planning a service

[cellio]

My rabbi has given me a Friday-night service to plan and lead this summer, and he'll actually be there to see me so I can get feedback and advice from him. Nifty! I'm going to doodle about some of my preliminary thoughts in this entry.

Sometimes when special groups -- brotherhood, the confirmation class, or whatever -- get a service to lead, they use it as an opportunity to put on a performance. They choose special readings and music, they displace the usual service leaders, they (sometimes) hinder congregational prayer (though they don't mean to, I'm sure), and so on. Broadly speaking, they make it about themselves. I do not want to do that. I want to give the congregation a comfortable, familiar experience, but with a new leader for large chunks of it. Ok, their rabbi won't be leading the service, but their experience should not be the worse for that.

We have two rabbis and a cantorial soloist. When both rabbis are there, which is most of the time, one rabbi reads torah and gives the sermon, and the other leads the service. The cantorial soloist typically leads all of the singing, both songs (opening/closing songs, etc) and liturgy (sh'ma, beginning of t'filah, etc). So I plan to, largely, fit into that model.

My rabbi is going to read torah and give the sermon; in effect I'm going to play the role of the other rabbi. (We'll have a new associate rabbi by then, but we don't yet know who and I've no clue whether that rabbi will be on the bima during this service.) I want the cantorial soloist to participate, but that said, I want to steal a few of her parts. :-)

Our Friday-night service breaks down into the following sections:

• Kabbalat Shabbat (welcoming Shabbat): the whole point of this part of the service is to be celebratory; ends with chatzi kaddish
• Kri'at Sh'ma (starting with barchu): this is where the core worship service starts
• T'filah: this is the central prayer, which dovetails with the previous section
• Kri'at Torah: torah service (lots of choreography here with the scroll)
• (Sermon goes here, followed by anthem)
• Concluding prayers (Aleinu, mourners' kaddish); closing song; benediction

One of the things they taught us in the Sh'liach K'hilah program is that in planning a service, you have to think about the overall arc -- where are the high and low points, the lighter and more intense parts, etc? Do your musical choices augment that flow, or do they fight against it? There are various legitimate choices you can make, but you have to consider the whole -- possibly even including the sermon topic, season, torah portion, and secular events. For instance, you would make different decisions during the high holy days versus on the Shabbat before Purim. You have to pay attention to context.

My service is the week after our monthly "mostly musical Shabbat", so I'm thinking I should bring some of that mood in from the previous week. Thus, kabbalat shabbat should have lively, accessible music with tunes everyone knows; this isn't the time to introduce a new tune for L'cha Dodi or whatever. Further, this should help make people comfortable with a new service leader -- oh look, she's doing stuff we can participate in. Build on the familiar here.

Having the cantorial soloist lead the music during kabbalat shabbat makes sense. First, it gives the congregation something familiar; second, it's the largest concentration of music in the service, and we have a professional musician so let's use her. So I'm thinking: have the cantorial soloist lead all the music through the end of that section (chatzi kaddish) (I'll do the spoken parts), and then I'll do everything in kri'at sh'ma and t'filah myself (and bring her back later). Barchu is a logical place for a transition; in addition, we're switching from celebration to core liturgy. A change in how the service is presented helps make that clear. (Before our rabbis settled on current practice, they would often trade off at this point in the service.)

For kri'at sh'ma and t'filah, I'll do everything, spoken and chanted/sung. The cantorial soloist can have the novel experience of actually getting to pray. :-)

The start of the torah service involves another transition, with extra people moving around on the bima. This part of the service is physically active: we open the ark, take the torah out, process it around the room, and finally open and read it. It's a change in style, so I'll change how we lead the service there. I'm thinking that I'll lead the spoken liturgy here (my rabbi could, as he'll be up there as the torah reader, but I'm inclined to do it), and the cantorial soloist will lead the singing. In addition to the style change and involving the cantorial soloist, there's a practical consideration: the service leader leads that procession with the torah around the room, and somebody needs to be on the bima leading the singing while that happens. (I'll probably be wired for sound, but even so a physical focus is helpful.)

After the torah reading is my rabbi's sermon and then a song; the song is generally not participatory and is done by the cantorial soloist. Keeping that that way makes sense. Then, since the soloist is up there anyway, she can lead Aleinu (she usually does), and then it's into the concluding readings, which I'll do. She'll lead the closing song.

That leaves the benediction. Properly speaking the service leader should do it, but I think it'll be important to give the congregation rabbinic "bookends": my rabbi should greet the congregation at the beginning and introduce me as the leader, to legitimize it, and I think they should hear him at the end to tie that together. Symmetry is good. :-) (And I think it's important for him to speak at the beginning; we're doing something unusual and he should explain it. Besides, that'll cut down on the whispered queries of "why's she doing this when he's sitting right there?" in the congregation.)

So the broad shape is: familiarity on both ends; start lively and familiar; the switch to my (complete) leadership corresponds with a change in the service to something more, err, focused and serious; use the cantorial soloist to bring the level up again for the torah service; finish with (mostly) the familiar.

I'll run this by my rabbi when we study this week and see what he says.

Comments

[siderea]

My service is the week after our monthly "mostly musical Shabbat", so I'm thinking I should bring some of that mood in from the previous week.

Not contrast? That would be my inclination in programming.

[cellio]

In a way, they'll be getting a contrast -- I'm just easing them into it. The "mostly musical shabbat" service is different from everything else in several ways: more music, more-accessible music, no sermon, earlier to encourage families with young kids (so different composition), and a few other things. I guess what I'm doing is pulling in some of that flavor in the first part of the service, but without all the other features of that service. And then, come the shift into the next section of the service, things are definitely different than in the musical service. I'm hoping that balances familiarity and contrast.

Often, the week following the musical service has more formal music -- less congregational singing, organ instead of piano, a little more elaborate solos. That's not a hard-and-fast rule. I definitely won't be using the organ for several reasons, including the lack of line of sight between me and the accompanist in that case. (That's asking for trouble.) So I can't follow that particular pattern of change. Instead they'll get a different pattern of change, with (as I'm positing it now) some reassuring comfort front-loaded.

[magid.livejournal.com]

This really shows up how different services are; my defaults are so different, with the words always a given, tunes up to the leader each time, whoever is carrying the Sefer Torah around leading the singing, and so on.

[cellio]

I see a lot of variation within my congregation and among others. On Shabbat morning, for instance, the leader is more free to change things and the leader does lead the singing during the procession. It's a smaller space with no amplification and no raised bima (everything's on one level), which helps. (The sanctuary, in contrast, seats about 400 people.)

For our Friday-night service, there's variation week to week but it's all planned out so the cantorial soloist, pianist/organist, and rabbi(s) will all be prepared. The text is generally pretty well set; we only see alternative readings and the like when some group is leading services and inserts them. We have a few standard melodies for most things that the congregation knows and sings along on. This is the main service for most people, and the rabbis try to balance familiarity and innovation.

And then there's the other congregation, where I lead shacharit once a week. The liturgy and melodies are both extremely fixed there; one week I accidentally used a different melody for Mi Chamocha and from the reaction you'd think I'd sprouted antennae and turned green or something. In over a year of leading that service I've made three pre-meditated changes; for one I sought consensus, for another I consulted one of the "elders", and for the third I just did it but deemed it a minor change. This is a group that is really set in its ways. (In case you're curious: (1) removing kaddish d'rabbanan in the absence of a minyan (!), (2) facing the ark during the t'filah; (3) for the morning study, replacing readings from Pirke Avot with the parsha bits -- we'd already established that they weren't going to used the fixed texts in the siddur.)