I helped to lead the service Friday night. (Someone later asked me what the occasion was; I said "I asked". Also, it's part of my continuing education.) I'm happy with how it went.

My rabbi and I divided up the service, the way he usually does when there's a second rabbi on the bimah. (Now that our associate rabbi leads another service earlier that night, he's not usually there now.) In our pre-service huddle with the cantorial soloist, for a couple things that she normally does she asked if I was doing them and I said no, the goal was to fit into a regular service rather than being "the Monica show". That might have scored me some points. I mean, yes, I enjoy leading an entire service (and loved the chance to run services, including a bar mitzvah, one week when we had no rabbi present), and I've got the skill to do the cantorial parts too, but part of leading a congregation is fitting into the structures already in place. We've had services where some special-interest group (like the sisterhood, or the 9th grade, or the social-action committee) takes over a service completely, and they have not been satisfying. (In the last year or so my rabbi has come up with a good solution to that problem.)

I led kabbalat shabbat and kri'at sh'ma. We did one non-standard thing (at my rabbi's suggestion), singing ahavat olam instead of just reading it. Enough people know the tune that we thought that would work, and from what I could see, it did. (The accoustics of the bimah, and my vision, are such that I couldn't actually tell if people were singing, but either they were or they were engaged in listening.) My rabbi led the t'filah and most of kri'at torah, except I did the opening (English) reading we always start that section with. I chanted torah, and he gave the sermon and led the concluding prayers. We came in about 10 minutes longer than usual, which I judge to be roughly: 2 minutes for starting late, 3 minutes for a slightly longer sermon (it was good and definitely worth it), 1 minute (delta) for singing ahavat olam -- and several extra minutes for the longest hakafah (torah procession) we've had in a while. (Usually the rabbi carries the scroll and sets a fast pace, but this time one of the aliyot did, taking a more stately pace. I do not have a problem with this; I'm just noting it, as the cantorial soloist did to me when we got back (she'd had to sing more songs than usual).)

A larger proportion than usual of my part was in English; we do the t'filah (which I've gotten in the past) mostly in Hebrew, but do a fair bit of the earlier parts in English (or English and Hebrew, in the case of sh'ma/v'ahavta). I find that leading English and Hebrew are different. (I think I mean diction here.) I can't really explain it; they flow off the tongue differently, and the Hebrew actually comes more naturally to me, once I'm past the parsing stage. (Give me unfamiliar Hebrew and I will either read slowly or stumble.) Anyway, this is probably a good reason to practice leading English in a public service. I got a lot of positive comments on my reading; good to hear. (Also on the torah chanting, including from the native speakers. I'll take that. :-) )

I had mostly figured out the mic (personal clip-on), until the torah service. I have a problem my rabbi doesn't have: a lack of (ahem) a smooth expanse of level real-estate down the front. He can just clip the mic onto his tie and he's good; what are you supposed to do with (err) hills and valleys? The first time I did this I wore a buttoned blouse and clipped it there, but the mic kept wanting to slide under the cloth. Now I usually clip it to the tallit, and that worked fine until it came time to chant torah and I leaned over the table to see the scroll, which caused some rustling. If it weren't for the hearing-challenged congregants who rely on the sound being piped to headphones, I would be tempted to just skip it -- I can make myself heard in a 400-seat sanctuary, after all. Oh well; we'll figure out a better approach to chanting torah next time. The cantorial soloist doesn't read torah, so I can't learn from her experience there. (There is a standing mic available, but using it tends to block my view of the scroll.)

(Yes, I would rather not be using a mic on Shabbat. Minhag ha-makom, the custom of the place, is a significant factor.)

The associate rabbi was sitting in the congregation (which I only noticed during the torah procession). Afterwards he said he'd be happy to have me lead the early service any time I want to. I said I would love to take him up on that in the fall, when that service is a little closer to sunset, and asked if that would be ok. He said yes, so I'll check back with him in four months or so.

Overall, I'm pleased with how it went. My rabbi will be away for all of July; I wonder if there are opportunities there to do this again. (This week had the benefit of having him see/hear me, so he can give me constructive feedback. Filling in is also good. :-) Our third rabbi starts July 1; I don't know if they're going to have him dive into an unfamiliar-to-him pulpit for a month. He will not be primarily a pulpit rabbi, but he's certainly capable.)

I am reading torah this Shabbat. The portion, Behar, is part of the double portion that is arguably "my" portion -- the week I acquired a Hebrew birthday we read both Behar and B'chukotai, which are sometimes doubled up and sometimes not. So to the extent that I have a designated portion, it's either Behar, B'chukotai, or the combination. This year they are not combined, and since I was semi-randomly picking a week to read anyway, I picked one of those.

Today I was asked to read the other one next Friday night. Clean sweep. :-) I'm glad to finally be at a level where my reaction to "can you read in 8 days?" is not "aiiieeeee!" but "sure". (My congregation only reads one aliyah -- the sixth, this year -- so we are usually talking about 10-30 verses, not several chapters. Both of these ones are short, so that when they're doubled up the reading is not burdensome. I can read or chant, but, honestly, the chanting is easier for me to learn.)

I won't actually start learning it until Sunday, probably -- don't want to distract myself from this week's, and there's an SCA event on Saturday. But that still gives me six days.

This grew out of something more general: I'll be helping to lead services next Friday night. So we knew I'd be involved, but we didn't actually talk about division of labor until today. (Yay! I get to lead services again!)

I attended a talk tonight by Rabbi Harold Kushner, who is best known for When Bad Things Happen to Good People. This talk was based around a different book, How Good Do We Have To Be?. The talk was engaging, and motivates me to seek out the book.

I'm not going to try to summarize. Instead, here are some short takes (my attempts to capture what he said):

The torah tells us that in Gan Eden, there were two trees in the center of the garden. A midrash asks: how can two objects occupy the same spot? The torah does not, after all, say that the two trees were near the center; it says in the center, and the torah speaks precisely. So, according to this midrash, the tree of life grew from the center of the tree of knowledge of good and evil -- you need knowledge to gain life. Interesting midrash -- at odds with those that say that had they not eaten from the one they would have had eternal life, but midrashim sometimes contradict each other.

Pop quiz: what is the first use of the word "sin" in the torah? It's not eating the fruit; original sin is a Christian concept. (This sentence inserted to give you a chance to answer.) Ready? Kayin (Cain) -- not the murder of his brother, but the jealousy that led to the murder. Interesting.

Guilt is about what you did. Shame is about what you are. For minor guilt you can sometimes talk people out of it; for major guilt you can't, but can sometimes temper it by giving the person something to do (giving tzedakah, etc). Shame doesn't work that way; people need acknowledgement that yes, we know you're like that, and that's ok. Best response he's seen to shame: 12-step programs.

There are four people in every marriage: the man, the woman he thought he was marrying, the woman, and the man she thought she was marrying. A marriage doesn't survive on attraction; it survives on the ability to forgive, to put happiness above righteousness (maybe he said "rightness", but I don't think so).

If you can't get angry at someone, you can't love him. Moshe is angry at God in D'varim and then tells Yisrael "v'ahavta..." -- you shall love God with all your heart, with all your might, and with all your being.

This sounds like kind of a hodge-podge. The talk wasn't, and I'm guessing the book isn't. I wish this had been in a setting where taking notes would have been seen as appropriate. (It was a synagogue sanctuary, not a classroom or lecture hall.) I jotted down a couple things on the back of my ticket, but the rest is from memory.

Today was Yom HaShoah and also my day to lead the morning minyan. I reviewed the siddur (Sim Shalom) in advance; there was one insertion into the Amidah (in sh'ma koleinu), and there was a section of readings in the back that seemed intended for a special-purpose service but not a general one. (That is, if you're specifically doing a Yom HaShoah service, which some communities do (usually in the evening), that would be good stuff to include, but that wasn't the intent here.)

When I arrived I consulted with the person who is more or less in charge of these things, and we agreed that we'd just do the Amidah insertion. That didn't end up being what happened, though, because members of this minyan are not shy. :-)

First, when we got to the end of the Amidah and I was getting ready to do the chatzi kaddish that goes there, someone shouted out "page 40!", which was that insertion. (I had made sure to point it out to people earlier in the service so they wouldn't automatically skip over it like usual.) I hesitated and then shrugged and said "ok", so we read that paragraph together in English. (After the fact it occurred to me that he'd probably assumed that people had read it in Hebrew, perhaps lacking comprehension.)

Then, during the torah service, as the torah reader was getting ready to do the mi shebeirach (prayer for healing), that first person came up and asked people to turn to the back and we did a couple readings there. (Ok, he must have changed his mind.) They were good choices; one was an E- Malei Rachamim specifically about the Shoah, and the other was a modified kaddish with names of camps interspersed. (It's intended for two readers, clearly. It was done responsively.) The reader, who is old enough to remember, was openly crying during both. I found that while the words affected me a little, his reaction to the words affected me a lot more. (As someone whose family was not affected, nor in a persecuted class, I realize that I have an unusual position in the community.)

In place of the usual "daf bit" I ended up using an excerpt from a sermon given in 1942 by the rabbi of a community that was then under attack. The sermon was given on Shabbat HaGadol, the Shabbat before Pesach. (This site does not say where he was writing from nor what became of his community.) This is the part I used:

I recalled what the great sage the Chatam Sofer had expounded on the seder song "one little kid". For the cat thought it could consume the kid but in truth, they will never consume us, because our father bought us for two zuz... So, inevitably there will always remain "one little kid"... For the Holy One will also make miracles for us. And the dog came... and the stick... all because of one little kid, Israel. And in the end what remains is the Holy One and the one little kid, after the Holy One consumes and smites all those who hate us. -Rabbi Shlomo Unsdorfer