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Tuesday
Monday night and Tuesday morning the staff modelled two non-standard services for us. (In general they have been trying to expose us to new techniques and different siddurim.) Monday night was a shiva minyan; two of the staff members played the roles of the mourners and we held the service in a lounge to simulate someone's living room (complete with suboptimal furniture layout and insufficient AC). Almost everything was familiar to me (I've done these before), though the student rabbi said it's normal to speak words of torah at a shiva minyan and I've only heard that once. This was apparently new to others too; when we asked him about it he said that of course you consult the family to see what they want.
Tuesday morning was a children's service; the conceit was that we were fourth- through seventh-grade students in a daily religious school. They pointed out afterward that they did more types of things in that service than you would normally do in any one, because they were only showing us one and they wanted to plant ideas. Unusual aspects included:
- inviting the kids to sit anywhere in the chapel they felt comfortable (not necessarily in the neatly-laid-out chairs)
- using a projector to display text of a prayer they were teaching (they used a pointer to follow the Hebrew)
- handing out instruments for mi chamocha (and collecting them immediately after), which requires extra people (staff support) but you presumably have teachers
- during the creation prayers (yotzeir etc), inviting kids to either follow in the siddur or use the provided paper and crayons to draw their idea of creation
- repetition: at one point they asked the kids to choose whether to chant, read in Hebrew, or read in English; they reiterated the choices two or three times before calling for the show of hands
- clear hand signals for "play instruments now" and "stop playing instruments now"
- they were very good at handling unruly children gently, though I didn't make specific notes here
Tomorrow morning is our group's service. We met today to assign parts and nail down some final details; I realized later that one idea one of the other group members threw in at the last minute is not going to work, so I'll have to point out the problem to him tomorrow morning. Oh well. You can't think of everything, and we're the first student group so with luck people will cut us some slack. Still, I want it to be good.
Luach games
The late-afternoon class slot today was called "learning to love the luach", taught by Paul, the same student rabbi who's teaching the Hebrew class. Paul is fun. He described himself to us as a very interactive teacher, and he said we'd enjoy the class but wouldn't say anything more.
(The luach is the calendar; in this context it means holidays, the cycle of torah readings, special liturgical days, and using a special calendar.)
When we got there we found the space divided into six teams (of 3-4 people), and he told us we'd be having a friendly competition. There was a series of contests with points awarded after each round. I think of this sort of thing as being for kids, but this group of adults had a lot of fun with it. The rounds generally built in difficulty (let's see if I can recall them all):
- Timed: the envelope contains cards listing all the major and minor holidays; put them in order.
- A series of "name the holiday that..." questions (we just held up the relevant cards).
- I'm forgetting the one that went here; sorry.
- Timed (but longer time limit): the envelope contains a dozen or so special days (holidays, etc) and citations of torah passages; match them up. This one turned out to be hard becaus he didn't give us the parsha names, just the cites (book, chapter, verses). Fortunately, almost half of them were in Exodus and I know my way around the relevant bits pretty well.
- Timed: practical calendar application: questions like "so-and-so is getting married on [date] and will have an aliya the previous shabbat; which portion?" There were a couple questions that looked like trick questions and it turned out he didn't intend them to be. Because there may well be one person in any group who's as pedantic as I am, you've got to be careful in laying out the premises.
- The only non-intellectual contest: each group is assigned a holiday; you have 5 minutes to prepare and 2 minutes to present this holiday. Judging is based on content (covering what it's about, key observances, special traditions, etc) and how engaging it is (generally interpreted as using humor). I hate stuff like that and felt that they were pulling a switch on us by changing the type of contest at that point, especially as this one was worth many more points than the others. I don't care about the scoring, but it's something I would keep in mind if I were doing this as a group study.
Theological introspection
The evening class was called "exploring your own theology". The instructor had assembled a set of 6-8 answers to each of 6 questions about God; we were to first choose our answers to each question and then analyze them. This was implemented as individual pieces of paper (in six different colors); sometimes no single answer fit, so she allowed us to take two if we wanted. (Some people modified the answers, too.) She then handed out a large chart that plotted each answer (and several more that she hadn't provided) by its theologic source -- biblical, rabbinic, Maimonides, Spinoza, Buber, etc etc etc. (There were about a dozen.) It felt sort of like taking those "what religion resonates most for you?" quizzes that float around the net. I wonder if she's seen those.
Between choosing our answers and getting the maps she had us break into discussion groups. There was enough time for each of us to describe to our group our general views, but not enough time for deep discussions. I'm not sure this added much.
This was an interesting exercise, though I'm not sure it was the best use of a class slot. Shrug.
I came out as having a blend of biblical, rabbinic, and (Milton) Steinberg's views of God, with secondary support from Rambam. Most of that's not too surprising. I don't know a lot about Steinberg.
She got the charts out of a book called Finding God (David Syme). She held it up and I didn't recognize it though I own a book of that title; it turns out there's a revised edition that adds a few more people/schools.
She suggested that people's views change over time and that this might be an interesting thing to do with kids. (I add: and their parents.) Do it once before bar mitzvah and once later (confirmation? graduation? later than that if you can swing it?) and keep the old ones to compare to.
Other classes
There was a good class on the responsa literature (and process). Rabbi Mark Washofsky is an excellent teacher in my opinion. It's getting late, so I'll have to come back to this later.
The Hebrew class started out as mostly decoding (not interesting to me) but included enough actual language stuff to keep me interested. We worked a fair bit on breaking down words -- finding the root and interpeting the prefixes and suffixes. We sometimes got mired in the differences between biblical and modern Hebrew; at the end of the class we reached consensus that we're interested in biblical.
There are four people in the class, two who are comfortable with decoding and want more, and two who want more practice with decoding. Meeting the needs of both groups seems to be a challenge, but we can't split into two groups (except by splitting the time, which people don't want to do). The teacher thinks he has some ideas, so we'll see what happens tomorrow.
I'm a little frustrated that there's no path for the people who took cantillation last year. I mean yes, there are unrelated chugim (the one-shots), on a completely different path, but it would have been nice to have either haftarah trope or the kind of Hebrew class I'm looking for as a natural follow-on to torah cantillation. (If you got through the cantillation class you already know how to decode Hebrew.) And while I would have taken the cantillation class last year even if I'd known it was the end of the line, I won't assume that of my classmates. People might have made different decisions last year if they knew there was no follow-on.
Conversation with a rabbinic student
One of the rabbinic students is probably a few years older than I am, so I asked her what it's like for her. She's single and already migratory (moved a bunch of times), so that part was easy for her. She said her class is really cohesive; they started out as about 60 (for the year in Jerusalem) and after being distributed to the various campuses, she ended up in a group of 13 that all support each other and like each other. With classes that small it sounds like that would be a really important factor; she said she knows of other classes where people won't even share their notes, let alone work together more closely. I hadn't considered the issue of class dynamic.
She said that she often has 6-7 hours of homework each night -- on top of a full day of classes. Her internship (student pulpit, I assume) causes her to travel every other weekend; she said she has a suitcase that she doesn't unpack except to do laundry and put it back in. She described it as pretty overwhelming at times. I asked if there's support for taking time off or studying part-time rather than dropping out entirely and she said yes. (I doubt HUC would actually let someone start part-time, though. I'm assuming it's a fallback, but that if you want to do that from the start you shouldn't plan to do it at HUC.)
She described a workload that's even higher than I'd imagined, and I had a fairly pesimistic view. Wow. (She also said class sizes have been increasing; if the perceived rabbi deficit is in the process of fixing itself, I wonder how that would affect the school's interest in attracting older students.)
I asked her about the job market (as best she can judge it): does she anticipate having trouble finding an entry-level position at her age? She said absolutely not; congregations love older junior rabbis, she said, because you've got the life clues but don't yet have the salary demands of someone who's been a rabbi all that time.
Random ritual note
This morning I asked someone to teach me how to lay t'fillin. I had two reasons: I want to be able to teach someone else if called upon to do so, and, well, does this observance speak to me? The answer to the second seems to be "not at this time". Well, you don't know if you don't try.
(I borrowed Dani's. I don't know if he's ever worn them; they belonged to his grandfather before him, so they aren't from his bar mitzvah.)