cellio | Shabbat service

The service on Saturday went better than I had expected. I had gone into the service thinking "this year and that's it", but I'm willing to consider being involved again. Mainly this is because after the service, the organizer said to me -- unprompted -- that she felt the organization wasn't good enough this year and she felt it would have been better for the leaders to all get together once. I agreed and said that this could both communicate her overall vision and facilitate contributions from others. (That was my gentle nudge of "other people have contributions too".)

I commented last week that I had what I felt was too much English and not enough Hebrew in my part. It turns out that my part was not unusual in this regard; while there were a lot of songs in Hebrew, this group seems to be largely Hebrew-averse when it comes to speaking. I find this unusual, because the largest single contingent is from my congregation (where we use a lot of Hebrew) and many of the rest are Conservative and Reconstructionist (where I assume they use Hebrew). And we were using the latest draft of Mishkan T'filah, which is fully transliterated. If there is actually an organizational meeting next year and I am invited to participate, I plan to bring this up.

The person who led the morning blessings (birkat ha-shachar) once again did the half-Hebrew/half-English thing. (She called it "Hebrish".) This means chanting the first six words of each bracha, which are the same for every one, and then chanting the rest in English. I don't know why this makes my skin crawl so much, but it does. This year there was an innovation: the group chanted the Hebrew together and then people called out completions as they felt moved. I did not participate, even in the Hebrew, because I don't think it's proper to start a blessing that I don't know the ending for. Starting commits me to either finish or take God's name in vain, and it's always possible that someone will say something I wouldn't agree with. Individual prayer is a great time for spontaneity; recommended, even. Group prayer? Not so much, IMO.

No one feminized God in the blessings this year -- hallelu!

We did not have a d'var torah this year. The person who did last year's apparently got some feedback of the "my, that was... long" variety, so this year after the torah reading she asked us to break up into small study groups for about ten minutes. She was aiming for chevruta style (partners), but we ended up with groups of 3-5, mostly. That's probably reasonable; when you know your study partner at least somewhat, chevruta style works reall well. When you're strangers and it's a short one-shot, it seems more awkward.

By the way, the latest Mishkan T'filah (which I now own a copy of, thanks to my rabbi) has addressed many of the concerns I had with earlier versions. It's nice to see progress. :-) They settled the "ha-kol/ha-meitim" problem using parentheses rather than two complete versions of the prayer, and they managed to find a combination of font face, size, and spacing to make that easy to use. (Sometimes I find this style, where text alternatives are put in parens, difficult to use because it's not easy enough to find the end of the parenthetical part. Granted, that mostly comes up with phrases rather than words.) There are two versions of Aleinu (one greatly abridged) but not the three of previous versions. They have done a much better job of sticking to the format universally. And the incorrect-bordering-on-dishonest translations are gone -- yay! (At least the ones I noticed before.) I should do a more detailed review of this edition, as it's for all practical purposes the final one (CCAR is voting thumbs up/down on this one). I should also send some positive comments to the editors, since they got quite a bit of feedback from me three years ago during the early trials.