Made it this far
Dec. 20th, 2023 12:38 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livThe second half of term was less terrifying than the first, though it contained some hard things.
A little after reading week I moved in with a cousin instead of the friend-of-a-friend I'd been staying with; I get on well with her, and my living situation isn't really better or worse than the previous one but a change seemed desirable when I'd originally planned to stay for no more than 6 weeks. There's still no real end in sight to housing doom, but eventually I will have my own flat.
The last week of term was basically all assessed presentations; it makes sense for them to be at the end of term as any sooner we wouldn't have covered the material to be assessed on, but that was a lot. Luckily two of them were things I could do in my sleep: a beginner-level practice at curriculum planning which has been my professional expertise since 2017, and creating an interfaith ceremony for a pass-fail course which I would love to take more seriously but I don't have the time or brain space. The second one, at the end of 5 solid days of assessments, I ended up literally writing in my sleep; when it wasn't done 8 hours before my alarm was due to go off, I gave up, dreamed something relevant, and over breakfast made enough notes to ad-lib. You might correctly infer from this account that I am very tired.
The other assessments were: an assessed sermon which needed to include some Biblical criticism, which I messed up on a very basic level, going over the allotted time and getting the feedback that I had at least 3 sermons muddled together. I'm really embarrassed by that, I have decades of experience of writing concise sermons that make exactly one point, so I should have done better. And a presentation on history of liturgy and what it means for contemporary practice, which was fine even though I did the research more at the last minute than I ought to have. I need to turn that into a 2000 word essay, but I'm not too worried.
For various reasons, partly my own bad planning, the same week I had to go through the ordeal of chanting the Torah in public for the first time. We have had a class with a really good teacher who I think might be the only person in the world who can teach someone as unmusical as me to chant. And thanks to her I basically understand the system and can sing something at least recognizable if not perfect, which a couple of months ago I would have assumed was basically impossible. But the required task was to do this in an actual service, not an artificial (and importantly private) exam situation, and despite working really hard on this for the past month or so, I wasn't really ready to do that. I messed up my last run-through the day before the actual thing, which really didn't help my confidence. So I've been doing a lot of crying on my friends, partners and classmates, and I got myself to the point where I couldn't even think about doing it without crying, which is unhelpful. I really wanted to be able to sing the 8 verses even with mistakes, rather than freeze or burst into tears in the middle, and I just wasn't sure I could manage it.
A really lovely fifth year student agreed to lead the service, and she created a custom liturgy specifically to celebrate us first years chanting for the first time and making it through our first term. With some really touching blessings for us, and bits of Joseph and the amazing technicolor dreamcoat since I was reading part of the Joseph story. And my classmate who hates mornings came in 2 hours before our first class to be able to be there to support me, and my other classmate who is even less naturally musical than I am did the Torah blessings note perfect, something she has also been working really hard on. So despite being terrifying it was an absolutely lovely and really moving experience. I did in fact achieve what I hoped: I made some mistakes, but I kept going, and the great thing about reading in front of rab students and faculty is that they were able to prompt me when I got lost. My lovely teacher was proud of me, and next time will still be hard but less terrifying.
And then it was the end of term and my class just looked at each other going, wow, we actually made it. We are 10% of the way through our training and somehow we've done all these scary public tests and learned soooooo much Talmud and a miscellaneous pile of academic stuff.
Other than that, I had an assignment to visit 6 different synagogues this term, and I've used it as an excuse to travel. I have completed only 4 of the 6 visits, but my failures have been instructive! First of allghoti_mhic_uait drove me to Newport in Wales so that I could attend services at Cardiff, the only Progressive synagogue in Wales, and Bristol where there is a highly reputed rabbi. We ended up doing the trip just a week after the escalation in violence in Israel and Gaza, so the communities were very emotionally off-balance. Cardiff meet in a very beautifully converted church, and their service is mostly lay-led. Bristol was fascinating because they have a huge and thriving religion school, which meets in parallel with their services rather than the more usual Sunday. More actively involved kids than I've seen in much bigger communities. And the rabbi is just as brilliant a preacher as she's reputed; she had some really hard-hitting theodicy around the Noah's Ark story, and one thing that really impressed me was that the children's presentation after the service picked up the same themes. As well as making a giant Ark out of cardboard and all their various stuffed animals. In between I managed to meet up with angelofthenorth for excellent tea and mooching around a lovely Queer shop and chatting, and with G's godmother.
I then came up with a completely ludicrous plan to visit a central London synagogue on Friday night, take the sleeper train, and go to Glasgow (the only Reform synagogue in Scotland) on Saturday morning, and ropedcjwatson into joining me. We hit the weekend of the coldsnap, but successfully made it to The Liberal Jewish synagogue ("The" because it's bigger than all the others put together), where they have a very good professional cantor though the rabbis were on parental leave and off sick that day. We got dinner Drummond St, what's left of it after the abortive HS2 project vandalized my favourite Indian restaurant, and caught our train as planned.
Then Scotland got 6 inches of snow overnight, which did not prevent the train from making it to Glasgow on time, but did prevent the rabbi from making it to the synagogue. So we turned up in a suburb to the south of Glasgow to find a small sad huddle of congregants outside the closed gate, having only got the message about the cancellation after they'd already set off that morning. When I admitted to being a student rabbi, they invited me to lead a morning service for them anyway, since they were all there and didn't want to just turn around and go home again. So we found some chairs in the open part of the shopping centre across the road, decided we weren't embarrassed to be Jewish in public and went right ahead. Absolutely lovely people, and my completely spontaneous service and Torah study were pretty decent, so it was overall a great experience, but didn't exactly tick the box of my assignment... We did manage to spend the afternoon and evening withkhalinche, one of my favourite people who I hadn't seen in far too long, who found us most excellent food and regaled us with local history and was generally wonderful. Sunday our planned train was cancelled due to strikes, and all the other trains were cancelled due to track maintenance, so the only way home was an 11 hour coach journey, which was somewhat grim but ultimately worth it.
And then this weekend, after getting through that gruelling last week of term, I travelled again withghoti_mhic_uait for a most wonderful weekend in and around Manchester. The three communities had combined forces for a big bat mitzvah, so Friday night was Zoom only, but the bat mitzvah itself was wonderful. The young person is autistic and partially verbal, and had chosen to have an accessible service. Her teacher prompted her to read the translation of the Torah and her explanation of the reading. Other aspects of the service which were altered for accessibility included using a simplified prayer book including visual language as well as Hebrew and English. The congregation were given explicit permission to move around or leave the space if they needed to, which is always fine but this was more overt than usual, and in general the service was a bit more informal and a bit shorter. They also handed out fidget and noisemaking sensory toys for those who like them. Obviously this would not be accessible for all possible combinations of disabilities, but there were many congregants present who joined in ways that wouldn't be typically expected, eg vocalizing at times that weren't connected with official reading or singing.
As as being really interesting and something that I hadn't experienced at all before, this was a really good networking opportunity! I met lots of people including a couple of rabbis who are excited about my possibly working with the three Manchester communities, so we'll see what works out. We then went on to camp afternoon tea in the Gay Village in central Manchester, which was completely delightful, good food and a lovely atmosphere, and then to a performance of Handel's Messiah by a choir includingghoti_mhic_uait's sister and her family. So even though there was only one actual service rather than the two I'd planned, it was just the most glorious day. And I'm going to revel in telling the story of the day I went to a bat mitzvah, a gay pilgrimage, and a Christian concert.
So, between now and 22 January, I need to revise for my written exams, write some assessed essays, and somehow fit in two more synagogue visits. I think I will go somewhere less exotic for the last two, probably London. But also I have a full month off from college and I plan to use a lot of it for sleeping.
A little after reading week I moved in with a cousin instead of the friend-of-a-friend I'd been staying with; I get on well with her, and my living situation isn't really better or worse than the previous one but a change seemed desirable when I'd originally planned to stay for no more than 6 weeks. There's still no real end in sight to housing doom, but eventually I will have my own flat.
The last week of term was basically all assessed presentations; it makes sense for them to be at the end of term as any sooner we wouldn't have covered the material to be assessed on, but that was a lot. Luckily two of them were things I could do in my sleep: a beginner-level practice at curriculum planning which has been my professional expertise since 2017, and creating an interfaith ceremony for a pass-fail course which I would love to take more seriously but I don't have the time or brain space. The second one, at the end of 5 solid days of assessments, I ended up literally writing in my sleep; when it wasn't done 8 hours before my alarm was due to go off, I gave up, dreamed something relevant, and over breakfast made enough notes to ad-lib. You might correctly infer from this account that I am very tired.
The other assessments were: an assessed sermon which needed to include some Biblical criticism, which I messed up on a very basic level, going over the allotted time and getting the feedback that I had at least 3 sermons muddled together. I'm really embarrassed by that, I have decades of experience of writing concise sermons that make exactly one point, so I should have done better. And a presentation on history of liturgy and what it means for contemporary practice, which was fine even though I did the research more at the last minute than I ought to have. I need to turn that into a 2000 word essay, but I'm not too worried.
For various reasons, partly my own bad planning, the same week I had to go through the ordeal of chanting the Torah in public for the first time. We have had a class with a really good teacher who I think might be the only person in the world who can teach someone as unmusical as me to chant. And thanks to her I basically understand the system and can sing something at least recognizable if not perfect, which a couple of months ago I would have assumed was basically impossible. But the required task was to do this in an actual service, not an artificial (and importantly private) exam situation, and despite working really hard on this for the past month or so, I wasn't really ready to do that. I messed up my last run-through the day before the actual thing, which really didn't help my confidence. So I've been doing a lot of crying on my friends, partners and classmates, and I got myself to the point where I couldn't even think about doing it without crying, which is unhelpful. I really wanted to be able to sing the 8 verses even with mistakes, rather than freeze or burst into tears in the middle, and I just wasn't sure I could manage it.
A really lovely fifth year student agreed to lead the service, and she created a custom liturgy specifically to celebrate us first years chanting for the first time and making it through our first term. With some really touching blessings for us, and bits of Joseph and the amazing technicolor dreamcoat since I was reading part of the Joseph story. And my classmate who hates mornings came in 2 hours before our first class to be able to be there to support me, and my other classmate who is even less naturally musical than I am did the Torah blessings note perfect, something she has also been working really hard on. So despite being terrifying it was an absolutely lovely and really moving experience. I did in fact achieve what I hoped: I made some mistakes, but I kept going, and the great thing about reading in front of rab students and faculty is that they were able to prompt me when I got lost. My lovely teacher was proud of me, and next time will still be hard but less terrifying.
And then it was the end of term and my class just looked at each other going, wow, we actually made it. We are 10% of the way through our training and somehow we've done all these scary public tests and learned soooooo much Talmud and a miscellaneous pile of academic stuff.
Other than that, I had an assignment to visit 6 different synagogues this term, and I've used it as an excuse to travel. I have completed only 4 of the 6 visits, but my failures have been instructive! First of all
ghoti_mhic_uait drove me to Newport in Wales so that I could attend services at Cardiff, the only Progressive synagogue in Wales, and Bristol where there is a highly reputed rabbi. We ended up doing the trip just a week after the escalation in violence in Israel and Gaza, so the communities were very emotionally off-balance. Cardiff meet in a very beautifully converted church, and their service is mostly lay-led. Bristol was fascinating because they have a huge and thriving religion school, which meets in parallel with their services rather than the more usual Sunday. More actively involved kids than I've seen in much bigger communities. And the rabbi is just as brilliant a preacher as she's reputed; she had some really hard-hitting theodicy around the Noah's Ark story, and one thing that really impressed me was that the children's presentation after the service picked up the same themes. As well as making a giant Ark out of cardboard and all their various stuffed animals. In between I managed to meet up with angelofthenorth for excellent tea and mooching around a lovely Queer shop and chatting, and with G's godmother. I then came up with a completely ludicrous plan to visit a central London synagogue on Friday night, take the sleeper train, and go to Glasgow (the only Reform synagogue in Scotland) on Saturday morning, and roped
cjwatson into joining me. We hit the weekend of the coldsnap, but successfully made it to The Liberal Jewish synagogue ("The" because it's bigger than all the others put together), where they have a very good professional cantor though the rabbis were on parental leave and off sick that day. We got dinner Drummond St, what's left of it after the abortive HS2 project vandalized my favourite Indian restaurant, and caught our train as planned. Then Scotland got 6 inches of snow overnight, which did not prevent the train from making it to Glasgow on time, but did prevent the rabbi from making it to the synagogue. So we turned up in a suburb to the south of Glasgow to find a small sad huddle of congregants outside the closed gate, having only got the message about the cancellation after they'd already set off that morning. When I admitted to being a student rabbi, they invited me to lead a morning service for them anyway, since they were all there and didn't want to just turn around and go home again. So we found some chairs in the open part of the shopping centre across the road, decided we weren't embarrassed to be Jewish in public and went right ahead. Absolutely lovely people, and my completely spontaneous service and Torah study were pretty decent, so it was overall a great experience, but didn't exactly tick the box of my assignment... We did manage to spend the afternoon and evening with
khalinche, one of my favourite people who I hadn't seen in far too long, who found us most excellent food and regaled us with local history and was generally wonderful. Sunday our planned train was cancelled due to strikes, and all the other trains were cancelled due to track maintenance, so the only way home was an 11 hour coach journey, which was somewhat grim but ultimately worth it.And then this weekend, after getting through that gruelling last week of term, I travelled again with
ghoti_mhic_uait for a most wonderful weekend in and around Manchester. The three communities had combined forces for a big bat mitzvah, so Friday night was Zoom only, but the bat mitzvah itself was wonderful. The young person is autistic and partially verbal, and had chosen to have an accessible service. Her teacher prompted her to read the translation of the Torah and her explanation of the reading. Other aspects of the service which were altered for accessibility included using a simplified prayer book including visual language as well as Hebrew and English. The congregation were given explicit permission to move around or leave the space if they needed to, which is always fine but this was more overt than usual, and in general the service was a bit more informal and a bit shorter. They also handed out fidget and noisemaking sensory toys for those who like them. Obviously this would not be accessible for all possible combinations of disabilities, but there were many congregants present who joined in ways that wouldn't be typically expected, eg vocalizing at times that weren't connected with official reading or singing. As as being really interesting and something that I hadn't experienced at all before, this was a really good networking opportunity! I met lots of people including a couple of rabbis who are excited about my possibly working with the three Manchester communities, so we'll see what works out. We then went on to camp afternoon tea in the Gay Village in central Manchester, which was completely delightful, good food and a lovely atmosphere, and then to a performance of Handel's Messiah by a choir including
ghoti_mhic_uait's sister and her family. So even though there was only one actual service rather than the two I'd planned, it was just the most glorious day. And I'm going to revel in telling the story of the day I went to a bat mitzvah, a gay pilgrimage, and a Christian concert. So, between now and 22 January, I need to revise for my written exams, write some assessed essays, and somehow fit in two more synagogue visits. I think I will go somewhere less exotic for the last two, probably London. But also I have a full month off from college and I plan to use a lot of it for sleeping.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-12-20 02:35 pm (UTC)Been busy with my paid hospital chaplaincy externship and just caught several somethings that had me out for over a week now. But it's not COVID, as hospital keeps professionally testing me.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-12-20 04:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-12-26 11:59 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-12-27 06:00 pm (UTC)Is the retiring rabbi Margaret Jacobi? She's the Progressive chaplain at the University.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-12-20 04:31 pm (UTC)That is impressive, especially knowing that it's three things, rather than either the bat mitzvah or the concert also being a gay pilgrimage.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-12-20 04:32 pm (UTC)How much do I love that? Not rhetorical: my heart is full just thinking about it.
I know the semester has been stressful. Good on you for persevering, and doing so with delights!
(no subject)
Date: 2023-12-22 05:55 pm (UTC)It was really lovely - genuinely one of the most memorable services I've been part of despite (or because of) being totally ad-hoc!
(no subject)
Date: 2023-12-20 04:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-12-20 05:18 pm (UTC)Wow, that's amazing, I especially love your spontaneous service in Glasgow. It might not have ticked the box of the assignment, but it was such a great thing to do.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-12-21 12:10 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-12-20 08:50 pm (UTC)There’s a couple of Jewish communities in Reading, if you ever want to come out this way.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-12-21 07:21 am (UTC)Should you fancy South London, this synagogue is maybe 10 mins walk from our house and it would be lovely to see you
https://www.southlondon.org/
(no subject)
Date: 2023-12-21 07:37 am (UTC)Coming out to Bat
Date: 2023-12-21 08:05 am (UTC)I hope the excitement and the sense of discovery never diminishes: it seems, somehow, very you.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-12-21 11:05 am (UTC)I continue to think of you and hold you in the light through all of this.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-12-21 02:05 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-12-23 09:43 am (UTC)Wishing for you the opportunity to take enough of a break to reflect and recover before it starts again.
Sleep well.
(no subject)
Date: 2023-12-23 10:48 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2023-12-28 03:52 pm (UTC)