Comments | cellio: planning a service

cellio

planning a service

Mar 26, 2006 22:04

My rabbi has given me a Friday-night service to plan and lead this summer, and he'll actually be there to see me so I can get feedback and advice from him. Nifty! I'm going to doodle about some of my preliminary thoughts in this entry.
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leading services

Comments 4

siderea March 27 2006, 05:03:53 UTC

My service is the week after our monthly "mostly musical Shabbat", so I'm thinking I should bring some of that mood in from the previous week.

Not contrast? That would be my inclination in programming.

cellio March 28 2006, 00:29:03 UTC

In a way, they'll be getting a contrast -- I'm just easing them into it. The "mostly musical shabbat" service is different from everything else in several ways: more music, more-accessible music, no sermon, earlier to encourage families with young kids (so different composition), and a few other things. I guess what I'm doing is pulling in some of that flavor in the first part of the service, but without all the other features of that service. And then, come the shift into the next section of the service, things are definitely different than in the musical service. I'm hoping that balances familiarity and contrast ( ... )

magid March 27 2006, 15:07:22 UTC

This really shows up how different services are; my defaults are so different, with the words always a given, tunes up to the leader each time, whoever is carrying the Sefer Torah around leading the singing, and so on.

cellio March 28 2006, 00:40:12 UTC

I see a lot of variation within my congregation and among others. On Shabbat morning, for instance, the leader is more free to change things and the leader does lead the singing during the procession. It's a smaller space with no amplification and no raised bima (everything's on one level), which helps. (The sanctuary, in contrast, seats about 400 people.)

For our Friday-night service, there's variation week to week but it's all planned out so the cantorial soloist, pianist/organist, and rabbi(s) will all be prepared. The text is generally pretty well set; we only see alternative readings and the like when some group is leading services and inserts them. We have a few standard melodies for most things that the congregation knows and sings along on. This is the main service for most people, and the rabbis try to balance familiarity and innovation.

And then there's the other congregation, where I lead shacharit once a week. The liturgy and melodies are both extremely fixed there; one week I accidentally used a different melody ( ... )