There is a prayer/song in the Yom Kippur liturgy called "Ki Anu Amecha", of the form: "we are your people, you are our king; we are your flock, you are our shepherd; we are your children, you are our father" etc. Last year for Kol Nidrei my rabbi asked me to write a short kavanah, or intention, to read at the service before singing this. (In a great display of trust of which I am quite mindful, he did not screen this before I read it in front of 900 people.) I didn't post this here at the time; I meant to post it before Yom Kippur this year instead. But I didn't, so here it is now.

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The Avinu Malkeinu prayer describes what God is to us -- our father and king. Both of these are one-sided; there is nothing about our role, our place in God's realm. The caring father and the just king both act upon us, not with us. So after days of pleading to the frightening, distant Avinu Malkeinu, it is time to add new images to our conception of God. It is time for us to be actors and not just acted-upon.

Ki Anu Amecha adds the relationship that has been missing until now. God is still Malkeinu, but we are his people. Still Avinu, but we are his children. Now we matter, taking our place as partners with God. Further, our view of God is not limited now to Avinu and Malkeinu -- God is shepherd to our flock, portion to our congregation, and most powerfully, our friend.

Friend? I don't know if I'm ready for God to be my friend. That's even more intimidating than Avinu and Malkeinu -- a true friend knows me as well as, or better than, I know myself. I am flawed, broken, not the best person I can be, and it's all laid bare for a true friend. Can I stand up to the scrutiny of a divine friend? On this Yom Kippur I look more for the divine teacher or the divine shepherd. I am grateful that God offers us so many ways to relate to each other; if one does not resonate for me this year, another will. What is most important is that the relationship exists; in Ki Anu Amecha God reaches out to us as surely as we reach out to him, true partners in teshuva and atonement on this grave night of Kol Nidrei.

My congregation has a writing group and we'd like to be able to share some of our work with each other and anyone else who cares. Our own web site doesn't yet support blogging; I'm told it's coming but not soon. So I want to set up a shared blog or journal somewhere, with posting access restricted to the members and commenting open to everyone. I'm looking for suggestions about where to do this.

Some factors to consider:

• Most group members are minimally proficient with internet tools and concepts; I'm the outlier. So the interface needs to be pretty simple and resilient.
• There will be 10-15 individuals posting to this and I'd like it to be clear who's posting. (I don't want to share one account.)
• There's no money for this. I'm willing to chip in up to about $50 a year, but I can't fund individual accounts for each poster.
• If the site is ad-supported it should be tasteful; I've seen LJ ads recently (when accidentally logged out) and that's just plain obnoxious.
• For this application I don't think threaded comments are a requirement. (I consider them essential for my own journal, but not for this.)
• Syndication (RSS or Atom) is a must, but I assume they all do that. (More specifically, I want to be able to read this blog via LJ.)
• I have a personal aversion to Blogspot because it's very hard for me to post comments there. (OpenID seems to be broken and their captchas are extremely difficult for me.)

I find myself leaning toward Dreamwidth because of the ad-free familiar interface, but I don't know if asking people to create individual accounts would be too much of a burden. Can I have accounts set up there with just names and email addresses and an empty shell of a profile? (Can I do that and just hand out login ID/password pairs to the group members?) And there may well be something much better for this project; I didn't so much shop for a blogging platform as stumble into LJ because of friends. I haven't used the others to publish, only to comment.

Thoughts?