Shabbat services

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Friday night murmur311 took me to Valley Temple for services. The same rabbinic intern who was there last year was there; they got him for a second year. (He's entering his final year of rabbinic school this fall, so this will presumably be his last stint as an intern.) Brad is an engaging service leader, and it's obvious that he and the congregation have clicked a lot in the last year. I was surprised that he recognized me and remembered that I was here for the Sh'liach K'hilah program; unless Jenny said something to him recently, that's a pretty good memory!

Service anthropology:

There was a fair bit of singing. I knew most but not all of the melodies; the ones I didn't know were easy to pick up. Most of the ~20-25 people there joined in on the singing.

V'ahavta was sung in English; I hadn't heard that before, I don't think. We sang the introduction to the t'filah (s'fatai tiftach) but then read the first blessing instead of singing it. I think that worked better, actually; it was easier to concentrate on the meaning of the words that way, even though the melody is thoroughly ingrained so I'm not spending cycles on that. (Well, not usually -- Thursday morning someone told me I'm not using the exact melody Tree of Life is used to and it's distracting people, so I must get a definitive rendition of that soon.)

Silent prayer at the end of the t'filah was silent for a while, and then the rabbi started playing very quietly on the guitar and slowly building up to y'hi l'ratzon (which we sang together). That worked well. The guitar is probably better-suited for that than the piano or organ, which are often the instruments used. (I don't know what the practical minimum volume is on piano, but our pianist doesn't get nearly as quiet as this guitarist did.)

Another nice bit: after aleinu, instead of reading one of the pre-kaddish readings like in almost every other congregation I've visited, the rabbi asked us to choose one of the readings to read silently (or none at all, if we preferred other words). Then he read the list of names and proceeded to kaddish. (This congregation reads names for the entire first year, by the way, not just the first month (and anniversaries) like my congregation. I was initially puzzled by the length of the "recent" list compared to the "yahrzeit" list.)

The service was about an hour long, including a 10-minute sermon and excluding a torah service.

Jenny and I chatted with the rabbi some after the service. He seems like a really friendly person; he'll be a good catch for some congregation. (Hmm, we'll be looking for an associate rabbi to start in a year, which is when he graduates...) We ended up talking a bit about rabbinic job-hunting and he explained how HUC's matching process works. (Ask me later if you're interested. He said it was similar to what medical schools do for residency placements, if that helps.) I said I might be seeing this process from the other side in the coming year (ok, I'm being presumptuous and assuming I can get onto the search committee), but this is interesting for other reasons too. He and Jenny had both recently read a book called The New Rabbi that he recommends highly. (He named the author. I forget. I'll look this up on Amazon when I get home if one of you hasn't fed it to me by then. :-) )

Shabbat morning we went to Temple Sholom, one of three Reform congregations within a block. That seems unusual to me; I think at least one of them split off from one of the others, but I didn't get the full history. (In Pittsburgh, by comparison, there are five Reform synagogues -- two in the city about two miles from each other, and the other three each in a different suburb ten miles out or so.)

Their rabbi said to tell my rabbi hi. I guess on the one hand you'd expect a movement's rabbis to generally know each other, but on the other hand there are what, 1200 or more Reform rabbis in the US? That's a lot of people to know or even know of.

Service anthropology:

We used "gates of gray" (that is, the more recent Gates of Prayer), same as Friday night. My regular minyan doesn't use it on Shabbat morning, so I had not previously noticed the complete absence of p'sukei d'zimra from the liturgy. How strange!

The group sat in a semi-circle (they call it "service in the round") and reading passed around the circle, like my group used to do. (We still sit in a circle, but now we do most readings together.) Most prayers were sung or chanted. The unfamiliar melodies were a little more unfamiliar this time. When we got to barchu we didn't have a minyan but someone reported seeing people walking into the building, so we sang Hineh Mah Tov until they showed up and then went on. Improvisation is good. :-)

I got an aliya, so I got a close look at their sefer torah. The script is larger than I'm used to (and maybe a little clearer). Ooh, nice.

(Aside: it's been a long time since I've heard my Hebrew name from the bima, because I don't get aliyot at Tree of Life any more and most of the lay torah readers at my congregation don't call people by Hebrew names. So I found myself thinking "oh cool, my name will get some use", but it turns out that this rabbi just uses secular names. Oh well.)

The person who chanted the haftarah blessings was very precise, was reading from the siddur, and used a melody that's broadly the same as what I know but different in many details. I've been told that those blessings use haftarah trope, and I suspect that she was chanting it correctly per the trope, while I come from a congregation of people who learned the melody by rote and mostly don't know how to read haftarah trope. Neat. (I really hope that I have the chance to learn haftarah trope at HUC this week; learning (torah) trope last year in that format was very helpful. Learning it on my own would be a lot harder.)

After we put the torah away, the rabbi led a discussion of the parsha before going on to the concluding prayers. I've seen torah study before the service and after the service, but not usually during. It worked well, and the immediacy of just having read the passage was helpful.

Before mourners' kaddish (which, by the way, both congregations I visited called by a different Hebrew name that I can't now remember but might recognize), after reading the names from the congregation the rabbi added two names from their sister city in Israel. (He didn't name it, though.) I wonder if that's a regular practice or if it was specific to a recent terror attack. (In general, I wonder how they would collect the information, and whether they would have a specific sister congregation in that city for this purpose.) I don't really know very much about the "sister city" concept, though I know the Pittsburgh Jewish community has one too (Misgav/Karmeil (approximately), I think).

During the torah study there was some discussion of why this story of a non-Jewish prophet would be part of the torah. One of the people there thought Bilaam had had a true change of heart (hey, that sounds familiar :-) ), though I think I remember reading last week that Rashi blames Bilaam for the Israelite men going on to sin with the Moabite women, so I'm not so sure that works. (Or maybe I'm misremembering and Rashi blames Balak. I don't have a copy of Rashi to check -- at all, let alone here in Cincinnati.) I suggested that while the torah is primarily about Yisrael, including a passage showing that even a gentile "gets it" about God's goodness and might could be valuable to later readers (and to b'nei yisrael too, if they were of a mind to pay attention). The rabbi thought this was a good interpretation. (I didn't bring up Rashi.)

I wonder, in thinking about it, if the Israelites at the time were even aware of Bilaam's curses-turned-blessings aimed at them. I don't see how they would be unless told. While this is not the generation that rebelled against God, they still might have been boosted somewhat by the endorsement from outside. Hmm.

I liked both congregations that I visited this Shabbat. I noticed that both have rabbinic interns in addition to rabbis; I guess proximity to HUC has something to do with that. :-) The intern I met Friday night knows one of the student rabbis we're going to have this week (not surprising; they're presumably classmates) and had good things to say about him. Presumably we'll meet them all tomorrow.

Comments

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Kaddish Yaton?

That's it.

Thanks for the other information.