services this Shabbat
Summary: Friday night ok (or good considering circumstances);
Saturday morning quite good.
Friday night I, with the cantorial soloist, led Shabbat services. Last week this service switched to a different siddur (a homegrown interim one based on Mishkan T'filah that they've been using for the 6:00 service). That made things a little challenging for me (the navigation isn't hard-wired like for its predecessor), and more than a little challenging for the congregation. So that was one challenge.
Another challenge -- and I think this knocked me a little off-kilter going in -- is that even though we tell people receiving honors (candles, kiddush, aliyot) to be there 15 minutes early, one of the two people designated for the aliyah was AWOL at start time. (We normally have one aliyah split between two people.) Normally I would have just shrugged; she'd show up or she wouldn't, and if she didn't the other person could do both blessings just fine (I know him). But, I didn't know the missing person and some congregants don't know the blessings and are prepared to do only their assigned one, and I wanted to split a long torah reading into two aliyot. That would mean each person would do one, doing both blessings, which ought to be a no-brainer but you can't assume. So, I wasn't sure how to proceed. (Another reason I didn't want to do it as one long aliyah, once I found out who the honorees were, is that one might have had trouble standing that long.)
So, just as the cantorial soloist and I were deciding "we'll go and just wing it", the person showed up. And she said no to doing an aliyah by herself. What I should have done, if I'd been thinking quickly, is to say "fine", walk over to someone known to be capable, and asked that person to join us. But I didn't think of that before someone else thought to invite this person's husband or brother (I didn't catch which), which involved more negotiation right there in the sanctuary. Bottom line, we started about 4-5 minutes late. I hate being late!
During the service it became clear that the cantorial soloist and I had opposing tendencies in one area: she wanted to stop and explain things at several points in the service, because of the new book, while I wanted to rely on familiar liturgy to guide people. (I mean, it's not like any of the core prayers changed. There were some different English readings and some of the page order was a little different.) I hadn't anticipated that, not having seen her "in charge" in this situation before. (Last week, one of the rabbis was there and she deferred to him in things like this.) While she has no more formal credentials than I do, she's up there every week and I guess she sees herself as clergy and me as a less-capable layperson. I'm not trying to diss her; I think it's a natural perception to have. And if she has that perception, it would be natural for her to try to step in on things like this. Oh well; it's not likely to come up again, so there's no point in trying to work out what happened or discuss it with her. It's one more learning experience for me, a thing to remember to coordinate on in advance.
However, all that aside (and some of it was not as visible to the congregation as to us), I think the service went pretty well. I had taken the precaution of applying post-it notes where there was any ambiguity at all in the new siddur, which helped me move through it seamlessly. Because this was a photocopy from a book designed to foil photocopying, some English passages were a little harder for me to read than they would be in a real book, so there were some minor stumbles there. (With the Hebrew it didn't matter so much because I know a lot of it cold. Though, important point for leaders IMO, even when I have something fully memorized, when I am leading I am on-book, and even following with a finger when I can. A small distraction should not be able to derail the leader.)
With some of the text being less familiar and/or hard to read, I was a little concerned about maintaining the connection with the congregation (the semblence of eye contact, getting the book out of my face, etc). I was gratified to receive compliments on my reading, particularly my diction, pacing/rhythm, and spirit. Oh good.
The new book doesn't contain the torah service, so we switched back to the old book for that. That worked out well; it meant that I could hold a sefer torah (torah scroll) and still casually manipulate a very-familiar book. (Why yes, I can turn a page in a held book one-handed, if it's not too big. I thought everyone could, until someone commented on it.)
Note to future self: mic + sefer torah + procession can cause problems. If I get to do this again, I will just turn the thing off for a good chunk of that, relying on either the fixed mic at the desk (when not standing at the ark) or good old lung power to be heard. At least until I ask my rabbi how he does it... (Or, better yet, a woman with, err, upper-body volume.) Have I mentioned lately how much I hate using mics at Shabbat services? (Not least because of the halachic issues.) But our sanctuary pretty much requires it, especially if we want to support those with hearing difficulties (who are able to plug in headphones to hear better).
The torah-chanting went pretty well. I stumbled in a few places and corrected myself, only having to do real violence to the trope once. The issue was tropes (melodies), not usually words. If I get a trope wrong and it "doesn't matter" I'll just blow through it, but if I need to do a phrase that's going to consume, say, three words (to get the comma in the right place) and I start to do one that maxes out at two, I have to fix it or I'll mess myself up for the rest of the verse. This passage had a lot of places where there was repetition in the text but the tropes were different, which made it hard to memorize the tropes. I think this might have also been the longest passage I've chanted, which I didn't notice up front.
For all that I stumbled in places, though, I got a lot of compliments. There were two types of people who said "that was hard" -- the ones who were probably reacting to the length, and the ones who I know were following along in the Hebrew with the tropes and knew how to read them. :-)
I had asked someone else to give the d'var torah (talk), someone I enjoy studying with who has given many good divrei torah on Shabbat morning but has never spoken for the larger congregation that I'm aware of. He did a good job. And it gave me a chance to not be the focus of attention for a few minutes.
This wasn't my best Friday-night service, but it was acceptable and I've learned some things about dealing with new-to-me circumstances. I don't think I've done wrong by my rabbis, and I'll do better next time.
Shabbat morning started out small (a dozen or so), which had me a little concerned. It is true that there are people who don't come if they know the rabbi won't be there, which is a little frustrating because it's supposed to be a community (and, in fact, that service is the best regular community we have in the congregation). But that's their call. What I was concerned about was having critical mass to achieve that sense of spirit that comes through all the singing we do. Fortunately, more people did file in and we ended up with a group that I would call on the small end of normal (as opposed to smaller than normal). I didn't count people.
I did a good job with leading the singing a-capella. (My rabbi plays a guitar, but I don't know how.) My voice is strong enough to be able to establish key, pace, cadences, etc, so I can pretty much ignore the people who will, given half a chance, try to change things to their own liking. (They don't usually do that to the rabbi, of course. So they don't to him and can't to me, but they can and do to some of the other lay leaders.)
We had some relative newcomers (a couple weeks), so I was particularly mindful of navigation. I was happy to see that they were fully participating and seemed happy. (I gave two of them hagbahah and g'lilah, honors in the torah service.)
Chanting torah went better at this service because I had a checker who knows the trope system. So when there was a question she was able to sing the word to me and I went on. (I had also circled, on the copy I gave her, the tropes I was most likely to have trouble with, as kind of a heads-up to her.) I was sure to tell the congregation that she was not being nit-picky and I had asked her to be that precise; I didn't want anyone to think she was being pushy.
Both Friday night and Saturday morning I did one thing that I thought was clever. Because the passage was long I didn't want to chant the whole thing and then translate. (It would have been several minutes, and Saturday morning most people don't follow in a text.) The portion broke logically (and whitespace-wise) into four parts, so I would chant a "paragraph", read its translation, and then do the next one. (Each aliyah got two of those pairs.) That's not the clever part. The clever part was realizing that handling a scroll and a book in that way would be a huge mess, and Friday night I didn't have someone there to just read it for me, so I printed out the English in a nice big font, one paragraph per sheet of paper. So when I got to the end of a section I could just pick up the top paper with my spare hand, read it, push the page aside, and continue. I first did this with that bar mitzvah that I conducted a couple of years ago (where I also had pages for the names of the people getting the aliyot); it worked well there so I used it here.
(This passage was tricky enough that even though there was a lot of repetition, I didn't want to try to translate straight from the scroll. There were just enough suble differences to make that a challenge. If I were just the torah reader in a rabbi-led morning service I would have tried it, but as the "rabbi substitute" for the whole morning I was mindful of being disruptive in a setting where things are already non-standard.)
I'm happy with how the morning service went. Still mystified by how I picked up about 10 minutes of time, but happy.
Friday night I, with the cantorial soloist, led Shabbat services. Last week this service switched to a different siddur (a homegrown interim one based on Mishkan T'filah that they've been using for the 6:00 service). That made things a little challenging for me (the navigation isn't hard-wired like for its predecessor), and more than a little challenging for the congregation. So that was one challenge.
Another challenge -- and I think this knocked me a little off-kilter going in -- is that even though we tell people receiving honors (candles, kiddush, aliyot) to be there 15 minutes early, one of the two people designated for the aliyah was AWOL at start time. (We normally have one aliyah split between two people.) Normally I would have just shrugged; she'd show up or she wouldn't, and if she didn't the other person could do both blessings just fine (I know him). But, I didn't know the missing person and some congregants don't know the blessings and are prepared to do only their assigned one, and I wanted to split a long torah reading into two aliyot. That would mean each person would do one, doing both blessings, which ought to be a no-brainer but you can't assume. So, I wasn't sure how to proceed. (Another reason I didn't want to do it as one long aliyah, once I found out who the honorees were, is that one might have had trouble standing that long.)
So, just as the cantorial soloist and I were deciding "we'll go and just wing it", the person showed up. And she said no to doing an aliyah by herself. What I should have done, if I'd been thinking quickly, is to say "fine", walk over to someone known to be capable, and asked that person to join us. But I didn't think of that before someone else thought to invite this person's husband or brother (I didn't catch which), which involved more negotiation right there in the sanctuary. Bottom line, we started about 4-5 minutes late. I hate being late!
During the service it became clear that the cantorial soloist and I had opposing tendencies in one area: she wanted to stop and explain things at several points in the service, because of the new book, while I wanted to rely on familiar liturgy to guide people. (I mean, it's not like any of the core prayers changed. There were some different English readings and some of the page order was a little different.) I hadn't anticipated that, not having seen her "in charge" in this situation before. (Last week, one of the rabbis was there and she deferred to him in things like this.) While she has no more formal credentials than I do, she's up there every week and I guess she sees herself as clergy and me as a less-capable layperson. I'm not trying to diss her; I think it's a natural perception to have. And if she has that perception, it would be natural for her to try to step in on things like this. Oh well; it's not likely to come up again, so there's no point in trying to work out what happened or discuss it with her. It's one more learning experience for me, a thing to remember to coordinate on in advance.
However, all that aside (and some of it was not as visible to the congregation as to us), I think the service went pretty well. I had taken the precaution of applying post-it notes where there was any ambiguity at all in the new siddur, which helped me move through it seamlessly. Because this was a photocopy from a book designed to foil photocopying, some English passages were a little harder for me to read than they would be in a real book, so there were some minor stumbles there. (With the Hebrew it didn't matter so much because I know a lot of it cold. Though, important point for leaders IMO, even when I have something fully memorized, when I am leading I am on-book, and even following with a finger when I can. A small distraction should not be able to derail the leader.)
With some of the text being less familiar and/or hard to read, I was a little concerned about maintaining the connection with the congregation (the semblence of eye contact, getting the book out of my face, etc). I was gratified to receive compliments on my reading, particularly my diction, pacing/rhythm, and spirit. Oh good.
The new book doesn't contain the torah service, so we switched back to the old book for that. That worked out well; it meant that I could hold a sefer torah (torah scroll) and still casually manipulate a very-familiar book. (Why yes, I can turn a page in a held book one-handed, if it's not too big. I thought everyone could, until someone commented on it.)
Note to future self: mic + sefer torah + procession can cause problems. If I get to do this again, I will just turn the thing off for a good chunk of that, relying on either the fixed mic at the desk (when not standing at the ark) or good old lung power to be heard. At least until I ask my rabbi how he does it... (Or, better yet, a woman with, err, upper-body volume.) Have I mentioned lately how much I hate using mics at Shabbat services? (Not least because of the halachic issues.) But our sanctuary pretty much requires it, especially if we want to support those with hearing difficulties (who are able to plug in headphones to hear better).
The torah-chanting went pretty well. I stumbled in a few places and corrected myself, only having to do real violence to the trope once. The issue was tropes (melodies), not usually words. If I get a trope wrong and it "doesn't matter" I'll just blow through it, but if I need to do a phrase that's going to consume, say, three words (to get the comma in the right place) and I start to do one that maxes out at two, I have to fix it or I'll mess myself up for the rest of the verse. This passage had a lot of places where there was repetition in the text but the tropes were different, which made it hard to memorize the tropes. I think this might have also been the longest passage I've chanted, which I didn't notice up front.
For all that I stumbled in places, though, I got a lot of compliments. There were two types of people who said "that was hard" -- the ones who were probably reacting to the length, and the ones who I know were following along in the Hebrew with the tropes and knew how to read them. :-)
I had asked someone else to give the d'var torah (talk), someone I enjoy studying with who has given many good divrei torah on Shabbat morning but has never spoken for the larger congregation that I'm aware of. He did a good job. And it gave me a chance to not be the focus of attention for a few minutes.
This wasn't my best Friday-night service, but it was acceptable and I've learned some things about dealing with new-to-me circumstances. I don't think I've done wrong by my rabbis, and I'll do better next time.
Shabbat morning started out small (a dozen or so), which had me a little concerned. It is true that there are people who don't come if they know the rabbi won't be there, which is a little frustrating because it's supposed to be a community (and, in fact, that service is the best regular community we have in the congregation). But that's their call. What I was concerned about was having critical mass to achieve that sense of spirit that comes through all the singing we do. Fortunately, more people did file in and we ended up with a group that I would call on the small end of normal (as opposed to smaller than normal). I didn't count people.
I did a good job with leading the singing a-capella. (My rabbi plays a guitar, but I don't know how.) My voice is strong enough to be able to establish key, pace, cadences, etc, so I can pretty much ignore the people who will, given half a chance, try to change things to their own liking. (They don't usually do that to the rabbi, of course. So they don't to him and can't to me, but they can and do to some of the other lay leaders.)
We had some relative newcomers (a couple weeks), so I was particularly mindful of navigation. I was happy to see that they were fully participating and seemed happy. (I gave two of them hagbahah and g'lilah, honors in the torah service.)
Chanting torah went better at this service because I had a checker who knows the trope system. So when there was a question she was able to sing the word to me and I went on. (I had also circled, on the copy I gave her, the tropes I was most likely to have trouble with, as kind of a heads-up to her.) I was sure to tell the congregation that she was not being nit-picky and I had asked her to be that precise; I didn't want anyone to think she was being pushy.
Both Friday night and Saturday morning I did one thing that I thought was clever. Because the passage was long I didn't want to chant the whole thing and then translate. (It would have been several minutes, and Saturday morning most people don't follow in a text.) The portion broke logically (and whitespace-wise) into four parts, so I would chant a "paragraph", read its translation, and then do the next one. (Each aliyah got two of those pairs.) That's not the clever part. The clever part was realizing that handling a scroll and a book in that way would be a huge mess, and Friday night I didn't have someone there to just read it for me, so I printed out the English in a nice big font, one paragraph per sheet of paper. So when I got to the end of a section I could just pick up the top paper with my spare hand, read it, push the page aside, and continue. I first did this with that bar mitzvah that I conducted a couple of years ago (where I also had pages for the names of the people getting the aliyot); it worked well there so I used it here.
(This passage was tricky enough that even though there was a lot of repetition, I didn't want to try to translate straight from the scroll. There were just enough suble differences to make that a challenge. If I were just the torah reader in a rabbi-led morning service I would have tried it, but as the "rabbi substitute" for the whole morning I was mindful of being disruptive in a setting where things are already non-standard.)
I'm happy with how the morning service went. Still mystified by how I picked up about 10 minutes of time, but happy.