Starting anew
Sep. 23rd, 2018 09:50 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livSo we're about half way through the festival season, and I knew I wasn't going to keep up with weekly posting right in the middle of Rosh haShana and Yom Kippur. But let me recap at least.
I got really wound up about preparation for the High Holies this year, and there wasn't any good reason for it, I was relatively un-busy at work and should have had plenty of time to prepare. I got to the last few days of Elul and hadn't even started learning the Torah readings, let alone anything substantial, and certainly no spiritual prep.
Thenangelofthenorth showed up with gwyddno. They were planning to arrive late on Thursday evening, and it happened to be the same night my community were running a Selichot service, which is explicitly about preparing for the festival by reading poetry and singing songs on the theme of forgiveness. angelofthenorth encouraged me to attend, even though it would mean a bit of a rush to meet her from her train, because she correctly realized that I needed something for myself, something I wasn't organizing. The service was small and not very polished – Selichot as a concept isn't well established within Reform tradition. But it did in fact help. When you're leading services, as I have been the majority of the High Holy Days since, oh, 2002, you can't really get emotional about it. And I've been not-crying at
Anyway my guests did cultural stuff while I was at work on Friday, and then came home and cooked me dinner, so that I could have a relaxing shabbat without having to put in much work, and start focusing on properly sorting stuff out for RH. And we had a really chilled morning on Saturday, we'd planned to go out to brunch but didn't even make it, we just had food and talking and I started to feel uncoiled enough to go forward. Which is yet another reason why I'm impossibly blessed in my friends, really.
We started the new term of Sunday school the day before the New Year. I wasn't very happy with that decision because I thought, most families will be pretty busy then, better to wait a week rather than trying to align with the school term. But actually it was pretty nice; I'm teaching the same children I had last year, as I've 'moved up' with them into Yr 5 and 6. I had to rush away slightly early to get to Stoke for the festival. Dear GS met me from the station, and went to pick up his partner who was celebrating her birthday, and apparently that of the Virgin Mary, with some Filipino friends of hers. Who promptly insisted on feeding me and entire meal, though I'd showed up unexpectedly and never met most of them before. I got to see G's exciting new house, and we got a bit delayed by various things including the unexpected birthday feast, and ended up walking into shul at 7:02 with the festival due to start at 7.
It was just a magical moment, really. Everybody was so pleased to see me and I just sailed in and up to the bimah and straight into Ma'ariv, the opening evening service for the New Year. We stayed around for a little after the service, catching up with gossip while we set the scrolls for the main service next day. That service was pretty good; we were missing 5 of our 12 most regular attendees, which meant we didn't have the required 10 participants. Which is a bit scary because if you can't even make a minyan for RH, you feel like the community is doomed, but in this case it was just a confluence of circumstances. Given that almost the entirety of the two services is the public recitation of the Amidah prayer with lots of additional poetry, I went ahead and did it anyway, but as a meditation in preparation for the Ten Days, not as official public prayer. And that gave me a bit more freedom than I'd usually take in an Orthodox service to improvise and read significant sections in English and personalize the prayers a bit. My sermon quickly turned into a little shiur, with some really interesting discussion. Afterwards we all decamped to GS's place to fix his mezuzah and dedicate the new home, not traditionally done on RH but he wanted to do it when I, and the rest of the community, were together.
Ten Days was a bit of a blur really. I attended a service in Cambridge for the Shabbat of Repentance, again as a congregant not a leader. And I had a nice, fairly domestic date withcjwatson in there, and stayed over with ghoti_mhic_uait one day, and once I'd broken the block of preparing for RH I was reasonably able to make forward progress towards YK. Unhelpfully I also had several days of travelling for work in the middle of the Ten, including a very long day trip to Nottingham and teaching a couple of intensive workshops at our other campus. What made this a million times better than it might have been was that I was able to stay over with doseybat rather than having to commute back and forth to Cambridge, and it was extremely wonderful to have a long gossip with them and verazea.
YK worked far better than I'd hoped, all things considered. Again, the travelling was rushed, leaving work at 12:30 to get in only a little over an hour before the start of the fast. Physically it was rough, I don't know why, I'm normally fine with fasting and I had had plenty of hydration and tapered caffeine in the days before, but I was painfully hungry and headachey for much of the afternoon and dizzy by the break-fast. But spiritually, the day did all it was supposed to. I felt so connected and loved with my lovely little former community, and unlike RH we had a full minyan at every stage of the whole day, with different people coming in and out at different times. I think everybody found it meaningful and engaging, and the atmosphere was just right. I did everything right in terms of my liturgical skills, even the delicate timing.
And then I came home and everybody was pleased to see me and the days since YK have been full of people being nice to me. Babysitting for my partners' children Friday evening, which they made into a treat for all three of us.emperor's party with dancing and good conversation. And now it's succot, the festival of joy, and I have to organize things for Simchat Torah at the end and the weekend after that I'm going to a siyyum, a celebration of completing a new prayer book, with my even older old community in Stockholm, and that's a lot of work too but I'm also really excited for it.
I've untied a knot, I think. Starting from letting myself cry in Selichot, and continuing to be buoyed up by my partners, my friends and my communities, the one where I grew up and everybody knows me from a rather precocious child, and the one where I've run services for a decade purely because there isn't anyone better. This past year... I've spent so much energy being scared about the future I've been retreating and withdrawing when I should have been opening out. The thing I like about myself is that I'm a good friend, and I haven't nourished my connections with my people properly. Some of that is just disorganization, which is perpetual with me, but some of it is being emotionally unavailable. Politically I've been letting peevishness replace action, even the very low level of action that is encouraging others in their activism. I don't entirely know how to fix this, but at least I've identified what the problem is, and prayed about it, in snatches in between facilitating everybody else's spiritual experience.
For 5779, then, more love. More love and less fear would be the glib thing to say, but I don't think I'm going to be less afraid. I hope I'm going to find love and strength and connection through fear, rather than just hiding from everything.
I got really wound up about preparation for the High Holies this year, and there wasn't any good reason for it, I was relatively un-busy at work and should have had plenty of time to prepare. I got to the last few days of Elul and hadn't even started learning the Torah readings, let alone anything substantial, and certainly no spiritual prep.
Then
angelofthenorth showed up with gwyddno. They were planning to arrive late on Thursday evening, and it happened to be the same night my community were running a Selichot service, which is explicitly about preparing for the festival by reading poetry and singing songs on the theme of forgiveness. angelofthenorth encouraged me to attend, even though it would mean a bit of a rush to meet her from her train, because she correctly realized that I needed something for myself, something I wasn't organizing. The service was small and not very polished – Selichot as a concept isn't well established within Reform tradition. But it did in fact help. When you're leading services, as I have been the majority of the High Holy Days since, oh, 2002, you can't really get emotional about it. And I've been not-crying at We are Your dear friend and You are our belovedfor most of those years, and some of those tears leaked out.
Anyway my guests did cultural stuff while I was at work on Friday, and then came home and cooked me dinner, so that I could have a relaxing shabbat without having to put in much work, and start focusing on properly sorting stuff out for RH. And we had a really chilled morning on Saturday, we'd planned to go out to brunch but didn't even make it, we just had food and talking and I started to feel uncoiled enough to go forward. Which is yet another reason why I'm impossibly blessed in my friends, really.
We started the new term of Sunday school the day before the New Year. I wasn't very happy with that decision because I thought, most families will be pretty busy then, better to wait a week rather than trying to align with the school term. But actually it was pretty nice; I'm teaching the same children I had last year, as I've 'moved up' with them into Yr 5 and 6. I had to rush away slightly early to get to Stoke for the festival. Dear GS met me from the station, and went to pick up his partner who was celebrating her birthday, and apparently that of the Virgin Mary, with some Filipino friends of hers. Who promptly insisted on feeding me and entire meal, though I'd showed up unexpectedly and never met most of them before. I got to see G's exciting new house, and we got a bit delayed by various things including the unexpected birthday feast, and ended up walking into shul at 7:02 with the festival due to start at 7.
It was just a magical moment, really. Everybody was so pleased to see me and I just sailed in and up to the bimah and straight into Ma'ariv, the opening evening service for the New Year. We stayed around for a little after the service, catching up with gossip while we set the scrolls for the main service next day. That service was pretty good; we were missing 5 of our 12 most regular attendees, which meant we didn't have the required 10 participants. Which is a bit scary because if you can't even make a minyan for RH, you feel like the community is doomed, but in this case it was just a confluence of circumstances. Given that almost the entirety of the two services is the public recitation of the Amidah prayer with lots of additional poetry, I went ahead and did it anyway, but as a meditation in preparation for the Ten Days, not as official public prayer. And that gave me a bit more freedom than I'd usually take in an Orthodox service to improvise and read significant sections in English and personalize the prayers a bit. My sermon quickly turned into a little shiur, with some really interesting discussion. Afterwards we all decamped to GS's place to fix his mezuzah and dedicate the new home, not traditionally done on RH but he wanted to do it when I, and the rest of the community, were together.
Ten Days was a bit of a blur really. I attended a service in Cambridge for the Shabbat of Repentance, again as a congregant not a leader. And I had a nice, fairly domestic date with
cjwatson in there, and stayed over with ghoti_mhic_uait one day, and once I'd broken the block of preparing for RH I was reasonably able to make forward progress towards YK. Unhelpfully I also had several days of travelling for work in the middle of the Ten, including a very long day trip to Nottingham and teaching a couple of intensive workshops at our other campus. What made this a million times better than it might have been was that I was able to stay over with doseybat rather than having to commute back and forth to Cambridge, and it was extremely wonderful to have a long gossip with them and verazea.YK worked far better than I'd hoped, all things considered. Again, the travelling was rushed, leaving work at 12:30 to get in only a little over an hour before the start of the fast. Physically it was rough, I don't know why, I'm normally fine with fasting and I had had plenty of hydration and tapered caffeine in the days before, but I was painfully hungry and headachey for much of the afternoon and dizzy by the break-fast. But spiritually, the day did all it was supposed to. I felt so connected and loved with my lovely little former community, and unlike RH we had a full minyan at every stage of the whole day, with different people coming in and out at different times. I think everybody found it meaningful and engaging, and the atmosphere was just right. I did everything right in terms of my liturgical skills, even the delicate timing.
And then I came home and everybody was pleased to see me and the days since YK have been full of people being nice to me. Babysitting for my partners' children Friday evening, which they made into a treat for all three of us.
emperor's party with dancing and good conversation. And now it's succot, the festival of joy, and I have to organize things for Simchat Torah at the end and the weekend after that I'm going to a siyyum, a celebration of completing a new prayer book, with my even older old community in Stockholm, and that's a lot of work too but I'm also really excited for it. I've untied a knot, I think. Starting from letting myself cry in Selichot, and continuing to be buoyed up by my partners, my friends and my communities, the one where I grew up and everybody knows me from a rather precocious child, and the one where I've run services for a decade purely because there isn't anyone better. This past year... I've spent so much energy being scared about the future I've been retreating and withdrawing when I should have been opening out. The thing I like about myself is that I'm a good friend, and I haven't nourished my connections with my people properly. Some of that is just disorganization, which is perpetual with me, but some of it is being emotionally unavailable. Politically I've been letting peevishness replace action, even the very low level of action that is encouraging others in their activism. I don't entirely know how to fix this, but at least I've identified what the problem is, and prayed about it, in snatches in between facilitating everybody else's spiritual experience.
For 5779, then, more love. More love and less fear would be the glib thing to say, but I don't think I'm going to be less afraid. I hope I'm going to find love and strength and connection through fear, rather than just hiding from everything.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-09-23 08:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-09-23 09:49 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-09-24 01:29 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-09-23 08:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-09-23 09:20 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-09-23 09:46 pm (UTC)[also many of the other things in this post seem like they are good too!]
(no subject)
Date: 2018-09-23 09:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-09-23 10:17 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-09-24 01:25 pm (UTC)Hmm, this struck a chord with me, something I need to think about and work through. Thank you for being open about it.
(no subject)
Date: 2018-09-24 03:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-09-24 07:25 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2018-09-26 08:30 am (UTC)