We were in Toronto for the first days of Pesach. I had previously had an excellent experience at Beit HaMinyan (not just the one, but that's the one I wrote about), so I was looking forward to going there for Shabbat/Pesach morning. I checked their web site before leaving Pittsburgh to make sure they were in the same place; thus reassured, I went there Saturday morning to...an empty, locked building. They're very friendly and welcoming when they're there, but maybe not so great at updating their web site. Bummer. :-(

So I fell back to the Village Shul (Aish HaTorah), a place I'd been once before. This time, as last, I found them to be not too welcoming; this time I knew where to go in the building so the indifferent man standing at the entrance didn't hinder me, but nor did he respond to my greeting. At the kiddush (which was a standing-around affair this time, not a sit-down one), not a single person greeted me, even when I made eye contact. It can be hard for me to approach random people and start conversations; I greeted some and usually got responses but no one engaged. I don't know what (if anything) I was doing wrong; I think it was fairly obvious that I wasn't a regular, but I wasn't inappropriate in any way I could determine.

But all that said, I'm very glad I went for one reason: Tal.

Ok, I need to back up. T'filat Tal, aka the prayer for dew, is said exactly once during the year, on the morning of Pesach, in the musaf service. I had never heard it before. The Reform movement doesn't do musaf and didn't import that part into another part of the service (like is done with some other parts), and when we're in Toronto I don't always make it to Yom Tov services (but I insist on Shabbat). It's possible that I was at a Conservative service for Pesach once, and if so either they didn't do it or they didn't do anything special with it and I didn't notice.

So, this is either the first time I've encountered this prayer or the first time it registered. And it did in fact register. A resonant text (which I am unable to find online, help?), a beautiful and fitting melody (which I can't find a good version of online), and just the right amount of congregational engagement (a few words sung together at the end of each stanza) all came together into a heartfelt but not over-the-top prayer that felt entirely right to me. Wow.

And I think it needs all of those. As I said, the Reform movement doesn't do this text -- but let me predict how it would go down if we did. Because it's unfamiliar and people can't be assumed to be fluent, we would read (not sing) it, in English. Perhaps responsively, alternating stanzas. And it would fall completely flat, done that way. I'm not fluent and I'd never seen this text before either, but I listened to it in Hebrew while reading the English translation, and that worked. If I didn't need the translation then that'd be even better, but the text I read and the text I hear don't need to be the same language and that's just fine. Alas, mine seems to be a small-minority position in my movement, so I will probably not get the opportunity to experience this prayer in that setting, which makes me sad.

( some service anthropology )

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?

Wednesday night I taught a last-minute class on liturgy at my synagogue. (A different person had been scheduled to teach a different topic but got sick; in exchange for pulling a class out of nowhere in one evening I got to pick the topic. :-) ) I've been thinking of trying to arrange something like this in the spring, perhaps one evening per major chunk of the service (amidah, kriat sh'ma, etc). The way I envision the class, we'd do some text study with lots of commentaries rather than this being a lecture. In the I-don't-have-time-to-prepare-materials version, this was a short lecture on the structure of the overall service followed by a somewhat-rambling discussion.

After my opening comments I had proposed breaking up into a few smaller groups so people could focus on the parts they were most interested in; most people didn't have specific interests so we stayed together. (There were ten of us, so that's feasible in a way that wouldn't have been had the class been well-advertised and popular.) One attendee wanted to discuss the r'tzei (one prayer in the amidah), so we started there. I asked someone to read it, asked the group to name themes in just that one paragraph (there are several), and then we talked about each of those in turn, going down a few side paths along the way. Then I suggested that -- since ours is a congregation where weekday prayer is largely unfamiliar -- we step through the weekday intermediate blessings, where we ask for things like wisdom, foregiveness, rain for our crops, and so on. I think this opened some eyes; these are broad communal petitions, not individual ones. One student requested a follow-on class on the Sh'ma and its blessings and some others suggested that they would be interested in that too.

I thought the class went ok; I am not a particularly proficient teacher and I think that showed, but the students also knew that this was a last-minute offering and were being forgiving. Three people told me later that they had really enjoyed it, which I hadn't been able to read in all of their faces during the class, so I guess that's a good sign. One of the three, who is an experienced teacher and the person who requested the session on the Sh'ma, asked about working together on it, which I will certainly take her up on.

I had brought, but did not use in class, the few volumes I own of My People's Prayer Book by Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman. These are excellent; they go through the liturgy in detail, with a range of commentaries, presented well. I plan to use these in future classes on this topic. (I also plan, someday, to buy the volumes I don't yet have.)

Today in our talmud study my rabbi and I reached the passage in B'rachot (16b) that records the concluding prayers of several sages. The t'filah, the central prayer, has a fixed text, but there is a place to insert personal words at the end. (Over time, some of these have in turn become fixed.) On this day before Yom Kippur, let me share some of these prayers that struck me most strongly.

( Read more... )

Thank you to everyone who responded to my laptop-versus-PDA query.

Thursday was our annual company retreat, held way the heck too far out of town. It's a nice site, but it's 40 miles from the office, and they schedule it so you're in rush-hour traffic both ways. Oh well. (Note to self: if we use this site again, bring own caffeine supply for the morning. They didn't put out pop until after lunch.)

I went late, after morning services, hitching a ride with someone else with a constraint (dropping kids off at school). I had an interesting (brief) conversation with that congregation's new rabbi after services. ( geeking )

Their new rabbi is on the bimah during morning services, but he doesn't lead. After the first time I asked him if I was encroaching (maybe he wanted to lead) and he said no, go ahead. Every week he has complimented me on something, so I'll take this as ongoing consent. (You don't need a rabbi to lead, of course, and it's not automatic that a rabbi would trump a layperson, but I figure it's polite to defer if that seems to be called for.)

The rabbi has an Ashkenazi pronunciation (and accent). Most of the congregation sits in the back third of the pews, so I'm not used to having a different-to-me pronunciation so close. It's improving my concentration skills. :-)

During Pesach I've finally noticed two things I'm a little curious about.( kinda-geeky Hebrew stuff )

There's a point in the morning service where we study a little bit of torah. For reasons unknown to me, the weekday morning minyan almost always reads something from Pirke Avot in that slot, rather than the usual text called for in the siddur. So I've been doing that since starting to lead that service because, well, that's what they do. But I've sometimes seen variation from this norm, and these readings didn't really seem to be doing their job, so I decided to try something new -- short bits about the weekly parsha. (Yeah, I should have started last week. Didn't think of it then.) This is supposed to be study, not a d'var torah, so my plan is to repeat something from a source, not add my own layer of interpretation. We'll see how this goes over (no noticable reactions today).

Today's bit:

We might ask: why was it necessary for God to destroy the whole world with the flood? Was there no possibility of redemption? We learn in Midrash Tanchuma that when Noach was commanded to build the ark, he began by planting cedar trees. The people asked him what he was doing and he told them about the coming flood, but they ridiculed him. Later, he cut down the grown trees to make planks, and again the people asked him and ridiculed him when they heard his answer. Noach then built the ark, and only after all of that did God send the flood.

Meta: When we were doing Pirke Avot I just read out of a siddur; with this my choices were to carry a book in with me (the one where I found the passage), make a copy, or do it from memory. I opted for the last. I was a little nervous, but I think it'll be fine next time.

( Why do this? )

Friday night I learned that there was a bar mitzvah scheduled for this morning. Our rabbi was scheduled to read torah in the informal minyan, which he couldn't do if he was conducting a bar mitzvah. (The associate rabbi is away.) Oops. Where'd that come from?

The new worship chair asked me how I'd dealt with this problem in the past, but it's a new problem. No one in our group who would answer a phone on Shabbat is up for preparing a reading with that little notice, but the new chair had a good idea that would allow us to not just skip that part of the service entirely. He asked one of the Hebrew-fluent regulars (who was there Friday night) to read out of a chumash; concurrently, he said he would, as an educational effort, follow the reading in the scroll with everyone gathered around so they could see. He asked me if that would be ok and I said "no blessings and it's just study, not a torah service, right? If so, fine by me". So we did that and it worked well.

(For those interested in minutiae: I led the group in singing Al Sh'losha D'varim as we took the scroll out and Eitz Chayim as we put it away, but no hakafah, no hagbahah/g'lilah, and no other bits of the torah service except the general misheberach of healing and the rosh chodesh insertion. Wasn't sure if I should do the latter; decided on the fly.)

Two thoughts occurred to me too late to do anything about them. First, during Roman rule public torah readings were outlawed and that's when the custom of haftarah readings arose; we could conceivably have read haftarah and not torah, hearkening back to that. If I'd thought of it Friday night we could have asked the rabbi, but I wasn't going to try to make that call this morning.

The other thought came when I realized that we had a larger-than-usual crowd this morning and there'd be no way everyone would be able to see while crowded around the table. A couple weeks ago at HUC I saw a videotape showing some unusual worship ideas; in one segment two people held a torah scroll vertically for the reader, with the text facing the congregation, so people could see from their seats. Neat idea, and if I'd thought of it earlier I would have suggested it as a solution.

Request to brain trust:

I'm looking for information on the "eitz chayim" passage in the torah-reading liturgy, starting with its textual source (dang, didn't bring a concordance). I'm interested in its liturgical history. Was it an earlier or later addition? It's universal in Ashkenazi nusach; what about others? Any other interesting tidbits?

Yes, I hope to get to the campus library tomorrow, but who am I to turn down any parallel processing that might be forthcoming?

Thanks.