murmur311

( service anthropology )

Jenny and I chatted with the rabbi some after the service. He seems like a really friendly person; he'll be a good catch for some congregation. (Hmm, we'll be looking for an associate rabbi to start in a year, which is when he graduates...) We ended up talking a bit about rabbinic job-hunting and he explained how HUC's matching process works. (Ask me later if you're interested. He said it was similar to what medical schools do for residency placements, if that helps.) I said I might be seeing this process from the other side in the coming year (ok, I'm being presumptuous and assuming I can get onto the search committee), but this is interesting for other reasons too. He and Jenny had both recently read a book called The New Rabbi that he recommends highly. (He named the author. I forget. I'll look this up on Amazon when I get home if one of you hasn't fed it to me by then. :-) )

Shabbat morning we went to Temple Sholom, one of three Reform congregations within a block. That seems unusual to me; I think at least one of them split off from one of the others, but I didn't get the full history. (In Pittsburgh, by comparison, there are five Reform synagogues -- two in the city about two miles from each other, and the other three each in a different suburb ten miles out or so.)

Their rabbi said to tell my rabbi hi. I guess on the one hand you'd expect a movement's rabbis to generally know each other, but on the other hand there are what, 1200 or more Reform rabbis in the US? That's a lot of people to know or even know of.

( service anthropology )

During the torah study there was some discussion of why this story of a non-Jewish prophet would be part of the torah. One of the people there thought Bilaam had had a true change of heart (hey, that sounds familiar :-) ), though I think I remember reading last week that Rashi blames Bilaam for the Israelite men going on to sin with the Moabite women, so I'm not so sure that works. (Or maybe I'm misremembering and Rashi blames Balak. I don't have a copy of Rashi to check -- at all, let alone here in Cincinnati.) I suggested that while the torah is primarily about Yisrael, including a passage showing that even a gentile "gets it" about God's goodness and might could be valuable to later readers (and to b'nei yisrael too, if they were of a mind to pay attention). The rabbi thought this was a good interpretation. (I didn't bring up Rashi.)

I wonder, in thinking about it, if the Israelites at the time were even aware of Bilaam's curses-turned-blessings aimed at them. I don't see how they would be unless told. While this is not the generation that rebelled against God, they still might have been boosted somewhat by the endorsement from outside. Hmm.

I liked both congregations that I visited this Shabbat. I noticed that both have rabbinic interns in addition to rabbis; I guess proximity to HUC has something to do with that. :-) The intern I met Friday night knows one of the student rabbis we're going to have this week (not surprising; they're presumably classmates) and had good things to say about him. Presumably we'll meet them all tomorrow.

The discussion went in two main directions. There were the liturgical questions -- how do I feel about praying for the restoration of the temple sacrifices, resurrection of the dead, and so on? I work around the first [1] and am comfortable viewing the second metaphorically, so those aren't problems. We are going to discuss the liturgy more next time, when I actually remember to bring a copy of that particular siddur along.

The other part of the discussion had to do with appearances. How large is this minyan? Could I be seen as being the leader of the group in general, which has implications beyond the service? We concluded that there is not an issue here; I'm one of several people who leads (and I'm not the main one), I'm on a short leash liturgically, I'm not doing anything else in that congregation, and the group is small (we usually have a minyan by Barchu, but usually not by Kaddish d'Rabbanan).

We also talked about my motivations and whether this fits with my educational path; everything appears to be fine there after discussion.

So everything's fine, but I really should have had the clue to talk with him when it first came up. I find it really hard to initiate conversations sometimes; with luck I'll get better at this. I really feel close to my rabbi, but there's also this professional arm's-length separation that prevents us from just being friends who talk about things. I wonder how I can change that.

( footnotes )

I hesitated. He heard the pause. I said I try not to drive on Shabbat. He said I was pretty far down on the list of people he could call. I hesitated a bit and then said yes, I'd do it.

( omphalokepsis ahead )

( liturgical oddities )

I stayed for a while after the service; they seemed to want that. The person I know introduced me to assorted relatives, one of whom sits on the national movement's board of trustees. (Or directors. I'm not sure which we have.) He asked if I'd been through the para-rabbinic program and I said I'm in it now. We talked for a while about the program, which he feels is very important. He had been to services the previous night and asked me some things about our congregation; he seemed to be favorably impressed with us. I'll try to remember to pass that on to my rabbi.

He asked me where I'd learned Hebrew and I said it was mostly by coming to services and studying torah and a little from a couple classes. He then asked me, in Hebrew, if I speak Hebrew, at which point I, err, provided a clear demonstration that comprehension is easier than generation. I knew what he said; I knew what I wanted to say; I didn't know how to formulate it. (And, well, I didn't know one verb I wanted to use.) So I shrugged and said "katan" -- which means "small" but probably doesn't mean "a little", but that was the best I could do. This is the second time this has happened to me, so I should prepare an answer for time #3.

( language stuff )

Another problem created: I need to make sure I'm familiar enough with the insertions into the liturgy for public fast days to be able to lead them next week. Either that or get David to lead that part. (I know we insert Avinu Malkeinu after the Amidah; I can't remember if there are other changes. Fortunately, I own a copy of the siddur we use, so there shouldn't be any surprises.)

I happened to glance at next month on the calendar and noticed that the fast of the first-born (before Pesach) also falls on a Thursday, my day to lead services. This one poses more uncertainty -- it's a public fast day but only for some people. Breakfast will be held, taking advantage of a rather dubious rules hack, but I don't know what liturgical changes are implied for a day on which some people must fast and others not. Fortunately, I have a month to find out. :-)

There are five minor fasts in the calendar. Three have to do with the destruction of the temple and one falls before Purim (commemorating Esther's call for a fast before she tried to save her people). These apply to everyone, but they don't resonate for me at all. I can't say exactly why, at least in the case of Purim. Maybe it's this nagging question of why this attempt to wipe out the Jewish people in a particular area warrants special treatment when it's not a singleton -- just the first that the rabbis noted. I don't know; I haven't spent a lot of time thinking about it.

But the fifth of these minor fasts is the fast of the first-born on the day before Pesach (or earlier if that would cause it to interfere with Shabbat, like this year). This fast exists because of the tenth plague, the one that killed the first-born malees. Jewish first-born were spared but this is later given as a reason that first-born men belong to the temple for service to God. (There is a redmption mechanism, called pidyan ha-ben -- which is good because otherwise those people would be stuck today.) And of all the minor fasts, this one resonates for me. Isn't that odd? I'm a first-born woman whose ancestors were never endangered by this plague, though obviously had I been there I would have been.

I'm a woman, so traditional Judaism would say I'm not obligated. But a consequence of being egalitarian is that I don't get out of it that easily; if I believe men are obligated, then I am obligated too.

I don't know if we are obligated, but I should give this one more thought. I've tended to non-observance in the past, or going along with that rules hack I mentioned, but I'm beginning to think that the correct thing for me is to (1) keep the fast and (2) not use the rules hack. I've got a month to figure that out, too.

I think I've finally, without really thinking about it, derived the appropriate response to the family either thanking me or praising me: "I'm glad I could help". I mean, you don't want to say "happy to help", given the circumstances, but it feels like I need to say something.

There is a dynamic of cues, some subtle and some overt, when leading a service, to clue people in about when to read together, stand/sit, and so on. Must remember: nothing subtle applies to mourners. They're pre-occupied; do not make them expend cycles on the mechanics of prayer. The ones who pray regularly will know anyway; the ones who don't need the direction.

Must remember to ask my rabbi #1: does our congregation have any conventions about what to do after the service? Leave immediately, accept the offers of food, hang around for 5-10 minutes and then slip out? Not sure. I tend to do the last unless I actually know the family.

<geek> Must remember to ask my rabbi #2: why is there a chatzi kaddish between hashkiveinu and t'filah? I'm so used to skipping over it -- because we almost never get a minyan for weekday evening and it's not there (in Gates of Prayer, anyway) in the Shabbat evening service -- that it took me by surprise tonight in the special siddur for a house of mourning (which I've rarely used). On the one hand, as long as there are interruptions between ga'al yisrael and t'filah anyway (hashkiveinu, v'shamru on Shabbat) what's the harm?, but on the other hand, we don't generally use that as an excuse to compound problems. Hmm. My rabbi and I studied that passage in B'rachot not long ago (well, maybe we'll yet return to the thread) and the sages raised hashkiveinu but said nothing of kaddish. Later addition? </geek>

Short takes:

I don't really care about my hair turning silver -- I actually think it can look striking under the right circumstances -- but is it too much to ask my body for symmetry? Why is the right side of my head so much more melanin-challenged than the left side? One of life's little mysteries, I guess.

From cahwyguy: Google Maps is live. So far, I'm liking it a lot better than Mapquest. (Haven't given it any tough cases yet, but the directions it's given me to a couple destinations I've previously tried with MapQuest are much better.)

Torah readers are assigned through mid-March. This is the farthest ahead we've been scheduled for a while! I don't know when I'll next read there; I'm probably reading for a women's service in February, but that's a different group. (They asked for volunteers to read torah or lead parts of the service; I said I could do either but have Opinions about content of the latter that I'd like to discuss before committing. So it looks like I get torah reading, which is fine.)

( minor puzzles )

Saturday night was my company's holiday party. It was huge! We've been growing a lot, but when people are spread out it's not as obvious. Put us all in one room with significant others and... wow. We missed the party last year, and this was much bigger than two years ago.

The party was fun; the organizers did a good job with it. This year, unlike last year (I'm told), we did not run out of food. Dani found a wine that was sweet enough for him (a Riesling, but I failed to get specifics). Some people brought instruments and were jamming in the front room; I didn't bring any on the theory that it would be Christmas music, but it turns out that would have been ok (they were improvising, mostly). On the other hand, for expedience I would have brought drums, not the hammer dulcimer -- and one of my coworkers is really good on drums, so there wouldn't have been much I could contribute. But I enjoyed listening, so that was fine.

Today the washer and dryer rebelled. (What did we ever do to them?) The washer has decided that it doesn't like the rinse cycle, so it just stops there. We can drain the water and reset it to get it to fill and agitate again, hacking a rinse, but it won't spin. Bah. And then the dryer decided that heat was optional, though once we took the front panel off to look for a fuse (unsuccessfully) and took the vent stack apart looking for a lint clog (nope), it began to give us lackluster heat. I guess we just needed to speak sternly to it -- for now.

The appliances came with the house (five years ago) and weren't new then. I wonder what the usual life-expectancy is on these things. I guess we should find out what a service call costs, and whether he'll give us a break for two appliances in one visit.

So, hours after I expected to be done, my shirts are slowly drying, jeans are queued up behind them, and Dani has a load queued up behind that. Whee.

We could acknowledge God in the third person; there are lots of things we can say about God without getting intimate, and in a lot of ways that's safer territory. But we don't do that (for the most part). God is transcendant and formal and so forth, but also immanent. We are not merely praying to a lofty being far beyond our comprehension; we are also, in some sense, speaking with someone close. And that requires that we speak with and to God, not just speak about God. And so instead of saying "baruch [God's name]" (praised is God) we say "baruch atah [God's name]" (praised are you, God). I like that.

I wonder if the other monotheistic religions -- or polytheistic ones that pray to specific entities, for that matter -- do this too. I don't remember enough Roman Catholic liturgy now to answer this question for that faith; I certainly remember it as being more distant and formal, but that impression could be wrong or could describe only parts of the liturgy. Or, perhaps, maybe Christianity sees Jesus as immanent while God [the father] is transcendant? That would be consistent with the idea that different aspects of the trinity have different natures; can anyone tell me if this guess is actually right?

But first, a short story from a class handout:

The Sacred Cat
(from The Art of Public Prayer)

Once upon a time, there was a guru in the mountains of Asia who gathered around him a band of monks dedicated to prayer. The guru owned a cat, which he loved deeply. He took the cat with him everywhere, even to morning prayer. When the disciples complained that the cat's prowling distracted them, the guru bought a leash and tied the cat to a post at the entrance to the prayer room. Years later, when the guru died, his disciples continued to care for the cat. But as they say, cats have nine lives, so the cat outlived even the disciples. By then the disciples had their own disciples, who began caring for the cat, but without recalling anymore why the cat was present during prayer. When the cat's leash wore out, they knitted another one in the scared colors of the sky and the earth, and when the post wore down, they built a beautiful new one that they began calling the sacred cat stand. During this third generation of disciples the cat died, and the disciples wasted no time in buying another sacred cat to accompany them in prayer. Their worship was eventually expanded to include the sacred actions of tying the cat to the leash and affixing the leash to the sacred cat stand.

( Read more... )

( leading services )

( class: history of liturgy )

Between this class and dinner I had about fifteen minutes to visit the room with the internet connection. (This consists of a hub, extra network cables, and one laptop connected to said hub.) I was able to glance at email (didn't see it all, and it looks like a mailing list I own went haywire) and make one LJ post. Another that I also had queued up refused to post -- don't know why but I'll try again when I post this.

Dinner included a brief talk on birkat hamazon, the grace after meals, and an invitation for us to start leading this at future meals. Having semi-botched this at our congregational retreat in May (one melodic bit I didn't know, and some unfamiliar text in the specific version we were using), so I'd like to try again.

( worship class )

Then it was on to the ma'ariv service. We are to fill out a brief questionnaire (a "service diary") after each service, ideally before leaving the chapel. ( Read more... )

An interesting bit from the introdutions at the orientation: of the 25 participants, six are converts and another (roughly) eight or nine returned to Judaism later in life (many from Orthodox childhoods). I knew that this group would not be representative of the Reform population in general, as it takes a certain degree of commitment and enthusiasm to enter a program like this, but I was still struck by the numbers.

The chugim that are on the schedule (four days) are, basically, electives. Some meet every day and some are one-shots. They haven't given a complete list of the one-shots; the ones that meet every day are two levels of Hebrew and a cantillation class. I'm going to do the cantillation; it'll be nice to get some formal structure there. It may also give me ideas on how we can teach this topic in my congregation.

The building containing the internet access was already locked right after the ma'ariv service. Sigh. Tomorrow's schedule is pretty full, but maybe there will be some breaks at useful times. I'm just going to carry the laptop with me tomorrow, since the dorm is not all that near the classroom space. (Not far, but making a round-trip could be the difference between useful time and not.) All I really need to carry is the laptop and the mouse; for short bursts I don't need the power cord, and they've got network cable.

But we're a large congregation, and sometimes there are more 13-year-olds than available Saturday mornings, and rather than double up on kids they'll occasionally stick a bar or bat mitzvah on a Friday night. (Ours, like most Reform congregations, reads some torah on Friday night, so this is plausible.) But the families, for the most part, don't seem to understand that they are modifying an established service with an established community, and they are not entitled to make it fully "about them" the way they can on Saturday mornings.

So we get grumpy family members who are upset because they didn't get seven aliyot to hand out to all the cousins, and we get kids who spend more time thanking their family and friends than speaking words of torah, and we get parents who go on at length with the "parental greeting" that is really only about the family, and the community gets shoved aside. (Even though they cut other stuff from the service to make room, one of these will run 20-30 minutes longer than a regular Friday service.) I know many people who just do not come on Friday nights when there is a bar or bat mitzvah. I've been tempted, but I don't really want to flee and provide that little bit of extra evidence that "the community doesn't come anyway so we can get away with this".

I want to talk to our rabbis, because I want to see this change, but I have to figure out how to approach them. I would like to see a Friday-night bar/bat mitzvah be treated as a privilege, an honor, a reward. I would like to see the future confirmands of the year on Friday nights, not the kids who've publicly said they're ditching Judaism as soon as the party is over. I would like to see the families work within the structure of the existing Friday-night service and make it less about their kids. (I think there's corrolation here; a kid who's going to stick with things and is mature enough to realize he's part of a community is more likely to want to function in that community.) It'll take years, but I would like the typical family's view of the Friday-night assignment to shift from "booby prize" to "special honor". (And just once, when families are going on about themselves, I'd like to see someone thank the congregation for their patience.)

If this could work, then maybe, in a decade or two, we'll even see the Saturday-morning bar mitzvah shift in focus from the family to the community. Wouldn't that be grand? Heck, the first time one of our kids says he wants to do his bar mitzvah at the established informal service rather than a special family service, I'll be thrilled. (We had someone recently who, in retrospect, could have done that, if anyone had thought of it in time.)

I wonder how we can get there.