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Shabbat

(I attempted to post this Sunday but LJ didn't seem to like it. Hmm.)

I spent part of Shabbat with the gracious murmur311, who took me to services at her congregation Friday night and another Saturday morning. (Hers doesn't have Saturday services this month. Lack of critical mass, I gather.)

( services and torah study )

Shabbat II

Aha! There's a length limitation through this net connection!

( torah study )

After the torah study Jenny and I went back to HUC, where we had a lunch of cold foods that I had brought. Paula joined us for conversation, though she had already eaten. Paula is from somewhere in Texas and has to drive an hour and a half each way to get kosher food; I am blessed to live in a kosher-equipped city. She belongs to a 65-family congregation without a rabbi; she runs their school and sometimes gets asked to lead services and do other things, which is why she's here. She, like I, learned that mostly by osmosis.

Shabbat III

(After lunch she commented that she felt outclassed by me, but I hastened to point out that everyone in this program is going to have stronger and weaker areas. I, for instance, do not know squat about teaching. I also wonder where she got this impression in the first place; we didn't really talk torah much at lunch, and I haven't talked too much about my own background with her, aside from describing our congregation and how I've learned about leading services. I suspect she leads services more than I do, actually, because we have rabbis. It will be interesting to learn about the backgrounds of everyone else in the program; I hope the orientation session includes these kinds of introductions.)

Another ten students or so drifted in over the course of the afternoon and evening. All but one of them had trouble slogging through Back to the Sources. Good; it's not just me. :-) (Some of my classmates had trouble with the talmud chapter, which I found to be intuitive -- but they completely grocked the bible-seen-through-literary-criticism part, which had me saying "yeah sure, if you say so" quite a bit.)

After havdalah some of us went out to an Indian restaurant for dinner. We have a mix of backgrounds (not surprising). The biggest surprise was when we were talking about the sizes of our congregations and one person said "nine". Nine families? No, nine people. They are a very old congregation (organizationally, but also member age in many cases) and used to be much much bigger. Wow. Nine. (At the other extreme, someone in our group comes from a 2000-family congregation.)

I've met one person I knew (of) previously: a woman named Suzanne with whom I've exchanged email. (We're both on the URJ worship mailing list.) Everyone else (so far) is new to me, but easy to talk with.

The people who are here so far are a fun group, and I think it will be easy for us to fall into long rambling conversations. Between that and the 13-hour days (shacharit at 8AM; ma'ariv starting at 8:30PM), I predict limited sleep. But that's quite all right, for something like this. (I do intend to write notes each night, as part of gathering my thoughts. When I'll get to post them remains to be seen -- probably the following night.)

Administrivia

Ok. Apparently we're all sharing a dialup connection or some such, and if you try to submit a browser form with lots of data something dies and the post doesn't happen. So, when I can get access at all (which is a story in itself), I'll be posting by email. I'll try to figure out how to get useful subject headers and stuff later, and I'll probably clean up some formatting stuff once I get home, but for now at least I can push some stuff out there. Enjoy.

Oh, and you should assume I'm not seeing email; I'll check comments on my posts when I've got service, but email and my friends list will mostly wait. Please send mail about posts I might miss and ought not. Thanks.

Dialup! Can you believe it? :-)

Sunday

They announced registration for 10 to noon, but almost everyone was here already so by 10:30 all but two people were checked in. This gave us some time to mingle and meet some of the staff before lunch and the formal orientation. I met another rabbinic student who knows my rabbi. :-) (From Camp Harlem and some NFTY activities.) During dinner he talked a little about what led him to decide to become a rabbi, and I noticed that if you made very few word substitutions, it was basically what drew me to Judaism. The resonance was strong, and I look forward to hearing more from him.

( leading services )

( class: history of liturgy )

Between this class and dinner I had about fifteen minutes to visit the room with the internet connection. (This consists of a hub, extra network cables, and one laptop connected to said hub.) I was able to glance at email (didn't see it all, and it looks like a mailing list I own went haywire) and make one LJ post. Another that I also had queued up refused to post -- don't know why but I'll try again when I post this.

Dinner included a brief talk on birkat hamazon, the grace after meals, and an invitation for us to start leading this at future meals. Having semi-botched this at our congregational retreat in May (one melodic bit I didn't know, and some unfamiliar text in the specific version we were using), so I'd like to try again.

( worship class )

Then it was on to the ma'ariv service. We are to fill out a brief questionnaire (a "service diary") after each service, ideally before leaving the chapel. ( Read more... )

An interesting bit from the introdutions at the orientation: of the 25 participants, six are converts and another (roughly) eight or nine returned to Judaism later in life (many from Orthodox childhoods). I knew that this group would not be representative of the Reform population in general, as it takes a certain degree of commitment and enthusiasm to enter a program like this, but I was still struck by the numbers.

The chugim that are on the schedule (four days) are, basically, electives. Some meet every day and some are one-shots. They haven't given a complete list of the one-shots; the ones that meet every day are two levels of Hebrew and a cantillation class. I'm going to do the cantillation; it'll be nice to get some formal structure there. It may also give me ideas on how we can teach this topic in my congregation.

The building containing the internet access was already locked right after the ma'ariv service. Sigh. Tomorrow's schedule is pretty full, but maybe there will be some breaks at useful times. I'm just going to carry the laptop with me tomorrow, since the dorm is not all that near the classroom space. (Not far, but making a round-trip could be the difference between useful time and not.) All I really need to carry is the laptop and the mouse; for short bursts I don't need the power cord, and they've got network cable.