Shabbat report

Friday night I ended up going to the Lubavich Center for services. ( an inner dialogue in one act, because I'm feeling punchy )

Oh well. It would have presumably gone much better if I'd had a (female) "native guide", but I don't know any. Saturday morning is probably a much better bet than Friday night, and I'll try that someday, but I had the Friday night available so I figured it was worth a try. I've got a Saturday-morning minyan that I'm very attached to.

Maybe I had unrealistic expectations; I don't know. You hear a lot about the joy in chassidism, and I guess I expected something similar to the "singing minyan" in Passaic NJ, which was sort of Carlebach-esque in feel (though I didn't know about Shlomo Carlebach's music until later). At that service there was singing and even a little dancing IIRC, and the community really felt inclusive. I somehow thought that Chassidism was that plus more. (And, of course, I don't know if Friday's service was representative of the larger community.)

This morning's service went very well. It also had much more ruach (spirit) and community than I expected (and about as much singing as I expected -- which is to say, a fair bit).

I got there early so I could get a look at the sefer torah (scroll) I'd be reading from. Good thing I did; the calligraphy was very hard to read, with more of the "widened" letters than I've seen elsewhere. (The text is justified, and rather than mucking with white space the way printers do, certain lettrs are permitted to be written wider than usual to fill in the space. Sometimes they're very wide. It can be distracting.)

I was the first of five torah readers. I was nervous, but it went well. I made one "invisible" trope error and am pleased that I didn't stumble when I realized it had happened; I just fudged things and went on, and I don't think anyone but the checker noticed. And she didn't stop me for it, which is good. I made no pronunciation errors, and I think the checker would have corrected me if I had (based on what I saw with another reader). I think my pronunciation was spot-on, actually, and my trope was pretty good. (Certainly musically sound; whether I had any glitches within that scope, I can't say.)

I learned three lessons, two of which I've learned before and had forgotten. So I will write them down this time:

• Practice chanting while leaning over a table, not while standing up straight. Breathing and vocal support are very different in that posture. (I was out of breath in places where I shouldn't have been, and hadn't been in practice.)
• Don't get too attached to the calligraphy in the tikkun (practice book); the scroll might be different (already discussed).
• Both of your hands will be occupied, so don't plan on using hidden gestures to aid in memorization. (I had two sections that were the same text and different trope, and I practiced with gestures under the table to help me memorize which was which. But I had to use one hand to hold a roller on the scroll and the other was holding the yad (pointer), leaving no hands free. And that's the trope I got wrong.)

I got a lot of compliments, and I think I did a good job. I need to chant it into a tape recorder (archive, in case I ever get this portion again), and then I'll be ready to focus on Behar (which will mean overwriting some of what I learned for this one). I didn't archive Behar last year or Shlach Lecha (my "adult bat mitzvah [sic]" portion) a few years ago, and time has taken its toll. Behar is still there but rusty; Shlach Lecha is gone. Oops.