book contains the afternoon and evening services, with the inserts specific for shiva.
Because it was well before sundown I said we would do the afternoon service and not the evening service. This was fine with the family. I quietly asked about Hebrew comfort (since I only knew about three of the 25ish people there), and I was told that I could expect the "greatest hits" but not much else. (For example, everyone knows the first two blessings of the t'filah in Hebrew.)
The afternoon service begins with Ashrei, which is kind of borderline on that Hebrew scale. I led it in Hebrew and about half the people did the Hebrew responses. When we got to the t'filah I said we would do the first three blessings in Hebrew and the rest in English. We were going along just fine when I turned the page to the third blessing and saw Kedusha staring at me. Um, right, afternoon service has Kedusha there, not Atah kadosh. Executive decision: English. Might not have been necessary, but I suspect it was.
Structurally, the t'filah is three opening blessings, stuff in the middle, and three closing blessings. On a weekday the stuff in the middle is 13 more blessings; on Shabbat it's different. I had already reconciled myself to doing the weekday text even though it was Shabbat; without any other prayer books, I didn't think I had a choice. (Were it not a setting that specifically supports participation we might have found out whether I can do the Shabbat intermediate blessings from memory. I suspect I can, but I haven't tested that.)
But, as it turned out, this siddur is weird. I've lead shiva minyanim several times but never the afternoon service, so I was completely unprepared to find three or four short, vague blessings in English (the Hebrew option wasn't even there) and then Oseh shalom -- skipping right over the three closing blessings. I actually thought my copy was missing a page, but no, that's how it was printed. I am puzzled. But I've learned something valuable; next time I find myself leading an afternoon service out of that book, I will have people turn to the version of the t'filah in the evening service instead when we get to the intermediate blessings. That version is complete.
I should mention that while I obsess about this stuff because it's my job as service leader to get it right (or come as close as I can), the family didn't see any of this. The ones who don't know liturgy didn't know anything was wrong; any who do know could see what I was working with for materials and probably just shrugged. I talked to the family member I know about it afterwards, as I think she knows the liturgy somewhat, and she said what I did was fine with her.
I stayed for a while after the service; they seemed to want that. The person I know introduced me to assorted relatives, one of whom sits on the national movement's board of trustees. (Or directors. I'm not sure which we have.) He asked if I'd been through the para-rabbinic program and I said I'm in it now. We talked for a while about the program, which he feels is very important. He had been to services the previous night and asked me some things about our congregation; he seemed to be favorably impressed with us. I'll try to remember to pass that on to my rabbi.
He asked me where I'd learned Hebrew and I said it was mostly by coming to services and studying torah and a little from a couple classes. He then asked me, in Hebrew, if I speak Hebrew, at which point I, err, provided a clear demonstration that comprehension is easier than generation. I knew what he said; I knew what I wanted to say; I didn't know how to formulate it. (And, well, I didn't know one verb I wanted to use.) So I shrugged and said "katan" -- which means "small" but probably doesn't mean "a little", but that was the best I could do. This is the second time this has happened to me, so I should prepare an answer for time #3.
So what I really want to be able to say is, roughly, I don't speak but I do understand some. I believe the first part of that is "ani lo medaberet [lashon Ivrit]". My dictionary reports that "understand" is "heivin" (that's the infinitive form); would that turn into "meheivinet"? That's parallel but somehow feels wrong. And I've completely blown off the question of binyan, which is wrong. I have no real clues about how to convey "some"; I pretty much don't know how to form words that aren't either nouns or verbs. :-) So, yeah, not ready for the streets of Tel Aviv just yet...
Re: try that again with correct markup :/