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that went well
On that last: I was expecting 30-40 people, basically the minyan regulars minus some who'd said they wanted to be in the sanctuary, plus some curious others. We had 80 and had to send out for more prayerbooks twice. The room seats about 100; we may be in trouble next year. Lots of people complimented me on it and my rabbi said many kind things about me for organizing it. We had my rabbi for the first hour and had lots of spirited singing, just like in the minyan. We had only expected to have him for half an hour, so plans about timing went out the window, but it was obvious that he really wanted to be there and of course everybody wanted him to be there, so I think we need to see if we can make that easier next year -- maybe start half an hour earlier? Because of the extra time we spent in the opening section we had to rush to try to catch up with the sanctuary service -- which was complicated by the fact that they were making up for a late start by adjusting and ended up running early. So while we had intended to enter the sanctuary at the beginning of the torah service, we actually missed the first few aliyot. Oops. We'll do better next year.
Even with the responsibility of running things -- it can be challenging to really pray when you're also responsible for watching the clock and tracking the people who might need extra page cues and signaling to your assistant leaders about changes to make and so on -- I was able to really engage with this service, and it was a great way to start a day spent in the synagogue. This ended up being even better than just switching the two morning sanctuary services (my original request) would have been; the new service had a much higher lowest common denominator, in terms of fluency, and that's huge. I carried the high from this service through most of the rest of the day. (My mind always wanders during Yizkor, which is more about the dreary English readings in our machzor than it is about Yizkor itself, but the rest was good.)
I read torah at the afternoon service. I didn't manage to learn the special high-holy-day trope this year either, either for Rosh Hashana or for Yom Kippur (I read on both). Someday... (Nobody else uses it, but I want to try -- and maybe start a trend.)
Fast notes: ("Fast" is a noun, or I suppose a nominal adjective. I'm not talking
about speed. :-) )
A few days ago I followed a link to this article about fasting and it was very helpful this year. The stuff about hydration and caffeine I already knew, but the new insights for me were: (1) meal content (more below), and (2) large breakfast, small lunch, large dinner. I usually have little breakfast (usually just a glass of soy milk or kefir), and had found in past years that large lunch plus moderate dinner seemed to work better for me than the reverse. But what the article suggested was even better. As for the meal content, I hadn't previously heard that cheese and tomato sauce were considered problematic; in the past I've often had cheese pasta of some sort for the pre-fast meal. And the advice about de-emphasizing veggies at that meal was new to me, though I'm not clear why that would be good.
For my own future reference:
Breakfast: two servings of cracked wheat with milk and honey.
During the day (not all at once): about half a pound of baby carrots with about a cup of hummus, 24oz orange juice, about a cup of applesauce, and I think there was a high-fiber nutrition bar in there. (I did have one can of Coke Zero during the day to fend off the drowsies. Next year consider taking erev Yom Kippur off from work.)
Dinner: pan-cooked lamb chop (with mint jelly), about 1.25C brown rice, half acorn squash stuffed with chopped apple and baked (and I ate the rest of the apple (that didn't go into Dani's half) while cooking), 24oz orange juice, water.
I had a headache on Friday afternoon (not good) so took ibuprofen with dinner. Last year I learned my lesson about ibuprofen and an empty stomach, so I had one dose of Tylenol with me today but did not need it, yay. (I don't normally take Tylenol, but could find no warnings on the packaging about not taking on an empty stomach. I can't take aspirin, in case you're wondering -- or rather, I can, but historically the results have not been good.)
OT: LiveJournal could go back to the fixed-width, larger font in the main part of the "post" page any time now, ahem. Yes, I filed a bug report. (I compose in emacs and paste in, but it's still a pain to do edits like the addition of this paragraph.)
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Gah! I thought that was a local browser issue I was having. So annoying to have to move out of the text area and hit '+' several times for every post.