I chanted torah and gave the d'var torah yesterday. (I'll post the d'var separately.) I read the Akeidah, the binding of Yitzchak, which is a challenging passage.

The text itself is pretty sparse: God decides to test Avraham, telling him to offer up his son Yitzchak as a burnt offering in a land some distance away. Avraham gets up in the morning, gathers what he'll need, and heads off with Yitzchak and two servant-boys. Three days pass and then they arrive. Avraham tells the servants "wait here and we'll return". Avraham and Yitzchak head up together, and Yitzchak asks "err, dad, where's the lamb?" and Avraham dodges. Avraham builds an altar and binds Yitzchak on it, and just as he's about to slaughter his son an angel cries out "stop!". Avraham sees a ram and offers it instead. The angel then tells Avraham that he'll be rewarded through his descendants -- they'll be as numerous as the stars or as grains of sand on the shore, they'll possess the gates of their foes, and everyone will be blessed through them. Avraham then heads back to the servants (Yitzchak is not mentioned) and they leave for Be'er Sheva, where Avraham will live.

It says somewhere in the talmud that a sage who can't find 150 reasons for a beetle to be kosher is no sage at all. I don't have 150 interpretations of the Akeidah, but I can see more than one. Here's the one I brought out in my chanting:

God gives this command. Avraham reluctantly heads off to comply; God gives him three days to stew over it (either to be sure or to bail). Yitzchak questions him and, with tears in his eyes, he says "God's in charge". Once they arrive and things are set in motion, though, Avraham's approach changes: it's like pulling the big sticky bandage off your skin; you can try to do it slowly and make things worse, or you can just grit your teeth and yank. I read it as Avraham gritting his teeth and trying to get it over with, which is why the angel had to rush in (calling from heaven instead of arriving) and had to call Avraham's name twice. After a tense moment, Avraham snaps out of it and says "yes?". For the first time Avraham looks up and sees the ram, which he offers up in place of his son, while Yitzchak sits by, stunned. The angel gives his promise, Yitzchak bolts, and Avraham returns alone, knowing he can't go home to his wife now.

Last time I read it I read it differently, and presumably next time will be different too. Torah is like that.

Even though I made some mistakes and had to be corrected, I think this went pretty well and I got lots of compliments. People appreciated the effort I put into reading it interpretively. (They didn't have the text in front of them, so I gave a summary and some keywords to listen for in advance.) I'd like to be able to share that reading with interested friends, though I'm not sure how to do that usefully for folks not fluent in Hebrew. If I produced an audio file, is there an easy way to turn it into a video with "subtitles" timed to the chanting?

We had a visiting rabbi this morning. (Not known in advance and not official; this was a relative of a member of the minyan.) I noticed that she was very quietly chanting along with me. Alas, she and her family left right after the service, so I didn't get a chance to talk with her. It did strike me that, usually accidentally, the more-knowledgeable-than-most-laypeople visitors tend to show up disproportionately on my weeks. Hmm. (It's not always accidental; there was one time we were having a visiting cantor who declined the offer to chant the portion, and consensus was that I was the congregant least likely to freak.)

I found the first 40% of Rabbi Eric Yoffie's sermon at the URJ biennial an interesting read. (The rest isn't uninteresting, but it's not my focus here.) He talks about increasing the importance of Shabbat in our communities. He's saying some things I've been saying for years, which is gratifying. (More people listen to him than to me, after all.)

When we undertook to revive Erev Shabbat worship, our intention was not to focus solely on a single hour of Friday night prayer. Erev Shabbat was to be the key, opening the door to a discussion of the Shabbat day in all its dimensions. [...] With members returning to the synagogue on Friday nights, we had hoped that some of them would also be drawn to our Shabbat morning prayer and to a serious conversation about the meaning of Shabbat. But this has not happened, and we all know one reason why that is so:

He goes on to talk about the bar-mitzvah service as typically seen in Reform congregations. What usually happens is that the celebrating family "owns" the service, so the rest of the community doesn't come because we feel shut out, so the family feels justified in claiming everything ("they don't come anyway"), so the bar mitzvah stops being about welcoming the child into his new role in the community. Rabbi Yoffie writes: "At the average bar mitzvah what you almost always get is a one-time assemblage of well-wishers with nothing in common but an invitation." I wasn't there at the formation, but I assume this is one of the reasons that our informal Shabbat-morning minyan formed: we have a regular community (with enough infusions to avoid becoming stagnant) that celebrates its members' milestones but feels no need to go upstairs afterwards. I go to shul on Shabbat morning to celebrate Shabbat in community, not to attend the theatre.

What typically happens in Orthodox and Conservative congregations, on the other hand, is that the bar mitzvah is a part of the community service: we celebrate with the family, but the family celebrates with the community. The focus is on Shabbat, not on the child. I have seen this work beautifully. It's not absent in Reform congregations (I saw it once at Holy Blossom in Toronto), but it's sure not the norm.

So what are we going to do about it? Rabbi Yoffie has brought the conversation to a broader forum (we've been talking about this problem in our congregations and on mailing lists for years). Rabbi Yoffie wisely recognizes it as part of a bigger issue: the place of Shabbat in the lives of modern, liberal Jews.

Also, other approaches to enhancing Jewish life have failed. Communal leaders outside of the synagogue love to talk the language of corporate strategy. They engage in endless debates on the latest demographic study. They plan elaborate conferences and demand new ideas. But sometimes we don't need new ideas; we need old ideas. We need less corporate planning and more text and tradition; less strategic thinking and more mitzvot; less demographic data and more Shabbat. Because we know, in our hearts, that in the absence of Shabbat, Judaism withers.

He talks about the importance of the whole day of Shabbat, not just the hour or three you spend at services. Hear, here. The URJ is trying to start this conversation in individual congregations, creating study programs and focus groups who will try, really try, to explore a more-meaningful Shabbat and report back. I'd love to be part of that conversation in my own congregation, should it happen. I already take Shabbat seriously, but there's still plenty to learn. And one of my biggest challenges is the shortage of a community that wants to keep doing Shabbat after morning services end. Shabbat afternoons, especially in the summer, can be pretty lonely for me.

Renewing some form of regular Shabbat observance among the members of our Movement will take time, and what we are proposing is only the first step. The plan is to begin with a chosen few and to heat the core, in the hope that the heat generated will then radiate in ever-widening circles.

But surely we must begin. Shabbat, after all, is not just a nice idea. It is a Jewish obligation and one of the Ten Commandments -- indeed the longest and most detailed of them all.

Where will it go? I don't know, but I'm glad to see people talking about it.

( Dogs in the Vineyard )

( Shabbat lunch )

( Purim SCA event )

( short takes )

This year's tikkun (late-night torah study) was great! Best one I've been to. (And Shavuot is my favorite holiday, so that made this even better.) I'm not going to try to distill it down into a post two days later; sorry. You will, however, be seeing some posts inspired by it.

( Shavuot )

( Shabbat )

Found on the way to looking up something else, an interesting sermon: what God made us good at. Food for thought.

Shabbat afternoon I got a phone call from my rabbi. Could I lead a shiva minyan that night at 7? 7 is rather before sundown these days, so I asked if it was in Squirrel Hill. No, he said, Oakland.

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 )

Obligatory Frienditto thingy: I'm not using it (really see no point; my journal is archived on LJ and on my computer). I expect that no one on my friends' list would violate my trust by publicly posting locked entries. I presume the tempest in the teapot will die down Real Soon Now.

Shabbat was pleasant. Saturday morning a young man who was bar mitzvah last summer read torah for our minyan (for the second time since his bar mitzvah). I'm glad that he's continuing to both attend and participate, and that he feels comfortable reading in front of our group.

The start-up that Dani works for has a major deadline Monday, so he worked all day Saturday. And all evening, and night. Whee. I met him for dinner after Shabbat and then met his co-workers. When we walked in the lead engineer turned to me and said something like "ready to write some LISP?". I said "LISP? I thought you were a Java shop", and he shrugged and started talking about something else. So I gave it no further thought at the time, figuring it was some sort of odd joke or something. (I just assumed that Dani had, somewhere along the line, talked about his wife the former LISPer.)

I asked Dani about it today, and he said that, in fact, one third-party tool they have to intergrate with has an API that resembles a cross between C and LISP. I didn't ask for details, but he said there's clearly a LISP interpreter under there somewhere because they get error messages that include names of LISP functions. Weird.

It's been almost 15 years since I wrote LISP professionally, but it was a fantastic language and if I'd known the guy was serious, I would have asked him to tell me more. I'd have been willing to give them a couple hours. (I have another friend there too.) Now, it probably wouldn't have been a net savings for him, because he would have had to teach me enough about the application to be useful, but...