cellio | Sukkot (mostly)

Sukkot has been good so far. We had a small crowd for services Tuesday morning, which isn't that surprising -- a lot of American Jews don't treat the festivals as holidays, so they'll come to evening services but go to work the next day. But the people who were there were engaged, and we had a nice lunch in the congregational sukkah afterwards.

As people were starting to pack up I quietly turned to the associate rabbi (the senior rabbi had gone home with his family) and said "bentching?". (This is the grace after meals.) He said we didn't have any bentchers (they were in the now-locked building) and I said we could probably do the short form from memory. After he got everyone's attention we had approximately this exchange:

Him: Since it was your idea, do you want to lead?
Me: I can do that but I'll defer to you.
Him: You are so hard to share leadership with!
Me: Ok. Rabbatai nevereich...

Ok, next time I won't defer to him. :-) He's fun to have around; I'll miss him when he leaves next summer. (Belatedly, I wonder if he lacked confidence in his own memorization? I know he knows this stuff, but maybe I caught him off guard.)

Speaking of leading things, two weeks ago at Tree of Life I did just fine with the holiday insertions for the days of awe. (Got compliments, even. I think they didn't know the melody I used for Zochreinu.) However, there's no way I'm competent to do the Hoshanot (special Sukkot insertion) tomorrow, so I really hope Joe the Hallel guy can do those. (Hallel is the other thing that gets added to the service during Sukkot (and at other times), and Joe always leads that. Which is good, because I'm not yet competent to lead that, though I'm a heck of a lot closer on Hallel than on Hoshanot!)

So far the weather has cooperated for all of our at-home meals. When Sukkot is this late in the secular calendar outdoor meals are chancy. (And no, I don't sleep in the sukkah. Not with as cold as the nights have been, but not in the city anyway. I mean yeah, it's a decent neighborhood, but...)

Tonight we visited friends in their sukkah, but failed to invite them to ours because of an imminent trip out of town. Oh well; we'll have to reciprocate some other way.

Then we came home and watched West Wing, thanks to a coworker's tape. Yup, we both thought we'd correctly identified the leak. And is it my imagination, or is more of current-day American politics creeping into that show? I mean, it always rang true or it wouldn't have worked, but it feels a little more like I'm seeing last week's newspaper stories on the show this week, and that feels different.