Shabbat

[cellio]

Friday night we gathered for services, dinner, and some singing. Some of the local students brought family members; others did not come. There were also some faculty members from the school there. There were probably about two dozen people total.

We started with kabbalat shabbat and ma'ariv. The Reform movement, at least in my experience, heavily abridges kabbalat shabbat; this is in part to make room for Friday-night torah reading and sermons without being butt-numbing, I'm sure, but I think the psalms in general and the ones in kabbalat shabbat specifically do not tend to resonate for most Reform Jews. I wish we would reconsider with singing. Reading psalms might be boring, but singing them can be quite uplifting. By the way, the one Conservative synagogue where I've attended several times on Friday night also abridges this part of the service, though not as heavily. So it's not just Reform.

Anyway, we sang all those psalms, and of course L'cha Dodi, all to tunes I didn't previously know but could figure out, and it was really nice. Ma'ariv was comparatively short and businesslike. We ended with kiddush, which was about the time I realized that we had not been given the chance to individually light candles, so I looked at the ones that were already lit and said the bracha over them before proceeding.

We prayed from Siddur Sim Shalom. I hadn't previously noticed that there's a small collection of z'mirot (songs) for Shabbat in there. After dinner we sang through some of those; again, I didn't know the melodies, but I was able to fake it. I also didn't previously know the texts, but singing is usually slower than reading (it was here) so I was able to mostly read along. I'm still a slower reader of Hebrew than I'd like to be, but I'm a lot better than I used to be.

We were on our own for Shabbat morning. Based on some advance scouting, I decided to check out Zvhil Beis Medrash mainly because we don't have anything like it back home. It's Chassidic and the rebbe is a ba'al t'shuvah (someone who came to religion later in life), and, well, I'm curious and have previously had bad luck with Chassidic congregations. I called Friday for the time and the recording said 9:00.

I got there closer to 9:15 (it was farther away than I thought). I found the sign (which included the service time), went to the door -- and it was locked. I then went to other doors -- all locked. I went back to the sign and wondered if the little arrow-like glyph indicated not "this building right here" as I'd thought but "we've moved farther down the street", so I explored some more to no avail. I hung around for a while, thinking other people might show up, and no one did. Well, so much for that.

So I headed back up the hill, went to my dorm room for my tallit (which certainly would have been out of place at Zvhil), and headed over to the Newton Center minyan at Hebrew College. I'm glad I went there. It was not the same congregation as the one in the beit midrash at Hebrew College last fall like I'd feared; this one was much better. I had of course missed all of the preliminary prayers by then, but I'd anticipated that and said many of them from memory on the way up the hill. As I slipped in they were just starting the chazan's repetition of the (first) amidah. The most common siddur was Sim Shalom, which is what I took. (The most common chumash was Eitz Chayim. Both of these are standards of the Conservative movement.)

The first person to welcome me (quietly, during the service) asked me if I'd like an aliya. I almost never get offered aliyot at home, so I was happy to accept. Each person who received an aliya was also given a blessing (that is, the service leader said a blessing on behalf of the aliya recipient); I'll have to look this up to see what he said on my behalf. :-) (I couldn't quite parse it in real time, though the gist seemed to be about growing in torah and blessings.) I have seen this practice really slow down a torah service (JWC, I'm looking at you), but they kept things moving here. It felt neither rushed nor tedious.

This appears to be a lay-run minyan; given the context there were almost certainly several rabbis present, but they did not lead the service. There were several torah readers, each doing one or two aliyot, and all of them were proficient. (Men and women; this was fully egalitarian.)

Now here's a sign of a highly-proficient group (or at least one with highly-proficient members): one of the torah readers was absent, so someone else (not one of the others who read today) stepped in and chanted it. He made mistakes and had to be corrected (not surprising), and he got a lot of the specific tropes wrong (definitely not surprising), but he got all the trope phrases right. That is, he might have chanted an et-nachta clause where a katon clause was called for, but he got the shape of the phrase right. And it was a long aliya. When he finished the "yashar koach"s were loud, numerous, and sincere.

While that's an extreme example, overall this congregation is much more fluent in the service than I'm used to seeing. There was no direction (people just knew what to do), everyone who led anything (including aliyot) got it right, the child who led some reading at the end of the torah service (I don't remember what) read better than many adults I know, everyone was following the torah and haftarah readings (which were not translated), and it just seemed that everyone there was very comfortable and engaged. (Aside: including me, which was pleasant.) Each thing I've said here is true of some (sometimes many) people in my Shabbat minyan, but seeing it all together like that struck me.

(I am also not saying that this is a perfect model; in particular, I believe in giving cues if there is any chance that there's someone present who doesn't know. When I am leading services, if I don't know everyone present to be fluent I give page numbers after any skip.)

The singing was (again) almost always to tunes I didn't know, but (again) that worked out fine. People sang; it's a very participatory group. I would certainly go there again.

Here's something I haven't seen before: near the end of the service (I think it was right before Aleinu but I'm not sure), they did announcements. That's not new, but this was: the leader announced the return of two people to the minyan after shiva for parents; one couple announced the engagement of their child, and several people introduced friends or family members who were visiting from out of town, giving both their names and where they were from. (No visitors introduced themselves, though, so I didn't either.)

The haftarah reader used what I'm told was Eicha cantillation because of Tish'a b'av this coming week. I don't know that trope (I think I've only heard it once); I could tell he was doing something different but not what.

A funny bit: there were four children who led Adon Olam at the end. (I've seen kids do that in some Orthodox congregations.) Adon Olam is Greensleeves-complete; you can sing it to just about everything. What they chose was the theme music from Harry Potter -- very fitting for this particular Shabbat. :-)

Shabbat lunch was in the beit midrash. Seven students were there, along with one of the two primary instructors, a staff member who's been taking care of a lot of the arrangements, and her husband (who is a rabbi at a local Reform congregation, Shir something I think). It was a nice lunch and we had some good discussions.

I don't know what the instructor had planned to teach (I saw handouts that were never distributed). We instead took a tour of the Shulchan Aruch and a predecessor source (Arba'at Urim, which I had not previously heard of), all as a result of an issue another student raised. She used to be on the board of a Jewish aid agency and they faced a dilemma: they had received an application for aid from a (Jewish) member of Jews for Jesus, and they had to decide if it was appropriate to grant the request. That specific case had long since been resolved, but she asked our instructor what he thought about the issue. He immediately pulled two volumes from the shelves. (Aside: he knew which specific volumes of two multi-volume sets without consulting indices or tables of contents. Some day I want to be that good.)

The first was a passage from Arab'at Urim, a 13th(?)-century law code. If I recall correctly, it was written by someone with both Ashkenazi and Sephardi influences, which is unusual. This source started out by saying that if anyone reaches out his hand for charity you must give it to him; this includes gentiles. It then records a minority opinion that you need not give to a Jew who does not keep the mitzvot. (I asked; this minority view is silent on gentiles, so the instructor understands it to just be a restriction on Jewish charity-seekers and you still have to help gentiles.)

The pages of this source were laid out much like pages of talmud, so I asked what the commentaries were (if in fact that was what they were). Yes -- the text in the center was the actual text of Arba'at Urim, and the text surrounding it was various later commentaries. The place of honor (closest to the binding) went to Yosef Karo, who took every passage and traced it back through the mishna, gemara, and proof-texts. That's a pretty impressive undertaking.

Yosef Karo (in the 16th century) went on to write the Shulchan Aruch, which we then turned to. (Heh -- it, too, has commentaries. I guess publishers have found that the format works. When I first saw the many volumes of Shulchan Aruch on a shelf I thought it was overwhelming, but I hadn't known until now that only a small part of that is actually the Shulchan Aruch itself. SA would fit in a book you could carry easily; all the rest is commentary.)

What was interesting about looking this up in SA was that the minority opinion from the earlier source had become the law given in the law code. Law codes generally just give you the law, not all the background, so I don't know if we know what happened. But according to the Shulchan Aruch, you do not give charity to a Jew who breaks even one of the mitzvot, and most especially not an apikorus like a convert to Christianity or Islam. I don't remember if SA even mentioned giving to gentiles.

Because we were in a conversational mode more than a lesson plan, one of the other students asked our instructor how he had come to be at this school. The fifth-year rabbinic student was there too, so we also heard some of his perspective as a student in the very first class. It was all pretty interesting.

Our instructor pointed to three things that make this school different from other rabbinic schools. First, the beit midrash -- other schools have them too, but at Hebrew College it is central, a place you will spend hours per day in study, and not just a library or a place to do your individual homework. Second, the diversity of views -- this is a trans-denominational school, so there isn't a single party line, all perspectives are heard (he says), and it's expected that this will affect you. (I'm curious how that really works out.) Third, there is spirituality and an awareness of God in everything they do, even in the classroom -- yes, they have conventional classes and they're rigorous, but, he feels, you can't compartmentalize, having God here and academics there and worship over there. It all has to come together, and he thinks this school does that better than others.

I would definitely like to talk more with that rabbinic student (who comes from a liberal background) about this. I have his email address, so I can do that.

(More later; I'm about to head out to meet magid.)

Comments

[chaos-wrangler.livejournal.com]

The first was a passage from Arab'at Urim, a 13th(?)-century law code. If I recall correctly, it was written by someone with both Ashkenazi and Sephardi influences, which is unusual.
The place of honor (closest to the binding) went to Yosef Karo

Rabbi Yosef Karo was Sephardi, so one goal of his commentary for the arba'a turim was to note where Sephardim did things differently from Askenazim. Similarly, the "first" commentator for the shulchan aruch is an Askenazi Rabbi who notes the differences in the other direction. The reason for the "place of honor" that I've heard is that the outer edges of a book are less protected that the edge by the binding (and all edges are less protected than the center of the page), so you put the oldest/most valuable commentary near the binding where it's most likely to escape damage if the book is partly scorched, soaked, nibbled, etc.

(Aside: he knew which specific volumes of two multi-volume sets without consulting indices or tables of contents. Some day I want to be that good.)

Given that both the arba'a turim and the shulchan aruch were meant to be reference works, with topics set up by category and in a logical order and without the stream of consciousness rambling of the mishna and gemara, knowing which volume in each set requires some familiarity but not nearly the amount needed to be able to do that with a set of gemara.

[cellio]

Thanks for the information!

(OK, I had assumed these sources would have the same problem as the gemara -- there was once a logical order but then commentary overwhelmed. Glad to hear it's easier to look things up in these sources; I can't imagine how people managed gemara before search engines.)