Monica

In an odd twist of timing, the rabbi emeritus of the other synagogue showed up to services this morning. This is, I'm pretty sure, the first time I've seen him this year; he travels a lot and doesn't always come to minyan even when he's in town. But he was there today (with a guest).

He hadn't seen me lead that service before, and he said lots of complimentary things to me afterwards. He also said he was heading off (with said guest, who turned out to be someone from JNF or UJF or some other Jewish TLA) to a meeting with my rabbi and he was planning to say nice things to him about me. Heh -- I'm glad I had that conversation yesterday. :-) Later in the day I got email from my own rabbi commenting positively on this.

So I think my rabbi is supportive. Time will tell how this affects my leadership opportunities in my congregation. (The worship committee is meeting next week; I don't yet know if lay leadership for Friday nights is on the agenda.)

The job of a service leader is to lead the congregation in prayer. In other words, the leader serves the rest of the group. In my limited experience, this means the leader himself usually doesn't get to immerse himself in prayer in the same way he would out in the congregation. But if he does it right, he can help buoy the congregation, making it a little easier for them to pray.

This morning I was really tired (Dani snores), and I didn't have high expectations for my ability to lead. But I did, 'cause that's my job, and anyway, Dave (my mentor in that minyan) wasn't there. (I knew I was still competent, or I wouldn't have.) And you know what? Sometime during p'sukei d'zimra the congregration was helping to support me, which doesn't usually happen. I don't think they even knew it. Things went swimmingly from that point. It was pretty neat. While I've experienced that feeling in my congregation, I've not previously experienced it in this minyan.

Someone called a meeting for next Thursday morning. Initially I thought "hmm, I could get here in time for that if I skip the minyan's breakfast after services". Then I looked more closely at the calendar and realized that, it being the day before Purim, it's a public fast day -- so no breakfast after services. Ok, one problem solved.

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.

Ok. I get it now.

When I had been going to morning services for not very long, I noticed a pattern: people in the congregation were given aliyot (saying the blessings for torah reading; this is an honor) in a very rough rotation, but the guy who led services every day never got one. I think, in the 6+ years I've been going there, I've seen him get one once. (Granted, I only go once a week and there are torah readings twice a week plus a few. But still.) The torah reader almost never gets one either, because he's, well, reading. (While historically the person who said the blessings would also read, that hasn't been routinely true for a very long time. The convention now is that the reader and the blesser are two different people except under special circumstances.)

So anyway, that seemed ironic: the aliya is the usual and customary way of honoring someone just a little bit, even if you know it's going to come around to you eventually because you need three per torah reading and there are only 25 people in the minyan, but it's still an honor. And the people who serve the community so there can be a service at which to hand out aliyot never get that honor themselves. I felt bad for the folks in this situation.

But now I am that person (in small scale). I led the entire service this morning; next week the regular guy is going to sit in the congregation rather than up on the bimah (where he was today just in case I needed him to bail me out). I've been gradually working up to this for months, and now I'm there. The training wheels are off and I'm still vertical.

And y'know what? I haven't had an aliya in months and that's just fine. I feel no lack. Getting to lead the service is also an honor, a huge one in fact, and I don't need to be the person who says those blessings when I say so many others and get to spend the entire torah service in close proximity to the sefer torah every week anyway.

That a community is willing to (collectively) say "we entrust you as our representative in prayer" is a pretty darn big honor in its own right, after all. I won't turn down an aliya should it happen in the future, but I'd be just as happy to see it go to that quiet person in the back row.

Non-Jewish readers probably don't care.

( explanation of relevant part of liturgy )

Ok, all that said...

This morning I was leading the service and when we got to kaddish d'rabbanan there was no minyan, so I skipped it and we went on. Most of the way through the following section a tenth person arrived, and a mourner called out "go back to the kaddish". I declined to do so because we were already past it and other kaddishim would be coming up. (I don't think you're supposed to go back in the service, in general.) Someone else suggested a compromise: instead of saying chatzi kaddish at the end of that section, say kaddish d'rabbanan instead. So we did that.

I wonder about two things. One is whether that was an appropriate thing to do; consensus of the group is that it was, but there was no rabbi or scholar present. The other is about the motivation of the person doing the asking. He knows, because he's been there every day, that there would be a mourners' kaddish at the end. Why did he consider the kaddish d'rabbanan important? It wasn't his only chance; is there some tradition that says that it's especially meritorious to say kaddish more than once in a single service? (He left immediately after the service ended, so I didn't get a chance to talk with him.)

I haven't seen this situation before, so when it first came up I turned to Dave (the usual leader) and he shrugged. It turns out he hadn't seen it come up before either and he didn't know the local custom.

( footnotes )

Edited to add: this morning service was at the Conservative shul I attend regularly, not my own (Reform) shul.

That went pretty well. I led (part of) morning services at Tree of Life for the first time today, after the regular guy was sufficiently insistent last week. I stumbled in a couple places but not badly (I recovered). Lots of people complimented me afterward, and the regular guy wants me to do this much regularly and learn the rest. So I'll keep working on that.

I led the opening prayers (through yotzeir), and then wasn't sure whether I should stay on the bima or slip back to the regular seats. (Yay, choreography. No one ever thinks about that.) So I stayed on the "don't draw attention by moving" principle, and when we got to the torah service the gabbai gave me an aliya. He also had me lead the concluding prayers. I'll take this as some base level of validation. :-)

Implementation note: the leader's copy of the siddur is conveniently marked up with highlighter and hand-written page cues. In the future I won't use it, though; while this shouldn't be an issue with highlighter pens, I found that the pink they used reduced contrast just enough that I had trouble reading some of the similar letters (e.g. I mistook a dalet for a reish, and stumbled on some vowels). I hadn't realized that this siddur is so close to the legibility line for me that a little pink marker makes a difference. (Many congregations use a larger siddur, with correspondingly larger print, on the bima, but this one doesn't seem to.)

I've done better torah readings, but this morning went ok. I was tripped up when I mis-remembered trope for one word, which had a cascading effect on the next few words. So I had to be prompted, but I got through it. Initially (a few years ago) I learned this portion by rote; now that I know how to read trope I did it "right" this time, uncovering some errors in my initial learning of it in the process. So I guess it's not surprising that something like this happened. I still got lots of apparently-genuine compliments.

There was a fascinating (to me) discussion at breakfast. There is a light breakfast after services every morning -- usually just bagels and bread, cream cheese, and drinks, unless someone sponsors a fancier breakfast. The process of getting the bread/bagels has been a pain for various reasons, and today someone (a regular, not a visitor) proposed a change: getting bagels from a new bakery that is better in quality, cheaper, more conveniently located -- and not under rabbinic supervision. This last point had not even occurred to the person bringing up the subject as something important; when others pointed it out he went on an anti-kashrut rant. ("What could be treif about a bagel?" "Well, this place sells sandwiches, right? So maybe they sliced your bagel with the same knife they just used to slice the ham?" "You're being too picky." And so on.)

Other people pressed that line of argument with him, but I brought up a more fundamental issue. This is a Conservative congregation. That means they, as a congregation, are bound to a certain interpretation of halacha. It doesn't matter if every member of the minyan eats treif at home; the congregational meal must be in accordance with that halacha, both for appearance and to support the needs of any visitor who actually keeps kosher. (I think, but am not sure, that failing to keep a kosher shul kitchen is one of the issues (along with performing an intermarriage, and I'm not sure what else) that can get a Conservative rabbi censured.) So if that halacha says a bakery must be under supervision, you have to follow that. Bottom line: you have to ask the rabbi and follow his ruling.

The person I was arguing with seemed to be of the belief that "kashrut is silly, so we don't need to worry about it". He failed to see the difference between decisions about personal practice and decisions about communal practice. At one point he brought up other Conservative deviations from the Orthodox interpretation of halacha, like allowing women to lead services, but I pointed out that this isn't the same thing at all: the Conservative movement has a process, which they followed, to determine that women can lead services. They didn't just get up one day and say "we don't like that restriction, so we're not doing it". That same process produces an understanding of kashrut, which must be followed in the shul.

The rabbi was not present, by the way. (I would of course have deferred to him if he were.) I didn't mean to be "speaker for the rabbi", and I said a few times that he needs to consult the rabbi about the kashrut rules for the shul. But when exactly did I, a Reform Jew, become a spokesman for Conservative Judaism in a Conservative shul? *boggle*

(I should clarify that I am not trying to malign or question this community as a whole. I assume that most people present agreed with me but just weren't putting it into words.)

This came as a complete surprise to me, but my sister would like to attend a Star Trek convention with at least one of her teenage kids. (None of them have ever been to any con.) If anyone has suggestions for ones not too far from Pittsburgh that might appeal to newcomers and not be too expensive, I'll pass the suggestions along. Shore Leave in Baltimore could work, except if I recall correctly the hotel is something well over $100/night, which might be a problem.

It seems a little, I don't know, unnerving that the "eye for an eye" part of the Torah (in Mishpatim) rolls trippingly off the tongue, both musically and textually. It's so smooth and graceful... but hey, at least it's easy to learn. :-)

They gave me an aliya this morning at services. Before reciting the blessings, it is customary for a man to touch the Torah scroll with a corner of his tallit. For a woman, they have you use the sash that's used to tie the scroll shut. But this morning they had temporarily lost track of that sash when it was my turn, and while they were looking for it one of the guys told me to "just wear a tallit already, ok?". This is the first evidence I've seen in ~5 years of going there that it would be considered socially acceptable in that congregation for a woman to wear a tallit. Heh -- learn something new every day.

Tonight's D&D game was fun. We had several combats in rapid succession, and we know there will be more before the characters have time to rest, which lends excitement to the game in excess of the sum of the excitement levels of the individual fights. And we did some fun things in the fights; I was particularly happy when something (probably called a cloaker or the like) enveloped someone and my sorceror -- polymorphed as a troll and flying -- attempted to out-grapple it and pull it off. This rightly failed, as my character is not a warrior, but it was entirely appropriate for her to try. (Similarly, it was entirely appropriate for her to charge into combat with the undead whatever-they-weres and smack them with her undead-hating sword.) I like the fact that the level of paladin gives me flexibility in interesting ways without in any way competing with the party's half-dragon fighter.

Impressive winds last night. At one point I woke up to the sound of the metal cover in the (decorative) fireplace in the bedroom rattling around. In other words, wind was coming down the chimney with enough force to do that. I've never heard that sound in my bedroom before.

Note to future self: when you buy your next car, make sure it weighs as much as your current one. (They make 'em out of plastic now, so it might not.) This morning's winds were still strong enough to push my car around. (Low-profile, but small.) And wow -- hail! In November! Little hailstones, but hail nonetheless. It was kind of neat, from an indoor vantage point.

This morning at services a couple of the guys asked me when I'm going to lead the service. I said I need to learn the service better (that is, the chazan's part), and that I'd actually tried to buy a copy of the siddur but Pinsker's doesn't carry it. So Joe told me to borrow one; I was concerned that they didn't have enough to lend one out, so he picked one up, turned to the "donor" plate in the front that has his name on it, and said it was ok. Gee, I guess they're serious. :-)

A bug in our infrastructure code is preventing me from effectively debugging my application. The relevant developer should appear any moment now with a workaround. I hope.

This morning I chanted Torah at Tree of Life. It went very well, and I feel great about it!

When I got there they asked if I wanted to lead the entire service, but I declined. (I'm a little shaky on a couple parts -- can follow but not necessarily lead. Maybe I can do this in six months to a year.) I don't know how many people knew I was going to be chanting Torah; I think it was a surprise to most of the congregation. It certainly seemed to be a surprise to the rabbi.

They gave me the first aliya, so I just walked up there with David (the regular Torah reader) at the beginning of the Torah service. (I took the opportunity to whisper in his ear that I was relying on him to actually find the beginning of the parsha in the scroll for me, which he had already been planning on.) The first aliya went, I believe, perfectly, both in terms of text and in terms of trope. For the second aliya, I had a little trouble finding my preferred starting pitch, and ended up doing it about a third higher than I had intended, but I did it correctly. But it didn't match the first one, and I'm picky about my own music. It's probably not a flaw that anyone else would really call a flaw, but I noticed.

David did the third aliya. I plan to learn that one for next year so I can do the whole thing, but it was too much to bite off for this year. (Initially David wanted me to just learn one, but when I nailed that one pretty quickly he gave me the second -- but too late to then tackle the third, which is much longer than the others.)

I stayed up there after this part of the service and led the concluding prayers (Aleinu etc), which they offered after I declined doing the entire service. That part I can do!

I got lots of compliments on the Torah reading, which made me feel all warm and fuzzy. I'd like to do it again sometime (before a year from now, I mean). David asked me if I wanted to come back and do it Shabbat morning, but I'll be at a Shabbaton. I wonder how he would have handled it, given that I don't know the entire first aliya for Shabbat? (The first aliya for the Shabbat reading is subdivided into three smaller aliyot to make up the weekday reading.)

Now I get to do it again at the Shabbaton on Saturday, except I have to remember to combine these two aliyot into a single one. (Minor trope change -- not hard but I have to remember.)