We have a large congregation, so there is a bar or bat mitzvah almost every Saturday morning. These are held at services that are attended primarily by the families and friends, not by a consistent community. The regular Shabbat community comes Friday nights and, for some, to the other minyan on Saturday morning. Things have been this way from time immemorial, or so I'm told. This isn't the way a bar mitzvah is supposed to work in theory; it's supposed to be about the kid taking his place in the community. But our situation is pretty common, unfortunately.

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.

This article on synagogue leadership is nominally aimed at synagogue presidents, but I find it has a lot of good advice for leaders in general -- and a fair bit of it applies to other volunteer-run organizations too. Thanks to cahwyguy for the pointer.

A few ramblings inspired by the article...

I recently ended a three-year term on my synagogue's board of trustees. There were certainly some stressful moments, and a couple times I thought of quitting because my way of doing things seemed to clash too much with theirs, but I decided I could do more good by sticking it out and, overall, it turned out to be a positive experience. I'm not at all interested in the executive track that ends at synagogue president, and I'm not going back to the board any time soon, but there are other ways to contribute. (In particular, I'm still a committee chair, and I have the sh'liach k'hilah program ahead of me.) Overall I'd say we're pretty functional, ahead of the curve.

(Aside: that board seat is directly responsible for my ~bi-weekly study sessions with my rabbi. For that alone it would have been worth it!)

One of the points that Rabbi Thal brings out, and I definitely saw this, is the question of when to let things die (so that other things can grow in their place). Few things have more ego-stake than pet projects and special-interest groups. The topic of a recent brotherhood discussion was something like "men: an endangered species" -- but what they really meant was men participating in brotherhoods. I wonder if they considered the possibility that men (and women!) no longer need gender-segregated organizations in order to be at all involved in their synagogues? I for one cannot see myself ever being part of the sisterhood; I define my participation by what I do, not who I am.

I'm glad that in the area of worship we are adapting and experimenting -- everything from new music to new opportunities for lay leadership in the informal minyan to adding mome special-interest events that seem to be going well (e.g. a monthly service aimed at families with small kids). Often change comes very slowly, but that's good -- because while you don't want to stagnate, you also don't want to be changing things out from under people. Gradual is best.

It can be challenging for larger congregations to remain cohesive. It's easy when everyone knows everyone else, but we don't have that. Even if everyone did come most weeks, rather than just on the high holy days, it would be hard to get to know everyone. There's always a tension between encouraging and supporting the subset who show up and reaching out to the rest. It's a hard balance to strike.

Friday night the sisterhood led Shabbat services. (They do this once a year. Brotherhood did theirs last month.) While they mostly did a good job with the individual parts, the whole was extremely disappointing. ( rant )

Friday's email brought a short reading list for the sh'liach k'hilah program. I am pleased that the list consists entirely of books I do not already own. This makes me even more optimistic about the program teaching me lots of things I don't already know. I expected that to be the case, but now I have some evidence to support that belief. (They haven't yet sent a detailed curriculum description.)

Saturday evening we went to an SCA dinner on the theme of "travelling food". There were more desserts than non-desserts, which in retrospect makes sense. Cookies are an obvious thing to make. I should have made something main-dish-y instead of individual strawberry tarts. It was a fun dinner, and I got to meet some new cats. :-) From there we went to an impromptu party that lefkowitzga threw together around some last-minute guests from out of town. She's a great party host, and I had fun talking with some people I don't see as often as I'd like.

Sunday dinner was especially tasty this week. ralphmelton grilled steaks that were very good; we concluded that the spice rub called "Chicago style" that he got at Penzey's was especially good. (I don't know what's in it. Eventually I will send agents to Penzey's to do some shopping for me, as the local instance has no hours that are compatable with working normal hours and keeping Shabbat.)

Random food note: sponge cake grilled for about 30 seconds per side and then topped with fruit is really good.

This is going to be kind of rambly. I'm trying to record a thought stream, not make an explicit point.

Launch point: B'rachot 8a, where the Amoraim are discussing places for torah study versus places for prayer and (later commenters) whether it is appropriate to suspend study in order to pray with a minyan. That is, if you're already in the study hall and there's no minyan and it's time to pray, do you pray there or go join the minyan? Some argue that study is more important than supporting the community in the minyan. This led us to a more general discussion: the tension between supporting community values and partaking of community offerings. ( Read more... )

Ah, the life of a gabbai [1] (I guess that's what I am now). I have no volunteer to read torah on February 21 (5 weeks away), so that means I'll cover it. That's ok, except that the person signed up for the following week is tentative (she's getting ready to move out of town). So I had been planning to be an understudy for her. Last time I tried to learn two portions simultaneously the results were not good; I don't think I'm ready to do that again yet.

I believe this is a local problem, not a global one. We've got several readers (I'd like a few moe); it's just that February seems to be bad for scheduling. Oops.

One of the people I had been counting as a regular told me that he can't commit to anything right now and he'd tell me why privately. (That hasn't happened yet.) I suspect health-related issues. That's unfortunate; he's very good, and was one-fifth of the core group. (In addition to the core group, all of whom can prepare a portion on a month's notice or less but would rather not, we've had several one-time readers, one of whom just signed up for a second time. So he'll become core, I think, but he currently wants long lead times -- which is perfectly understandable.)

So this more-or-less works right now, except if we get unfortunate combinations of vacations or business trips or the like. We need to build up the group some before summer, though, when that gets worse. I need to figure out how to do that.

[1] The gabbai, as I understand the term, is the person who makes sure that all the details of services happen -- most significantly, in my case, that there is a torah reader each week who is prepared. (I've been making the photocopies of portions and mailing them out as needed, and of course maintaining the assignment list. I am not yet qualified to make tape recordings, unfortunately.)

The morning minyan switched to the new format this week. It worked well; we just hit the start of the torah service when the rabbi had to leave, and the member who volunteered for this week did a good job with it. We need to do some tweaking of physical setup (in particular, making a fast transition between study and service), but we knew we were going to have some bumps along the way there.

Minor logistical thing: we used to have snacks during torah study; now that we've flipped things, we declared that snacks would be after the service. But the rabbi didn't get any, because he left. (I was actually walking around the back of the room with a pile of cookies for him, but he ducked out before I got there.) The later service doesn't end until something like 12:45, which is a long time for him to go without food. We need to fix this.

Friday night was a larger-than-normal crowd. There were some people I wanted to talk to but didn't get to. On the positive side, I spoke to several newcomers and helped make them feel welcome, which is important.

I've received several compliments on the committee meeting I ran on Wednesday. Apparently I give good meeting. :-) Actually, I'm just organized and perfectly willing to step into a conversation that's drifting and bring it back to the agenda. I didn't think this was all that unusual, but in thinking about other meetings I've been to, maybe it's not as common as I had thought.

The flowers my rabbi sent were a beautiful addition to the Shabbat table. Some of the blooms opened up today, and others will probably open up tomorrow. They're very pretty.

Friday's mail brought a birthday present from Dani's mother, a goregous silver havdalah set. I inaguarated it tonight. (I had previously been using a hodge-podge of tools on hand; I didn't have a set.) (Havdalah is the ceremony marking the end of Shabbat. It involves wine, a candle, and a spice-box.)

Today I worked on my upcoming torah portion (in a few weeks). It's short, and after resolving one ambiguity that required consultation with someone actually fluent in Hebrew (today's torah reader, in fact), I now have the portion from the right-hand side of the book (with vowels and trope). I should be able to move to the left-hand side within a week. Plenty of time, as it turned out. (I've been conservative in my estimates of learning speed.)

Some days the commute is a not-unpleasant drive. Other days it is a cross between Dodgeball and 20 Questions. Sheesh.

There was a board meeting last night. One of the new members seems to have my tendency to ask detailed questions about financial statements. Good; there needs to be a friendly nit-picker there after my term expires in a year. :-) (I can't tell yet if he has my uncanny knack of spotting math anomolies without trying.)

I am now officially the tech lead of my project at work.

I got email a couple days ago from someone who's looking for a congregation and a rabbi and found me via a mailing list. She sounded enthusiastic when I told her about mine, so she's joining me for services and Shabbat dinner tonight. I'm looking forward to meeting her and playing host.

I owe some people interview questions (and answers), but it's not going to happen until after Shabbat. Sorry for the delay. I'm not ignoring you -- just busy.

Yesterday morning I chanted Torah at Tree of Life. It went really well! Next year I will learn the third aliyah so I can do the entire thing. One of the minyanaires was trying to get me to lead the service (Dave, the usual leader, was sick); I deflected it. I'd like to be able to do so, but my Hebrew isn't yet good enough to do a morning service in an acceptable amount of time. Eventually...

Last night's board meeting was the annual budget discussion. This meeting (every year) also gets the incoming trustees, who will be elected at next week's congregational meeting, so there were some extra people there. One of those newcomers came up to me after the meeting and said she really likes the way I analyze things and ask questions. I guess I haven't lost the touch. :-)

After the board meeting (and dinner) we watched this week's "West Wing". Wow. That was really well-done. We knew to expect a cliff-hanger, of course. The plot twist for which the episode was named did not actually surprise me (though it was poingiantly done); after the events of a couple weeks ago, didn't everyone look up that part of the constitution? Or was it only the geeky fans?

I've been getting spam lately with the subject line "seek of spam?". The source of the error seems obvious (non-native speaker with vowel confusion), but given that spammers mainly seek vectors, I found it amusing.

Today was the last morning of the siddur pilot. They handed out evaluation forms and asked us to bring them back next week. The questions that the CCAR did, and didn't, ask gave me a little insight into their goals. More about the evaluation in a separate entry, later.

At Torah study we talked about the question: why do we need a rabbi to lead services? We don't, of course; any somewhat-educated person who meets the (straightforward) halachic requirements can lead. In most Orthodox and some Conservative congregations, in fact, the rabbi doesn't lead services -- other congregants do. But in the Reform movement, by and large, the rabbi leads, unless you're such a small congregation that you don't have a rabbi.

( Aside: what do rabbis do? )

My theory (which I wasn't fast enough to articulate this morning) is that this is a product of our culture. People (Americans specifically? people in general?) tend to want access to the expert. We don't want to settle for the physician's assistant to treat our illness, even if that person is perfectly qualified because it's only the flu and the flu is a well-understood problem; we hold out for the doctor. We don't want the apprentice electrician even though it's only a light switch; we want the experienced one. We only consider the "lesser" positions if we can save money, for the most part. (Yes, of course I'm over-generalizing.) So I think it's the same with rabbis and services; people want the rabbi, who they know will do everything right, and not the qualified layman who has no credentials, even though it's only a regular Shabbat service and that person has seen this hundreds or thousands of times. I've already seen this with respect to music; the Reform congregations I'm familiar with want the professional singers, even if they're not Jewish, and not the ameteurs from within the congregation.

Why is this a more common attitude in Reform than in other movements? Two factors, I think: first, we're more assimilated into the surrounding culture and second, we're (overall) less educated.

Assimilation means, in this case, that we are more inclined to imitate what we see or hear about from other parts of Americana, like church services. That organ at services isn't a coincidence, after all. The Reform community is more outward-focused, while the Orthodox community is more inward-focused (or so it appears from the outside). We're more likely to have had diverse worship experiences, and the ideas rub off. (Remember that most Orthodox would not set food in a church at all, and some of them will not set foot in non-Orthodox Jewish services.) I'm not trying to say that they're shutting the world out; it's not nearly that active. But they will have fewer chance encounters, and therefore fewer opportunities to pick up foreign ideas about "how things are done". Combine this with the fact that most Reform Jews do not attend services regularly, and you get a community that's more in tune with the outside world than with its own traditions and history.

And then there's the education factor. In the Orthodox community, it is pretty much presumed -- correctly -- that almost any adult male present is capable of leading services. He's been davening daily for most of his life, after all, so he knows the drill and can probably read the Hebrew correctly. Maybe he doesn't have a good voice, but that's not so important. I see this dynamic in play in the morning minyan at the Conservative shul I frequent, by the way; at least half the regulars can step in to lead services if the regular guy isn't there. (By the way, I am not yet one of those people. I am in the bottom third of that group for liturgical skill. I have most of the knowledge, but am just not fast enough with the Hebrew yet. Ironically, I am in the top half or third for pronoucing the Hebrew correctly -- I'm just too slow.)

Most Orthodox and many Conservative Jews of my generation have had significant Jewish educations -- day school, or at least a daily after-school program, and maybe Yeshiva, and maybe something beyond that. They also attend services regularly, so the Hebrew component of that is reinforced on a regular basis. But there's more to it than just the Hebrew; they learn halacha, study Talmud, study Torah in some depth, and so on. Most of my traditional friends can quote relevant sources off the tops of their heads, and know how to look up most of the rest. And they're just regular people -- lawyers and accountants and programmers and shopkeepers, not rabbis.

Most Reform Jews of my generation have not had a similar education, and are not seeing that their children get that kind of education. They send their kids to Hebrew school, which meets after school one day a week and on Sunday mornings, until bar mitzvah. A smaller number continue on through high school. They are studying a broader range of topics (after all, the Reform movement's focus isn't on traditional halacha), and they are spending less time on it, so of course their knowledge isn't as deep. Hebrew is not a large part of it, judging from what I've heard when the various classes lead services; they just don't read well, for the most part. I'm not dissing the kids; they read better than I probably would have at that age, and some of them read better than I do now. But most of them do not read well, do not maintain the skill past the bar mitzvah, and are not going to emphasize it with their eventual kids.

So, all told, the average person at a Reform service probably isn't capable of leading it. (Some of those could if they had time to practice.) So if you suggest to the average Reform Jew that someone other than the rabbi can lead the service, his thinking will probably go something like this: "Well, I can't do it, and I'm pretty normal, so why should I assume that David there can? He hasn't had any more schooling than I have; he's just a regular guy. No, he'll probably screw something up. We should stick with the rabbi; he's an expert." And if they've never actually heard David lead services, how are they to know that he's actually capable of doing it?

So the Reform Jew who is qualified to lead services faces a real up-hill battle -- not necessarily with the rabbi or the administration, but rather with the congregation. And who wants to put up with that kind of grief? Speaking only for myself, why would I want to try to force myself onto people who apparently wouldn't want me? And who am I to go to the rabbi and say "please make a pitch and let me do this"? Unless the rabbi decides that you don't have to be a rabbi to lead services, thus drawing flack from people who will say he's shirking his job responsibilities, it's not going to happen. So at some level, it's all politics.

And that's why, in the Reform movement, you have to be a rabbi to lead services, most of the time. In my opinion, of course.

Friday night I went to Tree of Life again. The turnout was small; I wonder how much of that was due to the time being listed wrong in the Chronicle and how much was just normal fluctuation. (No bar mitzvah, winter, threatening bad weather...)

Rabbi Berkun had larnygitis (I bet I've misspelled that but I'm not sufficiently motivated to look it up), so it's just as well he had a guest cantorial type. He could barely talk; singing would have been a Bad Idea. I offered to take over most of the English reading that he normally does, but he had already scared up someone for that job. He still tried to give a sermon, but he cut it short.

The "sermon" was really more of a report from a conference he attended last week. It was a joint conference of Conservative entities with acronyms; I'm sorry, but I don't know who they all were. The rabbinical body, the cantors' association, something tied to education, a couple more... Anyway, some of the speakers, the rabbi said, had talked about ways of increasing individual observance levels, and Rabbi Berkun rattled off suggestions like lighting Shabbat candles, at least dropping pork and shellfish from the diet if not keeping fully kosher, and so on -- really basic stuff, in other words. I was surprised; the Conservative movement is a halachic one and -- officially -- considers all of these things obligatory, but either this speaker was out in left field or they are having big problems with this among the rank and file. These were suggestions I've often heard from Reform rabbis, but in that movement individual autonomy is encouraged, not shunned. I wonder what it all means.

This Friday was one of the nights that the intergenerational choir at Temple Sinai was singing -- oops. I didn't know about that at the time I scheduled Tree of Life or I would have tried for a different night. But I'm not sure how to discretely get a choir schedule, and I still feel like I'm "moonlighting" and thus don't really want to spread around my real reason for asking.

Saturday morning Rabbi Freedman led the informal minyan, which is unusual. He did ok for the most part (he doesn't usually come so he doesn't know the drill), though he lost control during his drash. (He allowed it to turn into a general conversation that went longer than we really had time for given that he had to go upstairs and do a bar mitzvah after this.) Oops. We still got some Torah study in, and after he left we just continued on our own.

Ok, I have a question about the various "personal offerings" (as opposed to specified communal ones) that were brought. (Maybe Rabbi Gibson will be able to help out next week.) One of these is often translated as the "peace-offering", though Plaut (and the Hebrew speakers in the room) assert that something like "offering of well-being" is closer to the mark. What I don't know is when, and how often, one typically brought these. And was this a case of "things are going well; time to give thanks", or one of "things are going badly; time to ask for help"? (Most people there seemed to think it's the former.) Was this something you did once or twice a year, or any time you wanted to have a festive meal, or what? (The offering could be anything from a bull on down to small birds... not sure if meal-offerings were part of this.)

The talmud talks at some length about making sure that procedures for handling "peace-offerings" and sin-offerings are the same, because we don't want to embarrass the person who brought the latter. The presumption, then, is that peace-offerings are at least as common as sin-offerings, because you're trying to set up the presumption that of course Shlomo over there is bringing a peace-offering, but that only begs the question. (We haven't gotten to sin-offerings yet.) Were people running to the Levites with offerings several times a week, or was this a special thing you did once or twice a year, or what? (I'm confident that the answer is between those extremes, but I don't have any better information.)

Saturday night I went to shiva for a fellow congregant. I didn't actually know the person who died, but I know his wife and she's on the board so I thought I should go. I still don't really understand the protocols. I'm also not sure why Rabbi Gibson has the idea in his head that I've offered to run shiva minyanim; I'm willing if asked, but no, this really isn't something that's calling to me, at least until I learn how to comfort the mourner better. (He asked me if I could run it one night later this week, but the night he wanted was bad and he said not to worry about it -- he has other people he can ask. That's reassuring.)