Tag Archives: shaliach tzibbur

A Peek into the Black and White World

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From my blog:

I have Haredi cousins.

I did not know this until last Friday night, enjoying couch-conversation with one of said cousins before Shabbat dinner.

So many different types of Jews...

So many different types of Jews…

“So what do people in this neighborhood call themselves?” I asked, wondering (after seeing all the black hats and streimels) which sect of Ultra-Orthodoxy I had resigned myself to for Shabbat.

“Mostly Haredi,” she replied. “Some Hassidish and Chabad, but most people are Haredi.” She paused, then added, “I’m Haredi.”

What is “Haredi”? According to the Oxford University Press, Haredi is defined as: “a member of any of various Orthodox Jewish sects characterized by strict adherence to the traditional form of Jewish law and rejection of modern secular culture.” Therefore, I was very surprised to find out that my cousin works for Continue reading →

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Women of the Wall Rosh Chodesh Tevet

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Originally posted on my blog:

I recently learned about Women of the Wall and their struggle for equality at the Kotel, the Western Wall, the most significant religious site for Jews. Every Rosh Chodesh they go to the Kotel to pray together in a minyan (technically, a group of 10 Jewish men, but for them, 10 Jewish women.) They have been facing a lot of hostility from police/government. The Rabbinut, Orthodox rabbis, controls the Kotel and what is allowed to happen there. So this morning, was Friday and we didn’t have school, so I wanted to go and show my support…

 

I came early before the other women entered and filmed a little of the men’s side. They get to read Torah, dance, wear tallit and tefillin. All things the women aren’t allowed to do at the Kotel yet. Continue reading →

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The Scariest Shabbat of my Life

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This is a note I have dreaded having to write when I decided to spend some time living in Israel. But as I am sure you are aware there has been an escalation of violence in the region. I want to let you know that I am safe and also to share with you what was potentially the scariest experience of my life.

On Friday night I arrived at synagogue just on time to start the service. The beautiful melodies were comforting after an intense week of hiking in the desert and hearing the news of the renewed tension between Israel and Gaza resulting in three Israeli fatalities and 35 Palestinian deaths. I was fully aware that rockets had hit further than their normal range and sirens had been sounded in Tel Aviv. However, living in Jerusalem like the rest of the city I felt completely out of harms way. After all, why would rockets be fired into the religious capital for Jews and Muslims alike? I had gone to Shul wanting to find the words to pray for peace and healing for those hurt in the crossfire.

The congregation was singing the opening prayers when we heard the first siren. There was a silence in the room and everyone froze and looked at each other. There was a collective gasp as we began to make sense of what was happening. I felt my whole body go rigid in the moment that the conflict became a living reality for me. I was unprepared experience anything like this. The Shilach Tzbor ( service leader) turned their head to look outside and then continued with the prayers. 30 seconds later the siren went off again. We left the room and headed downstairs to the bomb shelter.

After a while the service resumed. This time everyone in the synagogue was singing with what I can with even greater spirit and power. It was the embodiment of the typical Israeli attitude that ‘life must go on’. Shabbat still needed to be celebrated even with bomb sirens going off. Witnessing this spiritual resistance was extremely powerful and I felt in awe of the bravery of the people in the room who were determined to continue. I for my part stood in the back of the room hyperventilating.

However, the optimism was short lived. After we finished the next psalm an announcement was made that a rocket had hit the south of the city, groups of 50 plus should disband- we all went home.

The contrast between the beauty of the Friday night service which strives to celebrate the creation of the world and provides a taste of the peace and harmony of the world to come and the fear and violence that was aroused by hearing a bomb siren is sickening. The rocket was launched at a time when Hamas knew it would have the most psychological damage. Shabbat is a time when I feel safe and calm knowing that I am entering into a space where I focus my energy on on things that are important to me, family, Judaism and of course food! This week it was shattered by the threat of violence from terrorism.

Whilst this is the first time since 1991 that Jerusalem has been on the receiving end of rockets, unfortunately the rocket- retaliation cycle is not new. Israel and Gaza have been at constant loggerheads since the disengagement. It was only a few years ago that Operation Cast Lead took place with the intention to putting an end to the threat from Hamas. However we are now witnessing a new round to the violent cat and mouse game that Israel and Gaza are playing. The situation is complex to say the least, it is not black and white, goodies and baddies, David and Goliath. To be honest I do not care who started it and who was right and wrong. My hope and prayer is that both sides can stop kidding themselves that it can be resolved through violence. What is needed is to sit down and begin to map out a future for both states.

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[Student Profile] Rob Murstein

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Rob Murstein comes from a ‘very liturgical’ family; they attend Shabbat services every Friday evening, Saturday morning, and Saturday afternoon until havdalah. Rob’s father is a regular Torah reader at shul, his brother studied chazzanut with their cantor, and Rob himself read Torah at shul for the first time when he was six years old; and then again at age seven when his brother and sister became b’nai mitzvah. The Mursteins also enjoyed their long Pesach seders, reveling in singing Birkat Hamazon.

At age 11, the young man began to study Chumash, Mishnah and Gemara with his rabbi, which whetted his appetite for Jewish learning, and he increasingly grew to wonder about Judaism beyond his affiliation with the other members of his family’s Boca Raton country club. Rob’s five summers at Camp Ramah Darom also gave him exposure to many empowered, inspiring staff members; and sharpened his sense that there was something more to Judaism that he wasn’t finding in his home environment.

Then – not long after Rob’s bar mitzvah – Continue reading →

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[Self / Soul & Text] The Practices of Giving & Openness

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I picked an amount of money to donate that was more than I felt comfortable donating, and I took the cash from the money that I’d put aside to pay for my Poland trip. I have enough funds available to me to cover my upcoming Poland adventure, but when I first decided to donate X amount to charity, I felt uncomfortable with it because I’m generally concerned about having left my job last year to study at Pardes… money is a real concern of mine because I will probably be in school for the next six to seven years.

That said, I quickly came to terms with making my donation, and I generally feel good about having done this mitzvah. I appreciate that James encouraged me to part with some of my money and consider my relative wealth. Interestingly, I’ve gradually been coming to terms with the major life-changing decision that I made by coming to Pardes, and making this donation ultimately came to feel like a minor challenge, compared to the upcoming six to seven years of my life and beyond.

As for saying ‘yes’ to others, I accidentally said ‘no’ to somebody almost immediately after we left class last Wednesday. At Ma’ariv davening during Night Seder, the Sh”Tz asked to use my siddur, which I’d taken out of my locker to use, and I instinctively said ‘no’, although I immediately realized my mistake. That mistake heightened my awareness of my responses to others, but the remaining days of ‘yes’ were fairly uneventful… nobody asked anything of me during that time that I would have refused hir otherwise.

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צו

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This week’s parsha continues to detail the different sacrifices, this time focusing on who can and cannot eat them.  The second half of the parsha (ch. 8) moves from commandment to narrative (or sorts) as the text describes the actual anointing of Aharon and his sons as active priests.  While the text is repetitive and not immediately meaningful for our times, I am struck by just how much space is devoted to this ceremony.  To imagine it as being more instructive, I think it is helpful to consider an analogous ceremony ‘anointing’ the first ever chazan (chanter of prayer) after the destruction of the Temple.  An even more modern analogy is that of the bar-mitzvah, which in some ways is meant to initiate a young man in leading services (though he is allowed to lead some of the services before his bar-mitzvah).  Given that prayer as we know it today is meant to replace sacrifice, the elaborateness of the text brings to mind how extended such a ceremony might have been (if it ever happened), especially if it had not followed a tragic event, but had rather been the fulfillment of a commandment from Hashem.

Beginning service

Of God, with ceremony

Like a bar-mitzvah

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[Student Profile] Avi Strausberg

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After graduating from Northwestern University in 2005 with a major in theater, Avi Strausberg (2010-2011) started a non-profit theater company called the ‘Hometown Theater Project’, and continued acting and directing in Chicago for nearly three years before she found herself becoming antsy.

“I wanted to be some place beautiful, and I became interested in organic eating & farming — so I moved to New Zealand to farm and manage an organic grocery store!

But after about a year in New Zealand, I realized that I really missed having a Jewish community… and then I heard about ‘Adamah’.”

In the Fall of 2008 Avi joined Adamah, and found exactly what she had been looking for. She lived in, farmed along with, and celebrated Shabbat with her new Jewish community, and even started exploring the texts of the siddur and Tanakh on her own.

After completing her three month Adamah program, Avi felt that she wanted to continue Jewish text study, and she spent the Summer of 2009 learning at Elat Chayyim before moving to NYC to begin a prestigious, year-long fellowship at Yeshivat Hadar. As one of 18 Fellows, Avi learned a great deal at Hadar. She developed her Talmud study and shaliach tzibbur skills, and she became inspired to study towards the rabbinate.

At Yeshivat Hadar Avi also met her girlfriend Chana Kupetz, another Fellow, who had come from Israel to study Torah for the year after completing her Israeli Army service. After being accepted into Hebrew College for rabbinical studies, Avi deferred to live and study Torah in Israel for a year, and she selected the Pardes Year Program for its diverse student body.

At Pardes, Avi can be found leading the egalitarian minyan as its gabbai, and grabbing volumes of Talmud off the shelves of the beit midrash with her chevruta. In Talmud class, Rabbi Zvi Hirschfield pushes Avi to become an independent Gemara student, and she finds herself greatly appreciating the skills that she learned from Leah Rosenthal at dissecting and clarifying Amoritic texts… some day, she’d like to integrate her new text skills with her passion for theater and the arts.

“I’d like to synthesize text with the creative energy of the arts to create deeper connections with the material, and make it more relevant and more personally meaningful. This was my vision for the Haiku Torah Project, which I began on Simchat Torah.”

UPDATE: Avi received the Wexner Fellowship for next year!

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The Individual

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Let me begin this brief post by expressing explicitly that I believe wholeheartedly in communal prayer as a viable and necessary outlet of group expression. Furthermore, please do not leave your respective minyanim in a situation where they will be without a minyan, just for the sake of this post. Nor should those saying kaddish forgo the public space. Disclaimer concluded.

Over the past few weeks I have come to greatly enjoy davening alone. In the context of the community, you are bound to certain rules of davening courtesy. Not too fast, not too slow, not too loud, etc… When you’re alone, none of those pressures apply. I have been able to be as vocal or emotional as I feel necessary without the fear of who might or might not be watching. My mumbling (discussed in an earlier post) can be as loud as I want, screaming, should I desire it, or even singing. I am free to move as I feel fit. Whether that manifests as pacing, shuckeling, or swaying, I know that nobody’s space will be invaded. Practically speaking, individual davening also serves as an opportunity to hone skills as a shaliach tzibbur. In this way, I think the lessons learned can be taken back into the communal environment.

I would urge others to give individual davening a try, we may learn a lot about ourselves as a community of daveners if we give ourselves that chance.

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Inside or Out?

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View in the Golan

Davening in sacred spaces has received several mentions on this blog, usually referring to indoor areas. Having just completed a three day tiyul in the Golan Heights, we had several opportunities to daven outdoors. After these few days, and other experiences, I can safely say that I do not personally find outdoor davening to be a moving experience. I know that there are a number of people who relish the opportunity to daven outdoors, in front of the miracles of creation, and with the wind in their hair. While all of those are fantastic reasons, for me the setting is simply too distracting. There are too many things to look at, dirt to kick, birds to hear, and others. Halakhically, I found it difficult to hear the shalich tzibbur. I am certainly not, nor would I ever, tell somebody not to daven outside. In fact, I would recommend it as an experiment. I’d be curious to hear about the experiences of others.

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The Great Synagogue

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I have written here and there about the shaliach tzibbur (communal emissary) and the importance that that role has in the experience of Jewish prayer. If you go back and read my post about Yom Kippur, I wrote that the shaliach tzibbur for musaf did not have the most magnificent voice, but that his presence, passion, and command for the t’fillah far surpassed any his vocal shortcomings. To draw a contrast, last night I attended kabbalat Shabbat at The Great Synagogue, pictured above.

The chazzan, accompanied by an award winning choir, delivered rousing renditions of the Friday evening t’fillot. It was an impressive display of what I think comes to mind when people think about classical European chazzanut. Any attempt at recounting the beauty of the music would fall woefully short of its true grandeur. At one point, I closed my eyes and allowed myself to be transported to the “old world,” where daveners would pack the shul to hear the magnificent voices of Europes finest chazzanim.

I would be remiss if I did not inform you that it was not a participatory experience. There were very few opportunities to sing along. As such, many of those in attendance, tourists and daveners alike, turned to side conversations which detracted from the power of the music. Unlike my Yom Kippur experience, which was highly participatory, this was perhaps akin to a concert, which while beautiful did not fulfill my desire to sing the Psalms of kabbalat Shabbat.

I hope this helps others in considering what kind of davening they wish to seek and build.

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