My rabbi and I were recently studying in tractrate B'rachot and came across a story with more drama than you usually find in the talmud. (This story was, of course, not new to my rabbi.) It's described in the commentary as one of the more famous stories in the talmud, but it was mostly new to me. (A tiny part of it shows up in the Pesach haggadah.)

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I have book lust that I can't immediately satisfy. Imrei Madrich is a copy of the torah text that shows the root of every word. Because it's not always obvious, and it would be a big help. Google found me someone who wrote about it on a mailing list, but I haven't found anyone who's selling it yet. I guess I'll call the local Jewish bookstore and see what they can do for me. (Do any of you know this book? Should I be looking for it under a different name?)

Apropos of that, I love studying with both of my rabbis. It is so cool that I get to do this. With one (known as "my rabbi") I'm studying talmud (and occasional other stuff), and with the other I'm reading midrash in Hebrew and not completely sucking at translation. :-) (Though I still have a long way to go.)

Speaking of my congregation (sort of), we are having a talent show in January, and the song I'm writing/arranging for it seems to be going well. kayre rocks for giving me some really great feedback on the piano part. I was also trying to get a quartet together for a Salamone Rossi piece (the organizer encouraged me even though I'm doing the other thing), but altos (among congregants) seem to be particularly elusive at the moment, so that might not work out.

Also speaking of my congregation, we sell Giant Eagle gift cards at face value and get a cut. (I know other congregations do this too.) If you're local and inclined to help us out in this, and we see each other frequently enough for it to work out, I would be happy to turn your check made out to the congregation into gift cards. Just ask.

Speaking not at all about my congregation now, a question for the "Stargate: SG-1" fans out there: do we eventually get an explanation for why almost everyone on various distant worlds speaks English, or am I supposed to just ignore that? The conceit is that many of these folks are humans who were taken from Earth, but that was thousands of years ago. Just wondering, since this show doesn't bother with the conceit of a universal translator. (Which is fine, since the show that did didn't always use it correctly. :-) )

The morning minyan has a particular person who always leads Hallel when it's included in the service (certain holiday seasons plus Rosh Chodesh, the first day(s) of every month). I lead the service on Thursdays, but if it's a Hallel day I turn it over to him at that point. A couple months ago he said "you need to start doing this"; I replied that I didn't want to usurp his role; he replied that I would do it next time. (Ok.) "Next time" is this Thursday, Rosh Chodesh Nissan. So I just ran through it; I'm comfortable with most of it, am unsure what melody to use in one place, and just plain don't know the melody he uses in one short place, but the world won't end if I just read that (and maybe I can get a quickie refresher before the service starts). Now, to see how this plan survives contact with the minyan. :-)

Err, yes, that does mean that Pesach is just over two weeks away. I'm looking forward to a seder with friends and singing. I should decide soon if I'm going to try to do something for the second night. (I don't hold it to be necessary, but it would be a learning opportunity. Hmm.)

Last week I co-led a workshop at my synagogue on a topic in prayer (the sh'ma and its blessings). Turnout was small and I felt kind of off the whole time, even though we prepared and I practiced. (The other person is a professional educator; I have no idea if she practiced, but if she didn't it didn't show.) I've received positive feedback from people who were there, but I still have the sense that I don't really know how to facilitate a discussion or teach an intimate class, though I'm a fine participant in either. (I don't know that I know how to present a lecture either, but I think I'd be on firmer ground -- but that's not what was called for here.) I'm not sure what to do about this -- the obvious answers being to teach more or teach less. (I'm leaning toward the latter but feeling like a bit of a coward for that leaning.)

Learning talmud with my rabbi and midrash with another of our rabbis continues to be quite nifty and engaging. For all that I can be nervous in a classroom (particularly if someone with superior knowledge is present), I really enjoy and hold my own in one-on-one study with people whose knowledge is vastly superior to mine. I wonder why that works like that. Sure, a lot of the comfort in one case comes from having studied with my rabbi (in various capacities) for more than ten years (!), but the other one is much newer so it's not just that. (I also wonder at what point I have the obligation to be the person with superior knowledge for someone else in a one-on-one setting.)

This is the second midrash we looked at in this session. (I previously knew this one, but reading it in Hebrew was still educational.)

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Last week I wrote about my first study session with our newest rabbi, but I didn't cover everything. After the midrash I previously wrote about we started a longer one.

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LJ tags are spiffy but not as fully-featured as I'd like, and I probably haven't figured out the best way to use them yet. So this entry is something of a cross-reference; if you got here via one of the tags on this entry you might also be interested in some of the others. I'll try to update this entry over time, and eventually will create similar entries for other tag families.

Judaism: education is a catch-all bucket. Sometimes things start here and then spin off into their own tags.

Sh'liach K'hilah (LJ swallows the first apostrophe for some reason) is (was) the Reform movement's para-rabbinic program. I attended in 2004 and 2005.

Open Beit Midrash (obm) at Hebrew College. I attended in 2007. I also have a more-general Hebrew College tag that includes entries about a program called Ta Sh'ma that I attended in 2006. One of these days I might give those their own tag.

Melton = Florence Melton Program, an international two-year program of which I completed the first year in 2006-2007. (My class session got cancelled the following year. Someday I will probably return, if the scheduling works.)

Study with my rabbi is for entries related to my one-on-one study. Midrash overlaps that, covering my midrash study in particular.

NHC is a tag for the chavurah program I attended in August 2008.

Kallah is a tag for the ALEPH kallah that I'm attending in 2009.

Shalom Hartman is a tag for the Shalom Hartman Institute, a program I considered in 2008 and 2009. I'll get there some year, I expect...

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.

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I think my rabbi and I have different perceptions of my language skills. I have homework for our next study session: a few passages from the Mishnah B'rurah, in Hebrew (I think Hebrew and not Aramaic; haven't looked closely), without vowels, in Rashi script. :-) I will do my best to rise to the challenge. Knowing that my rabbi has that much confidence in me helps, and I appreciate it when he pushes me.

A few months ago I was very surprised to find that I could usefully study g'mara (with partners) with just the Aramaic text, albeit with vowels. I didn't think I could do it without English. (The partners were essential; my vocabulary is still poor.) So it is possible that I will be able to do something with this commentary. We'll see!

I studied with my rabbi today. When I got there he said that if it's ok with me he wants to study a different section of talmud than where we are right now. Fine with me, I said. After we laid the foundation, he raised an issue of practical application. We've done that before, but this time we argued about it more. It's a real unsettled issue in our community, he said, and he had me arguing both sides -- "ok, then if you say X, the logical response to that would be Y, and the logical response to that would be Z, and...". I don't think I came up with anything he hadn't already come up with, but he was definitely working me harder than usual, and I appreciate it.

He also asked me to do a shiva minyan tonight, and asked if I'd like to chant torah for the high holy days. (Woot!)

I feel like I've moved up to a new level. Nifty! It's not that any one of those would have been all that unusual on its own (well, maybe high-holy-day torah reading...), but the combination of them all in one 45-minute meeting was novel.

(Yes, he agreed that learning high-holy-day trope in this timeframe would be impractical, and I should use the trope I already know.)

Yet again, talmud study provides a jumping-off point for interesting conversation.

We were talking about why people do or don't come to services, and more broadly, why we pray. That is, do we feel directly commanded to pray a certain liturgy three times a day, the way our traditional friends do? Do we feel that this is our only method of connecting with God? If yes (to either), where is everyone? (Mind, some of our traditional friends may ask the same question.) Why does the weeknight minyan so often consist of just my rabbi and me, and what would we be doing otherwise?

My rabbi believes, and I tend to agree, that people, by and large, come to our Friday-evening services for events, not for prayer. They come for a bar mitzvah, or a baby naming, or to hear a particular speaker. There is a dedicated core, people who come nearly every week as part of the community, but at any given service they are the minority.

Contrast this, I said, with our Saturday-morning service -- the real one, not the bar-mitzvah service. We have an established community; it's pretty much the same people every week, and we're there for the service and for each other, and not for external factors like on Friday night. I asserted that people who don't come for events come for community -- maybe also for prayer, but it's the community that dominates. (After all, you can pray at home.)

(Speaking for myself, I am there on Friday nights and weekdays for both prayer and community support. While I will seek out Shabbat services if I'm away from my own synagogue, I'm not diligent about weekdays. I mean, even in town, I don't go every day. If we were to declare our weekday evening service a failure and shut it down, I wouldn't start going elsewhere. But because we have one, I support it. Our Shabbat morning service, on the other hand, is something that really means a lot to me, and if something were to threaten its existence I'd be in for the fight.)

My rabbi believes that people -- by which I think he mainly means modern Reform Jews -- are looking for three things in a prayer experience: intimacy, intensity, and authenticity. Our Shabbat morning service certainly has all three characteristics, but I think that can only happen in a strong community. I don't think you'd get that at the bar-mitzvah service. While our service does get visitors who seem to fit right in to the community (it appears to me -- some may be reading this and I invite you to speak up), it's because there is a strong foundation of an established community. Friday night also has an established community, but it's not large enough to provide intimacy and intensity for everyone.

We ended up talking a little about the question I raised here a while back of how do rabbis pray?. He pointed out the irony -- that those who are most motivated end up being the least able to actually pray in a community. This is another reason our Shabbat morning service is so valuable -- while yes, the rabbi is in charge, the service can practically run itself, and he's much freer to be "just a congregant" there.