Monica

He did a very good job with the Friday-night service. He seemed at ease on the bimah, and he spoke well during the sermon. (Not reading and mostly not from notes either; I want to learn how to do that!) I know that he feels a little uncertain about his English (not his first language), but really, he did fine. Nothing to worry about there. (Hebrew aside: he pronounces the ayin. I can't quite figure out how; more observation is needed.)

He had never been to the informal morning service, so he asked the chair of the worship committee to have someone in the group lead it and the chair asked me. (I told him to give others the chance first and he did ask a couple people, who declined. Only later did it occur to me that maybe some people are nervous about leading in front of a rabbi, as opposed to when we're on our own. I, on the other hand, am not bothered by that in the least, any more. :-) )

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Friday night I met next week's bar mitzvah and his parents. They seem like nice folks, and I'm glad we got to say hello to each other sometime before the rehearsal on Tuesday. They didn't stay for the oneg after the service, so I didn't get much chance to talk with them. Because I am not quick enough on the uptake, I failed to thank them for allowing me to play a role in their simcha. Must say so at the rehearsal. After all, they are making a sacrifice and taking a chance; when they started planning we expected to have a rabbi available that week, and they only have my rabbi's word that I'm up to the task. I want to make sure they're comfortable.

Shabbat morning we had a first-time torah reader. He did a good job and had some interesting things to say about the portion (which, alas, have not cohered in my brain). Every time a new person from our minyan decides to take a shot at reading torah and leading that part of the service I do a little happy dance inside. :-)

I will be conducting the torah study next week. (I had been assuming that the chair of the worship committee would do it, but he'll be out of town.) We're in Va'etchanan, in the repetition of the ten commandments. After an animated discussion these last couple weeks about "do not murder", next week we move on to "don't commit adultery". So I have to think about how to structure that and have some provocative conversation-starters on tap. This is one part of the job I'm not very good at yet -- I can participate in study (though less effectively at 8:30 in the morning), but guiding it is something I need more practice with. So, I'm getting practice, which is good. (I've done this in this group twice before, once with preparation and once with 30 seconds' notice.)

The first draft of Friday's sermon is almost done. I need some transitional bits in a few places and a better wrap-up. Then I need to put it aside for a day or two and then revise.

The part assignments for Friday's service are all taken care of. I was surprised to learn that of the four people from the worship committee (other than me) who are involved, only one is comfortable leading the Hebrew reading of ma'ariv aravim -- and I'm already using her for the torah service. I could do that part, of course, but then it would be obvious to the congregation at large that the person leading that section couldn't, and I don't want to cause embarrassment. So I asked the cantorial soloist to do it; that'll make it look like I planned to give her a role that's a little different. (She'll already be up there, having just lead barchu.) I think I'm starting to get a little better at those "people skills" I hear so much about. :-)

I've got the torah reading pretty much under control. Tomorrow I will move from practicing with the nice, neat print-out from Trope Trainer to practicing from the sometimes-fuzzy, sometimes-sloppy calligraphy in a printed tikkun. That's more realistic. (I am also promised access to the actual scroll for practice.)

All together, I'm doing, in one week, several parts of the job my rabbi does so smoothly (and, seemingly, effortlessly) -- leading services (two), reading torah, giving a sermon, conducting study, and coordinating the efforts of other congregants involved in the services. Some of my preparation has been spread out over several weeks; my rabbi does this every single week. Of course, he doesn't have another job -- but he does have a family, pastoral duties, administrative duties, community duties, and more. Still, this is all providing an interesting window into (part of) my rabbi's world.

Fortunately, all the rabbis in town have cross-coverage agreements, so there is zero chance that I would be called on to do a funeral while he's gone.

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( funeral )

( an observation about music )

( an observation about eulogies )

( later )

Today ian_gunn and eclectic_1 came for lunch with their two daughters. It was nice to have some time to catch up with them; we pretty much never get up to New Hampshire and with small children they don't always get to Pennsic. It's unfortunate that a sad occasion brought us together, but at least we did manage to get together.

The burial is tomorrow in Johan's home town, so the family went there today. Ian and Eclectic One are staying at the house through the weekend, which works out well for everyone -- they get a place to stay and the house isn't looter-bait. (I'm horrified by the apparent trend of people scanning obituaries and robbing houses during funerals.)

We talked a little about delivery, especially when working with a set text (not notes). It's fine -- even not uncommon -- to go ahead and write in stage directions to address your weaknesses -- "slow down", "breathe", "look up", etc. Color highlighting can mark phrases that ought to be emmphasized or places where you specifically want to pause. No one else will see your copy; do whatever works.

I mentioned the challenge of the text-study assignment (I characterized it as "working with people you don't know at all, with different backgrounds, to produce something quickly"), but we didn't really get into it. Another time, maybe. Or maybe I've learned all I can from that experience already.

We talked about next steps within the congregation. He's still a little unsure of how to handle Friday-night services; he said he'd be happy to have me read torah, so maybe I'll start with that. We talked about kabbalat shabbat with no resolution; I said that there's only one Shabbat in the next several months I'll be away and he has but to name a date. We got interrupted while we were talking about this and didn't get to finish, so I'll follow up.

I did not get a chance to ask about further study (much); I haven't asked his opinion about Melton, Drisha, Hebrew College, and others. I'd like to hear his thoughts on those. Next meeting, then.

I did ask (on the way out the door) about Hebrew. He mentioned a publisher called EKS as a good source. I mentioned courses at Pitt; he thinks they start with modern and then go to biblical and you can't just jump into biblical there. But, he said, you really have to learn the two together anyway; you can't do just biblical and be effective. So he thinks a two-pronged approach would work: learn modern at JEI and biblical with him, replacing our talmud study with Hebrew study. The next round of courses at JEI should start in September, so I'll see what they have to offer. The course I took there several years ago didn't work for me, but it's been several years and maybe that style of teaching will work better now.

Edit: Ok, I thought EKS sounded vaguely familiar. I actually have one of their books. A friend and I started to work through it a while back. Time to pull it out again.

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The feel of this year's program is somewhat different from last year. I don't know how much of that is me, how much is this particular group of people, and how much is the program itself. I was talking with a classmate tonight who's also feeling it.

I've sometimes described Level 1 as "open brain, insert knowledge, shake until blended". It was overwhelming but exhilerating. I didn't get much sleep but I rode that wave for a week and it was grand. Yes, of course there were problems, but the overall feeling was still "wow". This year is positive -- don't get me wrong! -- but the balance of content is different and I'm having more trouble catching that wave.

They gave us an hour and a half a day (well, less any transit time) to work on assignments; one of the problems last year was not having enough time to work on the services, so that was good. But they gave us a second group assignment and two individual assignments that occupied that work time and then some, so it feels like I'm learning less. Yes, if we punt on one or both of the individual assignments the world will not end, and they encouraged us to do so if we need to, but I'm here to learn as much as I can.

Yes, the work time is being spent learning practical skills (as side-effects of the assignments), but I think I'm learning them more slowly than if I were being guided by a teacher, so the density of learning is lower this year -- same amount of time, less overall learning. I don't know what they could reasonably do about that, mind. Maybe, just as the service groups have assigned advisors, the text-study groups should have had advisors too. That might have eliminated some of the disconnects in my group. Yes, we're all adults and we can ask for help when we need it, but having someone there who spots the landmine before we saunter up to it and say "ooh, what's this shiny thing?" might be helpful.

I should stress again that I've taken a lot of good classes this week. I do not at all regret coming; I just hoped for a slightly different experience than I'm getting.

Mind, some of it is certainly me. More specifically, this week has done a lot to convince me that I would never hack it in rabbinic school, at least at HUC, and while I wasn't planning to try to go to rabbinic school any time soon, it hurts to see that thought dashed. I wanted the decision against it to be my decision, dammit. This is, obviously, not an issue that the organizers of the program could or should address. My baggage, my problem. And I didn't realize it would even be a factor, so I didn't pack the right things in that baggage.

1. Your four favorite blogging topics are food, gaming, Judaism, and work. Does this represent a fair division of your life? Would you change the relative proportions, if you could? ( Read more... )

2. There are lots of similarities between being a technical documentation author and being a rabbi arguing over the mishnah. Do you like this analogy? How does it make you feel? ( Read more... )

3. You get the chance to make a major manufacturer or producer of goods and services introduce one new thing that you really want. It has to be currently physically possible (i.e. no teleport booths, no fusion reactors) and it will be priced realistically. What do you want? ( Read more... )

4. What's the biggest threat to your continued happiness? ( Read more... )

5. How many fences around fences do you feel comfortable drawing? As a Reform Jew, you have a duty to interpret for yourself. For example, we separate milk and meat because we are commanded not to boil a kid in it's mother's milk. The first fence is extending that to not cooking any meat in any milk. The second fence is to prohibit eating meat and milk at the same meal. The third fence extends this to not eating chicken (considered meat) with cheese even though chickens are in no way mammals, chicken eggs can be eaten with cheese, and fish can be eaten with cheese. Feel free to go with other rules, if you'd like. ( Read more... )

1. How has the field of software documentation evolved during your career?

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2. How did growing up in the SCA community in particular influence who you are now? Would you have grown into more or less the same person in a different social environment, such as your current congregation?

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3. If you could become a pen pal of any person from any time, with whom would you correspond? (To avoid paradox, assume that the person exists in a parallel universe, so you could even correspond with yourself from the past without causing reality to implode.)

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4. Alternatively, what do you do if the genie allows you to undo after seeing the consequences? Specifically, you may once instantly revert reality to a backup copy of the moment before he would have contacted you. Does your answer change if you could remember your experiences from the forked reality?

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5. How would you characterize the stories that you most enjoy reading or watching? How have these desiderata changed over time?

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Here's how this works:

1. If you want to be interviewed, leave a comment saying so.
2. I will respond, asking you five questions.
3. You'll update your journal with my five questions and your five answers.
4. You'll include this explanation.
5. You'll ask other people five questions when they want to be interviewed.

When I had been going to morning services for not very long, I noticed a pattern: people in the congregation were given aliyot (saying the blessings for torah reading; this is an honor) in a very rough rotation, but the guy who led services every day never got one. I think, in the 6+ years I've been going there, I've seen him get one once. (Granted, I only go once a week and there are torah readings twice a week plus a few. But still.) The torah reader almost never gets one either, because he's, well, reading. (While historically the person who said the blessings would also read, that hasn't been routinely true for a very long time. The convention now is that the reader and the blesser are two different people except under special circumstances.)

So anyway, that seemed ironic: the aliya is the usual and customary way of honoring someone just a little bit, even if you know it's going to come around to you eventually because you need three per torah reading and there are only 25 people in the minyan, but it's still an honor. And the people who serve the community so there can be a service at which to hand out aliyot never get that honor themselves. I felt bad for the folks in this situation.

But now I am that person (in small scale). I led the entire service this morning; next week the regular guy is going to sit in the congregation rather than up on the bimah (where he was today just in case I needed him to bail me out). I've been gradually working up to this for months, and now I'm there. The training wheels are off and I'm still vertical.

And y'know what? I haven't had an aliya in months and that's just fine. I feel no lack. Getting to lead the service is also an honor, a huge one in fact, and I don't need to be the person who says those blessings when I say so many others and get to spend the entire torah service in close proximity to the sefer torah every week anyway.

That a community is willing to (collectively) say "we entrust you as our representative in prayer" is a pretty darn big honor in its own right, after all. I won't turn down an aliya should it happen in the future, but I'd be just as happy to see it go to that quiet person in the back row.

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.

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The chairs were arranged in a circle. The instructors talked to us about our roles as leaders in our congregations and how we weren't just there for ourselves but to take things back. They thanked us for participating, and then gave anyone who wanted to the chance to talk. While this wasn't what they apparently intended, we ended up going around in a circle.

People mostly talked about how much they had enjoyed the past week, and some people highlighted specific things they had gotten out of it. For the most part people spoke personally and from the heart; this wasn't pro-forma thanks. Real friendships were formed in that week, and that touched people.

When it got to me (about three-quarters of the way around, so I had some time to think), I said roughly the following:

I've long been an analytical, academic type of person. When I found myself being drawn to Judaism, fairly early on I figured I'd better read the manual. (This got a big laugh.) So I read the Torah, and then much of the Kitzur Shulchan Aruch, and signed up for classes in Hebrew and Talmud. Later, I started connecting with the community -- and I'm part of a very close community now, but it took years to get there. So when I applied to this program, I thought I was going to college for a week. I was completely blind-sided by the community that we developed here in only a week, and I am thrilled to have had the chance to draw closer to everyone here.

(Remember, I never had the camp experience that many people did as kids. And while I've been part of communities that bonded, it never happened so quickly. Our annual shabbaton is an immersion experience similar to this, but that's with people I already know. These were strangers.)

The organizers are supposed to be creating a class mailing list for us so we can stay in touch between now and next year's session. They also distributed a roster with contact information. One of the members of the group is going to set up a web site and share all the photos he took, and I imagine that other people will send their photos to him too. It should be interesting to see how things develop now that we're all home.

After the formal wrap-up (and before lunch) people stayed around the chapel to say individual good-byes. More than half of my classmates praised the insights and questions I raised in class. Since I am someone who values intellect and is more comfortable with that than affect (I find it hard to really connect with people sometimes), this touched me. It's one thing to be praised as standing out among a random community; it's another among leaders.

Leigh (the cantorial student) told me I have an obvious talent for cantillation and I should stick with it. I told him there's no risk of me giving that up and I'll be back for year two of his cantillation class. (I also told him my Hebrew name. He approved. :-) )

During lunch we met some of the incoming second-year students, and I met someone I've corresponded with briefly. I'm looking forward to comparing notes with her when she gets home -- and picking her brain about what to expect in the second year.

The advance materials for this program said that we were committing to two summer sessions, two mid-year weekend sessions, and unspecified other coursework (with internet-based options). Also monthly (or better) meetings with our sponsoring rabbis for mentoring. This week they told us that they are relaxing all of that; basically, they said, we're all smart, motivated people and rather than micro-managing our educations, they're just going to offer stuff and we'll come to what we want. I'm a little surprised and disappointed by this; while I certainly don't need to be micro-managed, I had hoped for more support and guidance for next steps. For example, what internet-based courses? Perhaps this is one of the things they're planning to use the class mailing list for; they did tell us that we won't lack for information about upcoming opportunities. So, we'll see.

This also means they've left the sponsoring rabbis kind of dangling. I asked specifically what is expected of them now -- because as part of my application, both I and my rabbi signed a contract to do what was then specified, and we take our commitments seriously. They basically said to work with our rabbis and let them guide us. Um, ok. I'm happy to let my rabbi guide me, but I suspect he may have wanted more guidance in turn from the program. On the other hand, he's an experienced rabbi, we already meet regularly, and we have an excellent relationship, so this will probably work out in the end.

The drive home was uneventful (getting onto the highway was trivial compared to getting off :-) ), and I made better time getting home than getting there (a bit over five hours). I wonder how much was traffic, how much was tailwinds, and how much was my car's desire to go faster than might really be called for. (Seriously, this was my first road trip with the new car, and 70 in it feels like 60 did in the old car. Fortunately, I realized this on the way out and paid attention.)

The cats decided to forgive me rather than shunning me for abandoning them; getting home at dinner time probably helped. Dani told me that Embla actually demanded petting from him, which is pretty surprising. She must have been really lonely!

Short takes:

I haven't stayed in a college dorm since, well, college. And my college dorm room was somewhat unusual (the dorm was a renovated mansion). The rooms were adequate (at least they had individual AC), with a shared bathroom. I see now why they offered information about local hotels. I think being on campus is more important than being more comfortable, but wow. Twenty-year-olds handle dorm mattrsses much better than forty-year-olds do. :-)

Almost all of my classmates were apparently older than me, some by a couple decades. There were a few other people roughly my age, and one who might have been in her early 30s. (Have I mentioned that I'm bad at ages?) This is not the demographic I expected. It was around 2:1 women to men, by the way. About a third of the group were raised in Orthodox or Conservative homes and about a quarter were (declared) converts, so this was not overwhelmingly a group that grew up in the Reform movement.

The food was very good (and kosher, for the person who was asking about that). They brought in an Orthodox caterer (so yes, she stayed on campus during Shabbat), and she was very friendly. She said some nice things at the end about Orthodox and Reform Jews working together -- though we have differences to be sure, we also have a lot of shared values. And while it's hard to say for sure, I think she may have gained a new appreciation for the idea that Reform does not equal dismissive of tradition.