Prayer, leadership, and music.

.תפילה, מנהיגות, ומוזיקה

Yesterday morning, Jessica and I attended Reconstructionist services held in the student lounge of HUC. During the services, I had one of those periodic waves of anticipation and excitement about being a rabbi some day, and I was actively engaged in thinking about prayer and leadership. Add to that the several conversations I've had with Jessica and HUC colleagues about our Rosh Hashanah services here--and Jewish prayer services in general--and it turns out I've been thinking about this topic a lot. So, here are some of my thoughts (many of which are inspired and tempered by others).

Let's start with the Reconstructionist service. The leadership style of the service was fairly laissez-faire, with the leader announcing page numbers, starting a song, and then getting quiet. In some communities, that leadership style can be quite effective. I understand that a number of Reconstructionist congregations are comprised largely of Jews who want to take an active role in prayer and therefore, a strong central leader would detract from their prayer experience. This results in a more organic, ground-up form of prayer service.

Now, in the environment that we had yesterday, I didn't find this leadership style particularly conducive to my own prayer. We weren't in a "Reconstructionist community" as such but rather a somewhat hodgepodge collection of Jews, at least some of whom were quite new to Reconstructionism. This resulted in not only a quiet leader but also a quite congregation. The service was slow, perhaps contemplative, and though it may have been beautiful and meaningful for some or most of the participants, it wasn't for me.

Now, this presents a troubling question: Am I dependent on someone else to facilitate my prayer experience? That is, how much should I be able to pray in any circumstance? The goal of my liturgy teacher is to familiarize us enough with Jewish prayer that we will be able to pray in any Jewish environment, and I would love that. One of my goals for the year is to be able to better understand, and indeed be better at, prayer. The more Hebrew I learn, the more meaningful Jewish prayer becomes to me. Also helpful are learning more about the structure, history, and composition of Jewish prayer as well as the context within which a particular prayer service is conducted. I hope that sooner than later, I'll be able to find myself able to pray in any setting.

But I know that it's rare for a person to be able to pray anywhere (and I know it will require a lot of work on my part). For most people, the community and the service leader are integral parts of the prayer experience, and that will always be true for me as well. Being able to pray on my own, after all, is only a part of the picture: Jewish prayer is also communal, and without connecting to my prayer community, my prayer will be incomplete. (This, by the way, is why it will be difficult for me to pray fully in an orthodox congregation - the segregation of men and women will, I believe, pose a significant barrier to my being able to fully connect to that prayer community.)

So, what should I, as a future professional prayer leader (possibly), be aware of in prayer leadership? Personally, I like a leader who exhibits confidence and control. Even though I can't sing well, if I'm singing first and loudly, I hope to be able to inspire intentional and meaningful singing from the congregation as well. Although I might be speaking a Hebrew that some congregants don't understand, I hope to read with sufficient conviction to convey the heart of the prayer even if the specific words are lost.

Because to me, understanding a prayer is crucial to its beauty. Some Hebrew songs are just beautiful, period, regardless of their meaning. But, I've found that the more I know about what I'm saying, the more meaningful my prayer experience. (Duh.) So, I feel it will be important to convey meaning and not just words during prayer. If that requires English or explanations or whatever, I hope to be able to find it.

And then there's the question of music. For me, I don't have to say every word to feel prayerful. I can listen to a song like Avinu Malkeinu and not say a word and have it be meaningful. (I think I wrote about that here earlier.) Even more "everyday" songs can inspire me if I don't sing along. I am in the process of exploring the relationship between my self and my prayer community, and I believe that my own prayers can be uttered by others and vice versa. By saying amen, I am affirming my place in the Jewish community, and the tenet of Jewish prayer that at least ten people are required before a full service can take place further supports the idea that a community is necessary for an individual to pray.

Yet there are others who feel differently. I've heard from people who say that if they're not participating in the prayer, they're generally unable to have a prayerful experience. So for them, beautiful and intricate music is just that: music. Not prayer. And many people don't want to attend concerts in place of services.

Obviously, there's a compromise position of a cantor being able to switch between "cantorial" music and "congregational" music effectively. But the High Holy Days can be a problem because they're the Days of Awe. For many, perhaps the majority, "accessible" music is not what's expected or enjoyed during Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. So, do we wash our hands of the Jews who don't like that kind of music?

I was hearing about a congregation back in the States that's actively engaged in this question of being able to provide meaningful prayer experiences to all of its congregants. The congregation offers different kinds of services, but the trade off is a further separation of the community. And that brings us back to the original question: How important is the individual in Jewish prayer, which is by nature communal?

Take, for example, our dilemma at UVA Hillel. For my last couple years at school, we had significant difficulty getting a minyan at both Reform and Conservative prayer services. The question before us was: Do we focus on the individual needs of the different groups, or do we sacrifice particular desires in order to bring the community together as a whole. I think I would have handled the situation differently now, especially as an outsider to the community, but we had so much difficulty understanding the question that I don't think we ever came up with a really satisfying solution.

It's one thing to say what I find most conducive to a positive prayer experience: A strong leader, beautiful music, and meaningful words in a language I understand. The challenge lies in finding what's most conducive to a positive prayer experience for a community.

Tomorrow, I will co-lead the first of the weekly student-led prayer services at HUC, and I'm fairly nervous about our ability to have accurately gauged the needs of our prayer community. I'm sure that we'll get some things wrong, and I'm really looking forward to seeing how other prayer leaders interpret the needs of our community. Hopefully by the end of the year, I'll have a better idea of how to assess those needs because I think that's going to be a vital skill to my future.

Ultimately, I'm just grateful and excited that I don't have to be a rabbi yet. Five years is a long time, and we're only just beginning. Hearing my colleagues discuss prayer in such a serious way for the past week has given me a lot of optimism about the degree to which we're going to be able to delve seriously into this business of Jewish professional life once we graduate from HUC. Let's hope we don't disappoint!

Wexner Summer Institute, Part 2.

.מכון ווקסנר קיץ, החלק השני

As I mentioned in my last significant post of August 17 (so long ago!), my arrival to Stowe was fraught with discomforts and disappointments. Thus, when I arrived on Sunday afternoon, I was still very tired/jetlagged. Nevertheless, I was excited to have finally arrived and to be meeting my cadre of fellows for the second time.

At the airport, I reconnected with a few people from our class, and that was pleasant. I also met a fellow Fellow named Jason, who was part of the Summer Institute planning committee. Jason's a rabbinical student at JTS, and we had a great conversation about rabbinical school, siblings' weddings, Stowe, and the Wexner Fellowship on the way to the Stoweflake Resort.

The first day was, thankfully, less intense than the following ones. We had a chance to meet everyone again, and we had a mixer exercise that I thought went really well. We sat in five groups of four, and each person received a number 1-4 and a small booklet with three pages: Agree (green paper), Ambivalent (yellow paper), and Disagree (red paper). Or, the director of the Fellowship, would read a statement (I support the two-state solution, I believe someone can be Jewish and not believe in God, I believe in the human soul, etc.), and we would hold up one of the cards and then discuss in our groups. After each round, two numbers would switch groups so that we would have opportunities to talk with a lot of people.

This set a tone that I really appreciated. On the one hand, the exercise understood that we didn't know each other very well, but it also assumed that we wanted to get better acquainted and not just in a "what's your favorite ice cream flavor" kind of way. We talked about serious, deep issues that we care about, and we established an atmosphere of trust amongst our class of Fellows. I saw these themes reflected throughout the Institute, and by the time I left, I felt that the first theme (not knowing one another) was mostly forgotten in lieu of focusing on getting into the thick of serious issues.

In order to give credit where credit is due, I'll focus on the programs that had a significant impact on me. So, although The ABCs of the Jewish Community was fun and interesting, I want to highlight the strongest parts of the Institute. Thus, I move next to our session on modernity. Dr. Kelner, with whom I had the pleasure of learning later in the Institute, is a professor of sociology at Vanderbilt and a Wexner alum. His session on Jewish Modernity zeroed in on the Pittsburg Platform drafted by the founders of the Reform Movement in 1885. I had never actually read the Platform, probably because the Reform Movement has diverged in several ways, and it was very interesting to me personally to be studying this text of vital importance to the history of my movement. It was also interesting to me to see non-Reform Jews from many different backgrounds studyding the same text, and I felt proud that this was a reflection of one Jewish response to modernity that has changed and remained strong for 120 years.

When I first started reading the Declaration of Principles laid out in the Pittsburgh Platform, I assumed that they wouldn't jive with me. I figured that since the Reform Movement has changed so much in the past century that I wouldn't identify with the Declaration. However, that wasn't the experience that I had. Rather, I felt a strong connection to the rabbis who were banding together and, for the first time in history, declaring a set of principles that established a "new" way being Jewish and that drew together like-minded Jews in such a way that they could practice their Judaism not in isolation. Additionally, I was moved by the constant references to God, holiness, and spirituality in the text. This was not a declaration that said, "We are afraid of being Jewish in a non-Jewish world; therefore, let us hide our Judaism and forget that which makes us different." Rather, the document says (in my words), "We have been raised in and we embrace modern society with all its advances and complexities, and yet we still affirm that God's presence can be felt in our lives through holiness. We affirm that Jewish tradition is the foundation of monotheistic human morality, and we support a unique and unflagging commitment to the ethics evident to us through science and tradition. Since the traditional practices of Judaism do not speak to us on a holy level, we reject their divinity and seek to isolate and expand upon the holy morality inherent to Judaism." I find this sentiment courageous and beautiful, and I'm proud to be its inheritor. Although I don't entirely agree with it on a personal level, I admire the rabbis who were strong enough to come to these conclusions and state them to the Jewish and non-Jewish world, just as I admire the progressive spirituality and ethics that Reform Judaism has championed for over a century.

Immediately, after this engaging study session, we undertook to make a "class portrait." We sat around a large table with magazines, scissors, markers, construction paper, tape, glue, popsicle sticks, yarn, etc. Without any further instruction, we were told we had five minutes to choose a theme. I immediately grabbed a marker and construction paper and facilitated a brainstorming and selection process. Our group dynamics were then publicly analyzed by Or and Cindy Chazan. It was interesting but also off-putting to have our groupwork dissected that way, and when we were told that we had 10 minutes to figure out a way to execute our theme (Insiders/Outsiders), I consciously refrained from "taking charge" as I had done before. This time, we worked much more popcorn style, and our progress was more circular than linear. When time was called, we still hadn't decided on an execution. Our group dynamic was again analyzed, and then we were given 30 minutes to execute our "class portrait." Without getting into the details of what we decided to do, I'll mention that we were very rushed, we ended up doing more individual work than group work, and by the time we had finished, some people were feeling very negative about the experience. Or said that to try to wrap up would be trite, so he simply excused us to lunch ... but we weren't done yet. We pressed him for additional information and then continued our project on our own. The staff left the room, and we continued to discuss the bad experiences that some of us had and tried to heal hurt feelings. We concluded our project and took ourselves to lunch.

After lunch, we had an intense session with Marty Linsky about our team dynamic. He pressed us to consider "exercising leadership" as a behavior rather than thinking of leadership as a characteristic. Examples of leadership tend to defy expectations and go beyond simply acting according to the demands of authorizers. He used specific examples of our class portrait exercise (which he observed) to discuss when certain people did and did not exercise leadership, and he was fairly pressing at times ... though at times we pressed right back. The whole session was permeated by emotions and wills, but Marty seems to thrive in such an environment. At first, I was a bit taken aback by his facilitation style, but ultimately (after speaking briefly with him after the session), I decided that Marty helped us think critically about ourselves. Good thing I concluded that, too, as our Winter Institute is going to involve a lot of time with him!

The Museum of the Jewish Family was very well put together, with a dozen stations representing different points in the life of a Jewish American. However, it didn't address non-normative family situations. Fortunately, we were to devote virtually the rest of the institute to topics dealing with a diversity of family interests.

On Tuesday, I met my seminar facilitator Rabbi Steven Greenberg, the only (as far as I know) openly gay orthodox rabbi and contributor to the documentary film Trembling Before God. He was a great teacher, and I was excited to study the Garden of Eden and Abraham stories with him (and the fellows in the seminar with me). However, the scope of the seminars was fairly broad, so I feel that we didn't get to go as deep as I had wanted. Nevertheless, the insights he brought regarding gender and family were very interesting.

Tuesday was also a day of excellent conversations. On the Fellowship Hike, I had a long conversation with Dani about Jewish peoplehood and the policies that it should or should not result in. After the Beit Midrash, I had a long conversation with Erin about her experiences with observant Judaism, in particular with relation to the pluralistic mission of the Wexner Fellowship. I won't go into details of either conversation here, but when I write Part Three (the part with the lessons I learned at the Institute), I will certainly include ideas that these two helped me generate.

Also on Tuesday, Jonathan Ross performed his one-man show Walking in Memphis: The Life of a Southern Jew, which I had actually seen in Jerusalem when I was visiting Pardes with Becca Klimpl. Ross is an excellent performer, and his personal stories were touching. I definitely recommend the show to anyone who has the opportunity to see it!

My second seminar with Shaul Kelner was about American childhood - and we tried to tie in Jewish childhood whenever we could. We talked about various Jewish childhood experiences and about the changing nature of childhood over time. We looked at www.webkinz.com as a model of modern play and discussed its possible effect on children today. In the second part of the seminar on Thursday, we talked about the line between childhood and adulthood, and that conversation was really fascinating. On both days, the fellows were the primary speakers with Dr. Kelner offering statistics and questions to guide discussions. It was great to hear from other fellows on these topics, although conversations about children and adulthood reinforced my (factual) self-perception as among the youngest people at the institute.

The rabbinical seminar I went to focused on whether and how much to let our political views influence how we act and what we say in public. It was hard for me to participate as I had barely even begun my studies at HUC, but I found the conversation very helpful. For the first time in a long time, I once again felt very excited to be a rabbi and more eager than usual (of late) to picture myself in a congregational role. (Lessons from this session will likely make their way into Part Three as well).

On Thursday, we had the opportunity to witness a panel discussion with Edmund Case (founder of www.interfaithfamily.com) and Sylvia Barack Fishman (author of Double or Nothing). In brief, Mr. Case believes that interfaith marriages are nothing to be afraid of while Dr. Fishman believes that they contribute to the decline of Judaism. There were a lot of probing discussions, and our class conversation afterward was the most heartfelt and bonding of the entire institute. Once again, see Part Three for the impact it had on me.

The beit cafe (talent show) on Thursday night was quite funny. There had been a big build-up (starting with Abigail Wexner at our orientation) that our class is the "funny" one, so we had a lot of pressure. I think we performed well, and the "judges" liked our reimagination of the song Tradition. The other acts were fairly funny as well, and there was also some "real" talent, including a scene from King Lear and a song from a Sephardic (Moroccan?) tradition.

When Friday rolled around, I was definitely sad to be leaving (and not overly excited about my long return home). We all said proper good-byes, and I hung out/packed until it was time to go. I went to the airport with a half-dozen other fellows, where we rode together to Newark, NJ before parting ways. My return to Jerusalem was much more comfortable than my trip to Stowe, but I still believe that I'll try to insist on a non-stop flight from Israel to the U.S. for the winter institute.

Obviously, I didn't cover everything, but in order to preserve the strongest memories, I've written about the things that impacted me the most. Overall, I found the programming was most useful in its ability to spark meaningful class discussion and side conversation. Yes, I learned a lot about family, what it means to be Jewish, gender roles, marriage, and so on, but the most valuable part of the institute was having my horizons greatly broadened by the poignant and potent insights of my fellow class members. I very much look forward to continuing conversations with them at future institutes and in between!

Now, stay tuned for the "good stuff..."