cellio | Entries tagged with shabbat

( local event )

Very occasionally we have a bar or bat mitzvah at the Friday-night service. Perhaps ironically (given the d'var torah I just posted), this week was one of those. With a couple small exceptions, it was pretty much spot-on what such a service should be.

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I found the first 40% of Rabbi Eric Yoffie's sermon at the URJ biennial an interesting read. (The rest isn't uninteresting, but it's not my focus here.) He talks about increasing the importance of Shabbat in our communities. He's saying some things I've been saying for years, which is gratifying. (More people listen to him than to me, after all.)

When we undertook to revive Erev Shabbat worship, our intention was not to focus solely on a single hour of Friday night prayer. Erev Shabbat was to be the key, opening the door to a discussion of the Shabbat day in all its dimensions. [...] With members returning to the synagogue on Friday nights, we had hoped that some of them would also be drawn to our Shabbat morning prayer and to a serious conversation about the meaning of Shabbat. But this has not happened, and we all know one reason why that is so:

He goes on to talk about the bar-mitzvah service as typically seen in Reform congregations. What usually happens is that the celebrating family "owns" the service, so the rest of the community doesn't come because we feel shut out, so the family feels justified in claiming everything ("they don't come anyway"), so the bar mitzvah stops being about welcoming the child into his new role in the community. Rabbi Yoffie writes: "At the average bar mitzvah what you almost always get is a one-time assemblage of well-wishers with nothing in common but an invitation." I wasn't there at the formation, but I assume this is one of the reasons that our informal Shabbat-morning minyan formed: we have a regular community (with enough infusions to avoid becoming stagnant) that celebrates its members' milestones but feels no need to go upstairs afterwards. I go to shul on Shabbat morning to celebrate Shabbat in community, not to attend the theatre.

What typically happens in Orthodox and Conservative congregations, on the other hand, is that the bar mitzvah is a part of the community service: we celebrate with the family, but the family celebrates with the community. The focus is on Shabbat, not on the child. I have seen this work beautifully. It's not absent in Reform congregations (I saw it once at Holy Blossom in Toronto), but it's sure not the norm.

So what are we going to do about it? Rabbi Yoffie has brought the conversation to a broader forum (we've been talking about this problem in our congregations and on mailing lists for years). Rabbi Yoffie wisely recognizes it as part of a bigger issue: the place of Shabbat in the lives of modern, liberal Jews.

Also, other approaches to enhancing Jewish life have failed. Communal leaders outside of the synagogue love to talk the language of corporate strategy. They engage in endless debates on the latest demographic study. They plan elaborate conferences and demand new ideas. But sometimes we don't need new ideas; we need old ideas. We need less corporate planning and more text and tradition; less strategic thinking and more mitzvot; less demographic data and more Shabbat. Because we know, in our hearts, that in the absence of Shabbat, Judaism withers.

He talks about the importance of the whole day of Shabbat, not just the hour or three you spend at services. Hear, here. The URJ is trying to start this conversation in individual congregations, creating study programs and focus groups who will try, really try, to explore a more-meaningful Shabbat and report back. I'd love to be part of that conversation in my own congregation, should it happen. I already take Shabbat seriously, but there's still plenty to learn. And one of my biggest challenges is the shortage of a community that wants to keep doing Shabbat after morning services end. Shabbat afternoons, especially in the summer, can be pretty lonely for me.

Renewing some form of regular Shabbat observance among the members of our Movement will take time, and what we are proposing is only the first step. The plan is to begin with a chosen few and to heat the core, in the hope that the heat generated will then radiate in ever-widening circles.
But surely we must begin. Shabbat, after all, is not just a nice idea. It is a Jewish obligation and one of the Ten Commandments -- indeed the longest and most detailed of them all.

Where will it go? I don't know, but I'm glad to see people talking about it.

This morning about half an hour into services the fire alarm went off. It's one of those newfangled piercing ones that you can't just ignore (I suppose that's the point), so we started to file out. The executive director met us in the hall and said "get your coats and go wait outside; it's a false alarm". After getting my coat I started to go back for the sefer torah but was deterred.

After about five minutes the director said it wasn't a false alarm after all (but no one was panicking either), so the fire trucks were on their way and we should probably go home. I suggested we try to relocate and continue the service. Someone else said she lives a couple blocks away, so we decided to go there. The director wouldn't let us back in for the sefer torah and siddurim, but eventually consented to let the rabbi and one other person go in. So the rest of us headed over to the house and they did that. (We ended up with about one siddur for every 2-3 people, but that was fine. I learned that I have more of the service memorized than I had thought.)

We did lose a couple people along the way, but most joined us and it was a pleasant experience. We were already reduced in number because the URJ biennial is happening this week, so we all fit in the living room. I read torah on the dining-room table, and people just moved around as needed to make that work. (I gave the hosts the aliyot -- seemed fitting.) After the service our hosts brought out wine for kiddush, and we also had food. Around then we got word that everything was fine back at the synagogue, so when we were done schmoozing a few of us carried everything back.

(If I understand correctly, something in the kitchen (I think a fridge) fried itself somehow. The kitchen was not in use at the time.)

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I was recently asked about this, and I don't know what the current thinking is.

The question of when an astronaut observes Shabbat (while in space) is well-understood. [1] But what happens when we colonize other planets and your hometown is on Mars? Do you count six Mars-days and observe the seventh as Shabbat? How long is a month (and how do you decide which moon)? Is it still desirable to stay in sync with Earthly seasons, or will that go out the window? If you follow the sun as locally experienced, what happens when that causes hardship? (Does the lunar colony observe one ~29-day Shabbat every seven months?) There must be commentary on this by now from sources other than Wandering Stars, but I don't know what the popular opinion is.

[1] I know of three opinions for the astronaut in space: follow your hometown, follow the city from which you launched (your port of departure, like for ships), or follow Jerusalem. All of these involve a ~25-hour Shabbat every seven days, like on Earth, even though your orbit might cause you to see a 90-minute day. But the astronaut is, by definition, just visiting.

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I'm on a mailing list for discussing worship issues in the Reform movement. Recently there's been a discussion of services on Shabbat morning. Someone posted about his congregation's successful early service, which draws people who wouldn't attend the bar-mitzvah service that is largely unfriendly to the community. Someone else chastised that person, accusing him of Balkanization of the synagogue and saying that those people should go to the bar mitzvah. This morning I posted the following, which I want to preserve here. (I am not the person who introduced the phrase "bar-mitzvah show", FYI.)

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( Dogs in the Vineyard )

( Shabbat lunch )

( Purim SCA event )

( short takes )

We went to Toronto this weekend to visit family. It was a fun trip. ( Read more... )

This year's tikkun (late-night torah study) was great! Best one I've been to. (And Shavuot is my favorite holiday, so that made this even better.) I'm not going to try to distill it down into a post two days later; sorry. You will, however, be seeing some posts inspired by it.

( Shavuot )

( Shabbat )

Found on the way to looking up something else, an interesting sermon: what God made us good at. Food for thought.

Shabbat was pleasantly low-key. Friday night our cantorial soloist and pianist were both out, and the associate rabbi is in Israel with a swarm of congregants (41 people! largest trip we've had so far), so it was just my rabbi (with his guitar) in the bimah.

The torah-study group reached the end of a book today. We don't do parsha hashuva; we (well, they) started at the first word of B'reishit (Genesis) 17 years ago, and today we finished Bamidbar (Numbers). So, as is traditional, we held a party. Everyone brought something and, hey, it wasn't all desserts. :-) I brought spinach quiche, which works fine at room temperature; I actually took them over to the synagogue Friday morning so I wouldn't have to shlep them today. They were completely gone at the end, so I guess people liked them. :-)

We should find excuses to have pot-lucks more often; we shouldn't have to wait for the end of D'varim. It was nice to be able to sit and talk with people for longer than the usual after-service chatting.

I spent some time talking with one of our regulars (also not raised in a Jewish home). She said very flattering things about me. We talked about studying talmud; she's currently taking a class she really likes, taught by Rabbi Schiff, who I've heard wonderful things about. The class assumes you've been through the Melton program; Melton is some sort of national two-year program that lots of people have good things to say about (including the person I was talking with, who took it about a decade ago). One of the rabbis at HUC this summer suggested I take it, but I missed it for this year so that'll be next fall at the earliest. From the description of Rabbi Schiff's talmud class, though, it sounds like I'd do just fine; the private study with my rabbi has given me some useful skills. So if that class comes around again, I might take it.

The person who coordinates torah readers for the morning service asked me if I could do Beshalach (in six weeks). I'm signed up to do Mishpatim (two weeks later), so I said I could do one or the other. (Actually, the fourth aliya of Mishpatim is short, but why push it?) But I want to check something first; the fourth aliya of Beshalach is Shirat HaYam, the song at the sea, and it has special trope. If we're only going to do it once every seven years (the way we divide up the portions), we should darn well do it with the special trope! But is my rabbi planning to do it himself? I'd be happy to learn it but happier to be able to hear him do it. So I asked the coordinator to check the rabbi's availability that week before I start to learn it.

I spent some time this afternoon working on biblical Hebrew. I'm working through The First Hebrew Primer, an excellent book for adults. There does not appear to be a second primer by these authors; does that mean when I finish this book I'll be able to read? Somehow I don't think it's that simple, so I wonder what the next step is. (File away to ask my rabbi when I get closer.)

Shabbat afternoon I got a phone call from my rabbi. Could I lead a shiva minyan that night at 7? 7 is rather before sundown these days, so I asked if it was in Squirrel Hill. No, he said, Oakland.

I hesitated. He heard the pause. I said I try not to drive on Shabbat. He said I was pretty far down on the list of people he could call. I hesitated a bit and then said yes, I'd do it.

( omphalokepsis ahead )

( liturgical oddities )

I stayed for a while after the service; they seemed to want that. The person I know introduced me to assorted relatives, one of whom sits on the national movement's board of trustees. (Or directors. I'm not sure which we have.) He asked if I'd been through the para-rabbinic program and I said I'm in it now. We talked for a while about the program, which he feels is very important. He had been to services the previous night and asked me some things about our congregation; he seemed to be favorably impressed with us. I'll try to remember to pass that on to my rabbi.

He asked me where I'd learned Hebrew and I said it was mostly by coming to services and studying torah and a little from a couple classes. He then asked me, in Hebrew, if I speak Hebrew, at which point I, err, provided a clear demonstration that comprehension is easier than generation. I knew what he said; I knew what I wanted to say; I didn't know how to formulate it. (And, well, I didn't know one verb I wanted to use.) So I shrugged and said "katan" -- which means "small" but probably doesn't mean "a little", but that was the best I could do. This is the second time this has happened to me, so I should prepare an answer for time #3.

( language stuff )

Thursday night Dani and I drove to Silver Spring to spend Purim and Shabbat with friends. It was a lot of fun, and I'm glad Dani decided to go with me. (And not just because that meant he drove through the foggy mountains at night. :-) )

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Obligatory Frienditto thingy: I'm not using it (really see no point; my journal is archived on LJ and on my computer). I expect that no one on my friends' list would violate my trust by publicly posting locked entries. I presume the tempest in the teapot will die down Real Soon Now.

Shabbat was pleasant. Saturday morning a young man who was bar mitzvah last summer read torah for our minyan (for the second time since his bar mitzvah). I'm glad that he's continuing to both attend and participate, and that he feels comfortable reading in front of our group.

The start-up that Dani works for has a major deadline Monday, so he worked all day Saturday. And all evening, and night. Whee. I met him for dinner after Shabbat and then met his co-workers. When we walked in the lead engineer turned to me and said something like "ready to write some LISP?". I said "LISP? I thought you were a Java shop", and he shrugged and started talking about something else. So I gave it no further thought at the time, figuring it was some sort of odd joke or something. (I just assumed that Dani had, somewhere along the line, talked about his wife the former LISPer.)

I asked Dani about it today, and he said that, in fact, one third-party tool they have to intergrate with has an API that resembles a cross between C and LISP. I didn't ask for details, but he said there's clearly a LISP interpreter under there somewhere because they get error messages that include names of LISP functions. Weird.

It's been almost 15 years since I wrote LISP professionally, but it was a fantastic language and if I'd known the guy was serious, I would have asked him to tell me more. I'd have been willing to give them a couple hours. (I have another friend there too.) Now, it probably wouldn't have been a net savings for him, because he would have had to teach me enough about the application to be useful, but...

This morning I participated in the annual Shabbat service held by the (Pittsburgh) Jewish Women's Center. I'm not really a member of the group (been to a couple functions, on the mailing list, don't pay dues), but several women in my congregation are and they recruited some of the rest of us.

I chanted torah, and it was the longest portion I've done to date (about three-quarters of a column in the scroll). I was a little worried about that, but apparently I wasn't the only one so they told us "do as much as you can and we'll fill in from a chumash as necessary". However, I really wanted to meet this challenge.

( torah-reading stuff )

The service overall went pretty well. There was a lot of singing, and I knew about two-thirds of the melodies (but picked up most of the others trivially). They handed out percussion instruments; next time I will do predatory choosing and take the large loud tambourine to keep it out of the hands of someone sitting next to me. :-) The song leader was very good (she's a pro) and the service leaders in general were good.

We used what I gather is the latest draft of Mishkan T'filah, the forthcoming Reform siddur. (Y'know, the economics of publishing have really changed. They've published a bunch of draft editions; I don't think that would have been feasible a generation ago.) They were on loan from URJ so I couldn't borrow one for a few days to look it over more closely; oh well. They've fixed some of the things I considered to be bugs in earlier drafts, but they've introduced some things that really annoy me. Oh well; I guess that's an inevitable consequence of committee-produced products.

The service was long (almost three hours, without musaf), and also started late. It was funny -- at 9:30 (the scheduled start time) the organizers were huddling in the front of the room, and all of the people from my congregation were exchanging glances. We start on time, always (barring something really unusual). Others present made comments about "Jewish standard time" and thought nothing of starting (ultimately) 15-20 minutes late.

( liturgical minutiae )

All in all, it was a pretty good service, with some things I liked and some I didn't care for. People were very friendly and everyone was working together, which made a big difference.

If they ask me to participate in a future service I'm not sure what I'll say. On the one hand it was fun, but on the other, it was a lot of work to learn the portion and I didn't get to put that work to use for the benefit of my own congregation. Maybe that means I should focus on chanting torah in my own congregation and ask to lead a part of the service if JWC invites me again. Leading doesn't require nearly the preparation that chanting torah does.

After I got home Dani and I headed out to an SCA event. More about that later, but I will mention the Jewish tie-in here. Halacha holds that if a negative consequence of keeping Shabbat is merely financial (and not of the will-be-out-on-the-street-if-this-goes-wrong variety), you keep Shabbat. This is one of the reasons that we don't conduct business on Shabbat even though you could make more money by keeping your store open on Saturday. More personally, it was the basis for my agreeing to let Dani drive my car -- with its previously-pristine clutch -- to the event, though Dani normally drives an automatic. Ouchy ouchy ouchy. :-)

Friday our congregation had a dinner after (early) services. It's become our tradition to have a dinner for the last Shabbat of the secular year; it started the last time new year's eve fell on a Friday night.

The plan was a catered main dish with people bringing side dishes to share with the people at their tables, but you can't get a caterer for new year's eve. That was fine, though; we had declared that the main dish would be fish (because I'm the committee chair and I feel strongly about the kashrut issues that would arise if we served meat), so I told the person at the synagogue that I would take care of it. She thought that would be too much work; I explained about cooking three-course dinners for 100 people and that took care of it. Yay, SCA experience. :-)

I got huge amounts of undeserved praise for what was a very simple dish. I hadn't really planned on making it generally known that I was cooking, actually, but I failed to clue my rabbi in about that. Oops. People gushed about the fish, beyond the usual bounds of polite thanks. I was pretty surprised. (I also note with amusement that twice now I've said I wanted to serve fish for a big dinner and had people balk because "people don't like fish"; the other time had similar results. And no, I'm not some sort of fish expert.)

Ok, for the curious: spray or oil a pan, lay grouper fillets in pan, top with thinly-sliced white onions, pour a little olive oil over that, apply spices (garlic powder, oregano, black pepper), top with diced tomatoes. Seal with foil, bake at 425. Check after 20 minutes. Because we were cooking for 55, I used canned tomatoes; in the past I've used sliced plum tomatoes instead, in which case you want to add a little liquid, either tomato sauce or white wine. Sprinkle with chopped fresh parsley right before serving.

I specifically chose grouper for this because it's a very durable and forgiving fish. I knew that we were going to have to hold this at low temperature for a couple hours (Shabbat started two hours before dinner), and I know that cooking times can get out of whack when dealing with large quantities and fully-loaded ovens. (I had two layers of fish in each pan and had to bake it for 30 minutes before turning the ovens down to 200 to hold.) You can do stuff like that to grouper; don't try this with cod. It'll disintegrate -- or, if you didn't add enough liquid, dry out.

Shabbat services were well-attended this week. I think we have a significant number of interfaith families in the congregation, so I wouldn't have been surprised by sparse attendance.

This morning my rabbi asked us to mention, during this darkest part of the year, something that brought light into our lives. Most people mentioned family in some form. He pointed out that where there's light there's also darkness, and certainly all families have times of strife (including Yaakov's family, which we read about one final time this week).

My family is pretty good in that department; there are some tensions and disagreements, of course, but mostly we all get along pretty well. I'm lucky to have parents who still love each other very much and other family members who are doing ok. My niece still needs some basic socialization, but oh well. (Her younger brother, who used to be a real brat, has grown up considerably, and is better behaved than she is at the moment.)

We visited them this evening for dinner and exchange of loot. (It's not my holiday, but it's theirs. I can play along to keep them happy.) Everyone seemed to be happy with what we got them. We had one challenge: my parents had hinted that they'd like a new card table and chairs, but it's not practical to wrap that. So we stashed them on the porch, and I wrapped up a deck of cards. When they opened that I said "and here's something to play them on" and we brought in the real gift. That went over well.

My father had asked Dani to bring his laptop along (it's a Mac running Panther). They spent a while playing with it before dinner, and he liked a lot of what he saw. So the copy of Panther we got him went over very well when we gave it to him later.

On our way home, several blocks from my parents' house but not yet on the highway, I observed to Dani that the car felt a little bumpier than I know this road to be, and asked if he had a flat tire. (I had a specific nominee based on the feel of the ride.) That was in fact the case. It looked like it might be fixable with an air compressor (at least for the nonce), so I called my parents to ask the location of the nearest gas station with air. They said they had a compressor, so we went back there. (At tonight's temperatures, driving on it and risking damage to the rim seemed like a better idea than changing the tire.) It turned out, though, that the tire has problems beyond what a refill can solve, so I suggested that we're paying AAA for five service calls a year and it's awfully cold out. It didn't take much to convince Dani that we could wait inside my parents' nice warm house for someone to show up and do this for us.

We were promised service within the hour and someone showed up 45 minutes later. With the right tools (a real jack rather than the toy that came with the car, and a power ratchet set instead of a hand wrench) he had the tire changed in just a few minutes and we were on our way. It turned out that my parents know the guy, because small towns are like that. In the process of digging out the doughnut Dani stumbled on the air compressor that he'd forgotten he had (and I never knew about). Heh. Not that it would have helped this time, of course, but it's useful to know that it's there.

This Shabbat was the first of four in a row where we have no bar or bat mitzvah. This means our rabbi gets to stay for the entire informal morning service -- yay! It's nice that we have lay people who can conduct the service and read torah, but this really is his minyan in many ways, and I feel bad when scheduling makes him miss some of it.

Torah readers are assigned through mid-March. This is the farthest ahead we've been scheduled for a while! I don't know when I'll next read there; I'm probably reading for a women's service in February, but that's a different group. (They asked for volunteers to read torah or lead parts of the service; I said I could do either but have Opinions about content of the latter that I'd like to discuss before committing. So it looks like I get torah reading, which is fine.)

( minor puzzles )

Saturday night was my company's holiday party. It was huge! We've been growing a lot, but when people are spread out it's not as obvious. Put us all in one room with significant others and... wow. We missed the party last year, and this was much bigger than two years ago.

The party was fun; the organizers did a good job with it. This year, unlike last year (I'm told), we did not run out of food. Dani found a wine that was sweet enough for him (a Riesling, but I failed to get specifics). Some people brought instruments and were jamming in the front room; I didn't bring any on the theory that it would be Christmas music, but it turns out that would have been ok (they were improvising, mostly). On the other hand, for expedience I would have brought drums, not the hammer dulcimer -- and one of my coworkers is really good on drums, so there wouldn't have been much I could contribute. But I enjoyed listening, so that was fine.

Today the washer and dryer rebelled. (What did we ever do to them?) The washer has decided that it doesn't like the rinse cycle, so it just stops there. We can drain the water and reset it to get it to fill and agitate again, hacking a rinse, but it won't spin. Bah. And then the dryer decided that heat was optional, though once we took the front panel off to look for a fuse (unsuccessfully) and took the vent stack apart looking for a lint clog (nope), it began to give us lackluster heat. I guess we just needed to speak sternly to it -- for now.

The appliances came with the house (five years ago) and weren't new then. I wonder what the usual life-expectancy is on these things. I guess we should find out what a service call costs, and whether he'll give us a break for two appliances in one visit.

So, hours after I expected to be done, my shirts are slowly drying, jeans are queued up behind them, and Dani has a load queued up behind that. Whee.

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.

I got home from Pennsic around 4:30 on Friday. I'll have a long Pennsic report later.

Between unpacking (not complete yet, of course), tiredness, feline demands for attention, and a heavy storm that came through around 6:30 that didn't seem to be ending, I decided not to go to evening services. I needed the decompression time more. So I didn't find out until I showed up Saturday morning that my rabbi has been in the hospital for the last several days -- he's ok now, and apparently was discharged today (I tried to call him there but failed), but he obviously wasn't available to lead services. The director knew that I was out of town, so she called my very-capable vice-chair, who lined up people to lead services, read torah, and give a sermon. It sounds like they did a great job. I wish I'd seen it.

The effect on me, though, was that when I walked in at 8:20 or so this morning, the director met me and said I needed to lead the service and torah study. The service was not a problem at all (and I got a bunch of compliments, though the sopranos were unhappy with my taste in keys :-) ), but my lack of preparation was blatantly obvious at torah study. And to make matters worse, we were in that long stretch of Numbers 7 that describes offerings from each and every tribe, in painstaking detail, and they're all the same. What can you do with that? I tried to get people to talk about why the torah would go to that much trouble instead of saying "each tribe brought the following stuff", but I didn't have a clever answer myself so the conversation rambled quite a bit. Oh well; when my rabbi comes back next week, if he doesn't like the fact that we covered about 80 verses in one week, he's free to backtrack. :-) I just feel a little bad that we probably didn't give a good impression to the young couple that was visiting us for the first time today. (They left immediately after the service, so I didn't get a chance to talk with them.)

We have an associate rabbi, whose plane returning from military training was delayed by those storms. At 8:20 they hoped he would be there for the 10:30 bat-mitzvah service; that no one raided our minyan at 10:25 for a leader led me to conclude that he had made it. I saw the director on the way out and she confirmed this, though she also said that she would have called the cantorial soloist, who is out on maternity leave, before raiding us. We don't dress formally for the early minyan, so that's probably right, though I also told her that I can do Shabbat services on basically no notice (sans torah :-) ) should this be needed in the future.

I came home to find that Dani was home from Pennsic, which surprised me. He told me that they had gotten major storms all night, much of the nearby land was swamp, cars were getting stuck in the mud, all the canvas was soaked, and camp tear-down is now tomorrow instead. Sounds wise. Fortunately, he'd eaten before getting home, so the fact that I hadn't factored him into my lunch plans was not a problem.

Shabbat went pretty well. Friday night my committee led services; I did most of the music, and we had several readers (one per section of the service), lay torah readers (two), and a sermon by a lay member. All of them did good jobs, and I think most of them enjoyed it. Walter, another member of the committee, sang the opening song and the anthem (the latter goes after the sermon). He has a wonderful voice and is a good orator (with speech and song).

My music mostly went well, and I received many compliments. Our cantorial soloist was there (with her two-week-old child), and she complimented me too. That felt nice! There were some glitches, all of which can be chalked up to "Monica is not used to working with an accompanist", and sadly, some of them were obvious to the congregation. One was not, because the aforementioned accompanist is very good. (There are a bunch of different settings of one song out there, and we had discussed which one to do. He played an intro that sounded to me like one of the others, I concluded that he had goofed and started to sing that one, and he concluded that I had goofed and followed me -- without music in front of him and while tranposing into a different key. As it turns out, the intros really are that similar but we hadn't noticed.)

The committee as a whole received a bunch of compliments; we were widely perceived as relaxed, comfortable, and competent, and a couple people told me they found the service to be moving because the leaders were obviously engaged -- praying and not just reciting. I hope some of them tell these things to the rabbi. :-)

My rabbi had asked me to lead torah study Saturday morning with some materials he had prepared, so I got an advance copy to review and scribble on. (I was trying to plan the conversation -- where to pause for discussion, what points to try to tease out of the group, and so on.) We usually have 10-20 people for study; today we had four. I expected the group to be smaller, but not that much smaller. Fortunately, the other three participated rather than just sitting and listening, and they were generally supportive, and things went fine.

The low turnout was foreshadowing, alas. This is only the second time I have seen this group not get a minyan. (The other time was on a cold, snowy winter day with hazardous roads.) We had eight people. I did a good job of leading the service, I think (many of the people who showed up thanked me later). We couldn't read torah without a minyan, but the two people who had prepared the portion (the same ones who read Friday night -- re-use is good) read it out of a chumash (that's allowed) and led a discussion of the parsha, which most people participated in. So that worked out. We read haftarah without the blessing, which I think was correct. (Reading it is fine, as reading the torah text was fine. What I'm not sure of is whether the blessing requires a minyan, so I erred on the side of caution, and for parity with the torah reading.)

Noted in passing: there is one prayer (kedusha) where if you don't have a minyan you say a different version. (Other things you just omit in the absence of a minyan.) Our siddur doesn't have the alternate text; it assumes a minyan. It turns out I have it memorized, though, so no biggie.

There are a few reasons for the low turnout. A lot of people are out of town for various reasons; I knew that. Attendance is always a little lower (but still higher than this!) when it is known that my rabbi won't be there but the associate rabbi will. (My rabbi built this service and is very strongly connected with it.) It's clear, though, that at least some people who will come for the associate rabbi won't come for a layperson, even a layperson who is a regular who knows the service inside and out. That attitude could be a hurdle if we try to increase lay involvement in our services more generally -- it's the whole "no one but the rabbi is good enough" problem. We need to figure out how widespread that attitude is and what to do about it.

I have a theory about meetings at my company. For any meeting that does not involve food or take place in a room with too few chairs, assume the offset from the scheduled meeting time is is 2 minutes plus 1 minute per attendee (in the late direction, of course). This actually seems to track with my previous few companies, too.

Cheat out, an essay that siderea wrote about one particular SCA group, has a lot of application in other groups, SCA and non-.

This explanation of "shabbos goy" made me giggle in places but is basically right (link via almeda).

A while ago I wrote about the contrast in attitudes between two (I thought) 80-something women in my congregation. Last Shabbat I learned two surprising things: the one with the great outlook on life, who seems young (despite having lost her husband of 65 years not long ago), just turned 93 -- and the cranky shrew for whom nothing is ever good enough, who seems "old", is only in her mid-70s. What a difference attitude makes!

(I attempted to post this Sunday but LJ didn't seem to like it. Hmm.)

I spent part of Shabbat with the gracious murmur311, who took me to services at her congregation Friday night and another Saturday morning. (Hers doesn't have Saturday services this month. Lack of critical mass, I gather.)

( services and torah study )

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.

Monica

[SCA] Siege at Harlech Castle

Shabbat evening

Shabbat in the Reform movement

unusual shabbat

Shabbat

Shabbat (and other times) on Mars

interviewed by filkerdave

communities and the "bar-mitzvah show"

assorted updates

trip to Toronto

Shavuot, Shabbat

Shabbat

shiva minyan, and community versus personal needs

Purim and Shabbat (road trip)

miscellany: frienditto, Shabbat, programming

JWC Shabbat service

Shabbat dinner

Shabbat, family visit

weekend stuff

mostly Shabbat (or "welcome to my rabbi's world, again")

Shabbat

Shabbat

short takes

Shabbat

why do we pray?

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