Monica

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.

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.

I don't think I had previously noticed that in the torah scroll the entire story of Bilaam, from the first solicition for his services through the talking-donkey episode through the curse attempts, is one long paragraph -- no breaks. It spans several columns. It's usually my job to roll the scroll to the correct place before the service, and I usually navigate by the whitespace (not being particularly fluent in Hebrew).

Saturday's mail brought an anticipated wedding invitation. I was surprised by a Saturday-morning ceremony; I thought they were doing afternoon or evening. And I will have to decide how I feel about a reception on Shabbat that's being held in a restaurant, rather than a privately-rented hall where there are fewer issues. Hmm. They're friends and I really want to be there for them.

Saturday night we held a party for tangerinpenguin, who will soon be leaving town. While there were several people who couldn't make it due to holiday-weekend plans, we still got a bunch of people and, as far as I could tell, everyone had a good time. Someone made a nifty cake, in the form of an open book with a jungle motif, in honor of his new employer. Saturday was a hot day and we don't have central AC, only window units; we did the best we could to keep the place habitable but found myself thinking "the engines canna take more of this, captain!" a few times. :-) Realizing that we couldn't possibly know all of Chris' friends, we made it open-invitation -- and still only got one person I didn't know. Also got a few people I hadn't thought to directly invite, so I'm glad we took that approach.

It's been a very hot and muggy weekend. I emptied the dehumidifier three times yesterday, which is a record. (It's rated for 40 gallons/week and the tank is about a gallon and a half, so we're still nowhere near capacity. There's a scary thought!) I was rather insistent that we were going to run the AC in the bedroom last night. Dani objects to open bedroom windows and ACs/fans, saying they're too noisy, but that resulted in unacceptable conditions Saturday night. And, y'know, sometimes I should get a turn at comfort.

Sunday we joined ralphmelton, lorimelton and her parents, mrpeck, and two others who I think are not LJ-enabled for an early dinner before some of them headed off for fireworks. Someone referred to Ralph as the grill-meister, and I have to concur. I do not have the grilled-meat clue, and I am envious. :-)

(We didn't go to the fireworks, not being big on crowds and noise. We watched two more episodes of B5 instead, but they were ones without fight scenes, so we can't say we watched a different kind of fireworks.)

Wednesday night is the next meeting of the worship committee. The rabbi can't actually make it (double-booked), but in this case that's ok. The single agenda item is to teach the committee about the structure of the Friday service in some detail and then assign parts for the service we'll be jointly leading at the end of the month. In my opinion members of this committee should be fully conversant with the service and able to lead it from the siddur without lots of extra annotations like "tell them to stand here", and some people couldn't do that when we led a service last year. So I'll try to teach them, and we'll see how it goes. This is certainly material I can teach on my own, so if the rabbi were going to be there I'd defer to him but there's no need for him to come.

I heard a new word this weekend, referring to certain breeds of terrier: "verminator". It made me giggle, but I knew exactly what she meant -- which, I suppose, is the purpose of language. :-)

What is it with cats and plastic, anyway? All of my cats like to lick plastic. (They don't ingest it -- just lick.) Embla likes to rub against it. Huh?

Saturday I had lunch with the Orthodox (Chabad) family we visited once before. It was a pleasant afternoon. ( Read more... )

Yesterday we got together with other members of our Pennsic camping group to make some camp furniture. We have two problems to address: we need more seating, and we need places to put the miscellaneous clutter that accumulates on the tables. So we made chests, specifically sized to work well for seating at tables. Some people actually built them Saturday; Sunday was sanding and painting. Note for future: sawdust is, or behaves like, an allergen. Oops. We had fun, and the chests are very spiffy -- comfortable to sit on and good for storage. We made two "one-seaters" and one double (it's three feet long). The double will require two people to carry, but the singles are light enough to be moved by one person.

After dinner and the departure of most of the people, Dani and I stuck around for a while to play games with Alaric. The first game we played was Vinci (I forget who publishes it). It's a neat game, though I think it plays rather differently with three players than with the max of six. You play on an abstract map of Europe, and you play a civilization with two arbitrary characteristics (such as "extra points from grasslands" or "extra points from resource spaces" or "get extra temporary soldiers at the start of each turn"). On your turn you expand/attack, then score based on your position, then pass to the next person. Units that you lose due to conquest are not replaced, so over time your ability to score decreases. When you think you've reached the point where it's no longer worthwhile, you declare that you are going into decline and get a new civilization to play on your next turn. Your tokens from the previous civilization stick around, and score, until blown away by the other players. When someone reaches a certain score threshold you complete the turn and then high score wins. I ended up with civilizations that were fairly straightforward to play, and won by a few points. I would enjoy playing this game again with more people; I think more players would force faster turnover.

After that we played Carcassonne; I'm not very good at it, but it was fun. Sometimes I think I will never get a handle on the strategy for claiming fields. We played with an expansion that included some new tiles, all of the "double or nothing" variety. For example, by default, at the end of the game, a partially-completed city still scores some points; if it contains a cathedral tile then it scores more points if complete but none at all if incomplete. I haven't played enough to know if this actually adds anything, or if it's just needless complexity. I suppose it can work well if played hostily -- that is, play a cathedral into someone else's city that you think he won't be able to complete.

This weekend we watched more of B5 season four, specifically the end of the shadow war. This seemed abrupt in the first run; it seems even more abrupt now. I assume, but don't know, that if JMS had known he had a fifth season, he would have carried this war through this season and into the fifth, and focused more on the Earth and Minbari civil wars. That would have made a much better story, I think. We were both struck by how well the end of "Into the Fire" could have worked as the end of the series -- not that that's where he would (or should) have ended it, but in terms of the storytelling, it had "major wrap-up" written all over it.

Another show where watching the DVDs reinforces a past impression is West Wing. Watching season three on DVD so soon after the broadcast of season five emphasizes just how much better the show was in the prior season. I think season four might have been weaker than season three, but five was much much weaker than anything that came before. Sad.

I drew the "leprosy" portion this week (Tazria-Metzora). Everyone is going to be talking about lashon hara (gossip, approximately), because that's the apparent cause of the affliction (midrash, and one data point in Torah). "Everyone" includes my rabbi tomorrow night (he mentioned it tonight). I'd like to say something Saturday morning that they haven't already heard a zillion times and one of them within the previous 14 hours. I wonder if inspiration will strike. (I suppose there's always the haftarah as a source of material, though we have a fairly strong convention of talking about the Torah portion.)

We had a visiting scholar this Shabbat, Rabbi Larry Kushner. (Larry, not Harold. That's a different famous Rabbi Kushner.) It was a neat experience. He spoke at services Friday, led a Saturday-morning service/lecture/discussion mix, and spoke and told stories Shabbat afternoon. (He also spoke at a brunch this morning, but I didn't attend that.)

One of Rabbi Kushner's more recent books is Invisible Lines of Connection, a collection of (true) stories that seem to show God's involvement in ordinary events of ordinary people. This idea -- lines of connection -- formed the theme for the visit. He told many stories on this theme (some from the book, some not), and tried to get us to think about God's involvement in our lives.

( Read more... )

I'm reading from Sh'mot on Saturday morning, which means I need to say a few words about the portion. So I'm going to babble here in an effort to get some thoughts in order.

The reading begins with the (Hebrew) midwives defying Paro's order to kill newborn Jewish males. The reason given for their defiance is that they "feared God".

This makes me think of "fear" as in "fear of punishment" -- God will zap them if they don't defy Paro. But I don't think that kind of fear is necessary as a motivator; the midwives are Jewish, not Egyptian, and they are presumably people who are particularly interested in children to begin with, given that they're midwives. Do the chief midwives among the Jews need external motivation to avoid killing Jewish children?

The same root (yud-reish-alef) is used during the story of the Akeidah (the binding of Isaac); when the angel stops Avraham from killing his son, it is with the statement that Avraham "fears" God. But again, this is incongruous -- Avraham fears God and so is willing to kill his son? I would think there would be more fear involved in defying that order, not in following it.

It helps, sometimes, to read the Torah with the original Hebrew, a dictionary, and a concordance at hand. (I don't have this last yet, but online texts and search can help mitigate. But I digress.)

The answer, I think, is that this is not "fear of punishment". From what I've been able to determine, not actually being a Hebrew scholar, a better word is "awe". This root is used in cases where people are awed by God's power and truth -- in the case of the midwives this awe causes them to defy Paro; (an action that should cause them to fear for their lives), and in the case of Avraham it causes him to fulfill an undesired commandment.

Our tradition certainly records a system of conventional reward and punishment, which is included in the twice-daily Sh'ma. If we keep the commandments we'll flourish; if we don't we won't. But we aren't supposed to be motivated primarily by fear of punishment; we're supposed to follow God's commandments because he's God and we're his people. This idea is referred to in traditional sources as "yir'at hashamayim" -- "'fear' of heaven". There's that root again. :-)

There doesn't seem to be a lot of awe of God in today's world. Maybe we have to go looking for it. It doesn't have to come from big, flashy miracles; most of us go through life without ever seeing those. But it can come from smaller miracles too -- life, health, beauty around us, and so on.

I don't particularly "fear" God -- I mean, if he wants bad things to happen to me he can certainly do that and that's not fun, but I don't obsess about it. I try to look for opportunities for "awe", though -- by just paying attention, or by keeping the mitzvot.

I hope I'm never confronted with a test like Avraham and the midwives were. If I ever am, though, I hope I'll be able to act out of awe and not fear.

Ok, I'm babbling and I'm not sure where I'm going with this, so I'll stop for now.

I'm working on learning to chant part of parsha Vayeira (November 15). I'm doing a relatively small part; the aliya is on the long side, too much for me to learn at my current skill level in the available time. Besides (she rationalizes), as the organizer of this stuff for the minyan I should occasionally set a non-intimidating example so we can get some new readers. :-)

The aliya begins in an odd place, or so it seems. I'm reading from the second aliya. The first aliya is where the three angels visit Avraham and they tell him and Sarah that they'll have a kid, which they both doubt. Sarah laughs. The second aliya begins with the final verse of that thought, where Sarah denies laughing and Avraham says "yes you did". (I'm paraphrasing.) After that single verse, our attention turns to S'dom and Gemorah.

What a weird place to break. There are no relevant paragraph breaks in the Torah text -- nothing to compel this particular division. So naturally, this leads me to speculate about why the sages made this decision. Without benefit of any actual sources here, I have a theory.

There are a few verses between the angels' visit and God telling Avraham about what is to come and Avraham bargaining God down on sparing the cities. What comes in the middle is a bit of God talking to himself, seemingly trying to decide whether to bring Avraham in on this. Essentially, it boils down to "look, I have big plans for Avraham; he's going to be a great nation. Should I trouble him with this?". (Gen 18:15-19, for the curious.)

In other words, we begin with Sarah concealing something and getting caught, and then to God considering concealing something and deciding better of it. I'm guessing that we're supposed to take a lesson about the efficacy of secrets from that.

In passing, I also note that while we get the definition of a minyan (quorum) from the story of the spies in Sh'lach Lecha, we also have in this parsha a community judgement being based on ten men. When Avraham bargains with God to preserve the cities, God won't go lower than ten -- if there are ten righteous men he'll spare the cities, and if not he won't. There turn out to be fewer than ten; he spares those individuals (so long as they follow directions) but not the cities. Fewer than ten and you don't represent the community. Given that, I wonder why the sages point only to the spies when defining a minyan.

"Thou shalt not go up and down as a talebearer among thy people; neither shalt thou stand idly by the blood of thy neighbour: I am the Lord." -Lev 19:16, JPS translation

We spent a while talking about this verse this morning. We started out talking about gossip and ended up talking about whistle-blowing.

(Rashi interprets the first part as: don't be a peddler of tales, a "retailer" (I wonder who introduced the pun, him or a translator).)

We talked about how the Chofetz Chayim says that gossip harms three people: the subject, the speaker, and the listener. We talked about how a need to know can override (that's where the whistle-blower thread came from). For example, the talmud argues that if you know of evidence that would clear someone of an accuastion, you are required (under Jewish law) to testify to that effect. (The judicial system under Jewish law is very much weighted toward the defendant, in case you're wondering. It's not clear that a death sentence was ever carried out, for example.)

I asked if the talmud draws this conclusion based on the fact that "don't be a tale-bearer" and "don't stand by the blood of your neighbor" are linked in the same verse. (The rabbi said yes, that's right.)

Some people who were there didn't see the real harm in gossip; I guess it's part of current American culture. I'm with the Chofetz Chayim (though not nearly as careful as he was): spreading rumors can do a great deal of harm, and it's harm that's very hard to undo should you later determine that you were in error. It's tempting, but I try to resist. Often fail, but I try to do better.

One thing that makes gossip especially bad is that most people seem to be pre-disposed to believe what they're told; critical thinkers are in the minority, from what I've seen. One thing I've been trying to work on is to look for the positive (or at least neutral) explanation for what appears to be bad behavior. And y'know, sometimes that guess even turns out to be right. Nifty when that happens.

The giving of Torah happened at one specific time, but the receiving of Torah happens all the time, in every generation. (Meir Alter, the Gerer Rebbe.)

Friday night's service went very well. The turnout was small; I think people were scared off by weather fears.

The rabbi gave a good talk about how we treat each other, starting with the midrash that explains why Aharon, and not Moshe, delivered the first two plagues to Mitzrayim (Egypt). Specifically, according to what the rabbi said (and I've heard this one elsewhere too), Moshe objected to God that he couldn't possibly strike the Nile and the sand, because the Nile had saved his life when he was an infant (carrying him to Paro's daughter, who adopted him) and the sand had saved him when he killed the Egyptian taskmaster, by covering the body. So out of respect for the river and the sand, God had Aharon strike them instead.

Now also consider this: on Shabbat we cover the challah while making kiddush over the wine. Why? Because we do not want to "offend" the challah by giving the wine precedence, so we cover it until we're ready for it. (There is a story, I think talmudic, about a man who covers his challah but berates his wife, but the rabbi didn't bring that one up.)

The point of all of this is: if we (in the case of Shabbat) or our forebears (in the case of Moshe) show that much consideration for objects, how much moreso should we show respect for other people. The message isn't new, but he delivered it well. (In my experience, though, what people really need are concrete steps, not broad goals, to change stuff like this, and he didn't offer those.)

---

This afternoon I read the final (for now) issue of "Bentsch Press", a newsletter Rabbi Mordechai Kamenetzky has been publishing for the last year. It's a good newsletter -- mostly a collection of his thoughts, which are well-written and interesting. He said in the final issue that while he's had no shortage of material to write about, the mechanics of publishing a newsletter are just too much of a pain. It sounds to me like what the rabbi really needs is an LJ. :-) (Well, a web site would do, but I get the impression that he's not set up to do that on his own.)

Hebrew notes: ( Read more... ) I wish I could develop the intuitive grasp for the grammar that Dani has but cannot explain.

The Torah-study group has gotten to the beginning of Tazria, the part of Leviticus about various impurities caused by various emissions. I really pity kids who get Tazria for a bar-mitzvah portion.

Our assistant rabbi has a commentary he's fond of (the editor's name is Milgram; I don't have more), but I disagree with some of the stuff he was reading from that on Saturday. I ended up being more challenging than usual, and essentially sent him off with questions for further study. That's not how that's supposed to work. :-) (My rabbi had already had to leave by then. I'd be interested in hearing his take on some of this. Perhaps next week.)

For instance, ( squick alert )

At one point the rabbi said something like "of course, you do all realize this is all academic now anyway, right?". He asserted that because we don't have the temple, there is no way for people to become tahor (ritually purified), so we're all impure, and we're stuck. I disagree, at least until he shows a source. Isn't that what the mikvah is for? Isn't that why women visit the mikvah monthly, and some men visit at least weekly, before Shabbat?

If we are all tamei anyway, then why does anyone worry about becoming tamei? There are not greater and lesser degrees of impurity; you are or you aren't. It's a toggle, not a matter of degree. Yet I see people in the traditional movements who are quite clearly concerned with these matters, which means they at least think it's not a lost cause.

(In contrast, sinning is not not a toggle. For example, if you violate Shabbat by lighting a fire, and then later by harvesting your grain, and then later by baking bread, you have sinned three times (or more), not once. The manifestation of this is that, when the temple stood, you were liable for an offering (a "chatat", or sin-offering) for each offense. But there is not a corresponding idea with ritual impurity; you don't have to go to the mikvah once for each thing that made you impure.)

Odd trivia of the week: after a woman gives birth, she is required (well, when the temple stood) to bring a chatat, a sin-offering. Why a sin-offering? What sin is involved in childbirth? The answer, according to unnamed sages (that is, I'm sure they're named, but they weren't cited to me) is that sometime during labor she may well have said some inappropriate things due to the pain, and this is "just in case".