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Originally I was supposed to lead the regular (congregational) service on Thursday, but with the shiva and some other stuff things got jiggled around. I wonder who did end up leading that service. I guess it was probably the associate rabbi. My rabbi told me that I may lead that service on some nights now even when he's there. (Specifically, nights with board meetings or executive-committee meetings -- also when we are almost guaranteed a minyan.) I appreciate my rabbi's willingness to give me these kinds of assignments; my query about Friday-night services requires a broader discussion, but meanwhile he's finding ways to give me other opportunities.
It's past time for me to explicitly tell him about Thursday mornings. It's not that it's a secret; it's just that it hasn't come up in conversation. But now it might matter to him, so I have to find a way to bring it up. (He does know -- and did at the time -- that I was leading occasional Shabbat services there for a while. But leading weekday services is newer.)
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.
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 )
We have a visiting musician this weekend (Danny Maseng), and he participated in the informal morning service. This tripled the attendance, which isn't surprising. I was the torah reader even though my rabbi was able to be there for the whole service. (There had been a time when that was in doubt, and when the doubt went away I asked if I could read anyway (I'd started to learn it) and he said sure.)
So I chanted torah, well, in front of a large crowd, my rabbi, and our cantorial soloist (who also usually doesn't come to this service). (And Danny Maseng, but celebrities who have no reason to learn my name don't spook me.) This portion had some unusual tropes, which the trope-literate noticed and commented on later. It'a a torah portion with some action in it, so I was able to make use of inflection and mood and all those things that turn a string of words into something with some expression to it. We were in a large room with so-so accoustics and I was able to project so everyone could hear, even while leaning over a table to read.
I received many compliments and I'm really pleased that everything came together so well. I'm also glad that I don't have much peripheral vision to speak of; one of the regulars (who was sitting right in front) told me later that my rabbi, who was acting as gabbai (checker), was (1) beaming and (2) doing the hand-gestures for the tropes as I read. The latter must have been for his own amusement, as he was standing slightly behind me so they couldn't fulfill their primary function. But, as it turned out, they didn't need to; I did get the trope wrong in one place, but I pushed on and I suspect only about three people even noticed.
I'm really glad I had the opportunity to do this. Sure, the egoboo is nice, but I feel that I did something good for the congregation as a whole, too, I hope including inspiring other lay people to participate.
And now, off to the concert that Danny is giving tonight. More later.
On the original schedule he was going to read torah next Saturday morning. Last week I asked someone else to learn it on contingency (i.e. you'll probably get to do this but you might get bumped). (This is someone who explicitly volunteered to do stuff on short notice; we'd know a couple days out if he was going to get bumped. So it was a request for speedy work, not possibly-wasted work.) On Wednesday he told me oops, he'd forgotten about a commitment that would keep him away that day. So I started to look at the portion myself, because I can't ask anyone else to do possibly-wasted work. Fortunately, I'm now off the hook; I asked the associate rabbi if he could do it (he'll be there anyway) and he said yes. I'd rather have more than a week to learn a portion, even a short one.
This afternoon I went to a friend's baby shower. There seemed to be a "classic Pooh" theme going, and, of course (the baby being a girl), enough pink to set off allergic reactions. :-) It was a fun afternoon; it was nice that so many of her friends could be there.
There was one game (showers are required to have games, apparently). The hostess had taken the names of everyone who would be there and looked them up in some sort of "meanings of baby names" book. She grouped them in batches of ten or so and we were to match the names to the meanings. Of course, many of these so-called meanings are hokey rationalizations applied after the fact, not the origins of the names, but you expect that from a book that attempts to attribute meaning to every name. (Y'know, sometimes a Susan is just a Susan...) Anyway, I looked over the list and said to myself that hey, I know a lot of the relevant cognates in at least three source languages (English, Hebrew, Latin), but that even so, I didn't know half of these names. So I filled in the ones I knew and guessed the rest. I was surprised to get 29 or 41 right, which I gather was the highest score in the room.
No, I have no idea of the basis this source had for saying that my name means "advisor". I can't even get a language connection out of that one. I completely missed "Cara" ("beloved"), but could have gotten it if I'd made a logical leap from the madrigal "Matona mia cara". Duh. I was minorly proud for getting "Barbara".
Speaking of languages (sort of), my friend ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
dglenn
has a question
about language structure and resulting expressiveness, with a geek
twist that made me giggle. Hebrew speakers in particular might be able
to help him out.
I had planned to go to a going-away party for a friend who's moving to the west coast, but I've been losing a fight against a headache all evening, and I don't think the noisy environment will help. I hope to connect with him before he leaves town. Worst case, he'll be back in a few weeks to arrange for packing and moving.
Amusing moment: as I've mentioned before, our congregation reads one aliya (out of the seven that make up a full Shabbat torah reading). This year we're reading slishi, the third aliya. Normally we have one aliya, meaning that we don't subdivide the reading, but when there's one of these committee services they usually do three to give more people a chance to participate. So, they assigned those parts, probably weeks ago. Friday morning the rabbi looked at the portion and realized that it's only four verses long. You need three verses (and some other conditions) to make a valid aliya. Oops. So he read part of the previous aliya too. (Yeah, I didn't know there were any that are that short, either! I found out when I asked someone last week if he could read torah this morning, since the rabbi wasn't going to be there. He looked at it and said "yeah, I can do those four verses". :-) )
Normally when my rabbi isn't available the associate rabbi leads the informal morning service. I have the impression that he's not all that comfortable doing that, because this is an established group with established customs and he doesn't usually come to that service (so isn't clued in about those). We talked earlier this week and he said he would be perfectly happy to just be a congregant and let someone else lead the service, so we did that. This went very well, and when I asked him later if that was weird for him he said no, he's happy and he'd like to keep doing that. Sounds good to me. Today I asked my co-chair to lead; for next week we threw it open and got a volunteer. (Today's leader asked me to lead Ashrei for her, which we do responsively (so most people only know half of it). That's also part of the weekday morning service, so I've gotten quite comfortable with it.)
When I studied with my rabbi Monday I asked if I could visit him in the hospital, and he suggested I come Shabbat afternoon. Either the distance from my house to the hospital is closer to three miles than two or I no longer walk a 20-minute mile. I'm inclined to believe the former, because I know the distance to my synagogue and I walk it regularly. :-) Hey, good exercise. Yeah, ok, I spent more time in transit than actually visiting, but it was Shabbat afternoon. What other pressing matters did I have to attend to?
Next Shabbat I'm participating in a women's service (an annual event run by a local group). I'm reading torah, and if I pull this off it'll be the longest reading I've done so far. I think I'll pull it off. There's some weird trope in the last couple verses, but I'll get the words right at least and so far as I know they won't stop me for trope errors that aren't also phrase-boundary errors, so it should be fine. I believe I will be solidly middle-of-the-pack, skill-wise, among the seven torah readers.
We played D&D last night. Third edition is inconsistent in one way -- usually high die rolls are good, except when determining whether something goes wrong during teleports. Those were my only high rolls of the night. Bugger. Well, that's what healing spells are for and third time's a charm, I guess. (I have an in-character explanation for why this happened at this particular time, but the out-of-character explanation is "Monica's dice lice were in open revolt".)
I talked with our associate rabbi this morning. Our senior rabbi, who leads the informal Shabbat morning service, isn't going to be there this week or next, so I had to find out if the associate rabbi is planning to take over or if we're supposed to take care of it on our own. It turns out that he would be delighted to just be a congregant and have us lead things (he's not a regular so he doesn't know the routine very well). He views it as a good learning opportunity for some of the folks in the group. Ok, now I don't need to find a way to make that suggestion. :-) This will probably strike some people as weird ("wait, there's a rabbi here but he's not in charge?!"), but that's actually perfectly normal in Judaism. Any competent adult can lead. So we'll do that for a couple weeks and see what happens. (Fortunately, I have two people I can tap for torah reading on short notice.)
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.
Tonight my rabbi had to teach so he asked me to lead the evening service. For a while there were just two of us (sigh) and the other person is fluent, so I invited him to lead. He's very good with Hebrew but hasn't been around long enough to pick up some of the nuances of leading, which I didn't really think about (so not his fault). So when five more people (one family, in mourning) showed up partway through the Amidah, I found myself wishing for telepathic powers so I could tell him to drop some English in for them. (I could tell that some members of the family were struggling with the Hebrew.) But he didn't notice, so that didn't happen. I hope we didn't alienate them. There's a natural break point between the end of the Amidah and the next part (Aleinu), where the rabbi often puts a two-minute talk, so I stepped in at that point and improvised a bit.
After the service one of the members of that family took me aside. He had this book of Tehillim (Psalms) that he had been given in 1936, and he didn't need it any more and wanted to donate it to a synagogue. I tried to very gently push back on that "don't need" part, but he was firm. So I accepted the donation and told him we would add it to our library. If he changes his mind in the future, I assume we would be happy to return it to him. There's got to be a story there and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't curious, but he didn't offer and I wasn't going to pry. I hope I did the right thing.
Shabbat morning I got a phone call from that day's torah reader, saying that she couldn't get there due to flooded-out areas between her house and the synagogue. I feel bad for her because she spent time learning the portion and now she can't use it until this time next year. She felt bad for leaving us in the lurch, and I tried to reassure her that it was obviously not her fault.
The rabbi couldn't stay today, so I suspected this would mean we wouldn't have a torah service, but then I said "hey, I read this portion last year; I wonder...". With ten minutes available to me to answer that question, I pulled out the tikkun and scraped the rust off of enough to make a valid torah reading. I wasn't going to be able to do all of it with that amount of time, but so long as you do at least three verses you can read torah. And I was able to do that, because (IMO) Ha'azinu is one of the easiest torah portions out there, and I'd done it before. When I got to shul I asked someone else to lead that part of the service and a third person to read the haftarah portion, because I didn't want to just take over myself. Remember those words; they'll be relevant later.
I mentally composed a d'var torah while walking to shul -- so it wasn't as polished as it might have been under better circumstances, but it was passable. I talked about the season and not the parsha directly. As my rabbi pointed out last week, this season is characterized by t'shuvah (repentance, or return), s'lichah (forgiveness), and kapparah (atonement). We've talked about the first and the last but not as much about the middle one. When we talk about forgiveness, we often focus on seeking it -- but we also have to be ready to grant it, when someone asks or even when the person doesn't ask. Sometimes the person who wronged you has no idea that he has done so, in which case he's not going to come to you. And sometimes the person knows he wronged you but he's not going to approach you and it's just not worth staying angry about it. So, I said, try to grant the possibility that the person might not know, and even if he doesn't, try not to carry minor grudges into the new year. It's just not worth it. Remember those words; they'll be relevant later.
One of the members of the group is a professor at a nearby college and is teaching a religion class this term. So, with advance notice to the rabbi, she brought about a dozen students to the service. The rabbi welcomed them and was extra-careful about giving page numbers, but otherwise did nothing special. Everything was going fine, and I assume the professor gave the students an overview of the service before she brought them.
( problem: the return of ranty-guy )
But other than that the day went really well, and I received many compliments on my last-minute torah reading. After the ranty guy left I spoke with a freshman from Pitt who was there for the first time, and she said she really enjoyed the service and will be back. We also told her about Yom Kippur services, and it sounds like she's planning to come. She seems like a nice person; I'm glad the ranty guy didn't scare her off.
After services we went to Coronation (SCA event), giving a ride to a student who's in the choir. It took a long time to get there due to heavy traffic caused by closed roads, but it was a good event and it was fun to spend the time in the car chatting with a newer member. We also sat with two newer members at dinner (I hadn't met them before, though one of them had heard of me), and they are both nice people I hope to see more of. A lot of people in the SCA worry about getting new members, which often comes through big demos and the like. But retention has a lot to do with that kind of one-on-one contact, and it's what I enjoy more. I'm not all that interested in pitching the SCA to a boy-scout troop, but I'm very interested in chatting with folks who've already decided to get involved about what they want to do and helping get them pointed in the right direction.
The dinner at the event was really good. I like it when Johan cooks. :-) In addition to being talented, he takes care to make sure that everyone will be able to get enough to eat -- at many events vegetarians basically get bread, noodles, rice, and maybe a salad, but I ate quite well yesterday -- spinach quiche, salmon (ok, "regular" vegetarians wouldn't eat that), noodles with cheese, asparagus, salad, nuts, another cooked vegetable, and more. I didn't even save room for dessert, as it turned out.
At torah study we talked about the direct contact that Moshe had with God (when God would descend on the mishkan and speak to him). The rabbi pointed out that we tend to not make a big deal about this -- "oh yeah, God talked to Moshe" as opposed to getting excited about it. Why are we so blase about it? The Christians he spent the last month would have been all over that sort of thing with excitement, he said. (I pointed out that compared to the revelation at Sinai, this is less dramatic. It doesn't happen out in public and it doesn't involve the whole people. We tend to focus on the immanance and pure power of that moment with the whole people.)
This led to a discussion of the transcendant versus immanent God, with my rabbi speculating that the Christians he's met seem to be much more focused on an immanent God, while he (personally) is more comfortable with a transcendant God. (Yes, of course it's some of each, but different people are comfortable with different divisions.) Most of the Christians in his group were happy to talk about their direct, personal relationships with God; most Jews, in his experience, are uncomfortable doing that. (We might or might not have such relationships, but we don't tend so much to talk about them.)
I think there is a structural issue there, at least when you talk about lay people. (Not so much clergy, I hope.) Christianity is a religion, and if you're part of the community it's because you're part of the religion. You can assume a high degree of agreement on basic theological principles. But Judaism is also a people, and there are quite a few people who identify as Jewish but don't believe in God, or don't share your understanding of what God wants or how to relate to him. They are part of the community for other reasons. So if you find yourself talking theology with the guy sitting next to you at the annual meeting, the odds are somewhat lower that you'll share core beliefs, especially in liberal congregations. In other words, the density of religious feeling in the congregation is lower.
When it came time for the ice-breaker question in the service, he asked us to share a significant religious moment from our childhoods. (He initially said a Jewish moment, then realized not everyone grew up Jewish.) People talked about all sorts of things -- seders, other family moments, b'nei mitzvah, camp, and other things. I said something to the effect that all of my significant religious experiences from childhood were negative so I wouldn't talk about those, but that the talmud states that a convert is like a newborn so I'm free to talk about anything Jewish. This got a big laugh, and when I was done the rabbi said something like "we'll all be here for you to help you through your adolescence; these are difficult years, but I'm sure you'll pull through". It's nice to have a rabbi with a sense of humor. :-) By the way, I talked about reading torah -- and it was actually the second time I read, not the first, that I really, really felt a connection with it.
Pacing is not one of the associate rabbi's strengths, so when he left at a bit after 10, we were just getting to Barchu. (Usually we start the torah service around 10:15.) I took over the service and tried to expedite, choosing shorter melodies and skipping optional readings and stuff like that, but we were still running pretty late. (It's hard to make up that much time in kriat shema and t'filah, after all.) Unfortunately, this week's torah reader didn't realize that we were running so late, so she didn't abbreviate the d'var she'd prepared or otherwise expedite. She was also kind of nervous, and seeing people leave partway through her part of the service probably didn't help. I feel for her. I talked with her some after the service, but I also need to send a note to the mailing list about tricks for keeping a service on track. I'm not perfect either, of course, but I seem to have picked up some hints by observing my rabbi. And maybe I need to get a clock for the room.
Thursday morning I led part of shacharit, as I mentioned before, and then led mincha at my congregation. I seemed to be more at ease with some of the text Thursday evening than I usually am. Repetition helps. :-)
This morning's study and service were back up to their usual numbers. My rabbi is back in town (yay!), but came back with some sort of bug (oops). I hope he's well enough to keep the appointment I have with him on Monday.
Today was the first day of Pennsic set-up. I got a message from our land agent that my house is in place, but that they managed to break the jack on the trailer hitch. Sigh! This is the second time that has happened. So it's in our camp, but it's not moving out at the end until I can replace that jack. I'll find out more when I go up there tomorrow. Last time it took 3-4 weeks for a mail-ordered jack to come, though I took the first web-based supplier I could find so maybe I can improve on that. The first thing to do, though, is find out how it failed so I know whether I should be buying a different jack. (That is, did something stupid happen, like driving it without raising the jack, or did it fail in a situation where it shouldn't've?)
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.
My music mostly went well, and I received many compliments. Our cantorial soloist was there (with her two-week-old child), and she complimented me too. That felt nice! There were some glitches, all of which can be chalked up to "Monica is not used to working with an accompanist", and sadly, some of them were obvious to the congregation. One was not, because the aforementioned accompanist is very good. (There are a bunch of different settings of one song out there, and we had discussed which one to do. He played an intro that sounded to me like one of the others, I concluded that he had goofed and started to sing that one, and he concluded that I had goofed and followed me -- without music in front of him and while tranposing into a different key. As it turns out, the intros really are that similar but we hadn't noticed.)
The committee as a whole received a bunch of compliments; we were widely perceived as relaxed, comfortable, and competent, and a couple people told me they found the service to be moving because the leaders were obviously engaged -- praying and not just reciting. I hope some of them tell these things to the rabbi. :-)
My rabbi had asked me to lead torah study Saturday morning with some materials he had prepared, so I got an advance copy to review and scribble on. (I was trying to plan the conversation -- where to pause for discussion, what points to try to tease out of the group, and so on.) We usually have 10-20 people for study; today we had four. I expected the group to be smaller, but not that much smaller. Fortunately, the other three participated rather than just sitting and listening, and they were generally supportive, and things went fine.
The low turnout was foreshadowing, alas. This is only the second time I have seen this group not get a minyan. (The other time was on a cold, snowy winter day with hazardous roads.) We had eight people. I did a good job of leading the service, I think (many of the people who showed up thanked me later). We couldn't read torah without a minyan, but the two people who had prepared the portion (the same ones who read Friday night -- re-use is good) read it out of a chumash (that's allowed) and led a discussion of the parsha, which most people participated in. So that worked out. We read haftarah without the blessing, which I think was correct. (Reading it is fine, as reading the torah text was fine. What I'm not sure of is whether the blessing requires a minyan, so I erred on the side of caution, and for parity with the torah reading.)
Noted in passing: there is one prayer (kedusha) where if you don't have a minyan you say a different version. (Other things you just omit in the absence of a minyan.) Our siddur doesn't have the alternate text; it assumes a minyan. It turns out I have it memorized, though, so no biggie.
There are a few reasons for the low turnout. A lot of people are out of town for various reasons; I knew that. Attendance is always a little lower (but still higher than this!) when it is known that my rabbi won't be there but the associate rabbi will. (My rabbi built this service and is very strongly connected with it.) It's clear, though, that at least some people who will come for the associate rabbi won't come for a layperson, even a layperson who is a regular who knows the service inside and out. That attitude could be a hurdle if we try to increase lay involvement in our services more generally -- it's the whole "no one but the rabbi is good enough" problem. We need to figure out how widespread that attitude is and what to do about it.
Tonight I knew I would be leading mincha, so while eating the blandest Thai food I have ever had (sigh) I mapped out the mini-sermon. No one else showed up, though; maybe people concluded that no rabbi means no service, though they oughtn't have. Shrug. So I got to daven at my own pace in my preferred language; that worked out fine for me.
Tomorrow night I'm the cantorial soloist at my congregation (yay!). This morning I got the one piece of sheet music I'd been waiting for; fortunately, I mostly knew the song already. So that'll be fine, I think. Saturday morning I lead torah study and then the morning service; that service nearly runs itself, so my role is to provide start pitches and come up with a question for the ice-breaker. Hmm; better not forget about the question.
And then there's the morning minyan I attend on Thursdays. A couple of the guys have been asking me for a while to lead that service; I'm working on learning it, but I'll admit I've been slacking recently what with HUC and all. And I hesitate to step on the toes of the guy who normally does it. This morning he asked me when I was going to do it. (They gave me the concluding prayers this morning, so I guess that prompted the thought.) We haggled, with me saying things like "we have to talk about page 31" and him saying "ok, you don't have to do the whole thing first time out", and we ended up deciding that I'll do the opening prayers (up through Barchu) next week. So there are a couple bits I should touch a few times before then, but I'm feeling pretty confident about that. We'll see how that goes.
Whee!
(We still have to find some way for my rabbi to actually see me in the service-leader role, so he can provide constructive feedback so I can get better, but that'll obviously have to wait.)
Early in one of the classes he asked us to brainstorm about things to consider when choosing music for a service. Here's the list we came up with:( Read more... )
He handed out an essay entitled some notes on the future of of Jewish sacred music (yay Google!) by Cantor Benjie-Ellen Schiller. (Aside: we had her as a visiting cantor one Shabbat several years ago, and she's great to work with.) Despite its vague title the essay is good. Excerpt:
Sacred music nurtures meaningful, honest prayer, whether or not the music we ultimately choose satisfies our artistic selves. The real test is whether our sacred music satisfies our spiritual selves, as individuals and as a community. To me, a successful service offers a healthy combination of all three moods of prayer to express an array of three paths toward knowing God.(Gee, you think there's some debate within the cantorial community? :-) )
Cantor Schiller describes four types of music (three in this essay, one added later):
Leigh (the instructor) gave us his "10 commandments of congregational singing", which I enjoyed. (These are for the congregation, not the cantor.) I haven't asked for permission to distribute the document, but here are some highlights:
But first, a short story from a class handout:
The Sacred Cat
(from The Art of Public Prayer)
Once upon a time, there was a guru in the mountains of Asia who gathered around him a band of monks dedicated to prayer. The guru owned a cat, which he loved deeply. He took the cat with him everywhere, even to morning prayer. When the disciples complained that the cat's prowling distracted them, the guru bought a leash and tied the cat to a post at the entrance to the prayer room. Years later, when the guru died, his disciples continued to care for the cat. But as they say, cats have nine lives, so the cat outlived even the disciples. By then the disciples had their own disciples, who began caring for the cat, but without recalling anymore why the cat was present during prayer. When the cat's leash wore out, they knitted another one in the scared colors of the sky and the earth, and when the post wore down, they built a beautiful new one that they began calling the sacred cat stand. During this third generation of disciples the cat died, and the disciples wasted no time in buying another sacred cat to accompany them in prayer. Their worship was eventually expanded to include the sacred actions of tying the cat to the leash and affixing the leash to the sacred cat stand.
( Read more... )
