My congregation hired a cantor two years ago, and wow did it make a difference. (Previously we'd had a cantorial soloist, meaning a good singer with an amateur understanding of liturgy, and we've had other such soloists at some of our services sometimes.) This difference really stood out for me at Shavuot a couple weeks ago.

I've encountered a few kinds of musical service leaders in liberal congregations. (Note: in many communities, especially more traditional ones, musical ability is a nice side-effect if you get it but not the driver -- somebody who's competent in the prayers and halachically qualified, who might or might not have a decent voice, leads the service. I'm not talking about that case.)

• Performers. This happens when the primary background is singing, with leading prayers being secondary. Some give off the definite vibe of performing for the congregation -- their singing, posture, and everything else says "I'm on a stage". I'm not dissing people's motivations here; this is about what they've spent time learning and doing before taking the job and what they convey (to me at least). If you hire a professional singer, you shouldn't be surprised to get a performer. But I don't go to services to hear a concert.

• Performers for God. These are people who understand before Whom they stand, who are focused on God more than the congregation, but it still feels like a performance. Again, not saying that's inherently bad -- in another religion you could put the "little drummer boy" into this category and that's generally considered to be a good role model -- but it still leaves the congregation as spectators, and that's a problem for me.

• Pray-ers who share their kavanah (intentionality, focus). These are people who are obviously praying not performing, and you can see their emotions, their intentionality, etc. I've been told that when I lead services I "exude kavanah", and I think this is what they mean. Sometimes this can carry people along; we had a visitor once to my Shabbat morning minyan and after the service I said to him, "it was a privilege to pray near you" because it felt like his prayer amplified mine. Other times it's just that guy over there having kavanah for his prayer but what does that have to do with me?

• Those who bring the congregation along in their kavanah. These are the ones who understand that da lifnei mei atah omeid, "know before whom you stand", has multiple targets -- God and congregation. They know that their role is in part to be a bridge. They're praying and facilitating others' prayer. I believe I have sometimes reached this level, but it's mostly instinct plus some coaching I've gotten along the way, not something I could explain how to do beyond being aware. Our cantor is in this category for me; her leading the service helps me, elevates my prayer, connects me.

(Yes I have told her, and my rabbi, this. Having done so, I'm now also trying to write it down.)

( background; some of you may know this already so I'm cutting )

So that brings us to this year. Apparently my rabbi got a fair bit of flack for not being in the sanctuary for the entire service (we have another rabbi, and a cantorial soloist, by the way), so he said he would not be able to lead the "ruach" services and asked me to do it. (Frankly, I believe I'm the only layperson in the congregation with all of the skills needed to do so.) I consider this a great honor, and my rabbi prominently honored me on Rosh Hashana during the torah service, so that's nice. (Funny story there, actually -- below the line.)

We are using the draft of the new machzor (about which I wrote previously). Rosh Hashana went pretty well aside from timing; my timing was spot-on for the target they had given me, but the folks in the sanctuary were moving more quickly so we had to hurry at the end. It appears that we will also be short on time for Yom Kippur, so I've done my best to make it fit and trim optional parts. I've practiced all the unfamiliar parts for Yom Kippur, as I did for Rosh Hashana last week, and I think I'm ready.

And for next year, I'm going to ask for an earlier start. This service starts at the same time as the sanctuary service because that was the earliest the rabbi could participate (rightly needing a break after the first service), but if we can't have the rabbi anyway, why not start half an hour earlier?

(In case you're wondering how two services can start at the same time and yet the other gets ahead of ours -- it's because the sanctuary service, using Gates of Repentance, skips all sorts of stuff that ought to be in there, while this service (and the minyan out of which it grew) strives for something more authentic.)

---

Here's the funny story: in recognition of my work with that service, my rabbi invited me to dress the torah (g'lilah) after it was read. There is another honor at that point, hgabahah, lifting the torah and turning around so everybody can see the text. This requires some coordination as you're holding the scroll overhead, from the bottom. The scroll we were using is also on the heavy side. But hey, I'm g'lilah; if the other person can handle that, the weight needn't concern me, right? The person who does the lifting then holds the scroll until it's time to return it to the ark.

So the other person was our associate rabbi. And he was helping to lead the part of the service right after this, so he couldn't hold it. So that meant me. That's still ok; just sitting there holding a heavy scroll isn't hard. Managing the prayerbook one-handed was a bit challenging, but I had that under control.

So, on Rosh Hashana we do the shofar service during the torah service (after the haftarah, for those who are curious). The shofar service is broken into three sections: a set of prayers and readings, then you stand for the shofar blasts, and then you sing s short song that's at a completely different place in this particular prayerbook. Then you sit down and iterate.

So as it turned out, I wasn't just holding the scroll in my lap. I got a bit of a workout! :-)

Also, did not prostrate during the Great Aleinu that fell during this time...

This was a really productive Yom Kippur, from the robo-call on the answering machine Friday afternoon about lashon hara (yeah, really) through Kol Nidrei last night and the whole day today. Parts of the liturgy newly resonated with me, I heard two excellent sermons (maybe more on that later), and the new morning service was a rousing success.

On that last: I was expecting 30-40 people, basically the minyan regulars minus some who'd said they wanted to be in the sanctuary, plus some curious others. We had 80 and had to send out for more prayerbooks twice. The room seats about 100; we may be in trouble next year. Lots of people complimented me on it and my rabbi said many kind things about me for organizing it. We had my rabbi for the first hour and had lots of spirited singing, just like in the minyan. We had only expected to have him for half an hour, so plans about timing went out the window, but it was obvious that he really wanted to be there and of course everybody wanted him to be there, so I think we need to see if we can make that easier next year -- maybe start half an hour earlier? Because of the extra time we spent in the opening section we had to rush to try to catch up with the sanctuary service -- which was complicated by the fact that they were making up for a late start by adjusting and ended up running early. So while we had intended to enter the sanctuary at the beginning of the torah service, we actually missed the first few aliyot. Oops. We'll do better next year.

Even with the responsibility of running things -- it can be challenging to really pray when you're also responsible for watching the clock and tracking the people who might need extra page cues and signaling to your assistant leaders about changes to make and so on -- I was able to really engage with this service, and it was a great way to start a day spent in the synagogue. This ended up being even better than just switching the two morning sanctuary services (my original request) would have been; the new service had a much higher lowest common denominator, in terms of fluency, and that's huge. I carried the high from this service through most of the rest of the day. (My mind always wanders during Yizkor, which is more about the dreary English readings in our machzor than it is about Yizkor itself, but the rest was good.)

I read torah at the afternoon service. I didn't manage to learn the special high-holy-day trope this year either, either for Rosh Hashana or for Yom Kippur (I read on both). Someday... (Nobody else uses it, but I want to try -- and maybe start a trend.)

( fast notes )

OT: LiveJournal could go back to the fixed-width, larger font in the main part of the "post" page any time now, ahem. Yes, I filed a bug report. (I compose in emacs and paste in, but it's still a pain to do edits like the addition of this paragraph.)

I used to think that henceforth I would only ever go to a church service for weddings, funerals, or educational historical recreations. But I failed to consider one other case, and now add ordination to that list. My friend M (who can identify himself if he wants, or not) was ordained this weekend as a Roman Catholic priest, and I was pleased to accept his invitation to the ceremony.

I am in awe of M, who gave up another career to enter the seminary several years ago. I couldn't really see the other three new priests clearly, but I think he was not the only one of that approximate age. I'm not saying it isn't noteworthy to do something like this right out of college, but making a profound change later in life strikes a particular chord with me. So seeing M achieve this, and seeing the joy and solemnity and sacredness all mingled together in the room, was pretty special.

The service was held at St. Paul's, a huge cathedral in Oakland. (It surely seats several thousand, but I couldn't tell more specifically.) They had a diocese choir, which was able to fill the place, and brass and percussion and of course organ. The pulpit is large, and good thing -- I think there were at least 75 people involved in this service (though not all at once, mostly).

I am not fluent in the high-church Roman Catholic mass (Wikipedia helped some), but this appeared to be most of a mass with a substantial ceremony occupying the center portion. During the ordination ceremony Bishop Zubick (the local bishop) spoke individually (but publicly) to each of the new priests, adding a personal touch that showed that he knows them. (I understand that when he came to Pittsburgh he declined the usual bishoply residence and asked for an apartment at the seminary instead.) Two of the four are returning to their school in Rome for graduate studies in the fall; the other two (including M) begin local assignments in a couple weeks. These assignments were given out during the ceremony; I had assumed that the priests knew in advance where they were being sent, but it turned out they learned when we did. I guess it reinforces that pledge they had each made to serve the church and the bishop no matter what. (It didn't actually say "no matter what", but there were words of some gravity.)

The mechanics of running this service were interesting. It was very smooth, and while most religious services are not on this scale, there's stuff to learn here for people running smaller ones. I'm going to talk about that first, and then I'll go into the geeking (for those who are still reading :-) ).

( service mechanics )

( geeking )

Friday night I led services with our cantorial soloist. Both she and I were pleased with how it went, and I got several compliments afterward. I hope I will have more-frequent opportunities to do this.

One oddity, though -- somehow we picked up about ten minutes! I asked afterward and the consensus of people I trust to tell it to me straight is that no, I was not rushing. We do know that my rabbi is more prone than I am to fill in extra explanatory bits and the like; this is not a criticism of him by any means (it's not excessive or anything), but more a comment on my comparative lack of skill and tendency in this area. I just don't ad-lib as well, and he's done this about a bazillion times more than I have so he's had more practice.

It is possible that some of the time came from musical choices. Not clear. And we did start on time, because I'm like that. This doesn't always happen.

Saturday morning I led both torah study and the service. (The lay torah reader had a sore throat, so while she would have led part of the service normally, she asked me to do it.) The second rabbi was there for this and he seemed pleased with the job I did. Another member of the minyan plays guitar and led some of the singing; I'm happy to see her be more involved. The torah reader asked the rabbi to read haftarah (I think on account of her voice). I hadn't heard him read before; I really enjoyed listening to him. He read more expressively than I'm used to.

After I prepared for discussion of the post-flood rainbow, we didn't actually get there. This is the nature of Jews studying torah sometimes. :-) (We spent the entire half hour on the three or four verses immediately preceeding that part.)

I was recently in a discussion about the choices that worship leaders make, and I realized that the Reform movement's approach imposes a higher literacy burden than I think most realize.

In an Orthodox service, the decisions made by the sh'liach tzibbur, the leader, pretty much boil down to what melodies to use. The actual text is fixed; you do what the the siddur tells you to do (and remember seasonal variations if the siddur doesn't mark them). I'm not saying it's easy, but I am saying it's not too complex. While (in my experience) most Orthodox Jews who would be in a position to lead services are thoroughly fluent, technically the leader doesn't have to know what it all means and why the service is structured that way and so on.

Now consider the Reform movement, which from the beginning declined to follow the fixed liturgy. The early reformers eliminated some parts of the service (like musaf and many of the kaddishes) because they were repetitive, changed the texts of some prayers for ideological reasons (like objecting to resurrection of the dead), and introduced English readings that did not necessarily strictly follow the Hebrew they replaced. My impression is that they did the vast majority of this thoughtfully; later generations might disagree with their reasons, but they had reasons.

At least since the publication of Gates of Prayer, a siddur that offered many (and quite varied) alternatives to the leader, Reform services have tended to vary from one time to another, skip some of the Hebrew readings, use very "creative" English readings, and vary the music (which sometimes means varying the text because you want to use so-and-so's setting and it's a little different). The publishers of the siddur stuck to the same service structure, but at least from what I've seen in the last 12 years or so (as long as I've been watching), leaders have used it pretty freely. So it wasn't uncommon to do the Sh'ma/v'ahavta in both Hebrew and English (despite the repetition) but skip ahavat olam entirely, for instance. (Why yes, that does bother me, but that's a different essay.)

Mishkan T'filah, the new Reform siddur, corrects some of the problems in GOP. The theory is brilliant: here is a two-page spread including the Hebrew, a decent translation, and some alternative English readings; choose exactly one thing from this spread and then turn the page. But some of the English readings really aren't connected to what's supposed to be going on at that point in the service, so I see leaders break the pattern -- skip a few pages, then do both the Hebrew and one of the English readings from one spread, and so on. (That the editors sometimes violated their own format doesn't help this.) I was recently talking with a lay person who sometimes leads services in her congregation, and she told me she picks and chooses "just like [she] did with GOP". She didn't realize that she was repeating some things and entirely skipping others.

Why didn't she realize this? Because she is not highly fluent in the service -- she doesn't understand why the (Shabbat) amidah has seven sections and what each of them is for (and why that one English reading is terrible in that place...), or that kri'at sh'ma has more structure than "something before, sh'ma, mi chamocha" and that skipping parts breaks the theme, or why the v'shamru earlier in the service doesn't cover you for the sanctification of the day later even though they're both "yay, shabbat" texts, and so on. She hasn't studied this stuff and doesn't engage with it like I do. And I realized: most Reform Jews don't study this stuff. In another movement they might not have to, but in the Reform movement, the leader is more likely to be making decisions about the content of the service and so, in my opinion, has an obligation to become fluent. By the nature of its siddur and its history, the movement imposes, or ought to impose, a higher burden of fluency than would have been necessary if we'd just stuck with the traditional text.

Of course our rabbis are fluent, and often they are the ones leading services. We have occasional geeks like me who are also fluent and have occasional opportunities to lead. But sometimes we have people who have occasional opportunities to lead who aren't fluent and don't even realize it matters. As a community we apparently aren't willing to say to those people "get fluent or follow instructions without varying or get off the bimah". So we get services that are sometimes haphazard and disjointed, which makes it really hard for people who do know what's going on to achieve kavannah (intentionality).

Once people know a little about the service structure I suspect they're more likely to not mess with it, but how -- aside from one conversation at a time -- do we get people to that "a ha!" moment that causes them to even notice the issue?

All three of our rabbis and our cantorial soloist are off at the URJ biennial conference this weekend. (It's in Toronto, which is pretty convenient as these things go, so lots of congregants are going too. I, though, am not so keen on 5000-person conventions, so I didn't go.) So I'll be leading services this Shabbat, and hoping for critical mass. :-)

Tomorrow night is our monthly "mostly musical shabbat", which is (as the name implies) more music than reading. (We have a band, even.) Our cantorial soloist arranged for a sub rather than giving the job to a congregant; I get to fill the "rabbi" role. I don't know the sub, but we met briefly tonight and agreed to show up early enough tomorrow to sort out cues and who does what for the ambiguous parts. I expect it'll all be fine, and it's a chance for me to be on the bimah in a meaningful way so I'm happy.

Shabbat morning I'll lead the informal minyan up to the torah service, when the person who signed up to read this week will take over. This was announced last Shabbat; on Sunday I got a call from a member of the minyan asking if she could play guitar on a couple of the songs. (My rabbi leads on guitar; when I lead I do it a-capella and count on the strength of my voice to carry things.) I said sure, and let's show up a little early to check things like pacing and keys. It should be an interesting experience in a safe environment.

I won't be leading shacharit tomorrow, so no daf bit, but instead I'll share a few short notes from some recent unusual-to-me services.

I've seen this a few times. The congregation chants a word or phrase from the part of the liturgy you're supposed to be doing, over and over, while the service leader chants the entire passage over it. The load on the congregation is lighter (useful if not everyone is fluent), the problems of skipping text are avoided (the representative of the congregation says them), and you might get a sort of minor meditative thing going that helps with focus. I wouldn't have predicted that I could be happy with my entire contribution to Ashrei being "Halleluyah" in a tight loop, but it worked.

The service leader is the locomotive; the congregation is the train. The leader leads, but everyone has to get there together. (This is an approximation of something said by Hazzan Jack Kessler.) This analogy breaks down if you look at it too hard, but I found it interesting enough to note.

This almost set off my woo-woo alarm but I tried it anyway: say Ashrei with a partner, delivering your part directly to the other person with intention. The reason I feared woo-woo is that I thought this would take praise of God too close to praise directed at the other person, but it didn't actually feel that way. I felt like I was praising God through this other person. It's not something I'd make a habit of, but it was an interesting experience.

I appear to be ok with thoughtful drumming during prayer. I am still not ok with chanted English where liturgy belongs -- doubly so if the English isn't a translation but something creative. Singing English is ok, but I find that I want the nusach, the traditional chant melody, to be reserved for more-or-less traditional Hebrew text.

The amidah is your private audience with God. What do you want to say to him? (Rabbi Richard Simon.)

More later, I presume.

I'll be leading Shabbat evening services this week, which I'm looking forward to. (It'll be my first time leading out of the final edition of Mishkan T'filah, though I've led out of drafts and, of course, used it as a congregant.) If you're local, interested, and in need of the details, drop me a note.

Last week the cantorial soloist was really sick. I hope she's doing better (it sucks to be sick, especially during the Pesach seder). If she's not, I guess I'll be doing more of the singing than originally planned.

The "H" in "NHC" stands for "havurah" [sic :-) ], which suggests a certain style of prayer: participatory, musical, casual. (I don't know if it's fair to equate chavurah with the Renewal movement, but there's clearly overlap.) The institute actually had a variety of services, and some of what I found surprised me.

( Read more... )