Monica

Yesterday the person in charge of this asked me if I can read torah in two weeks, which will be the Shabbat in the middle of Sukkot. All the holidays (and their intermediate days, as in this case) have special torah readings, so I asked what it was. No one present remembered. I said sure, I'd take care of it; I could look this up at home. I hoped I wasn't biting off something that would be too hard on that timescale, but figured I could roll with it, whatever it was.

I pulled it up in Trope Trainer today (forget about its cantilation features; it lets me print nice big copies to practice from!) and started to read. I fell into chanting it easily -- too easily. Err, wait a minute, I recognize that turn of phrase. Heh -- I chanted this exact passage last winter. Ok, this just got easier. :-)

The Sukkot portion is from Ki Tisa, after the incident with the golden calf when Moshe talks God into giving the people another chance and they make the second set of tablets. There's a reference to Sukkot somewhere in there, which might be why it was chosen for this holiday, but I can't help noticing the parallel between the servicable fragility of the sukkah and the fragility of our people's relationship with God at that point in time -- and, perhaps, individually since then. So maybe I'll work that idea up into a d'var torah.

Summary: Friday night ok (or good considering circumstances); Saturday morning quite good.

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The interview meme is making the rounds again.

( singing, adaptive technology, trope, food, retirement )

I am reading torah this Shabbat. The portion, Behar, is part of the double portion that is arguably "my" portion -- the week I acquired a Hebrew birthday we read both Behar and B'chukotai, which are sometimes doubled up and sometimes not. So to the extent that I have a designated portion, it's either Behar, B'chukotai, or the combination. This year they are not combined, and since I was semi-randomly picking a week to read anyway, I picked one of those.

Today I was asked to read the other one next Friday night. Clean sweep. :-) I'm glad to finally be at a level where my reaction to "can you read in 8 days?" is not "aiiieeeee!" but "sure". (My congregation only reads one aliyah -- the sixth, this year -- so we are usually talking about 10-30 verses, not several chapters. Both of these ones are short, so that when they're doubled up the reading is not burdensome. I can read or chant, but, honestly, the chanting is easier for me to learn.)

I won't actually start learning it until Sunday, probably -- don't want to distract myself from this week's, and there's an SCA event on Saturday. But that still gives me six days.

This grew out of something more general: I'll be helping to lead services next Friday night. So we knew I'd be involved, but we didn't actually talk about division of labor until today. (Yay! I get to lead services again!)

We got a huge crowd for the evening Simchat Torah service (Wednesday night). There were lots of kids; someone had organized a gathering before services where the kids could make paper flags to parade around with, and I suspect that made a difference. (We always get lots of kids, but the "lots" seemed bigger this year.)

Lots of kids means lots of noise, especially when you factor in today's trend toward permissive/oblivious parenting, and that continued through the first two aliyot of the torah reading (read by our two rabbis). As I went up to read the third and fourth aliyot (from B'reishit), I mentally braced myself for the distraction.

I should mention that the previous aliyot were read, not chanted. I began chanting -- and everyone shut up, just like that. Wow! I don't think they were just being polite to the layperson; I must conclude that it was the unexpected music that did it. I won't complain. :-)

I got compliments that night (and the next morning when I repeated it), which is not uncommon (it's polite, after all). The person who stopped me on the street to compliment me was a little unusual, and the rabbinic student who told me Shabbat evening that he was especially pleased with the way I'd chanted one phrase made me happy. It's nice to know that those little details matter to people other than me. :-) (This was, in fact, a passage I'd worked on to get the expressiveness right.)

The hakafot (dancing, or at least parading in a somewhat-perky manner) were more lively this year than in the past. We've been attracting more Israeli members (I suspect because of our Israeli rabbi); maybe that's part of it, as they bring in the enthusaism that (I'm told) characterizes this holiday there. Some of it is coming from the rabbis and cantorial soloist, for sure. I think we've got a fair number of congregants who will follow a lead to cut loose a little but won't lead, which isn't surprising.

Thursday morning during one of the hakafot I had a sefer torah that had silver crowns on it (not all of ours do), and the crowns had bells on them. So I could produce sound effects in time to the music. :-) (The scroll was too heavy for me to safely hold over my head, alas, especially as it was wound to one end. At other times I had smaller ones that I could do that with.)

Learned in passing: we are one of three (Reform?) congregations in the US that has a complete set of Nevi'im (Prophets) and Ketuvim (Writings) on scrolls. (I do not know how this came to be.) We pretty much only use these on Simchat Torah and Kol Nidrei, alas; most bar-mitzvah students want to read their haftarot with the permitted vowels, which you can't really blame them for. (While we read torah on Friday nights, we do not read haftarah then.)

I led services Friday night at my synagogue. (In this congregation, for a lay person, this is a big deal.) It went really well!

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The person who was supposed to read torah this week got sick, so earlier this week the chair of the worship committee asked me if I could do at least some of it. I said sure. The fifth aliya begins with some difficult vocabulary (well, I thought it was difficult); after I concluded that I wouldn't be able to learn the whole thing in a few oherwise-busy days anyway, I chose a part out of the middle that looked easier.

Also for the sake of time, I decided to read rather than chant. But I was having trouble getting it to flow right and getting all the phrase boundaries in the right place. Friday night, on a whim, I looked at the trope. An hour later (!) I had it, and I chanted it this morning. Wish I'd thought of that a couple days ago; I might have learned more of the aliya. Oh well.

The d'var torah was kind of ad-hoc (those cycles had gone to preparing the torah portion). No written-out copy and no notes; I just spoke. (Yes, I did practice.) I knew it would be shorter, so I figured that would be ok. I thought my delivery was decent but could have been a lot better.

Here is roughly what I said (some phrasing improved in the writing): ( Read more... )

I'm not a rabbi, but this is the Shabbat when I played one at my synagogue. Overall, that went quite well!

( Friday night )

( torah study )

( bar mitzvah )

All together, this was the longest torah portion I've learned (one chapter, 23 verses, one full column -- and it had the decency to actually fall out as one column, so I didn't have to roll the scroll mid-reading). I read different, overlapping parts Friday night and Saturday morning; I didn't read all that at once. I realize that to some of my readers this sounds piddly; a full parsha is generally three or four chapters (sometimes more), and readers routinely prepare that much. My congregation doesn't read the entire parsha -- never has, so far as I know. But still, this was a milestone for me.

I need to get some hair clips or something. Because I have medium-length hair and need to get fairly close to the torah scroll to read, my hair was hanging down while I read Friday night. It wasn't blocking my view, but a couple people told me that it meant they couldn't see my face. I wouldn't have thought that my face would be an interesting visual target at that point, but I guess I'm wrong. I think wearing a ponytail on the bimah would seem too casual and unprofessional, so I need to figure out something more decorative. I haven't got a hair-aesthetics gene, so this could be interesting.

I really enjoyed this stint in my rabbi's shoes, and I hope I get to do it again someday. I have high hopes that sometime this fall I will lead a Friday service when my rabbi will be there to see me.

"The NSA would like to remind everyone to call their mothers this Sunday. They need to calibrate their system." (Seen here and passed on by sui66iy.)

That poll I posted on Friday got 15 responses in the first 20 minutes, three of them from people who don't openly subscribe to my journal. *boggle*

SCA: Woo hoo! A local clue-enabled couple won Crown Tourney yesterday. Nice folks; I'm really happy for them. The next 11 months should be lots of fun. (As ariannawyn pointed out, this might be the first queen who's won one of Yama Kaminari's fundoshi oil-wrestling contests, which, yes, is as strange as it sounds.)

Quoth some recent spam: "your woman wants a replica". Really? I have a woman? Please give her two messages, then: (1) she's late with her share of the mortgage, and (2) she can buy her own damn replica.

Around 6:00 tonight I got a phone solicitation from someone claiming to be calling from Jerusalem. So that would have been, what, 1:00 AM? That seems like a lot of effort to catch people at dinner time -- and that's just eastern time. (Though I'm told that Californians eat late compared to midwesterners, so maybe they just call them first thing in the caller's morning.)

Trope geekery: the torah portion I'm currently learning (fourth aliya of Bamidbar) has four munachs in a row (followed by pazeir, which itself is pretty unusual). I occasionally see two munachs in a row; I think I've seen three. Four? Weird. I had to look up what to do with that. (Munach is one of those symbols that has different melodies depending on local context.)

For the bar mitzvah I'm conducting in July, I've decided to read rather than chant the portion up to where the student takes over. I figure that this way I won't be upstaging the kid; while in many congregations it wouldn't be perceived that way, I'm not sure about ours and that family is already having to deal with deviation from the norm because they won't get a rabbi. I asked my rabbi if this seemed appropriate to him (and explained my reasoning) and he concurred. Reading without chanting is going to take some getting used to, though!

Hebrew class tomorrow night. I'm considering asking the teacher to move me to the next section for the ulpan (that is, one ahead of where the group I'm now with will be going). It's possible that this will also get me a different teacher, which is not a change I'd frown on. But mainly, I figure that if it's too advanced we can fix it on the first night, but if the class is too basic I'll never be able to jump up.

We're having a visit from a guest cantor at the end of April. Shabbat morning the chair of the worship committee asked me if I'd like to chant torah that morning. Twist my arm! :-) We had both assumed that the visitor would do so, but apparently not. It occurred to me after the fact that I did this the last time we had a guest cantor too; I hope that doesn't look bad. I did offer to defer to a (specific) other person, but he wanted me. That's pleasant.

I'm not sure which is doing more to speed up my learning of portions, practice or comprehension, but I'm not complaining. For my current portion (I'm reading next Shabbat), I spent about six hours in the course of one week and had it in pretty good shape. This was an experiment; I wanted to see if I could learn a portion in a week and the answer seems to be yes. (Portion = one aliya, not the entire parsha. In this case it's about 20 lines in the scroll.) And I understand a lot of the text -- not necessarily every verb or noun (which is largely a vocabulary issue), but enough grammar and basic vocabulary to tie the bits together and know who is acting upon whom, and stuff like that.

This coming Shabbat is Shabbat HaGadol, the Shabbat before Pesach. While these days rabbis -- or at least the ones I'm familiar with -- give sermons almost every week, historically there were only two times a year when rabbis preached, and this Shabbat is one of them. (The other is Shabbat Shuva, during the high holy days.) I'm not so presumptuous to step into that role full-force, but I am planning to do a little extra preparation for my talk that morning, actually writing out the text instead of just outlining it and speaking from notes. So it'll be a little more formal than the norm for that group, which seems reasonable. I'm going to tie the portion together with Pesach and talk about the transformative effect of ritual. Or at least it sounds like a good idea in my head; we'll see what happens when I write it down. :-) (Yes, I'll post -- after I deliver it.)

Friday night's torah reading was a little rough, but we all survived. They had me read from a large scroll, which means the top of the column was pretty far away once the scroll was rolled out on the table. Naturally, my portion started two lines down from the top of a column, and the table was kind of high. I was standing on tip-toes and leaning on the table to get close enough to almost see. Next time, I ask for a different scroll. (The associate rabbi also pointed out, after, that the height of the table could be adjusted with the press of a button. Great; wish I'd known that earlier. :-) )

It appears that many in the congregation interpreted my problems as nervousness. Nope. I chanted the climactic part of the binding of Yitzchak in front of 900 people on Rosh Hashana; I think I'm over nervousess in my own congregation.

But I also got a lot of positive feedback; chanting is not common in our congregation and it was a longer portion, and I guess that impressed people. I actually find that the chanting makes it easier for me, not harder, but I've got a knack for music and not-yet-adequate Hebrew comprehension. The music provides hints about the phrasing, which makes for a more coherent reading than if I just read the words without knowing what each one meant. Mind, I do go over a portion pretty thoroughly when learning it, first attempting my own translation and then studying a translation alongside the Hebrew, but that doesn't mean I can retain it all at the word level.

The associate rabbi said some nice things about me in the context of the Sh'liach K'hilah program. (They took the opportunity to tell the congregation at large that I've completed that program.) This generated some nice comments at the oneg.

Reading on Shabbat morning went much more smoothly. I tried, for the first time, giving my d'var torah without using notes; it turns out I'm not ready for that yet. Well, you don't know if you don't try, and it's a forgiving group. But there were things I meant to say and didn't, and things I didn't say as eloquently as I'd planned, and I'll just have to do better next time.

On Shabbat morning my rabbi also brought up the Sh'liach K'hilah program briefly, and mentioned that I'd read the previous night (many of the morning people hadn't been there). He also said something to the effect that he'd be giving me increasing opportunities to read on Friday nights; woot! I have hopes of eventually parlaying that into helping to lead worship too, but I'll take any advance.

Naturally, yesterday (when I couldn't put up the sukkah) the weather was wonderful, and today (when I could) it was colder and threatening rain. But I got it up and I didn't get wet, so that worked out. It only took half an hour to put the frame and roof (s'chach) together. The walls took another half hour. I'm sure I could expedite if I'd just use plastic walls like lots of other people, but I like the look of the lattice pieces that I use much better, so it's worth some fussing. Besides, the lattice makes it easier, in principle, to have decorations; one of these years I'll get some of those.

Sukkot begins tomorrow night. Chag sameach to all who celebrate!

Yesterday was the wedding of two SCA friends. I think the SCA people outnumbered the relatives at the reception. Everyone seemed to be having fun, even the pinch-hitting cooks. (The original cook got into an accident on Wednesday and is still in the hospital. We planned to visit him today, but he was moved back into the ICU so we couldn't. I really hope he's ok!)

Yesterday morning I chanted torah. There was no bar mitzvah, so my rabbi stayed for the whole service and acted as my checker. He had chanted the portion the previous night; I'd tried to call him on Friday to talk about that but didn't reach him. (It was a very busy week. I had learned the portion anyway. I was calling to offer to save him the time preparing it, which I suspected he wasn't going to do until after Yom Kippur anyway.) He usually doesn't chant but did this time, though, so I suspect he wouldn't have taken me up on the offer. And he is, as you might expect, much better at it than I am. Still, mine went ok -- forgot one trope and had to be prompted but fine otherwise. My comments on the portion were well-received. Some people commented on my having read for Rosh Hashana and wanted to know if I'd really learned this portion since then; mostly, but it was short. But hey! I can learn a torah portion more quickly than I used to be able to.

Most dates are taken for the next several weeks, except one week when I'll be out of town (Thanskgiving), so I'm next reading for Vayishlach in mid-December. I'll ask to read Friday night too; I last did that at the end of August. I'm glad that we've got people siging up again for Shabbat morning; there were some rough spots during the summer, I guess due to vacations.

Tonight's dinner included a culinary mystery. When I was last at the store I picked up a package that was labelled "California lamb chops". I didn't know what that meant (origin? applied seasoning?) but they looked like lamb chops so I shrugged and put the package in my basket. Tonight, in preparing to cook them, I saw that they looked like they'd been fabricated from ground lamb -- but they had bones! What was that all about? I cooked them and they were ok (but not as good as actual chops), but I'm still a little puzzled by what I was eating. Is this some novelty I'm unaware of, or was the packaging meant to be deceptive? Next time I'll look more closely, I guess.

I've gotten a lot better at chanting torah in the two years that my congregation has had a program of lay readers. That's not surprising, of course; practice leads to improvement. But I've just realized that my notion of what's "hard" and what's "easy" has changed.

Two years ago I read the first aliya of Ha'azinu, which I thought had to be the easiest portion out there. It was short, but much more importantly, Ha'azinu is a poem, and ends of verses always (so far) match up with ends of lines or half-lines. (It's a two-column format.) For a beginning reader still learning the feel of which tropes go together and how things flow, that's incredibly important, because "end of verse" has its own trope and getting those right can orient you for much of the rest.

Last year, on ten minutes' notice, I read that same part of Ha'azinu, and it came back really quickly -- reinforcing my notion of the portion's ease.

This year? I'm learning the third aliya of this same portion, and... ack. Yes, the formatting is quite helpful; that's nice. But the vocabuluary! Ack! It's chock full of flowery speech and words I don't otherwise know (and I wouldn't be surprised if there are some weird verb forms or something too), and that seems hard. I had not realized how much I now depend on rudimentary comprehension. Two years ago comprehension was a pipe dream and I was just reading words; now comprehension is possible and I'm noticing how comprehensible the Akeidah (which I'm reading Tuesday) is and how comprehensible Ha'azinu is not.

Someone else can have this portion next year; I'm going to try to load up on more Genesis. :-)