cellio | Entries tagged with shiva

Some things are not part of the formal Jewish learning process. I understand how to behave at a shiva house (house of mourning), and I've puzzeled out some of the rest by observation, but I'm curious: what typically happens with food? There are a couple facets to this (and I am blessed to not have first-hand knowledge yet).

The community generally provides meals for the family so they don't have to cook during that week. Sometimes there seems to be someone coordinating ("can you do Thursday?"), but either this is usually not the case or those people rarely call me. Assuming no one has yet emerged in this role, the behavior I've learned is to show up with something that can be reheated (and is freezer-safe) and hand it to whoever seems to be in charge. Correct?

(When there is someone in the coordinator role, how does that come about? Does the family ask someone? Does someone volunteer to the family? Does someone step up but work through the community or synagogue?)

The other facet is refreshments. This might be a function of the liberal Jewish community (the only one in which I've attended shiva minyanim), but it is almost always the case that the family has put out a spread -- cookies, cakes, fruit, and sometimes more-substantial food. So even if I'm not bringing a meal I always bring something to contribute to that. This (the spread, not the contribution) feels weird -- the family in mourning should not be forced into the role of host, I would think. Is this normal?

I've been wondering about these things for years, and just happened to remember to do something about it after a visit tonight. (Well, if sending questions out into the void counts as doing something. :-) )

My congregation has an evening service on Thursdays. (Long story.) Usually one of the rabbis leads it; if neither is available, usually I get a phone call. Tonight there was no rabbi and no phone call (something must have come up), so at five minutes past the start time the consensus was that I should lead it.

That by itself would not be worthy of a post.

Two of my friends in my congregation are sisters, and their father died while I was out of town. I missed shiva, but they came tonight. We talked a little before the service; they said their dad had had as perfect a death as you can, at the age of 93, surrounded by family, and not in pain. They're feeling the loss, of course, but they said he was at peace and that helped.

It's customary for the leader of this service to give a two-minute d'var torah, generally on the weekly portion. See previous comment about having had no notice. Normally I can wing it; if nothing else, every Thursday morning I find some bit of midrash to tell to the morning minyan, so I can usually use that as a starting point if I need to. And I'm starting to develop a small repertoire of "d'var-lets" that I can spin up without falling on my face.

But it felt wrong. At least half the people there tonight were mourners, including the sisters, and I didn't want to just talk about Moshe preaching to the people or retelling the revelation at Sinai. So I improvised massively: I started by talking about what I studied last week at Hebrew College, used that as a basis for talking about Moshe's achievements through faith and despite adversity (and that they started late in life), and that this kind of leadership is inspirational, and then I talked about how we can all emulate Moshe to some level if we want to and it's inspiring to see parents or grandparents serving as models for us by doing so. It didn't come out as well as I would have liked, though the two sisters both thanked me and said this sounded just like their father, so that's good.

Comforting words do not come naturally to me, so after the fact I feel like I was playing with fire. Hmm. I guess it's good I didn't have time to think about it.

I led a shiva minyan tonight. Two liturgically-competent Conservative Jews thought I was a rabbi, which I'll take as a compliment. :-) (My rabbi had clued me in that the family was a mix of Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist, several very involved in their congregations, so I did more Hebrew than I would have otherwise and watched/listened for people having trouble. Sometimes families aren't that comfortable and since the whole point of the service is to help the family in mourning, you adapt to their needs.)

I feel bad about one thing. Even though I allowed extra time as insurance against this, I had a lot of trouble finding the building -- well-hidden behind trees and in an area largely lacking in posted numbers (and street signs for that matter). I ended up being about five minutes late, after calling the house and asking for guidance. That meant a few things: first, I walked into a room full of people sitting patiently waiting to daven (embarrassing); second, I didn't get to speak to the family beforehand to offer condolences (just the person who ushered me in); third, I didn't get to double-check a couple things in the special siddur for a house of mourning before we started (and they only had the smaller-print edition).

I need to remember that Google Maps offers a satellite view and this can provide useful information. In this case, it would have given me a gas station as a landmark. I'm too used to the idea that maps are line art, but they're a lot more now.

The family didn't seem to be miffed and I apologized to each of them. But it shouldn't have happened; it looked unprofessional.

I should also get myself a (larger-print) copy of that siddur -- so that I'll always have it available, and so that I can paste in two versions of E- Malei Rachamim, one for each gender, instead of messing around with the parenthesized alternate words. That's just too hard to read.

Thursday night I led the shiva minyan for Steve. I hadn't led one for someone I was close to before, but I thought I'd do ok or I wouldn't have accepted the assignment. It went ok -- a little shaky in a couple places as I thought about Steve, but overall fine. My rabbi was able to make it after all (he arrived just as we were starting), so we split it. That turned out to be perfect, as I don't know how to chant ...malei rachamim yet. My rabbi complimented me later. Several of my coworkers were there, thus mingling work and private lives just a bit more. The entry I posted Thursday night was partly a result of a conversation I had with someone after the minyan, though it's something I've been meaning to do for years.

Originally I was supposed to lead the regular (congregational) service on Thursday, but with the shiva and some other stuff things got jiggled around. I wonder who did end up leading that service. I guess it was probably the associate rabbi. My rabbi told me that I may lead that service on some nights now even when he's there. (Specifically, nights with board meetings or executive-committee meetings -- also when we are almost guaranteed a minyan.) I appreciate my rabbi's willingness to give me these kinds of assignments; my query about Friday-night services requires a broader discussion, but meanwhile he's finding ways to give me other opportunities.

It's past time for me to explicitly tell him about Thursday mornings. It's not that it's a secret; it's just that it hasn't come up in conversation. But now it might matter to him, so I have to find a way to bring it up. (He does know -- and did at the time -- that I was leading occasional Shabbat services there for a while. But leading weekday services is newer.)

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 )

I led a shiva minyan tonight for the family of a congregant. He was 90 years old and his wife and two siblings (all comparable in age, or so I understand) are still alive. I know people are living longer than ever now, but that's still pretty impressive.

I think I've finally, without really thinking about it, derived the appropriate response to the family either thanking me or praising me: "I'm glad I could help". I mean, you don't want to say "happy to help", given the circumstances, but it feels like I need to say something.

There is a dynamic of cues, some subtle and some overt, when leading a service, to clue people in about when to read together, stand/sit, and so on. Must remember: nothing subtle applies to mourners. They're pre-occupied; do not make them expend cycles on the mechanics of prayer. The ones who pray regularly will know anyway; the ones who don't need the direction.

Must remember to ask my rabbi #1: does our congregation have any conventions about what to do after the service? Leave immediately, accept the offers of food, hang around for 5-10 minutes and then slip out? Not sure. I tend to do the last unless I actually know the family.

<geek> Must remember to ask my rabbi #2: why is there a chatzi kaddish between hashkiveinu and t'filah? I'm so used to skipping over it -- because we almost never get a minyan for weekday evening and it's not there (in Gates of Prayer, anyway) in the Shabbat evening service -- that it took me by surprise tonight in the special siddur for a house of mourning (which I've rarely used). On the one hand, as long as there are interruptions between ga'al yisrael and t'filah anyway (hashkiveinu, v'shamru on Shabbat) what's the harm?, but on the other hand, we don't generally use that as an excuse to compound problems. Hmm. My rabbi and I studied that passage in B'rachot not long ago (well, maybe we'll yet return to the thread) and the sages raised hashkiveinu but said nothing of kaddish. Later addition? </geek>

Short takes:

I don't really care about my hair turning silver -- I actually think it can look striking under the right circumstances -- but is it too much to ask my body for symmetry? Why is the right side of my head so much more melanin-challenged than the left side? One of life's little mysteries, I guess.

From cahwyguy: Google Maps is live. So far, I'm liking it a lot better than Mapquest. (Haven't given it any tough cases yet, but the directions it's given me to a couple destinations I've previously tried with MapQuest are much better.)

Today was a full day. We actually had a real break (almost 30 minutes); during that time I tried to post Monday's entry but saw no evidence that it took. I guess I'll find out when I connect to attempt to post this. I'm sorry for sending large bursts of stuff out all at once.

The campus store and the library have very limited hours during the summer. I haven't yet been to the library (sigh -- who's got time? but I want to), but the store stayed open later today to accommodate us. I think it was worthwhile for them; lots of people skipped part of dinner to buy books and the like. I picked up the JPS Hebrew-English Tanach (I wanted to see it "in the flesh" first to see the size of the print, which is adequate), passed on Braude's Book of Legends this time (highly recommended, but I'll bet I can improve on the $75 price via the used market), and picked up a new talit. I have a talit and it has signifance to me, but there have been times when I wanted the option of a larger one, particularly when leading services. (The one I have, which belonged to Dani's grandfather, is the small "scarf" size.) It turns out that the large size is too big for me (drags the ground, which isn't an appropriate thing to do to tzitzit), but there is an intermediate size that gives me enough material to draw the talit up over my head for the sh'ma, which I can't do with the one from Dani's family. I'd also rather use a larger one when leading services. So now I have that option. I was going to use it for the first time at Friday's service, which I'm helping to lead, but I see wisdom in getting used to it first, so I'll be using it tomorrow.

The planning for that service got off to a rocky start due to logistics (not at all due to the people, who are wonderful), but we finally had a good solid hour and change to go over it tonight. Tomorrow we will meet with our staff advisor about our plans (each group has an advisor), and then tomorrow night we'll solidify things down to the level of who does what and sticking post-it notes in the siddur and stuff. I'm doing all the music leading; that wasn't my plan, but the other two really want to not do this and like me in that role. I introduced them to some new melodies tonight. Some of that was explicit experiment; I figured that if they could pick them up quickly (just by listening) then the others could too. And they did. So we'll be using a niggun that my rabbi taught us at the last Shabbaton, and a new meditation before the Sh'ma (and setting of the Sh'ma) that our cantorial soloist introduced some months back (by Jeff Klepper). Our group feels that in this setting, each service should have a lot that is familiar and some that is new, because (1) we're experimenting and learning and (2) this is a group of synagogue leaders who will then disperse, not an established congregation where you would be much more conservative about change. I'm looking forward to the service; I think we've done a good job of preparing. (I seem to be the unofficial leader of the group, but not for lack of trying to push decisions out to the other two.)

( people in need of a clue-by-four )

All that aside, onward to today's nifty classes.

( class: text study )

( lunch: leadership development )

( class: Jewish music )

( class: shiva/funeral )

( chug: trope )

( class: illness and the community )

( ma'ariv )

Good heavens. I can have 50 userpics now?!

I led a shiva minyan tonight (my second time). Gauging people's level of comfort with Hebrew continues to challenge me, but we did ok. I need to learn Eil Malei Rachamim -- the prayer in which we specifically name the deceased -- in Hebrew. The combination of unfamiliar text and the navigational hazards of a paragraph set up to support masculine and feminine options meant I wasn't about to try. (I will probably, eventually, make myself two complete versions, one for each gender. That would be much easier for me.)

Sunday dinner was just four of us this week; Mike is in Italy (lucky guy!) and none of the other usual suspects made it. We spent some time D&D-geeking. :-)

The order of seasons seems to have gotten shuffled locally. Not that I object to 70-degree days in November; it's just a little peculiar. And I was able to get the sukkah down Sunday after music practice.

Tomorrow is our company's annual retreat. I'm always ambivalent about these, and I wonder if this is the best timing given a major deadline coming up soon, but oh well. It'll probably be a long day (after which I have to go vote), because they never stagger these with respect to rush hour so we get it on both ends. I'd actually be fine with either shift; I could show up at 7am once a year if it meant shorter drives. Fortunately, I was able to hitch a ride with someone. (There's no way I'm driving some of the roads involved after dark.)

Political compass (I've seen this before but it's been a while):

Economic Left/Right: 1.75
Libertarian/Authoritarian: -4.62

They include a graph showing (their assessment of) the placement of assorted political figures. They show no one in my quadrant. Sniff. (An earlier example shows Friedman -- presumably Milton -- in my quadrant, but not especially close to me.)

Welcome to

siderea, aka Tibicen -- SCA person, early-music geek, and interesting writer. Apparently the Boston crowd sucked her into LJ. :-)

Last night my rabbi gave a class/discussion on mourning, funerals, etc. This was for the group of people who may be called on to lead shiva minyanim (services in a house of mourning), or who might help out those families in other ways. I didn't learn a lot that was new, but I think it was useful to pull all the information, and all the people who might need it, together. And we were given books, and books are never bad. :-)

I came home to find that there was no West Wing episode. I'm glad NBC ran a message on the bottom of the screen during the replacement show. But I was surprised: I can understand pre-empting a show for a baseball game that you're airing, but near as I can tell, they decided to pull West Wing because they didn't think it could compete with someone else's broadcast of the game. So did they think the Law & Order episode they showed could compete, or was it an old rerun and they were giving up on viewer share that night?

I wonder if Nielsen et al have changed the way they do ratings. In these days of TiVo and VCRs (often multiples), I can't believe they're only interested in people who watch the broadcast live. Yeah, we fast-forward through the commercials when time-shifting, but it seems like that's still better than not seeing them at all. So live is best, fast-forwarded is not worthless, and not watching the show at all is worthless.

We finished watching the second season of West Wing a couple nights ago. (Now we wait until April, if past performance is an indicator of future trends.) I'm impressed by this show, and the last episode of that season was very effective even though it used some techniques I normally consider cheesy. It was well-done, both in the writing and the direction. I hope the show doesn't go into a death spiral with Sorkin gone.

I went to services this morning at Tree of Life, where lulav and etrog were provided for pretty much everyone who wanted them. I still cannot hold a lulav, an etrog, and a siddur (prayer book) in a useful way. Fortunately, I'm starting to memorize the responses. :-)

My brother-in-law-once-removed [1] called tonight asking for computer advice. He said he was sitting in front of a dead machine, he had the Windows 98 CD in the drive, and how does he boot from that? This spawned several mental threads: (1) Define "dead". (2) Hey, aren't you a Mac snob? (3) Beats me, but I think Dani has done this. I opted for #3 and gave the phone to Dani. :-)

[1] My sister-in-law's husband. I know that English doesn't distinguish between Dani's sister and Dani's sister's husband in the "-in-law" thing, but it still feels weird to call him my brother-in-law when he's not related to either of us. I mean, if my brother-in-law is married to my sister-in-law, doesn't that sound just a bit too much like incest to you? It does to me.

This Shabbat is Sh'mini Atzeret (cue chorus of "what's that?"s -- goljerp did a good job with this here). In the Reform movement it's also Simchat Torah. In my congregation, this year, it's also the b'nei mitzvah of my rabbi's twins. And, due to unfortunate timing, it's also baronial investiture, a once-in-every-several-years occurrence in the local SCA group. I want to be able to spawn clones in the morning and sync memories at the end of the day, darnit!

Today while we were studying we ended up talking about funeral practices. My rabbi recently did a funeral for a member of an interfaith family, so there was also a priest or minister there and this led to some things my rabbi isn't used to, most notably the open casket and the things said to comfort the mourners. So he asked me how I feel about all that, given that my background is different from his. ( Read more... )

We went to the shiva for Ray tonight. (The funeral was yesterday, so this was the first one.) They had a good-sized crowd, mostly members of their congregation (I assume). A few other SCA people were there.

I had failed to give some SCA friends a heads-up that there would be a short service there; I hope they weren't too uncomfortable. The service was actually longer than what I'm used to, for three reasons: (1) Reconstructionists include more liturgy than we do; (2) the leader was having the group do the "let's all read this passage together" thing in a number of places, and that's always slower than just one person reading; and (3) the leader threw in other commentary along the way.

After that was over we spent time talking with the family members. Esther seemed to be very glad that we were there. It sounds like Ray's last few days were frustrating but not painful. She seems to be coping ok so far, at least in front of other people.

One of the people I met at New Light a couple weeks ago was there, and I spaced on where I knew her from and had to be told. Oops. Context is everything, I guess. (She turns out to be a relative of an inlaw.)

The SCA household has a dinner scheduled for tomorrow night. Esther is in that household, so I was semi-expecting the dinner to be cancelled in deference to the shiva, but I haven't heard anything about it. So I don't know what our plans are for tomorrow evening at this point -- maybe going to the dinner and leaving early enough to go to the shiva?

I got email yesterday from one of the regulars at my synagogue. She's involved in a local Jewish women's group, and they're organizing a Shabbat service in a few months for that group, and she wanted to know if I'd like to chant Torah for it. Sure, twist my arm. :-)

Tonight at minyan my rabbi asked me how the shiva minyan had gone, and I said it went ok and that it helped me overcome a fear, as it was my first shiva minyan (leading, I mean; I've attended) and I had been apprehensive. I don't think he'd realized that it was my first. There wasn't time to really talk, so we didn't get into it more than that.

The truth is that my rabbi is one of a very small number of people who can ask me to do something and, if it is within my capabilities, I will pretty-automatically do it, even if I don't want to. We might discuss it, but I'd do it. (I wonder whether knowing that would make him happy, or horrified.) I didn't especially want to do a shiva minyan, but it was a learning experience, it wasn't nearly as intimidating as I feared it would be, and it was good for me. And I'll do better next time.

Last night's shiva minyan (see previous entry) went ok. I had to change a couple things on the fly and I made one stupid mistake that, fortunately, wasn't too hard to correct. (I had failed to ask for the Hebrew name of the deceased before we started, and when I got to El Molei Rachamim and needed it I had to stop and ask. Oops. I had her secular name.)

During the Amidah I noticed that almost no one was chanting along with me on the Hebrew for Avot, so on the fly I decided to switch to English for the rest. (Our congregation's convention is that everyone recites together.) I'm not sure if that was the right call; they might have just preferred to listen and say "amein".

During Aleinu (which I led in Hebrew anyway; more people seemed to know it, oddly) I almost launched into the second paragraph on auto-pilot while turning a page, only to discover that the second paragraph wasn't there in this siddur. It was there in English, but not in Hebrew. Weird. So I stopped myself and read it in English; I could do it from memory, but I wasn't going to assume anyone else could.

(My goal had been to get there 5-10 minutes early so, after giving condolences to the family, I could take a quick flip through the siddur, which I'm not very familiar with. But weather and parking problems conspired to cause me to get there about 2 minutes before the start time, so I didn't get this chance. So everything that is additional for a house of mourning, rather than standard liturgy, I was doing cold.)

I think I did ok, but things like the Hebrew call and the name make me feel like I didn't do a good job. But the family appreciated it (or at least was polite enough to say so), so I guess it worked out.

Our congregation currently has three shiva minyanim [1] going. We have two rabbis. I just got a phone call.

<deep breath> I can do this; really I can.

I sure hope I don't screw it up.

[1] When someone dies, the family (traditionally) "sits shiva" for a week. This is a formal mourning period. Services are held during this time, but the community comes to the mourners, not the other way around. So tonight I'm going to someone's house and leading services for a mourning family (no one I know) and their friends. This is a much more intimate setting than usual services, and the family is already not in the usual emotional state... and the funeral was this morning, so this will be the first shiva service.

When I said a while back that there were certain parts of the rabbi's job that I wasn't sure I could do, this was one of them. I'm just fine with the intellectual part and the "performance" part (for lack of a better word) and of course the spiritual part; I live in fear of the "touchy-feely" part (I do not mean that term disrespectfully).

I can lead the service just fine -- but I have an irrational fear that I will do something stupid that upsets someone in the family. It's irrational, of course; so long as I don't, say, forget the name of the deceased, I'm sure I'll be fine. (And I have the name written down on a post-it note in my pocket.) But that doesn't mean I can just banish the fear.

But I'll never overcome it if I don't at least try, so I said yes. And I am deeply flattered that my rabbi entrusts this to me.

This morning after services someone approached me because she had a question and, to quote her, "you know everything". That's scary. I don't know everything, of course -- but, so far, every time a member of my congregation has said that to me (in a Jewish context), I have in fact known the answer to the question that followed. Today was no exception.

Our rabbi is a storyteller, and as often as not his sermons will lead off with a story about someone he knows or knew (relatives, classmates, past congregants, whatever). He's very careful not to do this in a way that would embarrass the people involved. Still, this morning I found myself wondering what stories he might tell about us in the future, when he has moved on to some other congregation. If anything about me is memorable, will it be something profound or will it be some stupid little thing? I'll never know, because I'm certainly not going to ask. :-)

This morning at Torah study we were reading the beginning of parsha Tzav, which talks about how the priests were required to keep a fire burning on the altar all the time. It specifically says that each morning they must kindle this flame. Someone raised the question of how this interacts with Shabbat. Someone tried to put forth an argument based on "work", but I believe that is unnecessary -- even if work in the temple is not "work" in the prohibited sense, kindling fire is specifically forbidden. So does a specific command (keep this fire going on the altar) trump the general prohibition, or is there something else going on? The rabbi had already left for the second service when the question came up, and none of the commentaries we had handy addressed it. I should check the commentaries I have, and also see if this was covered when our mishna study group did Tractate Tamid. I mostly skimmed that one. (It can't be a general work prohibition anyway, as animals were sacrificed on Shabbat.)

I'm taking this out of order. Sometime before the Shabbat discussion, we -- somehow -- got to talking about cremation. The rabbi (among others) pointed out that cremation is against halacha, and someone objected that honoring the wishes of the dead should take priority. This caused someone else to ask why that matters, if the dead person won't know what you actually did with his body, which is a straightforward, practical answer if you don't believe that the soul lives on. (Some do and some don't.)

Someone said (correctly) that the prohibition is tied to the messianic resurrection of the dead. Someone then brought up the Shoah -- how could our tradition say that those 6 million people were condemned to not be resurrected when it clearly wasn't their fault? So I said that clearly if God can resurrect the dead then he can also reassemble the bodies from ash if need be, but that it is impolite (dare I say irreverent?) to make unnecessary work for him. This got a laugh, which I did not intend. I wonder how I should have phrased that.

Some people there felt strongly that they had to honor the wishes of the dead, and one person had had to deal with this problem personally. I have not had to deal with it (and I know that my parents have bought burial plots already), but I strongly suspect that I would not honor such a wish. There are two scenarios: either we discussed it in advance, in which case I had the opportunity to say "I can't do that; find soemone else to handle your funeral arrangements", or it was sprung with no warning after the fact (in the will, for instance), in which case I never even implicitly agreed to honor such wishes and would be free not to. And anyway, Jewish tradition says that honoring your parents stops before obeying a command to transgress. (Yeah, in my case there'd be the question of what applies if the dead parent isn't Jewish, but I'm not going there.)

Does this mean I personally believe in resurrection? Well, no -- it's not that I don't believe in it, but that I believe it is both unknowable and unimportant. The halacha, and respecting the tradition, still matter to me, and I would need a real reason to violate that. Now, if the societal norm changed to cremation and we were clearly running out of land to bury people in, and a case came up that I had to deal with, then I would re-open the question -- in a discussion with my rabbi, not on my own. But we're not there yet. <p

Friday night I went to Tree of Life again. The turnout was small; I wonder how much of that was due to the time being listed wrong in the Chronicle and how much was just normal fluctuation. (No bar mitzvah, winter, threatening bad weather...)

Rabbi Berkun had larnygitis (I bet I've misspelled that but I'm not sufficiently motivated to look it up), so it's just as well he had a guest cantorial type. He could barely talk; singing would have been a Bad Idea. I offered to take over most of the English reading that he normally does, but he had already scared up someone for that job. He still tried to give a sermon, but he cut it short.

The "sermon" was really more of a report from a conference he attended last week. It was a joint conference of Conservative entities with acronyms; I'm sorry, but I don't know who they all were. The rabbinical body, the cantors' association, something tied to education, a couple more... Anyway, some of the speakers, the rabbi said, had talked about ways of increasing individual observance levels, and Rabbi Berkun rattled off suggestions like lighting Shabbat candles, at least dropping pork and shellfish from the diet if not keeping fully kosher, and so on -- really basic stuff, in other words. I was surprised; the Conservative movement is a halachic one and -- officially -- considers all of these things obligatory, but either this speaker was out in left field or they are having big problems with this among the rank and file. These were suggestions I've often heard from Reform rabbis, but in that movement individual autonomy is encouraged, not shunned. I wonder what it all means.

This Friday was one of the nights that the intergenerational choir at Temple Sinai was singing -- oops. I didn't know about that at the time I scheduled Tree of Life or I would have tried for a different night. But I'm not sure how to discretely get a choir schedule, and I still feel like I'm "moonlighting" and thus don't really want to spread around my real reason for asking.

Saturday morning Rabbi Freedman led the informal minyan, which is unusual. He did ok for the most part (he doesn't usually come so he doesn't know the drill), though he lost control during his drash. (He allowed it to turn into a general conversation that went longer than we really had time for given that he had to go upstairs and do a bar mitzvah after this.) Oops. We still got some Torah study in, and after he left we just continued on our own.

Ok, I have a question about the various "personal offerings" (as opposed to specified communal ones) that were brought. (Maybe Rabbi Gibson will be able to help out next week.) One of these is often translated as the "peace-offering", though Plaut (and the Hebrew speakers in the room) assert that something like "offering of well-being" is closer to the mark. What I don't know is when, and how often, one typically brought these. And was this a case of "things are going well; time to give thanks", or one of "things are going badly; time to ask for help"? (Most people there seemed to think it's the former.) Was this something you did once or twice a year, or any time you wanted to have a festive meal, or what? (The offering could be anything from a bull on down to small birds... not sure if meal-offerings were part of this.)

The talmud talks at some length about making sure that procedures for handling "peace-offerings" and sin-offerings are the same, because we don't want to embarrass the person who brought the latter. The presumption, then, is that peace-offerings are at least as common as sin-offerings, because you're trying to set up the presumption that of course Shlomo over there is bringing a peace-offering, but that only begs the question. (We haven't gotten to sin-offerings yet.) Were people running to the Levites with offerings several times a week, or was this a special thing you did once or twice a year, or what? (I'm confident that the answer is between those extremes, but I don't have any better information.)

Saturday night I went to shiva for a fellow congregant. I didn't actually know the person who died, but I know his wife and she's on the board so I thought I should go. I still don't really understand the protocols. I'm also not sure why Rabbi Gibson has the idea in his head that I've offered to run shiva minyanim; I'm willing if asked, but no, this really isn't something that's calling to me, at least until I learn how to comfort the mourner better. (He asked me if I could run it one night later this week, but the night he wanted was bad and he said not to worry about it -- he has other people he can ask. That's reassuring.)

Yesterday morning the mother of a friend from Temple Sinai died. We didn't get to the funeral because we had tickets for Les Mis (and they're non-exchangeable, and it's the last day anyway), but we'll go to the shiva tonight. (I'll go the rest of the week.) Last night I baked them a cheese and onion pie, which I know they like, that they can eat for lunch tomorrow or something. But the few times I've been to shiva homes there's always been a table full of food for the visitors, so I'll make some brownies to contribute to that just as soon as the oven heats up.

I really appreciate that Dani is willing to go with me to the shiva. Because he knows the couple too (we've had them over a few times), it would have been awkward for me if he bailed. On the other hand, our agreement was that he wouldn't have to "do Jewish stuff" so long as he didn't prevent *me* from doing so. So he didn't have to, but I'm glad he's going to.

Monica

shiva and food

not exactly a shiva minyan

shiva minyan

leading services

shiva minyan, and community versus personal needs

shiva minyan, short takes

Tuesday

short takes

short takes

funeral practices

shiva

services and stuff

shiva minyan

gulp

Shabbat musings

Shabbat report

(no subject)

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