Monica

I'm reading torah Shabbat morning in our minyan, so a few weeks ago I asked my rabbi if I could also read Friday night. (Most Reform congregations read Friday nights because that's when most people come.) He said yes, and I'm looking forward to it. I like reading in the morning minyan because we're all friends and there's a lot of ruach (spirit) in the group. Friday night, on the other hand, is a chance to read for the larger community.

It turns out that it'll probably be larger than usual tomorrow, too. I didn't know this when I picked the portion, but both the congregational choir and the youth choir are participating, and that usually draws more people out of the woodwork.

I had hoped to get a look at the sefer torah tonight after minyan, but partway through the drive home from work it became apparent that attending the minyan wasn't going to happen. (There wasn't time to drop off the cat at home and slide over there in time, and going straight there and taking the cat in with me seemed contra-indicated.) Maybe if I get there early enough tomorrow night I can sneak a look. If not, oh well -- I do have a tikkun to practice from, so I'm not expecting trouble. But it's always nice to get a peek to confirm.

Monday night friends from the congregation invited us for dinner, so we joined them and then everyone but Dani went to shul. This meant going to the late service, which has the more formal (and more "classical Reform") music; I prefer the music of the early service but wanted to accept the invitation. I'm glad we did accept; it was a very nice dinner and Dani got to know some of my shul friends a little better (and vice-versa).

I didn't connect so much with last night's service, but I really did this morning. At several points I felt I was truly in the presence of the divine king, and I spent a lot of time thinking about things in the past year that I ought've done differently.

My torah reading went really well, and I got many compliments -- including two people telling me that they'd gotten chills listening to me. Those are good chills; I was reading the climax of the binding of Yitzchak and trying to do it expressively. I guess I succeeded. :-) I backed off a bit when I got up there and found a mike right there in my face, only an inch or two from my mouth; I was worried about overblowing it when the angel shouts to Avraham. But still, it worked.

( sermon )

lefkowitzga came for lunch and we got to spend a couple hours chatting. That was very nice; we haven't been able to just sit down and talk in a while.

( we ate... )

I've heard a little informal talk in the congregation about possibly going to a two-day Rosh Hashana at some to-be-defined future time. If that suggestion makes its way to the worship committee it should make for some interesting discussion. There are several points of view to consider:

( Read more... )

Ok, I realize that Friday isn't the best time to post about a partly-baked halachic issue, but hey, I post things when I think of them. C'est la vie. (Hmm, is there a corresponding Hebrew idiom to "c'est la vie", perhaps one that would be easier to spell?)

There is an issue in halacha called kol isha, which literally means "a woman's voice". The idea is that a woman's voice -- specifically a singing voice, according to B'rachot 24a -- will arouse men in the same way that seeing her hair (or certain body parts, and I don't just mean the naughty bits) will. So just as women are to cover their hair and wear modest garments to keep men from sinning, so too are they to refrain from singing around men. (Well, at least solo; being in a group can mitigate.)

I'd long assumed that kol isha is the reason women can't read torah (except in women's groups) in traditional communities. But I've thought of an argument against that position, which probably means that either the argument is wrong or this isn't a kol-isha issue to begin with. (I tend to assume that no halachic argument that turns out to be correct would be original to me, because I don't have the vast knowledge base yet.)

( Read more... )

The torah-reading went well -- better Saturday morning than Friday night, but reasonable both times.

We're in the process of renovating the sanctuary, so services are being held in the chapel at the moment. I love the chapel; it's a beautiful room, and as long as your crowd isn't too large it's great. I knew, intellectually, that the reading desk in the chapel is rather smaller than the one in the sanctuary, but somehow it didn't hit me just how small until I was actually reading torah on it. It was, um, cramped. And the desk is high and the portion started near the top of a column, so I was standing on tip-toes and leaning forward to read the first few lines. I probably looked kind of goofy, but if so people had the good grace not to say so to me. :-)

The other challenge Friday night was that the cloth on the desk must have been bunched up or something, because the parchment of the scroll was not lying flat. At one point I missed when going to the next line and needed to be prompted, and there were a couple other times when the curvature made things "interesting". But I got through it and I got lots of positive comments.

Shabbat morning the environment was familiar and I had no trouble seeing the scroll. And there was enough room that when I needed to go to a new column I could do so easily. Note to future self: bring a hair tie or something on torah-reading days; while my hair didn't get in my way as it hung down and reached for the parchment, it would be better to not do that. I wonder why I haven't noticed that before. I think I was having a fluffy-hair day, so maybe that was it.

Both times we did this with interspersed translations: I would chant a few verses and then pause while my rabbi translated, and then I'd pick it up again. (So this was all one aliyah, as opposed to breaking it up.) I think that worked really well; people who aren't fluent in Hebrew didn't have to go too long without help, and I got to pause during the reading. I wasn't sure if pausing would be an advantage or disadvantage going in, but it worked reasonably well. I wouldn't recommend it for someone who's nervous about reading or who isn't strong musically, though. I didn't have to think about start pitch for each segment; I was just there.

One person told me Saturday morning that my torah chanting helps her focus -- it's the combination of going more slowly than when just reading and my voice, she said. That's always nice to hear. One other person said I should do this some Friday night because I'm obviously good enough; I said "this was the rerun; I did that last night". :-)

My rabbi was right about soemthing Thursday night: I seem to have learned one of the trope symbols (gershayim) a third down from where it should be. Hmm. Must fix that for next time. I'm not actually sure if I've generally mis-learned it or if I somehow just goofed in this particular portion. (It only shows up twice, so not a lot of data.) And yes, my rabbi correctly identified the interval by which I was off. And no, we don't correct readers for trope errors unless they affect phrasing.

I chanted torah Saturday morning. It went very well; I did make a couple mistakes, but the associate rabbi was checking for me and he was able to feed me the corrections without throwing me. We've never worked before in that way. (The associate rabbi usually doesn't come to this service, but my rabbi is out of town so he led the torah study and most of the service. I led the torah service and concluding prayers.)

Later I will try to write up what I talked about. Thanks for the ideas.

The D&D game Saturday was fairly long (from around 4:00 to around midnight); we knew there'd be a lot going on and wanted the luxury of not playing on a weeknight. I'm glad we had a good long stretch for the climax of the story.

When I got home, I saw a flash of gray and white on the front porch. First thought: why is Baldur outside? Second though: waitaminute, that cat's not big enough. That's maybe half a Baldur. It turned out to be a vary friendly, affectionate young adult that sat patiently at the door with every expectation of being let in. I saw a tag on a collar but couldn't read it (too-small print in too-dim light), so I asked Dani to help me. When I picked up the cat I adjusted my estimate still further; this was about a third of a Baldur. :-)

The tag had a phone number but not an address. I thought about the lateness of the hour and called anyway; I figure that if one of my cats had gotten out I'd want someone to report a sighting right away. I got a machine, so I left a timestamp and an address. The cat was curled up sleeping on our doormat when I went to bed (I left the porch light on) and gone in the morning. I hope that if he's lost he was reunited with his people.

Today after brunch Dani and I went shopping for cell phones (and plans). Sprint, Cingular, and Verizon all offer the same package: 2 phones, 500 shared prime minutes, unlimited night/weekend, free long distance, $60. We ended up choosing based on the maps; we told the salesman that 98% of the time we're in Pittsburgh but we want to Just Not Care that other 2% of the time. So we ended up with Verizon, and we have 30 days to discover if that was a mistake (dead spots locally, etc).

Transferring the existing phone numbers turned out to be a PITA because we were instantiating a family plan from two individual plans. It took the salesman at least an hour to get this set up, and he had to call his tech-support people. At the end he said it could take up to three days for the service to transfer, but we both have service on the new phones tonight. (Dani got his a couple hours before I did; dunno why.)

Soon I'll read the documentation on the phone. I managed to get rid of the annoying background image, icon-based navigation (give me text, darn it!), and invasive ring tone; the rest can wait. Granted, I solved one of those (the icon thing) by saying to the salesman "this looks like a good phone but I can't see what those images are supposed to be; can it do text?". :-)

We have a visiting cantor coming in a month (for one Shabbat). When we have a visitor (cantor or rabbi), the informal service gets merged into a general morning service. So I'd been told not to line up a lay torah reader for that date.

Then an administrator told me that we should have someone read after all (the cantor prefers to not stomp on existing traditions, or something). I responded that I would take it myself if they like (getting a little tight for some of the other readers), except that I assumed that our rabbi would read instead so she should ask.

I just got mail saying "he said you should do it". Woot!

So I get to read torah in front of the larger congregation (not just our minyan), and in front of my rabbi (which basically never happens, because the lay readers fill in when he can't be there). I'm psyched. :-)

And with that, off to trope class.

I should know better by now. Every now and then -- just infrequently enough for the pain to have worn off -- I get the idea that I can stop by the Giant Eagle on Murray on my way home from work to do the grocery shopping. This is, in principle, not out of the way, unlike the Giant Eagle I usually patronize. However, this only works if (1) the store actually has all the stuff I want and (2) the checkout lines aren't horrendous. When I had my third failure only one aisle past produce, I decided to cut my losses, pay for my vegetables, and go to the better store. (For the record: ginger root, fresh cranberries, and Listerine. I don't begrudge the cranberries, but the other two surprised me.)

Dani and I have decided to buck the Hallmark tradition and have a nicer-than-usual evening some other night in February. Besides, until Saturday he had a choir practice scheduled for tonight.

Actually, we also had a nicer-than-usual evening last night. ralphmelton and lorimelton got engaged at the end of the last Sunday dinner that fell on February 13; Ralph had slyly arranged for things to run late so that he could propose just after midnight in front of some of their friends. So they made an especially-nice dinner for friends last night to celebrate the anniversary. We had risotto with goat cheese and salmon, spinach salad with fruit, and two homemade desserts: chocolate truffles and a concoction of ladyfingers, raspberry mousse, whipped cream, and (I think) alcohol. It was all fabulous.

Yesterday afternoon we joined a crowd of people helping out an older friend of ours whose basement recently flooded. There was stuff to be thrown out, stuff to be cleaned up, and stuff that said friend had to look at so we'd know how much effort to put into saving it. That last was, of course, the bottleneck. There were a lot of papers that had gotten wet but were now dry, but that might have started to grow mold. A lot of those papers were records from her parents. Lesson learned: store papers of that sort neither in the basement nor in the attic. (I lost some papers once to an attic with a leaky roof.)

My synagogue is running a trope class, which started last Wednesday. (It runs for six weeks.) Some of the people in the class are good-naturedly grumpy about my taking the class because I'm a "ringer". I pointed out that there is plenty I don't know about trope and I expect to learn things in this class. That said, I haven't brought the book in from the car yet. :-) (After this week's class, probably.)

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.

I'll be chanting torah in a couple weeks (Vayeitzei), and preparing the portion reminds me of why the book of Bereishit (Genesis) is so cool. Drama! And the trope helps to reinforce it! I try to make a point of understanding what I'm chanting on a word-by-word basis, and as I've done that with this portion the pieces have just fallen into place. Which doesn't mean I don't have the usual memorization challenge, but this time the associations are a little stronger. This is the portion where Lavan dupes Yaakov by giving him the wrong bride and therefore getting an extra seven years' labor out of him, and it feels like, when chanted, the sneakiness and then the confrontation just come through clearly even in a language most people don't understand. Neat.

At first I thought that Yaakov was being way too cooperative in all this; I mean, he was pretty clearly cheated, yet he didn't try to annul the marriage with Leah and demand the bride he was promised. (These days I suppose someone would sue, too.) But I'm not convinced he's being a wuss; I think he might be showing exceptional care for Leah's feelings. Her father is a lout, but that's not her fault -- yet she's the one who would suffer if Yaakov succeeded in dumping her. So, maybe, for her sake he accepts her, so long as he also gets the wife he loves.

This could be wrong, of course. The torah makes it clear that the patriarchs are real people with real flaws, and Yaakov seems to have more than others. So maybe he's being a wuss, or maybe he's starting to get that first important clue about other people's feelings. Maybe.

Rosh Hashana went well for me, but I don't find myself having a lot to say about it. There are some bits of the liturgy that particularly struck me, and maybe later I'll get my machzor (high-holy-day prayerbook) and post them.

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.

Today was a full day. We actually had a real break (almost 30 minutes); during that time I tried to post Monday's entry but saw no evidence that it took. I guess I'll find out when I connect to attempt to post this. I'm sorry for sending large bursts of stuff out all at once.

The campus store and the library have very limited hours during the summer. I haven't yet been to the library (sigh -- who's got time? but I want to), but the store stayed open later today to accommodate us. I think it was worthwhile for them; lots of people skipped part of dinner to buy books and the like. I picked up the JPS Hebrew-English Tanach (I wanted to see it "in the flesh" first to see the size of the print, which is adequate), passed on Braude's Book of Legends this time (highly recommended, but I'll bet I can improve on the $75 price via the used market), and picked up a new talit. I have a talit and it has signifance to me, but there have been times when I wanted the option of a larger one, particularly when leading services. (The one I have, which belonged to Dani's grandfather, is the small "scarf" size.) It turns out that the large size is too big for me (drags the ground, which isn't an appropriate thing to do to tzitzit), but there is an intermediate size that gives me enough material to draw the talit up over my head for the sh'ma, which I can't do with the one from Dani's family. I'd also rather use a larger one when leading services. So now I have that option. I was going to use it for the first time at Friday's service, which I'm helping to lead, but I see wisdom in getting used to it first, so I'll be using it tomorrow.

The planning for that service got off to a rocky start due to logistics (not at all due to the people, who are wonderful), but we finally had a good solid hour and change to go over it tonight. Tomorrow we will meet with our staff advisor about our plans (each group has an advisor), and then tomorrow night we'll solidify things down to the level of who does what and sticking post-it notes in the siddur and stuff. I'm doing all the music leading; that wasn't my plan, but the other two really want to not do this and like me in that role. I introduced them to some new melodies tonight. Some of that was explicit experiment; I figured that if they could pick them up quickly (just by listening) then the others could too. And they did. So we'll be using a niggun that my rabbi taught us at the last Shabbaton, and a new meditation before the Sh'ma (and setting of the Sh'ma) that our cantorial soloist introduced some months back (by Jeff Klepper). Our group feels that in this setting, each service should have a lot that is familiar and some that is new, because (1) we're experimenting and learning and (2) this is a group of synagogue leaders who will then disperse, not an established congregation where you would be much more conservative about change. I'm looking forward to the service; I think we've done a good job of preparing. (I seem to be the unofficial leader of the group, but not for lack of trying to push decisions out to the other two.)

( people in need of a clue-by-four )

All that aside, onward to today's nifty classes.

( class: text study )

( lunch: leadership development )

( class: Jewish music )

( class: shiva/funeral )

( chug: trope )

( class: illness and the community )

( ma'ariv )

I've done better torah readings, but this morning went ok. I was tripped up when I mis-remembered trope for one word, which had a cascading effect on the next few words. So I had to be prompted, but I got through it. Initially (a few years ago) I learned this portion by rote; now that I know how to read trope I did it "right" this time, uncovering some errors in my initial learning of it in the process. So I guess it's not surprising that something like this happened. I still got lots of apparently-genuine compliments.

There was a fascinating (to me) discussion at breakfast. There is a light breakfast after services every morning -- usually just bagels and bread, cream cheese, and drinks, unless someone sponsors a fancier breakfast. The process of getting the bread/bagels has been a pain for various reasons, and today someone (a regular, not a visitor) proposed a change: getting bagels from a new bakery that is better in quality, cheaper, more conveniently located -- and not under rabbinic supervision. This last point had not even occurred to the person bringing up the subject as something important; when others pointed it out he went on an anti-kashrut rant. ("What could be treif about a bagel?" "Well, this place sells sandwiches, right? So maybe they sliced your bagel with the same knife they just used to slice the ham?" "You're being too picky." And so on.)

Other people pressed that line of argument with him, but I brought up a more fundamental issue. This is a Conservative congregation. That means they, as a congregation, are bound to a certain interpretation of halacha. It doesn't matter if every member of the minyan eats treif at home; the congregational meal must be in accordance with that halacha, both for appearance and to support the needs of any visitor who actually keeps kosher. (I think, but am not sure, that failing to keep a kosher shul kitchen is one of the issues (along with performing an intermarriage, and I'm not sure what else) that can get a Conservative rabbi censured.) So if that halacha says a bakery must be under supervision, you have to follow that. Bottom line: you have to ask the rabbi and follow his ruling.

The person I was arguing with seemed to be of the belief that "kashrut is silly, so we don't need to worry about it". He failed to see the difference between decisions about personal practice and decisions about communal practice. At one point he brought up other Conservative deviations from the Orthodox interpretation of halacha, like allowing women to lead services, but I pointed out that this isn't the same thing at all: the Conservative movement has a process, which they followed, to determine that women can lead services. They didn't just get up one day and say "we don't like that restriction, so we're not doing it". That same process produces an understanding of kashrut, which must be followed in the shul.

The rabbi was not present, by the way. (I would of course have deferred to him if he were.) I didn't mean to be "speaker for the rabbi", and I said a few times that he needs to consult the rabbi about the kashrut rules for the shul. But when exactly did I, a Reform Jew, become a spokesman for Conservative Judaism in a Conservative shul? *boggle*

(I should clarify that I am not trying to malign or question this community as a whole. I assume that most people present agreed with me but just weren't putting it into words.)