shabbaton

This year's shabbaton was wonderful. The sense of connection and completeness that it provides is just so much stronger than a "regular" Shabbat. I want more of that! :-)

We had 24 people this year, and went back to the site we used before the one we've been using for the last few years. This site is a longer drive and is a little more primitive in some ways, but it's in a more pleasant location (lake, trees, privacy) than the other, and the communal space is more comfortable. I also found the staff we encountered to be more friendly. And it doesn't have crosses and stuff all over the place like the Lutheran camp. I hope we keep going to this one.

One of the best things about a retreat like this is that you're not time-constrained. You don't have to worry about the folks who are getting antsy because the service is running long and they want to get their kids in bed, or the rabbi isn't getting ready to run upstairs for the second service, and stuff like that. Things take as long as they take and no one cares. So we took some things slower, and did stuff we sometimes skip, and experimented with some things. (Like an actual individual Amidah -- this congregation is mostly used to saying it together, and I've been hoping we would try cutting people loose to go at their own pace. That seemed to work, so I hope we do it more.)

Friday night, after the service and dinner and before the singing that goes into the wee hours, is usually kind of quiet and meditative (niggunim, storytelling, focusing on breathing, and so on). That worked really well this year. I think my rabbi was fairly relaxed by then, maybe more relaxed than in past years.

I found myself being my rabbi's "right-hand man" in assorted things. It was very natural for both of us. ( Read more... )

This afernoon during the study session we talked about middot, which are, basically, self-improvement techniques. (The text we had referred to this as "tikkun middot", analogous to "tikkun olam" but focused inward rather than outward.) I've encountered many of the ideas before, of course, but not all neatly packaged up under a single heading. Some of them are things I've been working on for years; others are things I should work on more; still others are things that I think I mostly have a reasonable grasp of.

I spent some time this afternoon with one of our newer torah readers, who will be reading in a few weeks (Bamidbar). She asked if I could chant some of her portion for her (she wanted to check some things). I said "I'm not very good at sight-reading, but let me look at it". I did, and it was all standard trope with no surprises, and the text was very easy (and repetitive), so as it turned out, I could chant it for her. Nifty! I'm glad a new person got this portion; we assign portions based on dates, mostly, not based on any sort of evaluation of difficulty.

Odd encounter: Friday when we arrived I noticed that one of the staff members seemed to be staring at me, but I shrugged it off. A bit later he came up to me and said "I think I know you but I don't know why". So we started comparing notes; it turns out that his brother was fringe SCA at CMU when I was there, and he recognized me from visits to his brother's fraternity house (where the SCA hung out and a RuneQuest! game I was in was held). Small world. He's now working for AOL in Virginia, but he works at this camp on some weekends. (Am I just incredibly bad at things like this, or is this a fluke? I would not know by sight any of my sister's friends from 20+ years ago; heck, I probably wouldn't recognize most of my own college classmates, if we weren't otherwise close.)

The only problem we had the entire time was in following the directions to get there. For my (and maybe your) amusement, here follow the directions with my annotations in italics: ( fluff )

calendars

Idle question the first: what is the origin of Shabbat (or Yom Tov) beginning 18 minutes before sunset? That is, the idea of starting early is solidly talmudic, but what is the significance of 18 minutes in particular? It is worth noting, as well, that many time differentials are in proportional hours (a day always has 12 hours; sometimes they're longer and sometimes they're shorter), but "18 minutes" is a constant. (Online search in the Soncino talmud isn't doing it for me, though I may be doing something wrong in specifying the search, given the lack of documentation.)

Idle question the second: the issues of Shabbat (etc) times for astronauts (e.g. on the shuttle or space station) are well-understood, but what will we do when we colonize other planets? If you don't go with the local times, things get rapidly wonky, with Shabbat perhaps starting mid-day one week and at dawn the next and so on. If you do go with local times, then you quickly have calendar drift with respect to Earth -- and you may need to change the number or length of months, if you want a physical year to equal a liturgical year. If you don't do that, your holidays move around all over the place like on the Muslim calendar.