games day

We had something over a dozen guests yesterday for a day and evening of board games. I think this was our largest crowd yet; usually when we send out a mass invitation we get about 65-75% positive responses, but this time everyone said yes. (Two then did not come; one was sick and I'm not sure what happened to the other.)

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One of our guests was temporarily in a wheelchair due to a broken leg (sounded like a bad break from her description), which I didn't know in advance. (I knew about the disability, but thought she was on crutches.) Most of our first floor did not pose problems, and it's good to know that a wheelchair does fit through one doorway I thought questionable. I'm not sure how she managed the powder room; that might have required using structural features (like the sink) as supports (lean on this and hop over). I guess it's an improvement over my previous house, which had no first-floor restroom at all, but it reminded me that we still have accessibility barriers even setting aside the steps one must use to get into the house in the first place.

not my best torah-reading day

Yesterday morning I read torah. It went ok, I guess, but it wasn't one of my better days. Sigh.

I read the seventh aliya of Vayigash, which is a bit long (Gen 47:11-27, about a column in the scroll). That's not the longest I've read, but it's up there. The vocabulary was mostly ok, though there were some minor variations I had to keep track of, like the rule that changes certain vowels if the word is the last one in a sentence. (No, I don't know why.) There was a higher-than-normal concentration of unusual tropes and a few cases where usual tropes came in unusual groupings. I guess it was just a little bit of a lot of things.

I realized while I was reading that I really should have broken this up for translation purposes -- chant several verses, stop and translate, chant more, and so on. If I were translating from the scroll (sometimes I do) I would have thought of that, maybe. But I didn't plan it in advance and didn't feel confident in just picking a spot on the fly. So I might have created an awkward situation for those not fluent in Hebrew. I got compliments nonetheless, but I don't feel they were earned this time.

My rabbi was there too. I don't think that had a direct effect on the torah reading, but by the end of the reading I was feeling a little flustered (made more mistakes than I should have), and that might have fed on itself a bit. So by the time I got to the d'var torah I was feeling off, and I think I probably talked too fast because I do that when I get nervous. So I need to find ways to detect and deal with that while it's happening rather than only figuring it out after the fact.

Oh, I just realized one thing I can do in that situation, and maybe if I write it down I'll remember. My usual sequence is: torah, d'var, halftarah, both because I tend to talk about the torah portion and because by the time of the haftarah someone is sitting and holding the torah scroll, and it would be a kindness not to make someone hold it through my d'var. (I have tried unsuccessfully to get people to put the dressed scroll back on the reading table so this wouldn't be an issue.) However, if something happens during the reading to throw me off, I can buy some time by doing the haftarah reading first. That's read right out of a book and (in my congregation) is in English, so that can be a chance to catch my breath.

Anyone else have tips for preventing or recovering from performance problems? (I count public speaking in the "perforamnce" bucket.)

Vayigash: managing famines

( yesterday's d'var torah )