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[liv]

Lots of posts around in the past few days about people getting ready for Yom Kippur, explaining what it means to them and how it fits into their complicated relationship with Judaism, and opening conversations about forgiveness with people they might have wronged during the year. I didn't post anything like that, mainly because I was too busy learning tricky bits of Leviticus, making a plan for how to manage the liturgy, writing sermons, and contacting congregants to assign them roles in the services and reassure them when they weren't confident about reading in public. In some ways this is explicitly the wrong priority; there's a story that often gets told about the student who asks to be excused from his studies at yeshiva in order to practise the liturgy for YK, and the rabbi rebukes him that it's more important to consider the state of his soul as the liturgy is the same every year. In other ways, well, my commitment to my community is a much more central part of religion for me than anything to do with personal spirituality.

At the same time, I would rather not be treating the major festivals as a theatrical performance, and I would prefer to have a bit more time and space to go through my own process of repentance and just simply be a participant in services rather than making them happen. Anyway, I have to work with the situation I have, and although it's been a bit of a mad rush, I feel reasonably satisfied about how this year has gone.

I had somewhat more time to prepare for Rosh haShana than Yom Kippur since it was before the start of term. Then again, in the one day I took off work, two colleagues I was relying on for different things let me down and left me with crises to fix when I came back on Tuesday. In any case, the festival gave me an opportunity to try out a style of services that I think makes the best of the situation and people I'm working with.

I have several... challenges: the community is tiny, and even among the small number of people we have, many of them don't really make Jewish stuff a priority in their life, so they'll come to services if they have nothing better to do, but you can't always rely on them to be there. The general level of Jewish knowledge is relatively low, and the level of confidence is much worse; everybody is terrified to get involved in case they do something wrong, and they're even scared to allow me to innovate because they don't have the background to be able to tell whether my suggestions are in keeping with traditional Judaism or not. As I mentioned in my previous post, nobody can sing. Or rather, the people who know the traditional tunes are old and deaf with failing voices, and the people who can sing don't know the tunes and aren't strong / confident enough singers to learn unfamiliar music and teach it to others. I have contradictory pressures on me: some people want the service to be more "Orthodox", by which they don't really mean Orthodox, they mean safe and comfortable and familiar according to the way they remember it from childhood. Conversely, some people want the service to be more "Liberal", by which they don't really mean Liberal, they mean fun and engaging and varied.

So what I've been trying to do is stick pretty closely to the Orthodox liturgy, but with a somewhat hybrid style. That is to say, I do some prayers where I read the opening line and let people continue at their own pace, and some prayers where I read each word clearly, and occasionally, where it seems most meaningful and appropriate, I read things in English with small amounts of unison reading. I try to provide some direction and framing and explanation of what I'm about to do, even on the very basic level of announcing page numbers from time to time, but try to keep that in the background so the liturgy dominates and it doesn't turn into a seminar.

For the High Holies in particular, a significant proportion of the liturgy is long, complex, Mediaeval poetry. If you do that full-on Ortho style, it can work well if you have a strong chazzan (cantor) such that listening to them chant for hours on end is a musically pleasant experience. Or if the community are musical and can join in many of the tunes, so that it becomes like a communal sing-along. Or if the community are knowledgeable, intimately familiar with the liturgy, and fluent enough in Hebrew to get something out of the intricate word-plays. In the reality I'm actually dealing with, me chanting every single word of the entire prayerbook would be the worst of all worlds, because I'd be out of tune and I would be forced to go too fast for people to be able to follow.

In fact, my not quite traditional compromise seemed to work pretty well. People commented to me that they wished services had been more like that when they were younger, rather than getting angry with me for doing things differently from how they remember. And I think people did appreciate being asked to come up to the bimah (pulpit) to read small sections, because it gave them some ownership of the service and made it less like several hours of me showing off. Realistically, doing things this way was more work than it would have been if I'd just handled everything myself, but I think the payoff is worth it in terms of building confidence and there's some hope that in future years I'll simply be able to hand some parts of the liturgy off to other people, rather than needing to do a lot of handholding. And the hybrid style worked out as an understated way of highlighting the most liturgically significant parts of the service (the sections where I read every word clearly, Reform-style), so along with my minimal explanations everybody had a reasonable understanding of the structure of the service. The inclusion of lots of letting people read at their own pace, more Orthodox-style, gave people time to relate to the service personally, and generally created an atmosphere that felt Jewishy to the people used to the more traditional approach.

With that having worked well on RH, I carried on in similar vein yesterday. To my grateful surprise we had a minyan (quorum) for the entire day; not everyone stayed the whole time, but enough people did, and people who dropped in and out overlapped enough to keep our numbers up. It was exhausting, but it was also just about manageable, being sure to pace myself carefully. There were several students; I think the one from a very left-Liberal community hated it more than the one from a proper, North London Orthodox community who came with her own Artscroll prayerbook, but I think everybody, regulars and visitors, respected that we were doing our best with the resources we have even if it wasn't quite what they were used to. The oldest members of the community didn't show at all, even for the memorial service. I can't tell whether that's because I've mortally offended them by either my gender or the compromise way I run services, or because they're just getting too frail and sick to come to shul, even for Yom Kippur.

And afterwards we had a communal break-fast, which other people organized so I didn't have to think about it, and people brought food from their own cultural backgrounds, everything from herring and beetroot salad to samosas, and plenty of it. It was really nice and relaxing and sociable, and people said more nice things about my service leading, not to mention that they gave me a big bouquet of flowers! I mean, I felt a bit weird about that, because it definitely seems to fit more in the theatrical performance mode than the contributing to the community mode, but it was still a sweet gesture.

In between, I spent the weekend of Shabbat Shuva, the sabbath of repentance, in London. What happened was that a friend of mine organized a party that weekend, and I really wasn't certain I had time to go to it, rather than using the weekend for extra time for HHD prep / making up for taking time off work in the last week of the vacation and first week of term. But I really wanted to go to the party, so I booked trains and accommodation and was all set to go. And then the party got moved at the last minute, for entirely good reasons, but I found I was really resenting my friend for depriving me of a fun break I'd been looking forward to, so I decided that I'd just go to London anyway.

It really wasn't very seasonal, since I spent the entire weekend having fun with friends and eating a lot of very tasty food. But I'm extremely glad I made the decision. I needed to put aside my work and community responsibilities for a couple of days! I stayed with jack in a random, rather grotty little B&B chosen purely because it was convenient for the party that ended up not happening. And we had dinner in Rasa, the really good Keralan vegetarian restaurant I discovered when I went there for my brother's birthday. Booking was a bit of a saga, particularly because we were stupid with London public transport and arrived about 45 minutes after our booked slot, but they did save a table for us. We ordered the banquet because there were too many exciting tasty things to choose from, which ended up being way too much food but all of it incredibly delicious. Even the selection of poppadoms and chutneys was exciting, but the stand-out dish for me was an auberginey thing called bagar baingan.

Sunday we headed for Chinatown; it was rainy enough that it wasn't as much fun as I'd hoped to wander around window-shopping. We took shelter in a café to drink tea, and then in a Charing Cross Road bookshop reminiscent of the lamented Galloway & Porter, where I found lots of treasures in the £1 bargain basement, including a new to me Rose Macaulay. We'd decided on dim sum, with the intention that it's fairly easy to organize on an ad hoc basis, and doseybat helpfully recommended us Joy King Lau. It's kind of an amazing place, there are huge queues to get in and an entirely chaotic system of matching customers to tables, and this right off Leicester Square so if people just wanted food there is plenty of choice. Actually the food is well worth standing around in the rain for half an hour getting shouted at by harassed staff. They helpfully mark their menu with V's for the benefit of ignorant anglos, and some of those V-marked dishes are incredibly tasty. I was a bit disappointed by the cheung fun, but really really good veggie dumplings and the water-chestnut paste thing that jack chose was one of the best weird gelatinous dishes I've tried. In the end, the usual weekend horrible public transport disruption meant that of several people who expressed interest, only mathcathy was able to join us. But that was really nice, because I hadn't had a chance to catch up with mathcathy since she moved away from Stoke. She ended up inviting us back to her place for a viciously competitive game of St Petersburg, and more excellent conversation.

That gave me just the right boost I needed to be ready for the students descending on us on Monday. I have met my new tutorial group, and the Med School is buzzing and busy again. And generally I'm feeling good about the beginning of the religious and the academic year, even though I could do without them coinciding! As far as repentance goes, I would like to hope that at any time of the year I'm open to people letting me know if I've hurt, wronged or upset them. I don't promise to be perfect, but I also hope I don't need the excuse of Yom Kippur to be able to have those conversations without being defensive or unkind.

Also, papersky wrote a High Holy Day themed thing which is a bit hard to describe, but I think is worth reading. It's sort of an imaginative idea of what Yom Kippur would be like if Judaism were a fantasy religion rather than a real world one? I have mixed feelings about it, because on the one hand, yay, somebody playing and being creative with my mythology, which is usually too obscure for that sort of creative response. But at the same time it feels a bit weird for an outsider to take something that's quite important to me religiously and play with it. I mean, it's really sweet and respectful, so you should probably check it out and see for yourself.

Comments

[evilsusan]

That sounds like a lot of work! I'm glad you got to have the sort of service you wanted.

I grew up in places with a lot of Jewish kids, so it's culturally normal to me, but I don't know much about most of the religious practices, so this is quite interesting to me. Thanks for writing it up.