URJ Biennial

[cellio]

I didn't go to the biennial URJ gathering (5000+ Reform Jews, lots of panels and stuff). But the velveteenrabbi did, and she's been posting some interesting reports. If you liked my reports from the Sh'liach K'hilah program, you may like these too.

Day 1:

• The beginning
• Are dietary laws kosher for Reform Jews?
• Creating meaningful worship in small congregations
• Ruth Messinger

Day 2 (I haven't read these yet but want to be able to find them again after Shabbat):

• Integrating social justice throughout the congregation
• What does it mean to be good?
• Innocence project and Rabbi Eugene Borowitz
• Worship
• How can Reform Jews encounter God?
• Plenary: Robert Reich
• Plenary: Robert Heller and Rabbi Michael Melchior

The convention runs through the weekend, so I assume she'll have another flurry of posts after Shabbat.

Ok, there's a lot more interesting-sounding stuff here than I would have expected. When the regional version of this conference was in Pittsburgh I looked at the program and it seemed, err, underwhelming. Either they save the good stuff for the national conferences or the Velveteen Rabbi is better at making the convention sound good than they are. :-) (Note: I didn't review the advance program for this one since I knew I wasn't going anyway.)

Comments

[cellio]

Well, ok, and then there are the sessions I would skip. :-) Fortunately (and sometimes unfortunately), there are several parallel tracks.

Somehow I've just never been able to connect with either yoga or meditation, both of which I perceive to be about clearing the mind so you're more receptive. I'm not knocking it for those who do it; I've just never felt any personal attraction. Which is fine; I suspect there are people out there who do not connect through music the way I do, either.

[magid.livejournal.com]

Why am I not surprised you'd not be interested in yoga davening?

(Neither would I, though I like the yoga-as-exercise-only classes at my gym.)

[cellio]

Yoga is a fine thing by itself. Combining it with davening, though, heavily revises an existing practice that people are invested in. Have the people doing "yoga davening" tried to connect with conventional davening and failed, or are they just inventing some newfangled thing? I think this is the basis of my objection to some of the fluffy not-really-on-theme English readings that sometimes creep into services; it seems like people went down that path without even trying to understand the original text, what it's trying to do liturgically, and whether that need still exists.

I realize there's some element of "whose ox is getting gored here". Do I daven the way I would have a thousand years ago? No -- for starters, I'm a leader of the community, which wouldn't have been permitted in the distant past. But somehow, my davening is enhanced by the weight of tradition, knowing that I didn't just make up these prayers a week ago Tuesday. I hope everyone trying this new thing has first at least tried to connect with tradition first.

People are of course free to daven -- or not -- however they choose. If there's an existing community, changes have to be made in accordance with the will of that community. If it's a new community, there are no rules and you can do what anything that'll attract your target people. I just feel a little sad when people go off and form something new when they could have remained with the larger community and had their needs met -- or, alternatively, had a dialogue with the larger community that leads to a change everyone agrees is good.

[magid.livejournal.com]

I don't know enough about the 'yoga davening' to say much towards your questions. The article mentioned fitting positions with themes in the davening, though I don't really understand how that would work. Not a surprise, though, since I'd find davening while trying to do complicated poses a recipe for neither one being done to my satisfaction.

I am a traditionalist myself; I find it hard to have the same feelings about a prayer someone made up yesterday or last year as I do about other prayer. Even the prayer for Israel resonates with me more, having been written by people steeped in knowledge about prayer (and now being decades old).

I've read some of the articles now, and I'm finding them interesting. My first reaction to seeing the title about meaningful worship in small congregations was that I'd think it easier to have meaningful worship in a smaller congregation, given that there are fewer opinions as to what works :-)