Monica

I was discussing my decreased involvement in the SCA (over the last decade or so) with a friend who suggested that I've shifted my social allegiance from the SCA to my synagogue. This is something I've thought about before and I want to record a comment I made in that discussion.

Certainly the degradation of the SCA over the last decade [1] has made it easier for me to find time for my synagogue. The SCA began its descent for me in 1994; it wasn't until 1998 that I even started showing up at my synagogue. I've thought a lot about how these are related, actually, and I think that had the SCA not gone the way it did I would still be involved in my synagogue but I would not be in a leadership position and I'd probably be a less-regular attendee. (Not infrequent, mind, but that I wouldn't have had a problem skipping Shabbat services to go to an event.) My synagogue has replaced the SCA in providing leadership opportunities, which have accompanying time commitments -- but, interestingly, I don't actually socialize a lot with the synagogue people outside of the synagogue context. I'm much more likely to go out to dinner and a movie (or whatever) with my SCA friends.

[1] We were talking about increasingly-obstructionist policies at the corporate level and their effects on the rank-and-file participants. The modern incarnation of these problems began with a major policy change, founded on false premises, in 1993. I spent a chunk of 1994 investigating those false premises, along with several other members, lawyers, and a judge.

I talked with my rabbi today about my leading services at the other shul. He already knew that I've been going there for shacharit for years (not every day); I told him that this was because of ties to a particular group of people, not to that synagogue or movement in general, and if that minyan were to disband I would not seek out another. I'm committed to my movement, my synagogue, and my rabbi; I just don't see a conflict with also participating elsewhere in small doses. (My synagogue does not have a daily morning minyan.) I then told him that I'm leading that service once a week, that this was because they had asked me (I didn't initiate), and that I'd said "no" for a good long time before agreeing. I asked if this was a problem for him. (I also apologized for not coming to him about this much earlier.)

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 )

D&D Thursday night was exciting. We are in the middle of a fight with our arch-rivals, a pair of high-level vampires. We ran out of time before we ran out of vampires, so we had to freeze the combat until next time.

Shabbat services were good. My rabbi seems to be mostly recovered from his surgery, so things are back to normal. He's moving around more easily and has more of his energy back. Friday night he gave an excellent sermon (that doesn't summarize well).

Saturday morning we had an interesting discussion at torah study that started off with the observation that we all reflect on the people as a whole. This somehow morphed into the question of how a congregation handles notorious members (or attendees). If a Jew who's accused -- but not yet convicted -- of heinous crimes shows up at services and asks for an aliya (saying the torah blessings -- an honor), do you give it to him? ( Read more... )

I'll be chanting torah in a few weeks, so I spent some of Saturday afternoon working on the portion. Let me just say that the third aliya of Sh'mini looks like it could be the poster child for weird trope combinations. I had to consult Trope Trainer for some of them; the book and class weren't enough. I'm just sayin'.

Saturday night was Ralph and Lori's annual St. Patrick's Day party. This was fun, and it looks like the hosts got to spend more time enjoying the party this time. (I believe they expressed a desire to have "only" too much food, as opposed to the vast quantities of food they've had in the past. This worked.) Several of the Claritech gang were there, though some past regulars were missing. We met some of Ralph's coworkers and didn't scare them away. There were people playing music, but not much gaming this time. (Well, we left around midnight and I think some gaming started later.)

We hosted Sunday dinner to allow Ralph and Lori to recover. As sometimes happens, I had a dessert I wanted to make and worked backwards from that. The dairy dessert dictated a non-meat meal, so I opted for spinach lasagna to prove I can make things other than fish. :-) (Note to future self: the recipe in Easy Kosher Cooking works well, and much much better than the one on the side of the noodle box.) As long as you're making lasagna anyway you may as well make extra, so I now have a pan in the freezer to donate to the synagogue food stash. Dessert was a gingerbread pineapple-upside-down cake, so I made a tossed salad with fruit (including pineapple) for foreshadowing. Ok, ok -- I had leftover pineapple. I wasn't sure how much garlic bread to make, but seem to have made exactly enough. It was a nice relaxing evening of pleasant conversation, and a good wind-down from the weekend.

This week is the final session of the trope class. Our numbers have dwindled and I don't know what's going on there. David (the teacher) told me to bring the torah portion I'm working on and we'll go over it. Sounds good to me.

Purim is in a bit under two weeks. estherchaya and sethcohen and beckyfeld and Harold invited Dani and me down for Purim and Shabbat, and I'm glad that Dani decided to go with me. It's been a while since I've seen most of these folks; it'll be nice to spend a weekend visiting. And, well, eating and drinking, 'cause you have to on Purim. :-)

This morning's roads were not nearly bad enough to justify the traffic conditions. The CD I was playing in the car looped. My normal commute is about 15 minutes (20 on a bad day). Feh.

I'm currently trying to learn to chant a torah passage that, if I'm successful, will be the longest one I've learned. This is true for most of the readers in this service (the annual local women's service), and they've told us to do as much as we can (so long as it's valid) and we can fill in the rest from a chumash if necessary. But I'm really trying to do it. And I've got good motivation: <geek> near the end of my section is the following trope sequence: pazeir pazeir t'lisha-g'dolah </geek>. That's fun! This is frilly show-off stuff, if I can just get there. :-)

I think the next president of my congregation likes me even though I've been a thorn in his side on some policy things (nothing personal). By law I'll be stepping down as worship chair in May, and I'm not currently on the board, so he wants to make sure that I have a leadership position I'm satisfied with. I told him that completing the Sh'liach K'hilah program and putting that learning to use, especially in worship contexts, is my top priority -- but that in the meantime he should put me on the budget committee so I can do my nit-picking early. :-) (If he was hoping I'd say "so, tell me about the executive track", he'll just have to be disappointed.)

Monday I got mail from Amazon UK saying that my copy of Blake's 7 (season 2) had shipped. It arrived today. I'm impressed! It's not as if I paid for any sort of expedited shipping; I just got lucky. Pity that I have other things I need to do in the next couple days, like work. :-)

Tonight's dinner featured grouper sprinkled with black pepper and cumin and pan-fried (use a non-stick pan and you can skip the fat). The recipe suggested a side of corn with bell peppers (I used red), green onions, a little cumin, lime juice, and honey. (The recipe called for cilantro too, but alas there was none to be found last night.) There was more cumin in the fish than in the corn, but Dani thought the corn was too spicy (and ate the fish without complaint). How odd. I liked both, and they did work well together.

A quick aside: one of the articles I came home with is "Music in the Synagogue: When the Chazzan 'Turned Around'", by William Sharlin (CCAR Journal, Jan 1962). It asserts that when the chazzan (cantor, prayer leader) faced the ark (and thus had his back to the congregation), prayer -- both his and the congregation's -- could be more heart-felt, private, and perhaps spontaneous. However, when the chazzan started facing the congregation, everyone got self-conscious. So how do you find seclusion for prayer in that kind of situation? He raises the question but doesn't answer it. I'm not sure I accept his premise; it sounds plausible but I haven't thought a lot about it yet. But he could be right. I certainly did notice on Friday night that I wasn't sure what to do with myself, physically, during the silent prayer at the end of the Amidah, when I was facing the congregation.

On to outreach...

The instructor stressed that "outreach" really means two things to her -- ahavat ger, welcoming the stranger, and kiruv, drawing (everyone) near. Our goal should be to build welcoming communities in general, recognizing that we have a diverse community with different needs. She also scored points with me by saying we need to not neglect the knowledgable, committed Jews in the process, or assume that everyone is a family (with kids). Data point: the NJPS survey in 2000 found that only 20% of Jewish households consisted of two parents plus kids; we (she says, and I agree) under-serve 80% of our households. (She talked about some programs that the Reform movement encourages to aid in all this; we received literature. :-)

We also received some good checklists on the theme of "is your congregation user-friendly?". Some of the points are excessive in my opinion (e.g. they suggest that your yellow-pages ad include a map), but others are things we could definitely be doing better on.

During the conversion class we looked at two texts, Avram's covenant with God and Ruth's conversion to Judaism. I noticed two interesting things here. First, with Avram God is the priority; with Ruth it seems to be more about peoplehood, with God as a side-effect. Second, Avram is given some assurances by God; Ruth is making a leap of faith with no real basis for predicting the outcome. (Will she be accepted by these people?) At least Avram had an invitation. So I guess it makes sense that Ruth rather than Avram is the model for conversion, because most of us don't receive divine invitations to do anything these days, but Avram's story makes a better source in setting priorities IMO. Yeah, we're also a people, but I think God has to come first or what's the point? (I realize this view is controversial with some.)

I found the CCAR guide on conversion to be largely familiar, which isn't surprising. :-) (The guide post-dates my conversion but had clearly been in progress for some years. My rabbi didn't follow it, but he did a lot of the same things and surely had input into the guide.) The format is clever: they have the core guidelines in the center of the page, with commentary, alternatives, and suggestions for implementation around the outside. It sort of resembles a page of talmud, which can't have been an accident.

According to the guide there are six questions a would-be convert has to answer affirmatively before being accepted. (This is a necessary, not sufficient, condition.) My rabbi used those same six but added a single word to one of them when I had to answer them; he added the word "exclusively" to "if you should be blessed with children, do you promise to raise them as Jews?". I approve of his addition. While I'm all for being as welcoming as we can to interfaith families, I have seen too much evidence that a child raised with two religions ends up with zero, and if you aren't ready to raise your hypothetical children as Jews, perhaps you need to rethink whether you'll be able to keep Judaism alive in your home in other ways.

I note in passing that the CCAR resolution on patrilineal descent -- which doesn't quite say what many people think it does -- also requires an exclusive religion for the child. I wonder how widely this one is enforced; the class on education and curriculum brought up the problems of dealing with kids who alternate between your Sunday school and the church's, or who celebrate both Christmas and Chanukah. Of course, sometimes doctrine and poltiics are at odds with each other.

Sunday consisted of wrap-up. The group that did the morning service worked in a theme of departure/ending, opening with the song Lechi Lach and ending with T'filat ha-Derech and using some related creative readings in the middle. They did a nice job. After breakfast and the service review, we were told to go back to the chapel for the wrap-up session.

The chairs were arranged in a circle. The instructors talked to us about our roles as leaders in our congregations and how we weren't just there for ourselves but to take things back. They thanked us for participating, and then gave anyone who wanted to the chance to talk. While this wasn't what they apparently intended, we ended up going around in a circle.

People mostly talked about how much they had enjoyed the past week, and some people highlighted specific things they had gotten out of it. For the most part people spoke personally and from the heart; this wasn't pro-forma thanks. Real friendships were formed in that week, and that touched people.

When it got to me (about three-quarters of the way around, so I had some time to think), I said roughly the following:

I've long been an analytical, academic type of person. When I found myself being drawn to Judaism, fairly early on I figured I'd better read the manual. (This got a big laugh.) So I read the Torah, and then much of the Kitzur Shulchan Aruch, and signed up for classes in Hebrew and Talmud. Later, I started connecting with the community -- and I'm part of a very close community now, but it took years to get there. So when I applied to this program, I thought I was going to college for a week. I was completely blind-sided by the community that we developed here in only a week, and I am thrilled to have had the chance to draw closer to everyone here.

(Remember, I never had the camp experience that many people did as kids. And while I've been part of communities that bonded, it never happened so quickly. Our annual shabbaton is an immersion experience similar to this, but that's with people I already know. These were strangers.)

The organizers are supposed to be creating a class mailing list for us so we can stay in touch between now and next year's session. They also distributed a roster with contact information. One of the members of the group is going to set up a web site and share all the photos he took, and I imagine that other people will send their photos to him too. It should be interesting to see how things develop now that we're all home.

After the formal wrap-up (and before lunch) people stayed around the chapel to say individual good-byes. More than half of my classmates praised the insights and questions I raised in class. Since I am someone who values intellect and is more comfortable with that than affect (I find it hard to really connect with people sometimes), this touched me. It's one thing to be praised as standing out among a random community; it's another among leaders.

Leigh (the cantorial student) told me I have an obvious talent for cantillation and I should stick with it. I told him there's no risk of me giving that up and I'll be back for year two of his cantillation class. (I also told him my Hebrew name. He approved. :-) )

During lunch we met some of the incoming second-year students, and I met someone I've corresponded with briefly. I'm looking forward to comparing notes with her when she gets home -- and picking her brain about what to expect in the second year.

The advance materials for this program said that we were committing to two summer sessions, two mid-year weekend sessions, and unspecified other coursework (with internet-based options). Also monthly (or better) meetings with our sponsoring rabbis for mentoring. This week they told us that they are relaxing all of that; basically, they said, we're all smart, motivated people and rather than micro-managing our educations, they're just going to offer stuff and we'll come to what we want. I'm a little surprised and disappointed by this; while I certainly don't need to be micro-managed, I had hoped for more support and guidance for next steps. For example, what internet-based courses? Perhaps this is one of the things they're planning to use the class mailing list for; they did tell us that we won't lack for information about upcoming opportunities. So, we'll see.

This also means they've left the sponsoring rabbis kind of dangling. I asked specifically what is expected of them now -- because as part of my application, both I and my rabbi signed a contract to do what was then specified, and we take our commitments seriously. They basically said to work with our rabbis and let them guide us. Um, ok. I'm happy to let my rabbi guide me, but I suspect he may have wanted more guidance in turn from the program. On the other hand, he's an experienced rabbi, we already meet regularly, and we have an excellent relationship, so this will probably work out in the end.

The drive home was uneventful (getting onto the highway was trivial compared to getting off :-) ), and I made better time getting home than getting there (a bit over five hours). I wonder how much was traffic, how much was tailwinds, and how much was my car's desire to go faster than might really be called for. (Seriously, this was my first road trip with the new car, and 70 in it feels like 60 did in the old car. Fortunately, I realized this on the way out and paid attention.)

The cats decided to forgive me rather than shunning me for abandoning them; getting home at dinner time probably helped. Dani told me that Embla actually demanded petting from him, which is pretty surprising. She must have been really lonely!

Short takes:

I haven't stayed in a college dorm since, well, college. And my college dorm room was somewhat unusual (the dorm was a renovated mansion). The rooms were adequate (at least they had individual AC), with a shared bathroom. I see now why they offered information about local hotels. I think being on campus is more important than being more comfortable, but wow. Twenty-year-olds handle dorm mattrsses much better than forty-year-olds do. :-)

Almost all of my classmates were apparently older than me, some by a couple decades. There were a few other people roughly my age, and one who might have been in her early 30s. (Have I mentioned that I'm bad at ages?) This is not the demographic I expected. It was around 2:1 women to men, by the way. About a third of the group were raised in Orthodox or Conservative homes and about a quarter were (declared) converts, so this was not overwhelmingly a group that grew up in the Reform movement.

The food was very good (and kosher, for the person who was asking about that). They brought in an Orthodox caterer (so yes, she stayed on campus during Shabbat), and she was very friendly. She said some nice things at the end about Orthodox and Reform Jews working together -- though we have differences to be sure, we also have a lot of shared values. And while it's hard to say for sure, I think she may have gained a new appreciation for the idea that Reform does not equal dismissive of tradition.

I don't think I had previously noticed that in the torah scroll the entire story of Bilaam, from the first solicition for his services through the talking-donkey episode through the curse attempts, is one long paragraph -- no breaks. It spans several columns. It's usually my job to roll the scroll to the correct place before the service, and I usually navigate by the whitespace (not being particularly fluent in Hebrew).

Saturday's mail brought an anticipated wedding invitation. I was surprised by a Saturday-morning ceremony; I thought they were doing afternoon or evening. And I will have to decide how I feel about a reception on Shabbat that's being held in a restaurant, rather than a privately-rented hall where there are fewer issues. Hmm. They're friends and I really want to be there for them.

Saturday night we held a party for tangerinpenguin, who will soon be leaving town. While there were several people who couldn't make it due to holiday-weekend plans, we still got a bunch of people and, as far as I could tell, everyone had a good time. Someone made a nifty cake, in the form of an open book with a jungle motif, in honor of his new employer. Saturday was a hot day and we don't have central AC, only window units; we did the best we could to keep the place habitable but found myself thinking "the engines canna take more of this, captain!" a few times. :-) Realizing that we couldn't possibly know all of Chris' friends, we made it open-invitation -- and still only got one person I didn't know. Also got a few people I hadn't thought to directly invite, so I'm glad we took that approach.

It's been a very hot and muggy weekend. I emptied the dehumidifier three times yesterday, which is a record. (It's rated for 40 gallons/week and the tank is about a gallon and a half, so we're still nowhere near capacity. There's a scary thought!) I was rather insistent that we were going to run the AC in the bedroom last night. Dani objects to open bedroom windows and ACs/fans, saying they're too noisy, but that resulted in unacceptable conditions Saturday night. And, y'know, sometimes I should get a turn at comfort.

Sunday we joined ralphmelton, lorimelton and her parents, mrpeck, and two others who I think are not LJ-enabled for an early dinner before some of them headed off for fireworks. Someone referred to Ralph as the grill-meister, and I have to concur. I do not have the grilled-meat clue, and I am envious. :-)

(We didn't go to the fireworks, not being big on crowds and noise. We watched two more episodes of B5 instead, but they were ones without fight scenes, so we can't say we watched a different kind of fireworks.)

Wednesday night is the next meeting of the worship committee. The rabbi can't actually make it (double-booked), but in this case that's ok. The single agenda item is to teach the committee about the structure of the Friday service in some detail and then assign parts for the service we'll be jointly leading at the end of the month. In my opinion members of this committee should be fully conversant with the service and able to lead it from the siddur without lots of extra annotations like "tell them to stand here", and some people couldn't do that when we led a service last year. So I'll try to teach them, and we'll see how it goes. This is certainly material I can teach on my own, so if the rabbi were going to be there I'd defer to him but there's no need for him to come.

cahwyguy wrote an interesting entry on some basic mistakes the leaders of his congregation are making. While he's talking specifically about a congregation, the principles apply to any voluntary association. And, sadly, the mistakes they're making are not new; I would have thought more people understood how to make organizations run well. "The current leaders (and the ones continuing into next year) like to talk about the strengths of a small congregation, and this one in particular. They like to emphasize the warmth and friendliness of its people, and how they value the contributions of everyone. It's a facade. [...] What they are forgetting is that volunteers need respect, and people remember how they are treated."

Failing to take care of your volunteers -- to thank them, to give them the resources they need, and to keep tabs on them to avert burn-out -- is fundamental. When you start taking people for granted, you send the "you owe us" message -- or worse yet, the "you don't really matter as a person" message. And that's when people start asking themselves if they really need this grief. Maybe it's time to drop back and let someone else organize the events, or do the scut-work, or reach out to new members, or whatever. And then you get into this downward spiral and it's very hard to recover.

I'm fortunate that my congregation doesn't have these issues. Some of that's luck, some of it's clues, and some of it's the fact that we're large (so it's hard to really drop below critical mass). But I've seen occasional presumptuousness on the part of some leaders, and I try to bring it up with them when it happens. Because I don't want us to end up with those kinds of problems. I've also seen it in other organizations, and sometimes I feel helpless to change it.

I thought some of my friends might be interested in discussing this (either here or in Daniel's journal), so rather than just commenting there I'm making an entry here. Besides, Daniel is new to LJ and not all that connected yet. So go say hi or something if you like; he won't mind.

I'm on a mailing list for synagogue music/musicians. It's mostly inhabited by cantors, and I try to just sit and listen.

Lately, though, they've been doing the "we don't get no respect" mantra, saying that synagogues underpay them and that non-proefessionals are cutting into their jobs (something like "how dare an accountant who sings part-time take away our jobs!"), and they've been tossing around the "union" word. And. Well.

I slept on this before sending it:
( Read more... )

This year's shabbaton was wonderful. The sense of connection and completeness that it provides is just so much stronger than a "regular" Shabbat. I want more of that! :-)

We had 24 people this year, and went back to the site we used before the one we've been using for the last few years. This site is a longer drive and is a little more primitive in some ways, but it's in a more pleasant location (lake, trees, privacy) than the other, and the communal space is more comfortable. I also found the staff we encountered to be more friendly. And it doesn't have crosses and stuff all over the place like the Lutheran camp. I hope we keep going to this one.

One of the best things about a retreat like this is that you're not time-constrained. You don't have to worry about the folks who are getting antsy because the service is running long and they want to get their kids in bed, or the rabbi isn't getting ready to run upstairs for the second service, and stuff like that. Things take as long as they take and no one cares. So we took some things slower, and did stuff we sometimes skip, and experimented with some things. (Like an actual individual Amidah -- this congregation is mostly used to saying it together, and I've been hoping we would try cutting people loose to go at their own pace. That seemed to work, so I hope we do it more.)

Friday night, after the service and dinner and before the singing that goes into the wee hours, is usually kind of quiet and meditative (niggunim, storytelling, focusing on breathing, and so on). That worked really well this year. I think my rabbi was fairly relaxed by then, maybe more relaxed than in past years.

I found myself being my rabbi's "right-hand man" in assorted things. It was very natural for both of us. ( Read more... )

This afernoon during the study session we talked about middot, which are, basically, self-improvement techniques. (The text we had referred to this as "tikkun middot", analogous to "tikkun olam" but focused inward rather than outward.) I've encountered many of the ideas before, of course, but not all neatly packaged up under a single heading. Some of them are things I've been working on for years; others are things I should work on more; still others are things that I think I mostly have a reasonable grasp of.

I spent some time this afternoon with one of our newer torah readers, who will be reading in a few weeks (Bamidbar). She asked if I could chant some of her portion for her (she wanted to check some things). I said "I'm not very good at sight-reading, but let me look at it". I did, and it was all standard trope with no surprises, and the text was very easy (and repetitive), so as it turned out, I could chant it for her. Nifty! I'm glad a new person got this portion; we assign portions based on dates, mostly, not based on any sort of evaluation of difficulty.

Odd encounter: Friday when we arrived I noticed that one of the staff members seemed to be staring at me, but I shrugged it off. A bit later he came up to me and said "I think I know you but I don't know why". So we started comparing notes; it turns out that his brother was fringe SCA at CMU when I was there, and he recognized me from visits to his brother's fraternity house (where the SCA hung out and a RuneQuest! game I was in was held). Small world. He's now working for AOL in Virginia, but he works at this camp on some weekends. (Am I just incredibly bad at things like this, or is this a fluke? I would not know by sight any of my sister's friends from 20+ years ago; heck, I probably wouldn't recognize most of my own college classmates, if we weren't otherwise close.)

The only problem we had the entire time was in following the directions to get there. For my (and maybe your) amusement, here follow the directions with my annotations in italics: ( fluff )

Question to me this morning: people scheduled my rabbi to be in two places at once this Shabbat; can I learn three verses of this week's parsha before Saturday morning? Sadly, I suspect the answer is "no", even if I get to pick the verses. (I think sometime this year the time will come when the answer would be "yes".) This illustrates a problem we're going to need to address, though -- people get sick, after all, and we don't have people who can read nearly-cold (yet). So either we cultivate some or we admit that there might be weeks when we don't have a torah service. I wonder what other congregations do when their torah readers are suddenly unavailable. (We ended up deciding to punt this week. We'll read the portion from a chumash, without the torah service proper.)

Some members of the worship commitee saw my subversive side for the first time last night. (I thought everyone knew already. :-) ) Once a week we have a weekday service (evening). We just don't have support for every day, but this is an attempt to do something. The folks who set this up chose a night when there's often other stuff going on in the building that dove-tail with this (7:30 service and 8:00 meetings), but it hasn't worked. We rarely have a minyan. Someone lamented the fact that even board members tend not to come a little early on meeting night, even though as leaders of the congregation they really ought to do so at least occasionally (IMO).

Board meetings are preceeded by a mailing (minutes, agenda, financial statements). This mailing has a cover sheet that specifies the meeting time (among other details). So, I said, change that cover sheet: "service 7:30 chapel; business meeting 8:00 library". See how many people will just show up to the first place/time listed. :-) (I think, actually, that we are going to do this.)

This was a low-key Shabbat for me, because Dani went off to an SCA event on Saturday but I didn't. After the hustle and bustle of travelling last weekend, it was a pleasant change. Didn't get very far on the torah portion I'm learning, but that's ok as there's time yet. (I need to remember to check one bit of weird pronunciation with Dani. I've never seen a kametz on a nun sofit; I assume it behaves the same way as on a chaf or chet.)

The SCA event was originally advertised as an event about children, Christmas, and shopping. The first two I don't do and the last I don't do on Shabbat, so I started off inclined against. And, of course, the event charged the corporate tax, which is a point against. A very deserving friend was being elevated to the peerage, which I wanted to see, but ultimately I decided that the combination of event activities, high price ($15+), and Shabbat complications argued against. (I wasn't willing to miss Shabbat services for a third event this fall, and stuff was happening before we would have gotten there.) I regret missing the elevation but I don't regret missing the event.

This afternoon I helped cook latkes for my synagogue's ("first annual") latke sale. That was fun, though I wasn't paying enough attention to repetitive motion early enough so one wrist is a little sore. I noticed it early enough that things should be fine tomorrow, though. And I learned a useful technique: form the patties by taking a slotted spoon, scooping up potato mixture, and squeezing with your other hand to send the excess moisture out through the slots while forming a spoon-shaped patty. That's much easier than pressing 'em between your hands, which is what I've done in the past.

I asked the coordinator if this fund-raiser was effective, and she said she wasn't sure yet. It replaces, in part, the annual "Jewish Food Festival", which I feel was way too much effort for too little money. And some board members fixated on it too much, and hounded other board members for not volunteering tons of time and effort to make it work. I remember one board meeting where I almost said, "Look, you're planning on tons of work to bring in $X. We have Y members. Here's $10, more than my share. You can keep the change but you have to stop pestering me." But I didn't, and we were finally able to kill it.

So this year we're doing a latke sale that probably won't raise that much money, but it's also not as much work. And they were able to graft a raffle onto it for basically no cost, so that might end up making a difference. We'll see.

There seems to be this mentality that working on fund-raising events is inherently fun and good, so even if they don't produce a lot of money you should do it. I take a more businesslike approach: if you aren't going to make a reasonable amount of money from it, you shouldn't abuse your volunteers, whose time is valuable. I would have been happy to pay an extra $10 a year in dues to never hear from the food festival again. This year I was willing to spend a few hours making latkes, but if I learn that it was basically a wash, I might not be willing to do so next year.

No one explained this aspect of the Jewish community to me, and I find it a little peculiar. When I was a kid involved in various organizations that needed to raise money, we did our best to optimize the payoff:effort ratio. I don't see that happening in my synagogue, and I get the impression it doesn't happen in others either.

Sunday dinner was fun. ralphmelton passed around a new game he picked up, My Life With Master, which looks like it could be neat. It's not a genre I'm generally fond of -- Victorian horror -- but it's almost pure role-playing, which has a lot of appeal. I'm looking forward to reading the rules. (He's written about it in his journal.)

Dessert tonight was a yummy concoction involving gingerbread cake, peaches, cranberries, whipped cream, and probably other stuff. Very pretty to look at (it was in layers in a colorless glass dish) and quite tasty.