that went well

This was a really productive Yom Kippur, from the robo-call on the answering machine Friday afternoon about lashon hara (yeah, really) through Kol Nidrei last night and the whole day today. Parts of the liturgy newly resonated with me, I heard two excellent sermons (maybe more on that later), and the new morning service was a rousing success.

On that last: I was expecting 30-40 people, basically the minyan regulars minus some who'd said they wanted to be in the sanctuary, plus some curious others. We had 80 and had to send out for more prayerbooks twice. The room seats about 100; we may be in trouble next year. Lots of people complimented me on it and my rabbi said many kind things about me for organizing it. We had my rabbi for the first hour and had lots of spirited singing, just like in the minyan. We had only expected to have him for half an hour, so plans about timing went out the window, but it was obvious that he really wanted to be there and of course everybody wanted him to be there, so I think we need to see if we can make that easier next year -- maybe start half an hour earlier? Because of the extra time we spent in the opening section we had to rush to try to catch up with the sanctuary service -- which was complicated by the fact that they were making up for a late start by adjusting and ended up running early. So while we had intended to enter the sanctuary at the beginning of the torah service, we actually missed the first few aliyot. Oops. We'll do better next year.

Even with the responsibility of running things -- it can be challenging to really pray when you're also responsible for watching the clock and tracking the people who might need extra page cues and signaling to your assistant leaders about changes to make and so on -- I was able to really engage with this service, and it was a great way to start a day spent in the synagogue. This ended up being even better than just switching the two morning sanctuary services (my original request) would have been; the new service had a much higher lowest common denominator, in terms of fluency, and that's huge. I carried the high from this service through most of the rest of the day. (My mind always wanders during Yizkor, which is more about the dreary English readings in our machzor than it is about Yizkor itself, but the rest was good.)

I read torah at the afternoon service. I didn't manage to learn the special high-holy-day trope this year either, either for Rosh Hashana or for Yom Kippur (I read on both). Someday... (Nobody else uses it, but I want to try -- and maybe start a trend.)

( fast notes )

OT: LiveJournal could go back to the fixed-width, larger font in the main part of the "post" page any time now, ahem. Yes, I filed a bug report. (I compose in emacs and paste in, but it's still a pain to do edits like the addition of this paragraph.)