report from the pews: Mishkan T'filah

Friday night I arrived to find copies of Mishkan T'filah, the new siddur published by the Reform movement, in the racks. There have been some services with photocopied subsets of this book (probably copied from earlier drafts), but this was our first chance to use the real thing.

The service went remarkably smoothly, and especially so given that the two rabbis and one cantorial soloist had not had substantial planning time. (The books just came, people were just getting back from various trips, etc.) When the leaders stuck to the intended usage pattern and when the book stuck to its own format, things were smooth. When someone decided to insert an English reading for something we'd just done in Hebrew, or the book broke from the two-page spread, things were a little rougher but still ok.

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Pennsic pictures

I have (finally) posted my Pennsic pictures. (And then Picasa died and took that album with it. :-( )

A few selections below the cut:

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