Entries tagged with leining

Entry tags:

Shabbat

( chanting torah )

On the Shabbat of memorial-day weekend my rabbi always does something to acknowledge the holiday. Last night he read excerpts from a moving eulogy given at Iwo Jima by the first rabbinic chaplain in the Navy. The rabbi prepared the eulogy for a general memorial service (all religions), but chaplains from other religions objected to a Jew being allowed to speak at a combined service, so they ended up splitting people up by religion and only a small group heard the eulogy. Ah, here it is. Thank you, Google.

Entry tags:

short takes

"The NSA would like to remind everyone to call their mothers this Sunday. They need to calibrate their system." (Seen here and passed on by

sui66iy.)

That poll I posted on Friday got 15 responses in the first 20 minutes, three of them from people who don't openly subscribe to my journal. *boggle*

SCA: Woo hoo! A local clue-enabled couple won Crown Tourney yesterday. Nice folks; I'm really happy for them. The next 11 months should be lots of fun. (As ariannawyn pointed out, this might be the first queen who's won one of Yama Kaminari's fundoshi oil-wrestling contests, which, yes, is as strange as it sounds.)

Quoth some recent spam: "your woman wants a replica". Really? I have a woman? Please give her two messages, then: (1) she's late with her share of the mortgage, and (2) she can buy her own damn replica.

Around 6:00 tonight I got a phone solicitation from someone claiming to be calling from Jerusalem. So that would have been, what, 1:00 AM? That seems like a lot of effort to catch people at dinner time -- and that's just eastern time. (Though I'm told that Californians eat late compared to midwesterners, so maybe they just call them first thing in the caller's morning.)

Trope geekery: the torah portion I'm currently learning (fourth aliya of Bamidbar) has four munachs in a row (followed by pazeir, which itself is pretty unusual). I occasionally see two munachs in a row; I think I've seen three. Four? Weird. I had to look up what to do with that. (Munach is one of those symbols that has different melodies depending on local context.)

For the bar mitzvah I'm conducting in July, I've decided to read rather than chant the portion up to where the student takes over. I figure that this way I won't be upstaging the kid; while in many congregations it wouldn't be perceived that way, I'm not sure about ours and that family is already having to deal with deviation from the norm because they won't get a rabbi. I asked my rabbi if this seemed appropriate to him (and explained my reasoning) and he concurred. Reading without chanting is going to take some getting used to, though!

Hebrew class tomorrow night. I'm considering asking the teacher to move me to the next section for the ulpan (that is, one ahead of where the group I'm now with will be going). It's possible that this will also get me a different teacher, which is not a change I'd frown on. But mainly, I figure that if it's too advanced we can fix it on the first night, but if the class is too basic I'll never be able to jump up.

Entry tags:

Shabbat

( visiting cantor )

Entry tags:

leining

chanting torah

We're having a visit from a guest cantor at the end of April. Shabbat morning the chair of the worship committee asked me if I'd like to chant torah that morning. Twist my arm! :-) We had both assumed that the visitor would do so, but apparently not. It occurred to me after the fact that I did this the last time we had a guest cantor too; I hope that doesn't look bad. I did offer to defer to a (specific) other person, but he wanted me. That's pleasant.

I'm not sure which is doing more to speed up my learning of portions, practice or comprehension, but I'm not complaining. For my current portion (I'm reading next Shabbat), I spent about six hours in the course of one week and had it in pretty good shape. This was an experiment; I wanted to see if I could learn a portion in a week and the answer seems to be yes. (Portion = one aliya, not the entire parsha. In this case it's about 20 lines in the scroll.) And I understand a lot of the text -- not necessarily every verb or noun (which is largely a vocabulary issue), but enough grammar and basic vocabulary to tie the bits together and know who is acting upon whom, and stuff like that.

This coming Shabbat is Shabbat HaGadol, the Shabbat before Pesach. While these days rabbis -- or at least the ones I'm familiar with -- give sermons almost every week, historically there were only two times a year when rabbis preached, and this Shabbat is one of them. (The other is Shabbat Shuva, during the high holy days.) I'm not so presumptuous to step into that role full-force, but I am planning to do a little extra preparation for my talk that morning, actually writing out the text instead of just outlining it and speaking from notes. So it'll be a little more formal than the norm for that group, which seems reasonable. I'm going to tie the portion together with Pesach and talk about the transformative effect of ritual. Or at least it sounds like a good idea in my head; we'll see what happens when I write it down. :-) (Yes, I'll post -- after I deliver it.)

Entry tags:

leining,
torah

reading torah

I'll be chanting torah this Shabbat morning. I asked if I could also do Friday night (I mean, I'm learning the portion anyway...) and the associate rabbi (who's leading that service) said he's happy to have a few hours of his week back. :-)

This week's parsha is Mishpatim, which is -- mostly -- a list of assorted laws. Last week we had the grandeur of the revelation at Sinai, with the "big-ticket" items (the ten utterances). I'm reading about giving over the first-born to God, not eating meat torn in the field, not bearing false reports or corrupting the justice system, and helping neighbors even when you don't like them -- all in the span of about a dozen verses. Somewhere in there I should be able to find a jumping-off point for a (mini-)sermon. (I can, of course, talk about something from the rest of the parsha, but I try to tie it to the actual reading when I can. I figure the rigor is good for me.)

There does not seem to be much midrash about this parsha -- either that or, more likely, I don't know where to look. I'm not sure what I'm going to do about Thursday morning's "parsha bit". I don't want to use the one about how God offered the torah to other nations and they objected to various clauses in it until he got to Israel; everyone in the congregation knows that one already, I'm sure.

Entry tags:

Shabbat

Friday night's torah reading was a little rough, but we all survived. They had me read from a large scroll, which means the top of the column was pretty far away once the scroll was rolled out on the table. Naturally, my portion started two lines down from the top of a column, and the table was kind of high. I was standing on tip-toes and leaning on the table to get close enough to almost see. Next time, I ask for a different scroll. (The associate rabbi also pointed out, after, that the height of the table could be adjusted with the press of a button. Great; wish I'd known that earlier. :-) )

It appears that many in the congregation interpreted my problems as nervousness. Nope. I chanted the climactic part of the binding of Yitzchak in front of 900 people on Rosh Hashana; I think I'm over nervousess in my own congregation.

But I also got a lot of positive feedback; chanting is not common in our congregation and it was a longer portion, and I guess that impressed people. I actually find that the chanting makes it easier for me, not harder, but I've got a knack for music and not-yet-adequate Hebrew comprehension. The music provides hints about the phrasing, which makes for a more coherent reading than if I just read the words without knowing what each one meant. Mind, I do go over a portion pretty thoroughly when learning it, first attempting my own translation and then studying a translation alongside the Hebrew, but that doesn't mean I can retain it all at the word level.

The associate rabbi said some nice things about me in the context of the Sh'liach K'hilah program. (They took the opportunity to tell the congregation at large that I've completed that program.) This generated some nice comments at the oneg.

Reading on Shabbat morning went much more smoothly. I tried, for the first time, giving my d'var torah without using notes; it turns out I'm not ready for that yet. Well, you don't know if you don't try, and it's a forgiving group. But there were things I meant to say and didn't, and things I didn't say as eloquently as I'd planned, and I'll just have to do better next time.

On Shabbat morning my rabbi also brought up the Sh'liach K'hilah program briefly, and mentioned that I'd read the previous night (many of the morning people hadn't been there). He also said something to the effect that he'd be giving me increasing opportunities to read on Friday nights; woot! I have hopes of eventually parlaying that into helping to lead worship too, but I'll take any advance.

Entry tags:

leining

reading torah

I'm reading torah Shabbat morning in our minyan, so a few weeks ago I asked my rabbi if I could also read Friday night. (Most Reform congregations read Friday nights because that's when most people come.) He said yes, and I'm looking forward to it. I like reading in the morning minyan because we're all friends and there's a lot of ruach (spirit) in the group. Friday night, on the other hand, is a chance to read for the larger community.

It turns out that it'll probably be larger than usual tomorrow, too. I didn't know this when I picked the portion, but both the congregational choir and the youth choir are participating, and that usually draws more people out of the woodwork.

I had hoped to get a look at the sefer torah tonight after minyan, but partway through the drive home from work it became apparent that attending the minyan wasn't going to happen. (There wasn't time to drop off the cat at home and slide over there in time, and going straight there and taking the cat in with me seemed contra-indicated.) Maybe if I get there early enough tomorrow night I can sneak a look. If not, oh well -- I do have a tikkun to practice from, so I'm not expecting trouble. But it's always nice to get a peek to confirm.

Entry tags:

weekend

Naturally, yesterday (when I couldn't put up the sukkah) the weather was wonderful, and today (when I could) it was colder and threatening rain. But I got it up and I didn't get wet, so that worked out. It only took half an hour to put the frame and roof (s'chach) together. The walls took another half hour. I'm sure I could expedite if I'd just use plastic walls like lots of other people, but I like the look of the lattice pieces that I use much better, so it's worth some fussing. Besides, the lattice makes it easier, in principle, to have decorations; one of these years I'll get some of those.

Sukkot begins tomorrow night. Chag sameach to all who celebrate!

Yesterday was the wedding of two SCA friends. I think the SCA people outnumbered the relatives at the reception. Everyone seemed to be having fun, even the pinch-hitting cooks. (The original cook got into an accident on Wednesday and is still in the hospital. We planned to visit him today, but he was moved back into the ICU so we couldn't. I really hope he's ok!)

Yesterday morning I chanted torah. There was no bar mitzvah, so my rabbi stayed for the whole service and acted as my checker. He had chanted the portion the previous night; I'd tried to call him on Friday to talk about that but didn't reach him. (It was a very busy week. I had learned the portion anyway. I was calling to offer to save him the time preparing it, which I suspected he wasn't going to do until after Yom Kippur anyway.) He usually doesn't chant but did this time, though, so I suspect he wouldn't have taken me up on the offer. And he is, as you might expect, much better at it than I am. Still, mine went ok -- forgot one trope and had to be prompted but fine otherwise. My comments on the portion were well-received. Some people commented on my having read for Rosh Hashana and wanted to know if I'd really learned this portion since then; mostly, but it was short. But hey! I can learn a torah portion more quickly than I used to be able to.

Most dates are taken for the next several weeks, except one week when I'll be out of town (Thanskgiving), so I'm next reading for Vayishlach in mid-December. I'll ask to read Friday night too; I last did that at the end of August. I'm glad that we've got people siging up again for Shabbat morning; there were some rough spots during the summer, I guess due to vacations.

Tonight's dinner included a culinary mystery. When I was last at the store I picked up a package that was labelled "California lamb chops". I didn't know what that meant (origin? applied seasoning?) but they looked like lamb chops so I shrugged and put the package in my basket. Tonight, in preparing to cook them, I saw that they looked like they'd been fabricated from ground lamb -- but they had bones! What was that all about? I cooked them and they were ok (but not as good as actual chops), but I'm still a little puzzled by what I was eating. Is this some novelty I'm unaware of, or was the packaging meant to be deceptive? Next time I'll look more closely, I guess.

Entry tags:

Rosh Hashana

Monday night friends from the congregation invited us for dinner, so we joined them and then everyone but Dani went to shul. This meant going to the late service, which has the more formal (and more "classical Reform") music; I prefer the music of the early service but wanted to accept the invitation. I'm glad we did accept; it was a very nice dinner and Dani got to know some of my shul friends a little better (and vice-versa).

I didn't connect so much with last night's service, but I really did this morning. At several points I felt I was truly in the presence of the divine king, and I spent a lot of time thinking about things in the past year that I ought've done differently.

My torah reading went really well, and I got many compliments -- including two people telling me that they'd gotten chills listening to me. Those are good chills; I was reading the climax of the binding of Yitzchak and trying to do it expressively. I guess I succeeded. :-) I backed off a bit when I got up there and found a mike right there in my face, only an inch or two from my mouth; I was worried about overblowing it when the angel shouts to Avraham. But still, it worked.

( sermon )

lefkowitzga came for lunch and we got to spend a couple hours chatting. That was very nice; we haven't been able to just sit down and talk in a while.

( we ate... )

I've heard a little informal talk in the congregation about possibly going to a two-day Rosh Hashana at some to-be-defined future time. If that suggestion makes its way to the worship committee it should make for some interesting discussion. There are several points of view to consider:

( Read more... )

Entry tags:

leining

progress in leining

I've gotten a lot better at chanting torah in the two years that my congregation has had a program of lay readers. That's not surprising, of course; practice leads to improvement. But I've just realized that my notion of what's "hard" and what's "easy" has changed.

Two years ago I read the first aliya of Ha'azinu, which I thought had to be the easiest portion out there. It was short, but much more importantly, Ha'azinu is a poem, and ends of verses always (so far) match up with ends of lines or half-lines. (It's a two-column format.) For a beginning reader still learning the feel of which tropes go together and how things flow, that's incredibly important, because "end of verse" has its own trope and getting those right can orient you for much of the rest.

Last year, on ten minutes' notice, I read that same part of Ha'azinu, and it came back really quickly -- reinforcing my notion of the portion's ease.

This year? I'm learning the third aliya of this same portion, and... ack. Yes, the formatting is quite helpful; that's nice. But the vocabuluary! Ack! It's chock full of flowery speech and words I don't otherwise know (and I wouldn't be surprised if there are some weird verb forms or something too), and that seems hard. I had not realized how much I now depend on rudimentary comprehension. Two years ago comprehension was a pipe dream and I was just reading words; now comprehension is possible and I'm noticing how comprehensible the Akeidah (which I'm reading Tuesday) is and how comprehensible Ha'azinu is not.

Someone else can have this portion next year; I'm going to try to load up on more Genesis. :-)

Entry tags:

halacha,
leining

kol isha, agency, and women reading torah

Ok, I realize that Friday isn't the best time to post about a partly-baked halachic issue, but hey, I post things when I think of them. C'est la vie. (Hmm, is there a corresponding Hebrew idiom to "c'est la vie", perhaps one that would be easier to spell?)

There is an issue in halacha called kol isha, which literally means "a woman's voice". The idea is that a woman's voice -- specifically a singing voice, according to B'rachot 24a -- will arouse men in the same way that seeing her hair (or certain body parts, and I don't just mean the naughty bits) will. So just as women are to cover their hair and wear modest garments to keep men from sinning, so too are they to refrain from singing around men. (Well, at least solo; being in a group can mitigate.)

I'd long assumed that kol isha is the reason women can't read torah (except in women's groups) in traditional communities. But I've thought of an argument against that position, which probably means that either the argument is wrong or this isn't a kol-isha issue to begin with. (I tend to assume that no halachic argument that turns out to be correct would be original to me, because I don't have the vast knowledge base yet.)

( Read more... )

Entry tags:

HHD torah reading

I'll be chanting torah for Rosh Hashana this year. Nifty! The portion is the Akeidah (the binding of Isaac); I get the climax. Which I will read in front of 900 people, give or take. Fortunately -- near as I can tell -- that sort of thing doesn't make me nervous any more.

It's just as well I didn't get Yom Kippur after all. I'd been hoping for that to allow more time to learn the portion (Rosh Hashana is in a bit under three weeks), but I'd forgotten that I'm reading on the Shabbat two days after Yom Kippur. Yes, I think Rosh Hashana will be better spacing. :-) (On the other hand, Ha'azinu, that Shabbat portion, has got to be the easiest portion out there, so it wouldn't have been a show-stopper.)

The book of B'reishit (Genesis) overall seems to be easier to learn than much of the rest of the Torah. I should remember that when choosing portions in the future, when looking at corner cases (i.e. end of D'varim versus beginning of B'reishit, and end of B'reishit versus beginning of Sh'mot.) Sometimes a week or two makes a real difference.

Entry tags:

Shabbat

The torah-reading went well -- better Saturday morning than Friday night, but reasonable both times.

We're in the process of renovating the sanctuary, so services are being held in the chapel at the moment. I love the chapel; it's a beautiful room, and as long as your crowd isn't too large it's great. I knew, intellectually, that the reading desk in the chapel is rather smaller than the one in the sanctuary, but somehow it didn't hit me just how small until I was actually reading torah on it. It was, um, cramped. And the desk is high and the portion started near the top of a column, so I was standing on tip-toes and leaning forward to read the first few lines. I probably looked kind of goofy, but if so people had the good grace not to say so to me. :-)

The other challenge Friday night was that the cloth on the desk must have been bunched up or something, because the parchment of the scroll was not lying flat. At one point I missed when going to the next line and needed to be prompted, and there were a couple other times when the curvature made things "interesting". But I got through it and I got lots of positive comments.

Shabbat morning the environment was familiar and I had no trouble seeing the scroll. And there was enough room that when I needed to go to a new column I could do so easily. Note to future self: bring a hair tie or something on torah-reading days; while my hair didn't get in my way as it hung down and reached for the parchment, it would be better to not do that. I wonder why I haven't noticed that before. I think I was having a fluffy-hair day, so maybe that was it.

Both times we did this with interspersed translations: I would chant a few verses and then pause while my rabbi translated, and then I'd pick it up again. (So this was all one aliyah, as opposed to breaking it up.) I think that worked really well; people who aren't fluent in Hebrew didn't have to go too long without help, and I got to pause during the reading. I wasn't sure if pausing would be an advantage or disadvantage going in, but it worked reasonably well. I wouldn't recommend it for someone who's nervous about reading or who isn't strong musically, though. I didn't have to think about start pitch for each segment; I was just there.

One person told me Saturday morning that my torah chanting helps her focus -- it's the combination of going more slowly than when just reading and my voice, she said. That's always nice to hear. One other person said I should do this some Friday night because I'm obviously good enough; I said "this was the rerun; I did that last night". :-)

My rabbi was right about soemthing Thursday night: I seem to have learned one of the trope symbols (gershayim) a third down from where it should be. Hmm. Must fix that for next time. I'm not actually sure if I've generally mis-learned it or if I somehow just goofed in this particular portion. (It only shows up twice, so not a lot of data.) And yes, my rabbi correctly identified the interval by which I was off. And no, we don't correct readers for trope errors unless they affect phrasing.

Entry tags:

chanting torah this week

I'm chanting torah tomorrow night and Shabbat morning at my synagogue. Chanting Friday night is kind of a big deal, because lay people almost never get that opportunity. (I last did this two years ago when both rabbis were away.) Yes, most Reform congregations read torah on Friday nights, because for many folks that's the main service. Some congregations only have a morning service if there's a bar mitzvah, and the community as a whole doesn't go to those. I'm glad that we have a regular morning service every Shabbat.

So anyway, my rabbi had said he was open to me chanting on Fridays occasionally, because he knows I'm good enough, so I asked if the next week for which I was already signed up to read on Saturday would do. :-) The portion is long and we'd discussed me not reading the whole thing; I'll read some and he'll read some. The part I am reading -- and remember that this is one aliya, not all seven -- runs over four minutes, and is about half of the aliya. (Eikev slishi.) Division into portions, and aliyot within them, is not what you'd call uniform. I'm reading almost an entire column in the scroll, which is the longest portion I've chanted so far.

He asked me how I felt about chanting a few verses, then having him translate them, chanting a few more, and so on. The congregation is used to "inline" translation, so almost no one follows the reading in a chumash, so asking them to sit and listen to Hebrew in a vacuum for four minutes might not go over well. I said "let's try it" and it ended up working fine when we practiced it. (And I even held pitch through the pauses, which matters to my inner musician.) Tonight I got to practice from the scroll, which is always different from practicing with the tikkun. This is also not the scroll I'm used to reading from on Shabbat mornings.

I'm looking forward to tomorrow night; I think it'll go well. Hmm, I better come up with something to say about the portion for Saturday morning, when the reader traditionally talks for a couple minutes.

Entry tags:

weekend bits

I chanted torah Saturday morning. It went very well; I did make a couple mistakes, but the associate rabbi was checking for me and he was able to feed me the corrections without throwing me. We've never worked before in that way. (The associate rabbi usually doesn't come to this service, but my rabbi is out of town so he led the torah study and most of the service. I led the torah service and concluding prayers.)

Later I will try to write up what I talked about. Thanks for the ideas.

The D&D game Saturday was fairly long (from around 4:00 to around midnight); we knew there'd be a lot going on and wanted the luxury of not playing on a weeknight. I'm glad we had a good long stretch for the climax of the story.

When I got home, I saw a flash of gray and white on the front porch. First thought: why is Baldur outside? Second though: waitaminute, that cat's not big enough. That's maybe half a Baldur. It turned out to be a vary friendly, affectionate young adult that sat patiently at the door with every expectation of being let in. I saw a tag on a collar but couldn't read it (too-small print in too-dim light), so I asked Dani to help me. When I picked up the cat I adjusted my estimate still further; this was about a third of a Baldur. :-)

The tag had a phone number but not an address. I thought about the lateness of the hour and called anyway; I figure that if one of my cats had gotten out I'd want someone to report a sighting right away. I got a machine, so I left a timestamp and an address. The cat was curled up sleeping on our doormat when I went to bed (I left the porch light on) and gone in the morning. I hope that if he's lost he was reunited with his people.

Today after brunch Dani and I went shopping for cell phones (and plans). Sprint, Cingular, and Verizon all offer the same package: 2 phones, 500 shared prime minutes, unlimited night/weekend, free long distance, $60. We ended up choosing based on the maps; we told the salesman that 98% of the time we're in Pittsburgh but we want to Just Not Care that other 2% of the time. So we ended up with Verizon, and we have 30 days to discover if that was a mistake (dead spots locally, etc).

Transferring the existing phone numbers turned out to be a PITA because we were instantiating a family plan from two individual plans. It took the salesman at least an hour to get this set up, and he had to call his tech-support people. At the end he said it could take up to three days for the service to transfer, but we both have service on the new phones tonight. (Dani got his a couple hours before I did; dunno why.)

Soon I'll read the documentation on the phone. I managed to get rid of the annoying background image, icon-based navigation (give me text, darn it!), and invasive ring tone; the rest can wait. Granted, I solved one of those (the icon thing) by saying to the salesman "this looks like a good phone but I can't see what those images are supposed to be; can it do text?". :-)

Entry tags:

morning service

That went really, really well.

We have a visiting musician this weekend (Danny Maseng), and he participated in the informal morning service. This tripled the attendance, which isn't surprising. I was the torah reader even though my rabbi was able to be there for the whole service. (There had been a time when that was in doubt, and when the doubt went away I asked if I could read anyway (I'd started to learn it) and he said sure.)

So I chanted torah, well, in front of a large crowd, my rabbi, and our cantorial soloist (who also usually doesn't come to this service). (And Danny Maseng, but celebrities who have no reason to learn my name don't spook me.) This portion had some unusual tropes, which the trope-literate noticed and commented on later. It'a a torah portion with some action in it, so I was able to make use of inflection and mood and all those things that turn a string of words into something with some expression to it. We were in a large room with so-so accoustics and I was able to project so everyone could hear, even while leaning over a table to read.

I received many compliments and I'm really pleased that everything came together so well. I'm also glad that I don't have much peripheral vision to speak of; one of the regulars (who was sitting right in front) told me later that my rabbi, who was acting as gabbai (checker), was (1) beaming and (2) doing the hand-gestures for the tropes as I read. The latter must have been for his own amusement, as he was standing slightly behind me so they couldn't fulfill their primary function. But, as it turned out, they didn't need to; I did get the trope wrong in one place, but I pushed on and I suspect only about three people even noticed.

I'm really glad I had the opportunity to do this. Sure, the egoboo is nice, but I feel that I did something good for the congregation as a whole, too, I hope including inspiring other lay people to participate.

And now, off to the concert that Danny is giving tonight. More later.

Entry tags:

reading torah

We have a visiting cantor coming in a month (for one Shabbat). When we have a visitor (cantor or rabbi), the informal service gets merged into a general morning service. So I'd been told not to line up a lay torah reader for that date.

Then an administrator told me that we should have someone read after all (the cantor prefers to not stomp on existing traditions, or something). I responded that I would take it myself if they like (getting a little tight for some of the other readers), except that I assumed that our rabbi would read instead so she should ask.

I just got mail saying "he said you should do it". Woot!

So I get to read torah in front of the larger congregation (not just our minyan), and in front of my rabbi (which basically never happens, because the lay readers fill in when he can't be there). I'm psyched. :-)

And with that, off to trope class.

Entry tags:

leining

trope class

I fear I could become the "student the other students hate" in the trope class. Everyone knew that I was coming in with some background, but it's not like I know all the material already. If I did I wouldn't be taking the class; I'm too busy to screw around with stuff like that. :-)

Last week we finished the first run through all the common tropes and he gave us all tapes and a homework assignment (daily practice, essentially). This week, he distributed a passage and asked us to chant, just using the names of the tropes (i.e. not reading the Hebrew on the fly as well).

No one volunteered. He pointed to me and told me to go first. So I did. There were a couple tropes I couldn't remember the melodies for (gershayim is my nemsesis; dunno why...), so it's not like I particularly shone here.

Only after that happened did it become apparent that my classmates were still at the "learning the names" stage and were, for the most part, not comfortable with the melodies.

Oops. Next week maybe the teacher will call on me last. That would be better. I think I'll suggest it.

Entry tags:

random bits

I should know better by now. Every now and then -- just infrequently enough for the pain to have worn off -- I get the idea that I can stop by the Giant Eagle on Murray on my way home from work to do the grocery shopping. This is, in principle, not out of the way, unlike the Giant Eagle I usually patronize. However, this only works if (1) the store actually has all the stuff I want and (2) the checkout lines aren't horrendous. When I had my third failure only one aisle past produce, I decided to cut my losses, pay for my vegetables, and go to the better store. (For the record: ginger root, fresh cranberries, and Listerine. I don't begrudge the cranberries, but the other two surprised me.)

Dani and I have decided to buck the Hallmark tradition and have a nicer-than-usual evening some other night in February. Besides, until Saturday he had a choir practice scheduled for tonight.

Actually, we also had a nicer-than-usual evening last night. ralphmelton and lorimelton got engaged at the end of the last Sunday dinner that fell on February 13; Ralph had slyly arranged for things to run late so that he could propose just after midnight in front of some of their friends. So they made an especially-nice dinner for friends last night to celebrate the anniversary. We had risotto with goat cheese and salmon, spinach salad with fruit, and two homemade desserts: chocolate truffles and a concoction of ladyfingers, raspberry mousse, whipped cream, and (I think) alcohol. It was all fabulous.

Yesterday afternoon we joined a crowd of people helping out an older friend of ours whose basement recently flooded. There was stuff to be thrown out, stuff to be cleaned up, and stuff that said friend had to look at so we'd know how much effort to put into saving it. That last was, of course, the bottleneck. There were a lot of papers that had gotten wet but were now dry, but that might have started to grow mold. A lot of those papers were records from her parents. Lesson learned: store papers of that sort neither in the basement nor in the attic. (I lost some papers once to an attic with a leaky roof.)

My synagogue is running a trope class, which started last Wednesday. (It runs for six weeks.) Some of the people in the class are good-naturedly grumpy about my taking the class because I'm a "ringer". I pointed out that there is plenty I don't know about trope and I expect to learn things in this class. That said, I haven't brought the book in from the car yet. :-) (After this week's class, probably.)

Entry tags:

JWC Shabbat service

This morning I participated in the annual Shabbat service held by the (Pittsburgh) Jewish Women's Center. I'm not really a member of the group (been to a couple functions, on the mailing list, don't pay dues), but several women in my congregation are and they recruited some of the rest of us.

I chanted torah, and it was the longest portion I've done to date (about three-quarters of a column in the scroll). I was a little worried about that, but apparently I wasn't the only one so they told us "do as much as you can and we'll fill in from a chumash as necessary". However, I really wanted to meet this challenge.

( torah-reading stuff )

The service overall went pretty well. There was a lot of singing, and I knew about two-thirds of the melodies (but picked up most of the others trivially). They handed out percussion instruments; next time I will do predatory choosing and take the large loud tambourine to keep it out of the hands of someone sitting next to me. :-) The song leader was very good (she's a pro) and the service leaders in general were good.

We used what I gather is the latest draft of Mishkan T'filah, the forthcoming Reform siddur. (Y'know, the economics of publishing have really changed. They've published a bunch of draft editions; I don't think that would have been feasible a generation ago.) They were on loan from URJ so I couldn't borrow one for a few days to look it over more closely; oh well. They've fixed some of the things I considered to be bugs in earlier drafts, but they've introduced some things that really annoy me. Oh well; I guess that's an inevitable consequence of committee-produced products.

The service was long (almost three hours, without musaf), and also started late. It was funny -- at 9:30 (the scheduled start time) the organizers were huddling in the front of the room, and all of the people from my congregation were exchanging glances. We start on time, always (barring something really unusual). Others present made comments about "Jewish standard time" and thought nothing of starting (ultimately) 15-20 minutes late.

( liturgical minutiae )

All in all, it was a pretty good service, with some things I liked and some I didn't care for. People were very friendly and everyone was working together, which made a big difference.

If they ask me to participate in a future service I'm not sure what I'll say. On the one hand it was fun, but on the other, it was a lot of work to learn the portion and I didn't get to put that work to use for the benefit of my own congregation. Maybe that means I should focus on chanting torah in my own congregation and ask to lead a part of the service if JWC invites me again. Leading doesn't require nearly the preparation that chanting torah does.

After I got home Dani and I headed out to an SCA event. More about that later, but I will mention the Jewish tie-in here. Halacha holds that if a negative consequence of keeping Shabbat is merely financial (and not of the will-be-out-on-the-street-if-this-goes-wrong variety), you keep Shabbat. This is one of the reasons that we don't conduct business on Shabbat even though you could make more money by keeping your store open on Saturday. More personally, it was the basis for my agreeing to let Dani drive my car -- with its previously-pristine clutch -- to the event, though Dani normally drives an automatic. Ouchy ouchy ouchy. :-)