kallah notes
It's been a few weeks since the kallah ended and there are things I'd
meant to have written about by now. Well, better late than never.
Classes
The format of the kallah, as at NHC, is that you take two week-long classes, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. The slots at the kallah were two hours long and the classes met for four days, so you can do stuff with that.
My morning class, with Chazzan Jack Kessler, was excellent. I had thought that it would be mainly about prayer-leading techniques, but it was about singing and evoking a spiritual connection more generally. Much of what he taught does not summarize well in words, but at the end of the first day I already felt I'd gotten my money's worth. (More specifically, he did more for me in one day than I got from a year's worth of voice lessons. Key take-away: the diaphragm, from which we are frequently exhorted to breathe, is not the bottom-most element. Sing from the kishkes (guts), he says, but if you're really in tune with your body, then as with martial arts the action starts in the balls of your feet. I'm not there, but I grok the kishkes part.)
One thing he talked about is to think of yourself not as the song but as the instrument. You don't so much make the music as provide a vehicle for it. That sounds kind of woo-woo, but there were physical exercises that went with this that made it more concrete for me. It also led to this quip: good musicians execute their music; bad ones murder it. :-)
My afternoon class, on the other hand, was quite disappointing. I had struggled with the afternoon classes before deciding to go; while there were several candidates in the morning, there were only two classes that sounded interesting in the afternoon and the form asked for three choices. Was that a hint? I contacted the registration folks to ask what would happen if I couldn't get one of my two top choices, and (after asking which they were) they said I would get one of them. So that just left the problem of ordering them.
One was an introduction to Chassidism. It sounded interesting and it's an area I don't know a lot about. The other was a class on Rabbi Hillel. I ultimately chose the latter, mainly because it's more specific yet the subject area seemed rich. I chose depth over breadth. I was also mindful that my top choices in the morning were "heart" classes and this would be a "head" class. (Intro to Chassidism could have gone either way.)
The first day went well, and on that basis I bought the recommended book. (Written by the instructor, I note, but it looked good on first examination and the instructor made a good impression. I now regret this purchase.) The second day of the class was so-so; the instructor seemed under-prepared and disorganized, and he did not rein in a couple talkative students who tried to take things way off topic. The instructor also sprinkled in more off-topic bits of his own, much of it on Chassidism but scattered. (Hey, if I'd wanted the Chassidism class, I would have signed up for the one that was about that.)
On day three we had deviated from any semblance of the original lesson plan, leading me to ask (twice) "could we please get back to talking about Hillel?". Another student thanked me privately but, as is par for these things, no one backed me up in class. It was really frustrating, and by dinner time that night I was pretty sure I wouldn't return on the last day, when he planned to talk about Jesus. (Some of Jesus' teachings came from Hillel, but it didn't appear that Hillel would be the focus. Edit: I'm not averse to learning about Jesus by any means, but I know much better sources of instruction on that topic and it's not how I wanted to spend my kallah time.) The next day at lunch I saw the instructor, who reminded me of the early start time that day, and I told him I wouldn't be returning. He didn't indicate that he wanted further input so I didn't force it on him.
It's not practical to join a four-day class on day four, but fortunately there was an alternative. One of the afternoon slots was the "workshop track"; instead of taking one class for four sessions you chose one one-shot class (from three or four offerings per) on each day. So I went to one of the workshops, which was interesting and I'll try to cover later.
Other daytime activities
I found scheduling to be a bit challenging. In the morning you could pretty much reliably do two of the following three: attend morning services, eat breakfast, be on time to class. Or perhaps three of four, if you throw "sleep past 6AM" into the mix. (The first services were at 6:45, IIRC.)
The late afternoon was similarly challenging: classes ended at 5:30, mincha was usually at 5:45, dinner was 5:30 to 7:30, certain other activities began at 6:45 or 7, and ma'ariv was at 7:30. (Aside: dinner was back in the main dorm, a 10-minute walk from where everything else was happening.) If you were in one of the choirs or were meeting with an "affinity group" (like BOF meetings at other conferences), and you wanted dinner, you had to skip one of the services. I'm not sure why they didn't do mincha and ma'ariv back to back like most traditional communities. That sure would have been easier on the participants, or at least this participant.
Meanwhile, there was a vast expanse of not-very-much-to-do in the middle of the day. Between 11:30 (end of morning classes) and 3:30 (start of afternoon classes), aside from lunch, there were the following: an off-site tikkun olam project that required advance planning (working on a farm, for which you needed appropriate gear), an art project, a smattering of short obscure films, and a set of pretty specialized small-discussion groups. All of these were very lightly attended, so I infer that most of the 400 attendees of the kallah did not do any of them. I found stuff to do, including checking email and working on a then-upcoming torah portion, but for as crunched as the ends of the day were, this felt wasteful to me. I wanted a more even distribution of core programming.
Evening activities
Evenings alternated between the one-large-thing-for-everyone model and the variety-of-choices model. This worked well for me; the whole group did come together but not all the time. There were two concert nights, with several people/groups doing a couple pieces each, and that was a nice introduction to a bunch of new-to-me performers. Most were musicians but a few were storytellers or poets.
Saturday night there was a tribute to two members of the community who had died in the past year. One died in the plane crash in Buffalo in February; I'm not sure what happened to the other. The second especially was obviously a big name in the community, though I didn't know of him (Reb Aryeh Hirshfield). It felt a little awkward, as if I were crashing someone else's funeral, though it wasn't as glum as a funeral usually is. It was, however, a little disconcerting to be watching fireworks out the window during this. Oops.
There were almost always late-night activities too -- jam sessions, short films, a dance one night, and so on. This is definitely not a community that shuts down after dinner. This is good; when I go to something like a convention or a retreat, that's why I'm there and I want it to fill my days.
General impressions
At the opening gathering someone said that a third of this year's attendees were new. I found the regulars there to be much more ready to approach newcomers than what I found at NHC last year, where few of us were new. I felt welcomed at the kallah; for the first couple days at NHC I felt like I had to force my way into conversations. (And I suck at that.)
Given that a third of us were new, the butt-numbingly-long sequence of individual thank-yous at the opening event might have been better handled late in the week, by which time we might have had some clue who those people were.
Punctuality is not a dominant trait in this community. (True at NHC last year too.)
The food was much better than I expect from college cafeterias. The organizers made sure there were always vegetarian and vegan options, there was good variety, there was always plenty of protein (not carb-heavy like conferences often are), and we had fish a few times (plus there was tuna available at the ever-present salad bar). The kitchen workers were friendly and helpful, and after the first meal traffic control wasn't much of a problem. The seating area was often cramped; if they had gotten their projected attendance (a few hundred more people) it's not at all clear to me where they would have put them.
There were some vibes that turned me off. One was a feeling, more than once articulated, that we should be driven by the heart only and that "head stuff" like text study doesn't matter. I saw very little in the way of serious text study, though I do note the presence of one class for which I did not have the text skills (intermediate Hebrew) so it was represented. Someone repeated a criticism he had received of Renewal Judaism: "you people just want to get high". That's harsh and a little unfair, but there's resonance there too.
There seems to be a lot of interest in "spiritual" activities that do not strike me as Jewish, like drum circles and Buddhism and some sort of eastern chant/dance combo ("kirtan"). I do want to get more in touch with my inner spirit (it's in there somewhere, I know), but I'm more interested in doing it in ways that feel Jewish to me. These ways obviously feel Jewish to some other people, but they don't to me.
I had a few encounters that triggered an inner "ok, you stay there and I'll back away slowly and we'll pretend this didn't happen, ok?" reaction -- nature worship, past-lives theory, aligning the chakras, panentheism (yeah, I know that one has a Jewish pedigree), that sort of thing. Some of it reminded me of things that are called "new-age" in other contexts. And Reb Zalman, the founder of the movement, has a cult-like following that sometimes weirded me out, like when they auctioned off a tallit that he had personally worn for morning prayers for the last year that was supposed to bring a special blessing to the buyer. (Opening bid was $1500, which they did not make; in past years they have.) Some of this is almost certainly dedication rather than worship, and I'm certainly not going to judge the whole movement based on my newcomer impressions, but some of it felt over the line to me. I guess this is what happens when a movement has a charismatic leader?
No, of course I didn't actually say anything in those cases where I was uncomfortable; I just found ways to be elsewhere as soon as possible.
One activity bordering on this space was a practice they strongly encouraged called "spirit buddies". At the beginning of morning classes you were supposed to meet with your cohort (groups of three people), to "create the container for practice for each other, pray for each other, offer one another as windows into the infinite divine expanse". Further quoting: "our spirit buddies listen with warm delighted attention, witnessing our dreams and commitments, taking us seriously and holding us accountable to our promises". That felt uncomfortable to me, so I intended to opt out. This was to occupy the first 20 minutes of class, so on the first day I showed up 15 minutes into that to be told that really, everyone should be doing this. I considered pushing back but didn't. For the next three days, my assigned "spirit buddies" were (1) always late and (2) much more interested in talking than listening. Both of them had Big Problems in their lives at the time, which made me feel even worse trying to break in with something smaller but about the kallah (what we were supposed to be focusing on). So, pretty much, they blew me off and I didn't mind, except that I would have preferred that they make it official so I could reclaim those valuable morning minutes. If they'd just said they weren't going to be there I wouldn't have been either, but every day after the first I was on time and alone for 10 or more minutes. Feh.
Most of the people I interacted with were very friendly, and as I said before, I felt welcomed as a newcomer. I rarely wanted for people to talk with at meals, even when they turned out to be big important people. My classmates were generally interesting to talk with before and after, and one was kind enough to send me recordings (made with her iPhone) of some of the melodies we did in the morning class. (I'd like a digital recorder but I don't think I want another specialized device. If the iTouch had a mic this would be another vote in its favor, but I don't want the iPhone because I don't want to change phone providers.)
I have sometimes described my kallah experience as "decent with a high standard deviation". There were a lot of very-good moments; there were also some, err, others. I am glad I went. I doubt I will go again.
Short takes
"The god you don't believe in doesn't exist." (Source unknown, said to someone there who eventually became religious.)
"Hebrew nouns are just slow-moving verbs." (Jack Kessler) And: "sheim" is not just "name" (the common translation) but also "essence".
"Be the ocean: even the worst hurricanes only affect about 100' down; below that is calm. The surface noise in our lives is like that, but the place deeper down within us is unaffected. Sing from there." (Jack Kessler)
"We don't take a breath because breath is a gift; we receive a breath." (Said by someone during a morning service, I think.)
Classes
The format of the kallah, as at NHC, is that you take two week-long classes, one in the morning and one in the afternoon. The slots at the kallah were two hours long and the classes met for four days, so you can do stuff with that.
My morning class, with Chazzan Jack Kessler, was excellent. I had thought that it would be mainly about prayer-leading techniques, but it was about singing and evoking a spiritual connection more generally. Much of what he taught does not summarize well in words, but at the end of the first day I already felt I'd gotten my money's worth. (More specifically, he did more for me in one day than I got from a year's worth of voice lessons. Key take-away: the diaphragm, from which we are frequently exhorted to breathe, is not the bottom-most element. Sing from the kishkes (guts), he says, but if you're really in tune with your body, then as with martial arts the action starts in the balls of your feet. I'm not there, but I grok the kishkes part.)
One thing he talked about is to think of yourself not as the song but as the instrument. You don't so much make the music as provide a vehicle for it. That sounds kind of woo-woo, but there were physical exercises that went with this that made it more concrete for me. It also led to this quip: good musicians execute their music; bad ones murder it. :-)
My afternoon class, on the other hand, was quite disappointing. I had struggled with the afternoon classes before deciding to go; while there were several candidates in the morning, there were only two classes that sounded interesting in the afternoon and the form asked for three choices. Was that a hint? I contacted the registration folks to ask what would happen if I couldn't get one of my two top choices, and (after asking which they were) they said I would get one of them. So that just left the problem of ordering them.
One was an introduction to Chassidism. It sounded interesting and it's an area I don't know a lot about. The other was a class on Rabbi Hillel. I ultimately chose the latter, mainly because it's more specific yet the subject area seemed rich. I chose depth over breadth. I was also mindful that my top choices in the morning were "heart" classes and this would be a "head" class. (Intro to Chassidism could have gone either way.)
The first day went well, and on that basis I bought the recommended book. (Written by the instructor, I note, but it looked good on first examination and the instructor made a good impression. I now regret this purchase.) The second day of the class was so-so; the instructor seemed under-prepared and disorganized, and he did not rein in a couple talkative students who tried to take things way off topic. The instructor also sprinkled in more off-topic bits of his own, much of it on Chassidism but scattered. (Hey, if I'd wanted the Chassidism class, I would have signed up for the one that was about that.)
On day three we had deviated from any semblance of the original lesson plan, leading me to ask (twice) "could we please get back to talking about Hillel?". Another student thanked me privately but, as is par for these things, no one backed me up in class. It was really frustrating, and by dinner time that night I was pretty sure I wouldn't return on the last day, when he planned to talk about Jesus. (Some of Jesus' teachings came from Hillel, but it didn't appear that Hillel would be the focus. Edit: I'm not averse to learning about Jesus by any means, but I know much better sources of instruction on that topic and it's not how I wanted to spend my kallah time.) The next day at lunch I saw the instructor, who reminded me of the early start time that day, and I told him I wouldn't be returning. He didn't indicate that he wanted further input so I didn't force it on him.
It's not practical to join a four-day class on day four, but fortunately there was an alternative. One of the afternoon slots was the "workshop track"; instead of taking one class for four sessions you chose one one-shot class (from three or four offerings per) on each day. So I went to one of the workshops, which was interesting and I'll try to cover later.
Other daytime activities
I found scheduling to be a bit challenging. In the morning you could pretty much reliably do two of the following three: attend morning services, eat breakfast, be on time to class. Or perhaps three of four, if you throw "sleep past 6AM" into the mix. (The first services were at 6:45, IIRC.)
The late afternoon was similarly challenging: classes ended at 5:30, mincha was usually at 5:45, dinner was 5:30 to 7:30, certain other activities began at 6:45 or 7, and ma'ariv was at 7:30. (Aside: dinner was back in the main dorm, a 10-minute walk from where everything else was happening.) If you were in one of the choirs or were meeting with an "affinity group" (like BOF meetings at other conferences), and you wanted dinner, you had to skip one of the services. I'm not sure why they didn't do mincha and ma'ariv back to back like most traditional communities. That sure would have been easier on the participants, or at least this participant.
Meanwhile, there was a vast expanse of not-very-much-to-do in the middle of the day. Between 11:30 (end of morning classes) and 3:30 (start of afternoon classes), aside from lunch, there were the following: an off-site tikkun olam project that required advance planning (working on a farm, for which you needed appropriate gear), an art project, a smattering of short obscure films, and a set of pretty specialized small-discussion groups. All of these were very lightly attended, so I infer that most of the 400 attendees of the kallah did not do any of them. I found stuff to do, including checking email and working on a then-upcoming torah portion, but for as crunched as the ends of the day were, this felt wasteful to me. I wanted a more even distribution of core programming.
Evening activities
Evenings alternated between the one-large-thing-for-everyone model and the variety-of-choices model. This worked well for me; the whole group did come together but not all the time. There were two concert nights, with several people/groups doing a couple pieces each, and that was a nice introduction to a bunch of new-to-me performers. Most were musicians but a few were storytellers or poets.
Saturday night there was a tribute to two members of the community who had died in the past year. One died in the plane crash in Buffalo in February; I'm not sure what happened to the other. The second especially was obviously a big name in the community, though I didn't know of him (Reb Aryeh Hirshfield). It felt a little awkward, as if I were crashing someone else's funeral, though it wasn't as glum as a funeral usually is. It was, however, a little disconcerting to be watching fireworks out the window during this. Oops.
There were almost always late-night activities too -- jam sessions, short films, a dance one night, and so on. This is definitely not a community that shuts down after dinner. This is good; when I go to something like a convention or a retreat, that's why I'm there and I want it to fill my days.
General impressions
At the opening gathering someone said that a third of this year's attendees were new. I found the regulars there to be much more ready to approach newcomers than what I found at NHC last year, where few of us were new. I felt welcomed at the kallah; for the first couple days at NHC I felt like I had to force my way into conversations. (And I suck at that.)
Given that a third of us were new, the butt-numbingly-long sequence of individual thank-yous at the opening event might have been better handled late in the week, by which time we might have had some clue who those people were.
Punctuality is not a dominant trait in this community. (True at NHC last year too.)
The food was much better than I expect from college cafeterias. The organizers made sure there were always vegetarian and vegan options, there was good variety, there was always plenty of protein (not carb-heavy like conferences often are), and we had fish a few times (plus there was tuna available at the ever-present salad bar). The kitchen workers were friendly and helpful, and after the first meal traffic control wasn't much of a problem. The seating area was often cramped; if they had gotten their projected attendance (a few hundred more people) it's not at all clear to me where they would have put them.
There were some vibes that turned me off. One was a feeling, more than once articulated, that we should be driven by the heart only and that "head stuff" like text study doesn't matter. I saw very little in the way of serious text study, though I do note the presence of one class for which I did not have the text skills (intermediate Hebrew) so it was represented. Someone repeated a criticism he had received of Renewal Judaism: "you people just want to get high". That's harsh and a little unfair, but there's resonance there too.
There seems to be a lot of interest in "spiritual" activities that do not strike me as Jewish, like drum circles and Buddhism and some sort of eastern chant/dance combo ("kirtan"). I do want to get more in touch with my inner spirit (it's in there somewhere, I know), but I'm more interested in doing it in ways that feel Jewish to me. These ways obviously feel Jewish to some other people, but they don't to me.
I had a few encounters that triggered an inner "ok, you stay there and I'll back away slowly and we'll pretend this didn't happen, ok?" reaction -- nature worship, past-lives theory, aligning the chakras, panentheism (yeah, I know that one has a Jewish pedigree), that sort of thing. Some of it reminded me of things that are called "new-age" in other contexts. And Reb Zalman, the founder of the movement, has a cult-like following that sometimes weirded me out, like when they auctioned off a tallit that he had personally worn for morning prayers for the last year that was supposed to bring a special blessing to the buyer. (Opening bid was $1500, which they did not make; in past years they have.) Some of this is almost certainly dedication rather than worship, and I'm certainly not going to judge the whole movement based on my newcomer impressions, but some of it felt over the line to me. I guess this is what happens when a movement has a charismatic leader?
No, of course I didn't actually say anything in those cases where I was uncomfortable; I just found ways to be elsewhere as soon as possible.
One activity bordering on this space was a practice they strongly encouraged called "spirit buddies". At the beginning of morning classes you were supposed to meet with your cohort (groups of three people), to "create the container for practice for each other, pray for each other, offer one another as windows into the infinite divine expanse". Further quoting: "our spirit buddies listen with warm delighted attention, witnessing our dreams and commitments, taking us seriously and holding us accountable to our promises". That felt uncomfortable to me, so I intended to opt out. This was to occupy the first 20 minutes of class, so on the first day I showed up 15 minutes into that to be told that really, everyone should be doing this. I considered pushing back but didn't. For the next three days, my assigned "spirit buddies" were (1) always late and (2) much more interested in talking than listening. Both of them had Big Problems in their lives at the time, which made me feel even worse trying to break in with something smaller but about the kallah (what we were supposed to be focusing on). So, pretty much, they blew me off and I didn't mind, except that I would have preferred that they make it official so I could reclaim those valuable morning minutes. If they'd just said they weren't going to be there I wouldn't have been either, but every day after the first I was on time and alone for 10 or more minutes. Feh.
Most of the people I interacted with were very friendly, and as I said before, I felt welcomed as a newcomer. I rarely wanted for people to talk with at meals, even when they turned out to be big important people. My classmates were generally interesting to talk with before and after, and one was kind enough to send me recordings (made with her iPhone) of some of the melodies we did in the morning class. (I'd like a digital recorder but I don't think I want another specialized device. If the iTouch had a mic this would be another vote in its favor, but I don't want the iPhone because I don't want to change phone providers.)
I have sometimes described my kallah experience as "decent with a high standard deviation". There were a lot of very-good moments; there were also some, err, others. I am glad I went. I doubt I will go again.
Short takes
"The god you don't believe in doesn't exist." (Source unknown, said to someone there who eventually became religious.)
"Hebrew nouns are just slow-moving verbs." (Jack Kessler) And: "sheim" is not just "name" (the common translation) but also "essence".
"Be the ocean: even the worst hurricanes only affect about 100' down; below that is calm. The surface noise in our lives is like that, but the place deeper down within us is unaffected. Sing from there." (Jack Kessler)
"We don't take a breath because breath is a gift; we receive a breath." (Said by someone during a morning service, I think.)