Monica

Saturday was the wedding of two friends, Krista and Ben. The short ceremony was nicely done; I hadn't realized that the groom is a preacher's kid until I saw that his father was conducting the service. Krista got a laugh by looking around the room with a glare when they got to the "if anyone has any objections..." part.

The reception had a higher ratio of SCA people to relatives than I expected. Boy, is it weird seeing SCA people in formal (non-SCA) dress. There was also the challenge of remembering people's real-world names in conversation. :-)

Just in case we didn't get enough food at the reception, there was a post-revel for some of the guests. This group seemed to include the SCA crowd and assorted friends of the bride's family who hadn't all been at the reception. (This party was hosted by the bride's mother.)

Over the weekend Dani's computer died. It had been sending up warning flares for a while, so this was not a complete surprise. So Sunday and Monday he went shopping, and to my surprise actually came home with a machine. Usually we have to special-order computers. (He had started by browsing Dell's site, but they wouldn't even ship until this coming Friday, so he decided to shop locally.) Amidst all this we learned that a party we'd been invited to on Monday, that had then been cancelled, was un-cancelled, but we found out too late to do anything about it. Oh well -- some other time.

Sunday afternoon I got a call from someone at VW who, after confirming that I've bought a car this year, asked if she could pay me $15 to take a customer survey about my experiencies. I told her I'd be delighted to do so. :-) Alas, the survey was more concerned about features than service, but that's ok too.

I began to catch up on the D&D log. (Ralph, I hope to have something posted in the next several days. Sorry for the delay.) I've commented before about how I enjoy the shared-world-fiction aspect of this.

I also pulled together some notes for tomorrow night's Worship meeting, where I'm going to give a summary of this summer's Sh'liach K'hilah program. Half the members of the committee have asked me about this individually, so I don't think people will mind spending meeting time on it. :-) Meanwhile, I've learned that the winter weekend session will be in LA and that it appears it won't actually cost an arm and a leg to get there.

We've been watching DVDs of Babylon 5 and West Wing alternately. We're nearing the ends of seasons 4 and 3 respectively. We have the first season of 24 to watch yet, and season 4 of West Wing ships at the end of the month. At the rate we watch TV, this'll hold us for a while.

A quick aside: one of the articles I came home with is "Music in the Synagogue: When the Chazzan 'Turned Around'", by William Sharlin (CCAR Journal, Jan 1962). It asserts that when the chazzan (cantor, prayer leader) faced the ark (and thus had his back to the congregation), prayer -- both his and the congregation's -- could be more heart-felt, private, and perhaps spontaneous. However, when the chazzan started facing the congregation, everyone got self-conscious. So how do you find seclusion for prayer in that kind of situation? He raises the question but doesn't answer it. I'm not sure I accept his premise; it sounds plausible but I haven't thought a lot about it yet. But he could be right. I certainly did notice on Friday night that I wasn't sure what to do with myself, physically, during the silent prayer at the end of the Amidah, when I was facing the congregation.

On to outreach...

The instructor stressed that "outreach" really means two things to her -- ahavat ger, welcoming the stranger, and kiruv, drawing (everyone) near. Our goal should be to build welcoming communities in general, recognizing that we have a diverse community with different needs. She also scored points with me by saying we need to not neglect the knowledgable, committed Jews in the process, or assume that everyone is a family (with kids). Data point: the NJPS survey in 2000 found that only 20% of Jewish households consisted of two parents plus kids; we (she says, and I agree) under-serve 80% of our households. (She talked about some programs that the Reform movement encourages to aid in all this; we received literature. :-)

We also received some good checklists on the theme of "is your congregation user-friendly?". Some of the points are excessive in my opinion (e.g. they suggest that your yellow-pages ad include a map), but others are things we could definitely be doing better on.

During the conversion class we looked at two texts, Avram's covenant with God and Ruth's conversion to Judaism. I noticed two interesting things here. First, with Avram God is the priority; with Ruth it seems to be more about peoplehood, with God as a side-effect. Second, Avram is given some assurances by God; Ruth is making a leap of faith with no real basis for predicting the outcome. (Will she be accepted by these people?) At least Avram had an invitation. So I guess it makes sense that Ruth rather than Avram is the model for conversion, because most of us don't receive divine invitations to do anything these days, but Avram's story makes a better source in setting priorities IMO. Yeah, we're also a people, but I think God has to come first or what's the point? (I realize this view is controversial with some.)

I found the CCAR guide on conversion to be largely familiar, which isn't surprising. :-) (The guide post-dates my conversion but had clearly been in progress for some years. My rabbi didn't follow it, but he did a lot of the same things and surely had input into the guide.) The format is clever: they have the core guidelines in the center of the page, with commentary, alternatives, and suggestions for implementation around the outside. It sort of resembles a page of talmud, which can't have been an accident.

According to the guide there are six questions a would-be convert has to answer affirmatively before being accepted. (This is a necessary, not sufficient, condition.) My rabbi used those same six but added a single word to one of them when I had to answer them; he added the word "exclusively" to "if you should be blessed with children, do you promise to raise them as Jews?". I approve of his addition. While I'm all for being as welcoming as we can to interfaith families, I have seen too much evidence that a child raised with two religions ends up with zero, and if you aren't ready to raise your hypothetical children as Jews, perhaps you need to rethink whether you'll be able to keep Judaism alive in your home in other ways.

I note in passing that the CCAR resolution on patrilineal descent -- which doesn't quite say what many people think it does -- also requires an exclusive religion for the child. I wonder how widely this one is enforced; the class on education and curriculum brought up the problems of dealing with kids who alternate between your Sunday school and the church's, or who celebrate both Christmas and Chanukah. Of course, sometimes doctrine and poltiics are at odds with each other.

During the "how to lead worship" class, the rabbi asked us to each describe one unusual thing that we've seen in worship (that seemed to work). Here's the list I transcribed (with my comments in brackets): ( Read more... )

Thursday night there was a board meeting concurrent with the evening minyan, so the rabbi got them to stop and attend the service. So we had a full house for once. :-) At the end he made assorted announcements (good & welfare), and he commented on my participation in the Sh'liach K'hilah program. (I think this was the first public announcement of that, though it hasn't been a secret or anything.) He said good things about me that made me happy, and the president of the congregation would like to meet with me soon to learn more about some of the topics we covered there.

The program is producing results already. I'm already organizing (and acting as cantorial soloist for) next Friday night's service; that was arranged in advance. And I just assumed that I'd be leading the Thursday services while he's gone, because that usually falls to me. That leaves next Saturday morning's service and torah study. I asked my rabbi if there was anyone in particular he wanted to have do either of those, and he said "you". Ok, I can do that. :-) Actually, while I expected that for the service, there's someone else he might plausibly have tapped for the study, and I'm not experienced with leading study (yet), so this will be a chance to learn something new.

Torah study this morning centered around the priestly benediction (the end of Naso, around the end of chapter 6 of Numbers). A question: how does anyone have the authority to give blessings (now)? All blessings come from God, of course, but we give each other small-scale blessings all the time, and rabbis are often asked for more significant blessings (such as at life-cycle events). But no one speaks for God, and we're all allowed to ask God directly for blessing, so doesn't that make a blessing either chutzpah or just a wish?

My rabbi pointed out that it is the person asking for the blessing who gives the blesser authority to do so. I'm not articulating this well now, but it made a lot of sense this morning. It's connected to trust and the relationship between the two people involved.

Someone I know from outside the congregation (she's not a member here) came to the morning service and really liked it. (I think she's been there a couple other times.) She asked me afterwards if you have to be a member of the congregation to read torah in that service. No one's ever asked before, and I'm certainly happy to be open about this (for people who are showing up anyway, as opposed to people who will only come when they get to read), so I said we'd be happy to have her. I then asked how much lead time she needs, and she said something like "a few days would be nice, or a week or two if I'm going to chant rather than read". I said that accommodating that would be no problem. :-) (Most of my readers want a month or so.)

The person leading the service gave me hagbahah (lifting the torah) today. I've never done that before. We're 80% of the way through the scroll, so it's kind of unbalanced. I had trouble holding it up straight, but I think I'd do ok with something more balanced or even something that favors the left hand instead of the right. (I'm a trained rightie but a natural leftie.) For those who are wondering, at the end of the torah reading it is customary to hold the opened scroll vertically and raise it up so everyone can see the text. You're supposed to have three columns showing (don't know why), but I only managed two today.

This afternoon and evening we had a bunch of people over for gaming. We played a new train game called Age of Steam that's like the 18xx games but simpler. (The railroad stock is abstracted away, there are fewer types of tiles, and the game is shorter.) It took a little while to get the hang of it, but I think I like it. We also played El Grande (my second time playing), and some people played a game that looked kind of like Civilization but simpler and shorter. It was a fun day, though we now have a surplus of cookies. :-) (You know how sometimes everyone brings chips, and sometimes everyone brings candy, and sometimes everyone brings drinks, and...? Well, today everyone brought cookies. There are worse fates.)

Sunday consisted of wrap-up. The group that did the morning service worked in a theme of departure/ending, opening with the song Lechi Lach and ending with T'filat ha-Derech and using some related creative readings in the middle. They did a nice job. After breakfast and the service review, we were told to go back to the chapel for the wrap-up session.

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.

Services went well. We made a few small mistakes, but overall things went well. I personally received many compliments on two things: my voice, and that I apparently exude spirituality. The latter came as a bit of a surprise; people said that watching me or just being around me helped them connect. Wow. What a compliment!

(Apparently some people also like my speaking voice. I don't -- or, at least, I don't like what I've heard on tape recordings. But that might be due to an association with an unliked relative who I sound a lot like. Shrug.)

Classes went well today. The second outreach session was about conversion and was fairly intimate (lots of people skipped it). It was neat, and I now have a copy of the CCAR guide for rabbis on this topic. Not that anyone in this program will be doing conversions, of course -- that's for rabbis -- but some people in this program might help counsel or teach would-be converts, and it's useful for that. (Well, I haven't opened it, but I suspect.) This is something I would like to be more involved with -- there's none so enthusiastic as the convert and all that. We'll see.

Time to go get ready for Shabbat. Next update sometime Sunday. (Hey, I said it was a quickie.)

Sleep is for the weak and unworthy, right? Or something like that. :-)

I'm finding that when I do finally settle down to sleep, the brain is still going and it's hard to turn it off. And then I'm waking up early with more of the same; I've only been awakened by the alarm once so far, not for lack of trying. I'm running on about 5-6 hours per night here, which is not my norm. I'm not sleepy during the day, but I have to make sure I get a good night's sleep Saturday somehow, because I'm driving home on Sunday. Well, at least Harry Potter and the CD that murmur311 gave me (thanks!) will keep me company. :-) (I packed a bunch of other CDs in case the audio book didn't work, but it did so I probably won't touch them.)

Today was a good day. Our service is in pretty good shape except for two things: we haven't yet done a full walk-through (that'll be tomorrow), and the cantorial student didn't have the tape of weekday nusach for me today. He'll have it tomorrow and this is a forgiving group, so that should be fine. But there's not a lot of time to learn it.

We've done a detailed talk-through of the service, with (as our advisor strongly suggested) post-it notes in the siddur for practically everything, including page cues and the "stand up now" gesture. This is right for a group not used to working together and using an unfamiliar siddur; I'd like to think that when we all go home to our familiar congregations wtih familiar liturgy, this wouldn't be such an issue. But maybe you have to lead a few dozen services before you're that comfortable; I forget. (And certainly when I was leading at Tree of Life I made my own doctored-up copy of the siddur, because neither the siddur nor the congregation was familiar. If I ever get around to learning the weekday shacharit service I won't need to do that, though.)

( shacharit )

( class: b'nei mitzvah )

( class: birth and baby namings )

( class: Jewish education )

( chug )

( class: congregational singing )

( ma'ariv, misc )

The learning in this program is great. There's a lot of it, though; they're working us fairly hard. The day officially starts at 8:15 for shacharit and ends around 9:15 at the end of ma'ariv, with no breaks longer than 15 minutes so far (and precious few of those) -- and then there's the occasional bit of homework, and the planning sessions for the services we'll lead, and individual consultations, to say nothing of decompression time. For me, writing these notes is an essential part of distilling everything I've learned into knowledge that will survive the week. So, onward.

I am sharing the Friday shacharit service with two other people (for reference, Steve and Diane). We had a huddle at lunch today, where we talked broadly about the style we'd like and decided which siddur to use. (HUC has several.) We ended up deciding to use the latest draft of Mishkan T'filah (yes, they're doing weekday too and not just Shabbat), which has the advantage of being equally unfamiliar to all of us. This should involve pushing some boundaries, after all. We're all a little concerned about learning the weekday nusach (melodies) in time; I ended up telling them that I think I can do it and they said "ok, you do that then". I hope I can deliver. (The weekday nusach we use at my congregation is different from what they use here. I should check with the cantorial staff member about that.)

We were going to meet tonight after ma'ariv to discuss the service in more detail, but the organizers declared a group run to Graeter's ice cream, and a little casual social time sure seemed like a good idea. It was after 10:30 when we got back, though, so I'll find Steve and Diane at breakfast.

The instructors so far have all been great. Some of the classes have had problems of pacing and going off-topic (some rabbis are just too polite to curb conversation, it appears), but the people are great and there's still plenty of good material.

(Someone remind me later that there's some stuff I want to say about program organization and credentials, but it's too late to get into tonight.)

( morning service )

( class: Tanach )

( class: how to lead worship )

( chug: trope )

( Plum Street Shul )

( class: how to write a d'var torah )

( evening service )

And now, it is late and "laptop neck" is setting in, that kink in the neck that comes from hunching over to be able to see the monitor, so I'm done for tonight.

Ok. Apparently we're all sharing a dialup connection or some such, and if you try to submit a browser form with lots of data something dies and the post doesn't happen. So, when I can get access at all (which is a story in itself), I'll be posting by email. I'll try to figure out how to get useful subject headers and stuff later, and I'll probably clean up some formatting stuff once I get home, but for now at least I can push some stuff out there. Enjoy.

Oh, and you should assume I'm not seeing email; I'll check comments on my posts when I've got service, but email and my friends list will mostly wait. Please send mail about posts I might miss and ought not. Thanks.

Dialup! Can you believe it? :-)

Aha! There's a length limitation through this net connection!

( torah study )

After the torah study Jenny and I went back to HUC, where we had a lunch of cold foods that I had brought. Paula joined us for conversation, though she had already eaten. Paula is from somewhere in Texas and has to drive an hour and a half each way to get kosher food; I am blessed to live in a kosher-equipped city. She belongs to a 65-family congregation without a rabbi; she runs their school and sometimes gets asked to lead services and do other things, which is why she's here. She, like I, learned that mostly by osmosis.

(Access note: there is no wireless network on campus. There will be access in one of the classrooms starting Sunday afternoon, I've been told, so that's probably when this will get posted. Sunday morning I buzzed the local Starbucks, but they are (in the employee's words) "in the dark ages" and don't yet have network access.)

The trip to Cincinnati was largely uneventful until I got to the city. I had failed to account for rush hour (I didn't realize that Cincinnati is as large as, or larger than, Pittsburgh, with rush hour spilling onto the interstates). I also made a wrong turn off the exit and it took me a while to figure that out, as I was looking for a T intersection on a road that I had been warned changes names. Oops. When I called the program organizer (yay for cell phones) for instruction, she seemed surprised to hear that I was arriving today (though we had talked about it via email). Fortunately, the dorm manager was around and could let me in once I found my way to campus.

There was one other student in my program here on Friday (Paula), and a woman who is at HUC doing research. (I've heard rumors of a second researcher but haven't seen her.) Almost everyone else arrived Saturday, with a few coming on Sunday. The people I've met so far seem to be very nice folks.

Aside to lefkowitzga: you were right; audio books in the car seem to work fine. I've now heard the first 3/7ths of the third Harry Potter book. There are definitely things that didn't come through in the movie, like the depth of Snape's resentment of Lupin and the whole triple-booked-Hermione thing (which was much more low-key in the movie).

My credit-card company informs me that they now offer "zero liability protection" (for stolen cards). Were I the writer I would have found a different way to phrase that. :-)

Speaking of phrasing, it might be in poor taste to use the word "deadline" when talking about a hostage situation. Just a thought, CNN.

The spammers have found a mailing list I own. It's a moderated list, so they are inconveniencing me a bit but not getting to the subscribers, but I still wish they'd stop it. I wonder whether things would get better or worse if I had Majordomo reject the messages. Would that be treated as bounced mail, or seen as a human being present? I assume the latter.

I heard back from the folks at HUC about internet access (check), and I have found someone to borrow a laptop from for the trip. Yay; I won't have to face a week and a half's worth of email all at once. :-) Aside: Mapquest seems to be broken; today it informed me that Pittsburgh to Cincinnati is a 3.5-hour drive. Um, not under current traffic laws! (I was looking at this so I could supply a highway starting point to get local directions.)

Friday night the sisterhood led Shabbat services. (They do this once a year. Brotherhood did theirs last month.) While they mostly did a good job with the individual parts, the whole was extremely disappointing. ( rant )

Friday's email brought a short reading list for the sh'liach k'hilah program. I am pleased that the list consists entirely of books I do not already own. This makes me even more optimistic about the program teaching me lots of things I don't already know. I expected that to be the case, but now I have some evidence to support that belief. (They haven't yet sent a detailed curriculum description.)

Saturday evening we went to an SCA dinner on the theme of "travelling food". There were more desserts than non-desserts, which in retrospect makes sense. Cookies are an obvious thing to make. I should have made something main-dish-y instead of individual strawberry tarts. It was a fun dinner, and I got to meet some new cats. :-) From there we went to an impromptu party that lefkowitzga threw together around some last-minute guests from out of town. She's a great party host, and I had fun talking with some people I don't see as often as I'd like.

Sunday dinner was especially tasty this week. ralphmelton grilled steaks that were very good; we concluded that the spice rub called "Chicago style" that he got at Penzey's was especially good. (I don't know what's in it. Eventually I will send agents to Penzey's to do some shopping for me, as the local instance has no hours that are compatable with working normal hours and keeping Shabbat.)

Random food note: sponge cake grilled for about 30 seconds per side and then topped with fruit is really good.