Pesach services

We were in Toronto for the first days of Pesach. I had previously had an excellent experience at Beit HaMinyan (not just the one, but that's the one I wrote about), so I was looking forward to going there for Shabbat/Pesach morning. I checked their web site before leaving Pittsburgh to make sure they were in the same place; thus reassured, I went there Saturday morning to...an empty, locked building. They're very friendly and welcoming when they're there, but maybe not so great at updating their web site. Bummer. :-(

So I fell back to the Village Shul (Aish HaTorah), a place I'd been once before. This time, as last, I found them to be not too welcoming; this time I knew where to go in the building so the indifferent man standing at the entrance didn't hinder me, but nor did he respond to my greeting. At the kiddush (which was a standing-around affair this time, not a sit-down one), not a single person greeted me, even when I made eye contact. It can be hard for me to approach random people and start conversations; I greeted some and usually got responses but no one engaged. I don't know what (if anything) I was doing wrong; I think it was fairly obvious that I wasn't a regular, but I wasn't inappropriate in any way I could determine.

But all that said, I'm very glad I went for one reason: Tal.

Ok, I need to back up. T'filat Tal, aka the prayer for dew, is said exactly once during the year, on the morning of Pesach, in the musaf service. I had never heard it before. The Reform movement doesn't do musaf and didn't import that part into another part of the service (like is done with some other parts), and when we're in Toronto I don't always make it to Yom Tov services (but I insist on Shabbat). It's possible that I was at a Conservative service for Pesach once, and if so either they didn't do it or they didn't do anything special with it and I didn't notice.

So, this is either the first time I've encountered this prayer or the first time it registered. And it did in fact register. A resonant text (which I am unable to find online, help?), a beautiful and fitting melody (which I can't find a good version of online), and just the right amount of congregational engagement (a few words sung together at the end of each stanza) all came together into a heartfelt but not over-the-top prayer that felt entirely right to me. Wow.

And I think it needs all of those. As I said, the Reform movement doesn't do this text -- but let me predict how it would go down if we did. Because it's unfamiliar and people can't be assumed to be fluent, we would read (not sing) it, in English. Perhaps responsively, alternating stanzas. And it would fall completely flat, done that way. I'm not fluent and I'd never seen this text before either, but I listened to it in Hebrew while reading the English translation, and that worked. If I didn't need the translation then that'd be even better, but the text I read and the text I hear don't need to be the same language and that's just fine. Alas, mine seems to be a small-minority position in my movement, so I will probably not get the opportunity to experience this prayer in that setting, which makes me sad.

( some service anthropology )