NHC: services
The "H" in "NHC" stands for "havurah" [sic :-) ], which suggests a certain
style of prayer: participatory, musical, casual. (I don't know if
it's fair to equate chavurah with the Renewal movement, but there's
clearly overlap.) The institute actually had a variety of services,
and some of what I found surprised me.
First, there was a lot more of a traditional baseline in the contents than I expected. Most services used the Conservative siddur Sim Shalom, and there was often a tendency to not skip much. I don't know if that's typical of Renewal or if my characterization of this as Renewal is incorrect.
There was a traditional egalitarian service every day at 7AM, which I never went to because (1) I wanted to try other things and (2) ahem, 7AM. Thursday morning I went to the "cathedral of the pines" service (more on that below), which was somewhat similar to my weekday Conservative service but with more active participation. This service was described as "havurah style". (Maybe I just don't know what that phrase means; I think of my Shabbat morning minyan as chavurah style, and it involves more singing, participation, and ruach (spirit) than most of what I experienced at NHC.)
There were outliers, to be sure. There was some stuff that revolved around yoga, and one that was described as a "four worlds" service ("four worlds" is mysticism), which I didn't attend. And I'm pretty sure a service described as "gender balanced" would have made my teeth hurt, though it obviously works for some. (On one foot: if God isn't male, God also isn't female; changing all, or half, the "he"s to "she"s doesn't help.)
One morning I went to a service described as "prayer through niggunim" (a niggun is a wordless melody); I expected niggunim to augment the prayer, not to be it. I got there late so missed any explanation that was offered at the beginning; what I experienced was, essentially, soundtrack and choreography and no words at all. It was an interesting experience, but I couldn't relate to it as prayer any more than I would feel I'd experienced a movie by simply listening to its score. (Not a perfect analogy as I already know the "script" of the service, but it's the best I can do.)
So, definitely a variety, and I haven't even talked about Shabbat yet. But first, more on that Thursday service.
This is the one service that's held off-site; there's a nice park + outdoor cathedral space a few miles from the campus that NHC uses once every year. It started off with logistical challenges. First, two different departure times had been published, and the later one would probably not allow enough time to get back in time for morning classes. I'd agreed to read torah on the promise that it wouldn't cost me the class, so when we were still standing around trying to assemble carpools 15 minutes after the earlier (and original) time, I began to grow a little concerned. Around then the organizer showed up; he said he was not actually going but would stand there to direct stragglers, so we headed off in a caravan.
And went, and went, and went. And then turned around; the lead driver had misremembered, and we had to backtrack all the way to the campus before getting back on the right course. We got to the site with about 40 minutes available before the time we would have to leave to be back for classes. I think they'd been planning a service closer to 60 minutes.
The leader started talking about what to cut out of the service and nominated the torah service. That bugged me -- not because of liturgical purity or anything like that, but because the only reason I hadn't bailed on this under-organized venture when the problems emerged was that I'd agreed to read torah. As had two other people. Some of us were also reading on Shabbat, so we wouldn't have learned the portion in vain, but I didn't know if that was true for everyone, and I still wanted us to read given the circumstances. So I said something like "please don't cut the torah service without checking with all of the readers first", and that seems to have taken care of it. Selfish? Maybe a little. Justified? Maybe a little.
Meanwhile, we were walking to our assigned space. The space was lovely -- rows of benches surrounded by trees. The only thing that marred it was the great big cross on a low wall in front. The caretaker said he could take care of that, and would do so while fetching a table for us (we had nothing to put the torah scroll on); this would all take him about 10 minutes, he said. In the interests of time we decided to start, facing away from the cross, and by the time it mattered the caretaker had covered it with a star of david and we had a table.
Given all of this it was a little hard to get into the proper head-space for prayer, but eventually I got there. (Perhaps ironically, we'd talked about just that challenge the previous day in the prayer-leading class.) We did an abbreviated-but-valid service, we read torah, people seemed satisfied, and I got to my class 30 seconds before it started. (That the driver I was with was willing drop me at the back door of the building made all the difference there. It's pretty obvious that the driver was late to her class, though.)
It's a nice space, but I don't feel a need to participate in this service again at NHC (even if it's run by yekkies [1] next time). Turnout was also smaller than I expected; the advance communication had suggested that this was a big deal at some level, but I think we had about 20 people -- out of 370+ at the institute. 20 people can feel nicely intimate, but it didn't really feel that way to me either. Eh.
[1] Yekkie: canonically German; utterly punctual and precise. The Yekkie tells his wife that he'll be home late because we add three extra words to the service tonight. :-)
Shabbat, on the other hand, had some of the most fulfilling services I've experienced in a while. Friday night there was just one option -- the only time nearly the entire community came together. There was a lot of singing, both niggunim and with words (shifting from one to the other and back, usually); I knew almost none of the melodies but picked them up quickly. I liked the melodies and wanted to retain them, but failed. (Maybe I'll track down one of the leaders and ask about recordings, or at least to have them sung over the phone into a tape recorder.) Probably a lot of it was Carlebach, but I think a lot was not.
We did what I believe was a complete kabbalat shabbat (I'm used to having some or most of the psalms skipped). There was much singing and some dancing, and it took 45 minutes. Then there was a short d'var torah (call it 7-8 minutes), and a fairly efficient ma'ariv. All together it was about the length of my congregation's Friday-night service, but with a very different distribution. It gave me ideas: given that my congregation can sit still for 75 minutes on a Friday night, and given that our "mostly musical shabbat" once a month is popular, can we do more specifically with kabbalat shabbat? Right now we tend to blow through that pretty quickly and either spend more time singing in kri'at sh'ma and the t'filah or we do a torah service. I'd be happy dropping the torah service and spending the recovered time on spirited singing of kabbalat shabbat. (Granted, I am not a typical congregant. But this showed me, again, what is possible.)
(This, by the way, was more what I was thinking of for "havurah style".)
Shabbat morning there were four options: traditional egalitarian, havurah, four worlds, and children's. I went to the havurah service, where I was one of the torah readers. The service used a newly-published siddur (Eit Ratzon) and was led by its editor. The content was fairly traditional and mostly in Hebrew, though there was a nice English meditation at the beginning to set the mood. There was, however, no chazan's repetition of the amidah, and no musaf. (They might have planned musaf and cut it for time, if I correctly interpreted some of the signals. I don't mind. :-) )
The torah reading went fairly well (especially given that, as with Thursday, there had been no chance to see the scroll ahead of time -- fortunately it was nice clear calligraphy, mostly). I had an odd experience: I seemed to be manifesting some of the outward signs of nervousness, but I wasn't nervous. How weird -- and a little annoying, as I'd like the times I look nervous to be a subset, not a superset, of the times I actually am.
There are some nuances of chanting torah that aren't taught in beginners' classes/books. I was taught some at HUC that I'm not used to hearing; one of the other torah readers clearly knew that stuff too. Neat to hear. And I learned a new one by observation: one of the readers (the leader of the service, in fact), paused at whitespace in the scroll. The first time he did it I thought he was stuck on a word or something, but it was obviously intentional. (We were in the repetition of the ten commandments -- lots of short passages.) I've never noticed a reader emphasize the breaks before.
I missed mincha; ma'ariv was outdoors and right before havdalah, so I hovered around the edges of it (wouldn't have been able to read text even with the street lights). Havdalah was another spirit-filled community gathering. I once heard someone say something like "only Reform Jews could drag havdalah out for 20 minutes", but Reform's got nothing on the havurah-niks. :-) First there were niggunim while multiple candles and bundles of spices were distributed. Then we sang the actual blessings (allowing enough time for said spice bundles to circulate), and then it morphed into more niggunim and songs and drumming and dancing. (And schmoozing, right there in the middle of it all, which was one of the things that made me feel outside rather than inside, 'cause I couldn't see faces well enough to identify people and no one was talking to me.) It was still going strong when I left after half an hour or more.
To sum up, then: some services really worked for me, especially on Shabbat, and I tried some other things with varying results, most of which I do not regret. As for Thursday morning, no harm done in the end.
First, there was a lot more of a traditional baseline in the contents than I expected. Most services used the Conservative siddur Sim Shalom, and there was often a tendency to not skip much. I don't know if that's typical of Renewal or if my characterization of this as Renewal is incorrect.
There was a traditional egalitarian service every day at 7AM, which I never went to because (1) I wanted to try other things and (2) ahem, 7AM. Thursday morning I went to the "cathedral of the pines" service (more on that below), which was somewhat similar to my weekday Conservative service but with more active participation. This service was described as "havurah style". (Maybe I just don't know what that phrase means; I think of my Shabbat morning minyan as chavurah style, and it involves more singing, participation, and ruach (spirit) than most of what I experienced at NHC.)
There were outliers, to be sure. There was some stuff that revolved around yoga, and one that was described as a "four worlds" service ("four worlds" is mysticism), which I didn't attend. And I'm pretty sure a service described as "gender balanced" would have made my teeth hurt, though it obviously works for some. (On one foot: if God isn't male, God also isn't female; changing all, or half, the "he"s to "she"s doesn't help.)
One morning I went to a service described as "prayer through niggunim" (a niggun is a wordless melody); I expected niggunim to augment the prayer, not to be it. I got there late so missed any explanation that was offered at the beginning; what I experienced was, essentially, soundtrack and choreography and no words at all. It was an interesting experience, but I couldn't relate to it as prayer any more than I would feel I'd experienced a movie by simply listening to its score. (Not a perfect analogy as I already know the "script" of the service, but it's the best I can do.)
So, definitely a variety, and I haven't even talked about Shabbat yet. But first, more on that Thursday service.
This is the one service that's held off-site; there's a nice park + outdoor cathedral space a few miles from the campus that NHC uses once every year. It started off with logistical challenges. First, two different departure times had been published, and the later one would probably not allow enough time to get back in time for morning classes. I'd agreed to read torah on the promise that it wouldn't cost me the class, so when we were still standing around trying to assemble carpools 15 minutes after the earlier (and original) time, I began to grow a little concerned. Around then the organizer showed up; he said he was not actually going but would stand there to direct stragglers, so we headed off in a caravan.
And went, and went, and went. And then turned around; the lead driver had misremembered, and we had to backtrack all the way to the campus before getting back on the right course. We got to the site with about 40 minutes available before the time we would have to leave to be back for classes. I think they'd been planning a service closer to 60 minutes.
The leader started talking about what to cut out of the service and nominated the torah service. That bugged me -- not because of liturgical purity or anything like that, but because the only reason I hadn't bailed on this under-organized venture when the problems emerged was that I'd agreed to read torah. As had two other people. Some of us were also reading on Shabbat, so we wouldn't have learned the portion in vain, but I didn't know if that was true for everyone, and I still wanted us to read given the circumstances. So I said something like "please don't cut the torah service without checking with all of the readers first", and that seems to have taken care of it. Selfish? Maybe a little. Justified? Maybe a little.
Meanwhile, we were walking to our assigned space. The space was lovely -- rows of benches surrounded by trees. The only thing that marred it was the great big cross on a low wall in front. The caretaker said he could take care of that, and would do so while fetching a table for us (we had nothing to put the torah scroll on); this would all take him about 10 minutes, he said. In the interests of time we decided to start, facing away from the cross, and by the time it mattered the caretaker had covered it with a star of david and we had a table.
Given all of this it was a little hard to get into the proper head-space for prayer, but eventually I got there. (Perhaps ironically, we'd talked about just that challenge the previous day in the prayer-leading class.) We did an abbreviated-but-valid service, we read torah, people seemed satisfied, and I got to my class 30 seconds before it started. (That the driver I was with was willing drop me at the back door of the building made all the difference there. It's pretty obvious that the driver was late to her class, though.)
It's a nice space, but I don't feel a need to participate in this service again at NHC (even if it's run by yekkies [1] next time). Turnout was also smaller than I expected; the advance communication had suggested that this was a big deal at some level, but I think we had about 20 people -- out of 370+ at the institute. 20 people can feel nicely intimate, but it didn't really feel that way to me either. Eh.
[1] Yekkie: canonically German; utterly punctual and precise. The Yekkie tells his wife that he'll be home late because we add three extra words to the service tonight. :-)
Shabbat, on the other hand, had some of the most fulfilling services I've experienced in a while. Friday night there was just one option -- the only time nearly the entire community came together. There was a lot of singing, both niggunim and with words (shifting from one to the other and back, usually); I knew almost none of the melodies but picked them up quickly. I liked the melodies and wanted to retain them, but failed. (Maybe I'll track down one of the leaders and ask about recordings, or at least to have them sung over the phone into a tape recorder.) Probably a lot of it was Carlebach, but I think a lot was not.
We did what I believe was a complete kabbalat shabbat (I'm used to having some or most of the psalms skipped). There was much singing and some dancing, and it took 45 minutes. Then there was a short d'var torah (call it 7-8 minutes), and a fairly efficient ma'ariv. All together it was about the length of my congregation's Friday-night service, but with a very different distribution. It gave me ideas: given that my congregation can sit still for 75 minutes on a Friday night, and given that our "mostly musical shabbat" once a month is popular, can we do more specifically with kabbalat shabbat? Right now we tend to blow through that pretty quickly and either spend more time singing in kri'at sh'ma and the t'filah or we do a torah service. I'd be happy dropping the torah service and spending the recovered time on spirited singing of kabbalat shabbat. (Granted, I am not a typical congregant. But this showed me, again, what is possible.)
(This, by the way, was more what I was thinking of for "havurah style".)
Shabbat morning there were four options: traditional egalitarian, havurah, four worlds, and children's. I went to the havurah service, where I was one of the torah readers. The service used a newly-published siddur (Eit Ratzon) and was led by its editor. The content was fairly traditional and mostly in Hebrew, though there was a nice English meditation at the beginning to set the mood. There was, however, no chazan's repetition of the amidah, and no musaf. (They might have planned musaf and cut it for time, if I correctly interpreted some of the signals. I don't mind. :-) )
The torah reading went fairly well (especially given that, as with Thursday, there had been no chance to see the scroll ahead of time -- fortunately it was nice clear calligraphy, mostly). I had an odd experience: I seemed to be manifesting some of the outward signs of nervousness, but I wasn't nervous. How weird -- and a little annoying, as I'd like the times I look nervous to be a subset, not a superset, of the times I actually am.
There are some nuances of chanting torah that aren't taught in beginners' classes/books. I was taught some at HUC that I'm not used to hearing; one of the other torah readers clearly knew that stuff too. Neat to hear. And I learned a new one by observation: one of the readers (the leader of the service, in fact), paused at whitespace in the scroll. The first time he did it I thought he was stuck on a word or something, but it was obviously intentional. (We were in the repetition of the ten commandments -- lots of short passages.) I've never noticed a reader emphasize the breaks before.
I missed mincha; ma'ariv was outdoors and right before havdalah, so I hovered around the edges of it (wouldn't have been able to read text even with the street lights). Havdalah was another spirit-filled community gathering. I once heard someone say something like "only Reform Jews could drag havdalah out for 20 minutes", but Reform's got nothing on the havurah-niks. :-) First there were niggunim while multiple candles and bundles of spices were distributed. Then we sang the actual blessings (allowing enough time for said spice bundles to circulate), and then it morphed into more niggunim and songs and drumming and dancing. (And schmoozing, right there in the middle of it all, which was one of the things that made me feel outside rather than inside, 'cause I couldn't see faces well enough to identify people and no one was talking to me.) It was still going strong when I left after half an hour or more.
To sum up, then: some services really worked for me, especially on Shabbat, and I tried some other things with varying results, most of which I do not regret. As for Thursday morning, no harm done in the end.