Shefa Gold, a prominent rabbi in the Renewal movement, was in Pittsburgh this weekend. I went to the Shabbat morning service that she led. It was...different.

I went to the Renewal movement's national kallah a few years ago, and most of what I know about their ideas and worship styles comes from that. (Much of the rest comes from reading the Velveteen Rabbi's blog.) At the kallah I encountered a lot of worship motifs that I think of as "new-age", such as drumming, movement/dance, yoga, meditation, and an abundance of creative English readings displacing set liturgy. But I also encountered well-done music that enhanced worship, and a focus on core kavannot (intentions) behind the prayers. At the time I described the kallah as a whole, including both worship and learning, as "decent with a high standard deviation".

So with some trepidation, and a resolve to leave if necessary, I went to the service. There were a couple good ideas there, but also some things that turned me off, so I'm glad this was a one-shot. I didn't walk out, but nor would I go again.

I'm not going to give a detailed chronology, but I have some observations of things that stood out:

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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.

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I attended a variety of services at the kallah (though I did not manage all three each day due to schedule complications). Here are some thoughts on some of them.

Shabbat morning had about six different options. I went to the service led by Rabbi Marcia Prager and Chazan Jack Kessler. I had been planning to go to one described as "standard renewal" to see what that was about, but I was in Jack's class all week, I was impressed by him, and he asked the class to help with something during the torah service, so I went there. It was an interesting service with a lot of good singing and a very unusual torah service. ( Read more...Collapse )

Friday night there were two options, one obviously "main" and one more specialized. I went to the main one, which was led by an Israeli music group named Navah Tehila. (Locals, they'll be at Rodef Shalom in a couple weeks.) The music was generally good and powerful, once I got (back) into the right frame of mind. I had been in the right frame of mind when I walked into the room, but something there threw me out of it and it took about an hour to recover. ( Read more...Collapse )

I also went to some weekday services. These were very much a mixed bag. ( Read more...Collapse )

I am home from the kallah. Short version: I had some very good experiences and some "educational" ones (now I know some things are not for me), met some nice people, heard some good music, and was surprised by the strength of the anti-intellectual vibe. I'm glad I went; I'm not sure I'll go again.

I expect to write much more about some of this later. Meanwhile, I'm a week behind on LJ and don't expect to catch up, so please point out anything you think I ought to see, ok?

I just came from an interesting demonstration called a "cosmic walk". (People who were at NHC last year might have seen this there. I saw only its after-effects then.)

The presenter laid out a long rope in a spiral, maybe 8-9 feet across with spacing around a foot. (I'm too lazy to do that math.) Each eighth of an inch represents 1.5 million years. There is a pillar candle in the center and about 30 tea lights at designated places along the rope.

As one person walked the spiral lighting candles the presenter narrated. The pillar candle is the big bang, followed nearly immediately (the candles are too big to be accurate) by the formation of the universe. The progression then goes through various highlights -- the emergence of the first stars (much bigger than our current ones), the emergence of elements other than hydrogen and helium, the first cell, and so on up through the formation of land, contintental drift, the rise and fall of the dinosaurs, the rise and fall of mega-fauna, etc, ultimately leading to the emergence of homo sapiens. The presentation mapped this to the days of creation in B'reishit. (The narration continued on with milestones way too close together to be represented as candles, by the way.)

What partcularly struck me with this was the clustering. I'm sorry I wasn't in a position to take a picture. After the initial flurry there are long stretches, billions of years, where nothing happens. (You could argue that the presenter chose the points to mark, but I -- not a scientist, to clarify -- did not notice any missing.) And then,, around the time of the dinosaurs, things start happening very quickly; the last dozen candles (maybe more) occupied only a few feet.

I found the spiral to be a more-effective representation than the conventional straight timeline, even though it's inherently distorting (inner legs are not the same length as outer legs). I wonder if that's just nifty or if it is in fact a better visualizaation in terms of conveying information.

I won't be leading shacharit tomorrow, so no daf bit, but instead I'll share a few short notes from some recent unusual-to-me services.

I've seen this a few times. The congregation chants a word or phrase from the part of the liturgy you're supposed to be doing, over and over, while the service leader chants the entire passage over it. The load on the congregation is lighter (useful if not everyone is fluent), the problems of skipping text are avoided (the representative of the congregation says them), and you might get a sort of minor meditative thing going that helps with focus. I wouldn't have predicted that I could be happy with my entire contribution to Ashrei being "Halleluyah" in a tight loop, but it worked.

The service leader is the locomotive; the congregation is the train. The leader leads, but everyone has to get there together. (This is an approximation of something said by Hazzan Jack Kessler.) This analogy breaks down if you look at it too hard, but I found it interesting enough to note.

This almost set off my woo-woo alarm but I tried it anyway: say Ashrei with a partner, delivering your part directly to the other person with intention. The reason I feared woo-woo is that I thought this would take praise of God too close to praise directed at the other person, but it didn't actually feel that way. I felt like I was praising God through this other person. It's not something I'd make a habit of, but it was an interesting experience.

I appear to be ok with thoughtful drumming during prayer. I am still not ok with chanted English where liturgy belongs -- doubly so if the English isn't a translation but something creative. Singing English is ok, but I find that I want the nusach, the traditional chant melody, to be reserved for more-or-less traditional Hebrew text.

The amidah is your private audience with God. What do you want to say to him? (Rabbi Richard Simon.)

More later, I presume.

My rabbi is currently in Jerusalem, so I was asked to lead the torah study before the morning service. (That day's torah reader led the whole service, which worked well.) We're currently in the second chapter of Genesis (the group progresses a few verses a week; last time it took 20 years to get through and that's fine with us), so this week we talked about the special trees in Gan Eden.

I hadn't realized in advance that our primary chumash, Plaut, translates the one as "the tree of knowledge of everything". That seems pretty loose to me; the conventional translation is "the tree of knowledge of good and evil" (or sometimes you see "bad"). There was a footnote: the translator understood "good and bad" as describing a spectrum, not binary choices. Interesting, but not really the focus of our conversation.

We talked some about how eating from the tree of life was permitted so long as they didn't eat from the other one, and that man (or Adam and Chava; not clear to me) could have been immortal but ignorant. I asked the group if there were things that it would be better we didn't know; is ignorance desirable? No one took up that argument; everyone was on board with chowing down on knowledge. (I am too, for the record, with the exception that there are things about individual people or communities I don't need/want to know. But I don't think that's what this is about.)

So what exactly is this "knowledge", anyway? Is it a moral knowledge, the identification that some things are "good" and some "bad" (and we should use that knowledge to moderate our behavior)? That is, is this the tree of ethics? Several people supported that view. Someone brought the Rambam (Maimonides) that it gave (if I understood this correctly) the will to set aside the best outcome for a desirable one. If I've got this right, the Rambam says that pre-fruit we were logical, taking the actions that were best for us, but eating from the tree brought free will into it (so this knowledge could only make things worse). So, according to the Rambam and to use a light example, it was only after eating the fruit that it was possible to say "I know this bowl of chocolate ice cream is bad for me but I'm going to eat it anyway"; previously, we wouldn't have eaten the ice cream.

The Ramban (Nachmanides) says that the "knowledge" is our inclinations; this is (again, if I understand correctly) where the yetizer tov (good inclination) and yetzer ra (bad inclination) come from. Before that, he says, the base state was for people to be good. I didn't get to push the conversation in that direction; that the base state is good rather than neutral seems controversial to me. Another time. (I won't be there next week, but I can send the suggestion along, maybe.)

Aside: the rabbis have quite a bit to say about the desirability of having the yeitzer ra in the world. We need it to be there but we're supposed to dominate it. (There's a midrash where people imprison and are going to kill the yeitzer ra, but there are bad consequences so they don't.)

You know what Rashi has to say about this tree? Absolutely nothing. That surprised me.

Other interesting things were said, but I haven't managed to retain them. Overall, I think the session went well. It was also a slightly larger group than normal, which is doubly surprising because when it's known my rabbi won't be there attendance usually drops off.

Apropos of nothing, I learned yesterday morning that another congregant is going to the kallah, so instead of driving myself I now have a ride. Nice! (I knew that her daughter's family was going; the husband is in the ALEPH rabbinic program so he pretty much has to. But that means he's staying another week after the kallah, so I didn't try to hook up with them. Turns out the whole gang is going, everyone but him is coming back after the kallah, and he's finding his own way back a week later.)

This is nothing new, but in recent months I have become more attuned to the variety of so-called "innovations" in worship -- everything from meditation to yoga to poetry (replacing liturgy) to interpretive dance (!) -- and I finally figured out one of the things that bugs me about it. Understand that, at some level, if it works for you then it's no bother to me except to the extent that you then interfere with me. But it doesn't tend to work for me, and I realized recently a big reason why: I have barely begun to plumb the depths of the traditional forms, and not only am I not ready to stray beyond that, but I feel I would be incapable of understanding a change of this sort if I didn't already understand the foundation upon which it's supposed to be built.

(There are other reasons, including that some of this tickles my "weird" meter, but that's a separate discussion. I mean, there's plenty of weirdness in mainstream Judaism too. Like, rejoicing while waving three branches and a piece of fruit around? Really? But I digress.)

A couple things have brought this to mind:

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Having completed the first pass at digitizing or replacing our folk music on old media (we still need to do some proof-listening), Dani and I are merging our iTunes libraries so this might be easier going forward. Oof. We're up to "S" so far. "T" is big because it includes all the "The"s. Tracking changes (e.g. to tagging) going forward is still going to be a bit of a challenge.

Was Joe Biden president of the US for about 5 minutes today? (We were watching in a conference room at work, and it was several minutes past noon before they got to Obama's swearing-in. So I'm curious.)

In English we say "it's all Greek to me". What do speakers of other languages say? Whom do they implicate? Wonder no more; Language Log has a nice graph of some of these. I admit to being surprised by China's designee.

What if the stop sign were designed by corporations? (link from filkerdave)

As dsrtao said, an airline charging a cancellation fee when they rebooked you on a downed flight is near-canonical chutzpah. (Yes, I saw the note that they recanted.)

This story of a mailing list gone wrong (from Microsoft) made me laugh. And sigh, because while I haven't had to deal with quite that level of mess, even 20ish years after mailing lists started to become broadly accessible, there are still an awful lot of people out there who don't behave appropriately.

There's an interesting discussion of filtering and politeness on social networks over on CommYou.

Note to self: if Shalom Hartman Institute is too expensive this summer, the Aleph kallah might be an alternative. It could be good or it could be too esoteric for me; I can't tell from the available information. When they post class descriptions I'll have a better idea. I had a similar concern about NHC but it turned out to be good, so I'm keeping an open mind. Has anyone reading this gone to one of these?

LJ tags are spiffy but not as fully-featured as I'd like, and I probably haven't figured out the best way to use them yet. So this entry is something of a cross-reference; if you got here via one of the tags on this entry you might also be interested in some of the others. I'll try to update this entry over time, and eventually will create similar entries for other tag families.

Judaism: education is a catch-all bucket. Sometimes things start here and then spin off into their own tags.

Sh'liach K'hilah (LJ swallows the first apostrophe for some reason) is (was) the Reform movement's para-rabbinic program. I attended in 2004 and 2005.

Open Beit Midrash (obm) at Hebrew College. I attended in 2007. I also have a more-general Hebrew College tag that includes entries about a program called Ta Sh'ma that I attended in 2006. One of these days I might give those their own tag.

Melton = Florence Melton Program, an international two-year program of which I completed the first year in 2006-2007. (My class session got cancelled the following year. Someday I will probably return, if the scheduling works.)

Study with my rabbi is for entries related to my one-on-one study. Midrash overlaps that, covering my midrash study in particular.

NHC is a tag for the chavurah program I attended in August 2008.

Kallah is a tag for the ALEPH kallah that I'm attending in 2009.

Shalom Hartman is a tag for the Shalom Hartman Institute, a program I considered in 2008 and 2009. I'll get there some year, I expect...