![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cellioI led much of the service Friday night, with some help from other members of the worship committee. I also read torah and gave a sermon (or d'var torah; I'm a little unclear on the difference). There were some glitches before the service and, to my minor embarrassment, we started three minutes late, but other than that there was nothing visible to the congregation.
The various people participating in the service (worship committee, bar mitzvah and his family, aliyot) had been told to be there at 7:45 (for an 8:00 service), so I arrived at 7:30. This turned out not to be enough time, and I'll do this differently in the future. It was enough time to get a look at the torah scroll (on that reading desk, in those lighting conditions) and receive instruction in the use of the personal mike, but it was not enough time for me to also get five minutes alone to clear my head. This manifested in embarrassments like forgetting the name of the bar mitzvah's mother, but fortunately that was in the office, not on the bimah. I didn't particularly feel nervous, but after that happened I just stopped and took a deep breath, and then things were better.
(It is, by the way, much easier to lead a service alone than to coordinate the efforts of several other participants. I think that's where part of the frazzle was coming from; it certainly wasn't nervousness about being in front of the congregation, because that makes me energetic, not nervous.)
My ploy to change the feel of the t'filah half-worked. Since I was going to be leading this (and a-capella), I thought the cantorial soloist would stand by her chair, not at her reading desk (since she wasn't participating in that part of the service). But I'd failed to suggest that explicitly, so she was at the desk, and I hadn't mentioned to her my plan to chant the first three blessings while facing the ark. I faced the ark during the first one and so did she, but she seemed to be shooting me quizical looks so after that I turned to face the congregation so she could too. (I think she would have followed my lead had I continued, but I'm not sure.) Ok, better coordination next time.
When my rabbi reads torah he reads and translates as he goes along. I'm not fluent enough to do that, but because that's what the congregation is used to, I didn't want to read a huge block of Hebrew before giving them a translation. So I read a few verses at a time and then had my checker (and person who led the torah service) read the translation, and did that until we were done. That worked well. I was reading, not chanting, which makes that easier; that said, I also did this once with my rabbi when I was chanting, so that can work.
My sermon (which I'll post separately later) went fairly well, and I don't think I sped up too much compared to my practice runs at home. (Alas, I didn't have someone from the worship committee time me so I'd have data.) While in some ways it feels excessive, I think I've settled on 24-point text for longer stuff that I'll be reading from the bima. I can't put even that down on the reading desk (I had to hold the papers), but it's large enough to let me look up at the congregation more. Enough? I'll have to ask someone who was sitting out there. But that aspect was better than in the past. (Last time I think I used 18-point type.)
I got a lot of compliments on the service. Enough people wanted to talk with me that I didn't succeed in snagging a cookie at the oneg afterwards. I'll take that as a good sign. (Ok, there are circumstances where that would be a bad sign, but I said "talk with me", not "yell at me". :-) )
I have a new appreciation for the water glasses under the reading desks. At the beginning I thought "eh, it's an hour and a half; I don't really need much water", but since I did most of the talking, I learned fairly quickly that no, I did need a full glass. I wonder how the rabbis and cantorial soloist get through Yom Kippur, which is hard enough for just plain congregants!
Normally someone else would have led the morning torah study, but the obvious candidate was out of town this Shabbat and he deemed me the next-most-obvious candidate, so it fell to me. This group isn't doing the weekly parsha; we're doing a verse-by-verse crawl through the torah, which began 18 years ago with the word "b'reishit". We are now in Deuteronomy, in the repetition of the ten commandments. For the past few weeks we've been talking about "lo tirtzach", do not murder. At the end of last week's session my rabbi said we should go on to "lo tin'af", do not commit adultery, and that he expected us to still be there when he returns.
So I looked for commentaries (not very successfully, as it turned out), and prepared some conversation-fodder in hopes of provoking some good discussions. And when I arrived (ten minutes early, when normally a few people would already be there), I was the first person there. At 8:30 (start time), there were three of us. (Normally there are about a dozen.) You work with what you have and don't punish the people who show up on time by delaying, so I suggested we get started. One more person arrived at about that time. Two more would arrive halfway through.
I did a bit of a recap and someone asked if we could go back to Shabbat (a couple commandments back) before moving on, because he had an issue he wanted to discuss. I said sure, and that ended up taking about 20 minutes. (Good conversation, perhaps to be recapped later.) With just a few minutes to go I decided to at least start the next topic.
I pointed out that the prohibition on adultery enjoys special status; in addition to being one of the ten commandments (yes, all 613 commandments are important, but you can't help noticing that murder makes the list for the ten and, say, mixing linen and wool doesn't, y'know?), it's also one of the Noachide laws (laws that apply to all people; there are seven), and it is also one of three commandments for which you are expected to die rather than transgress. (The other two are murder and idolatry. If someone points a gun at your head and tells you to eat the bacon cheeseburger, you do (and I assume you say a bracha?). If someone points a gun at your head and tells you to bow down to an idol or kill someone or commit adultery, you decline.)
So, with all that as prelude, I asked, what's the big deal about adultery? Someone immediately offered "property rights", and we had a discussion about other things that would also be property issues, and that adultery is still adultery even if it's with your slave. I was trying to get someone to say "marriage is sacred". As it was now time for the service to start I ended with the suggestion that for next week, people think about ways in which marriage is special.
The low turnout was not just for the study; we had a total of 13 people for the service, when we usually have about 30. Some people were out of town, I know, but I'm still a little surprised. I wonder if we have more people than I thought who won't come if they know the rabbi won't be there. That wouldn't surprise me for a Friday service (though it didn't really play out that way last night), but our morning group is a tighter community, so if that's what happened I'm a little disappointed in people. I hope the person who led the service didn't take it personally.
Having learned a lesson the previous night, I left the early service at 9:45 (instead of my planned 10:00) to get ready for the 10:30 service. I had thought that would let me just sit in the chapel alone for five minutes before seeing to logistics. Nope. The family was already there and things were in high gear. Oh well.
One of those logistics concerned the list of people getting aliyot. Friday night the father had told me that one person to be so honored had been unable to make it, and we said we'd jiggle things around in the morning. (So much for my carefully-crafted large-print cheat sheets. :-) ) So we discussed who to move where and I added circles and arrows and whatnot to said cheat sheets. Then, about five minutes before the service started, a family member asked me which aliya she had, and when I asked her name she said something I didn't recognize. Oops. So the mother of the bar mitzvah came over to help work that out, and we jiggled things around again, and it was all fine. I'm just glad that it came up before the service!
The service itself went quite well, and most of the family members thanked me afterwards. The bar mitzvah was quite good; he chanted well (including learning more than he had to), led parts of the service and did that well, and gave a very good d'var torah about the separation of church and state. He was calm and poised, and seemed comfortable in front of the congregation. We should invite him to read torah for the high holy days. (We try to invite some of the previous year's bar/bat-mitzvah students to do so.)
I had a blast. There were some minor glitches, but nothing significant and we just moved right past them. The family was really easy to work with. They seemed happy with the results. After it was all over the director and the cantorial soloist both praised me, so I said "so the rabbi will get a good report?" and they confirmed that he would. :-)
Lessons learned:
In advance I had prepared large-print translations of each aliya's worth of text, so that (1) I'd have a nice easy copy to read and (2) I wouldn't have to fumble with a chumash on a small reading desk. To make things easy, on each page I had also included the name of the person getting that aliya, so I could just look down, call the name, read torah, read the translation, and then move on to the next page. Good idea, except see the previous discussion of switching aliyot around. Next time, use separate pages. (The desk was not large enough to support the scroll, a visible translation, and a visible list of people to call for aliyot. That's why I combined things.)
The chapel is small (seats approximately 100) and has one small reading desk, with a built-in microphone. The cantorial soloist, bar mitzvah, and I were all, at various times, sharing that desk, which involved more people-shuffling than I would have liked. I have no trouble making myself heard in a space that size sans mike (and did so a few times this morning because that was just easier). I assume the cantorial soloist can, though I noticed that she prefers the mike. I wouldn't assume that every student can, but that's ok -- we could still have it there for the students. But I don't think the regular, professional (-ish, in my case) leaders need to depend on it when doing so makes for awkward movement.
&c
All together, this was the longest torah portion I've learned (one chapter, 23 verses, one full column -- and it had the decency to actually fall out as one column, so I didn't have to roll the scroll mid-reading). I read different, overlapping parts Friday night and Saturday morning; I didn't read all that at once. I realize that to some of my readers this sounds piddly; a full parsha is generally three or four chapters (sometimes more), and readers routinely prepare that much. My congregation doesn't read the entire parsha -- never has, so far as I know. But still, this was a milestone for me.
I need to get some hair clips or something. Because I have medium-length hair and need to get fairly close to the torah scroll to read, my hair was hanging down while I read Friday night. It wasn't blocking my view, but a couple people told me that it meant they couldn't see my face. I wouldn't have thought that my face would be an interesting visual target at that point, but I guess I'm wrong. I think wearing a ponytail on the bimah would seem too casual and unprofessional, so I need to figure out something more decorative. I haven't got a hair-aesthetics gene, so this could be interesting.
I really enjoyed this stint in my rabbi's shoes, and I hope I get to do it again someday. I have high hopes that sometime this fall I will lead a Friday service when my rabbi will be there to see me.
(no subject)
Date: 2006-07-16 04:47 pm (UTC)I never would have thought to look for that. Thanks for the interesting discussion.
And, gufa (i..e, back to the main subject), yiyasher kochachen to Monica!
Thank you!
Thanks for the tip on leading. I hadn't thought about that. I do worry about text getting too large; for people's names (for the aliyot) on Saturday I used 36-point, and Hebrew names tended to occupy two lines (we include mothers -- e.g. Ploni ben Avraham v'Rachel). That would definitely have been overkill for the d'var torah (or translations), but it's worth exploring things between 24 (worked) and that. I'll see what 28 looks like.
For haftarah, my rabbi reads straight from a regular chumash (more power to him; I couldn't do that) and the b'nei mitzvah get individual print-outs, I think from Trope Trainer, that seem to be of a decent size. We don't have a dedicated book. (Well, we probably have several, but we don't use one that I've ever seen.)