This is a traditional greeting for the Jewish High Holidays (Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur).  For those who live with their heads in the ground (though this is probably no one who reads blogs) or just don’t live places with a large Jewish community, today was Yom Kippur, the closing holiday of the High Holidays.  It is a day of repentance, atonement, and remembrance.  Many Jews will mistakenly tell you that it is the most important holiday on the Jewish calendar.  While it is good that people  think this, I do think it is part of the problem with what I call “once-a-year” Jews.  Cest La vie, everyone should observe their religion in their own way, I have just always thought it was goofy to only come to services at this time of year.

The High Holidays are a time to reflect on the past year and try to make the new year better.  It is also a time of great pomp and circumstance at most synagogues.  It is probably the only time of year that most synagogues require you to have tickets to get in the door and a pass to park in the parking lot.  Some congregations go so far as to have reserved seating and getting seats closer to the front “costs” more (in dues or donations).

The Holidays are also a time when congregations give honors to people, usually people who have either given of themselves or given money.  I do a lot of volunteer work to help with organizing and leading services, especially over the past six months while we were looking for a new Rabbi.  Also, during the holidays my shul runs both a conservative and reform service, but we only have one rabbi and cantor so I was asked to help lead parts of both services (on different days).  I am happy to help, I feel like it makes the holidays mean a little more to me, knowing that I am helping others have a good experience with them.

So this year I get my package with my tickets and parking passes and such, and included in that are two additional pages.  Both are notifications of honors that the congregation gave to me.  The first, however, was for the part of services that I was asked to lead.  I would not really have thought too much about it save fore the fact that it was the same form letter used for the other honor that I was given.  Leading services was something that I volunteered to do, the other honor was given to me as recognition.  Both letters, in the same envelope, asked that I make a donation in recognition of these honors.

This is the thing that gets me every year, I give of myself because I don’t really have money to give, I volunteer to do things like lead services because the congregation needs help, and then twice in one fell swoop they are asking for more money?  Tradition or not, it bugs me that this is how it works.  The people who they honor who give money will most likely continue to give whether you ask as part of the honor or not.  I understand the thought process, but it has never sat well with me.

All that aside and despite the fact that I had to race to work after all of the High Holiday services, I felt good about the holidays this year.  As I said before, helping to lead services, helping to facilitate the prayers of others makes the holidays mean much more to me.  In both Jewish tradition and in my personal life, music means a lot.  Leading a congregation in song is one of the highest forms of prayer.  It was a beautiful service this morning, and walking out knowing that the congregation felt good about  the service is a nice feeling.

My mother likes to remind me that it is never to late to become a rabbi or cantor.  While I enjoy studying my religion, I am not sure if that is for me.  I have said before on this blog that I don’t know if I could really be a spiritual leader full time.  I think the way that I have balanced my life works pretty darn well.

I know that a few times I have mentioned that currently the synagogue that I am a member of  is on the hunt for a new Rabbi.  As I understand it, the reasons behind our old rabbi leaving is mostly political and financial.  It is unfortunate that no matter what your religion may be, there is always some kind of political undercurrents that affect the day-to-day activities of the congregation or community.  So, that is how we find ourselves in the middle of a search for a new rabbi and a period of what will amount to almost six months without a rabbi at all.

Thankfully, there are plenty of people, like myself, who are volunteering to help the synagogue continue to maintain the same ritual feeling during this rabbinic drought.  We have people who help lead services, read Torah, and all that kind of stuff.  It is actually rather enjoyable, I personally like the lay-led feeling, which I think is something that I have expressed before.  Religion is all about community, and while i do think that there is an importance to having a trained spiritual leader, the fact that any Jew who is over the age of Bar/Bat Mitzvah is eligible to officiate at services (by Jewish Law).

This morning we had one of our Shir Hadash services, which has always been a lay-led service.  Today was also a volunteer recognition day and we had a candidate for rabbi who was visiting.  It was almost a trifecta of events.  As usual, we had not to many people there at the beginning of the service, but I kicked everything off on a good start, I think.  Rabbi Goldstein, the visiting rabbi, seemed to really enjoy my leading of the first part of the service, he said it really put him in a great frame of mind to lead the next section.  Pretty cool.

I kind of book-ended the service in that I did the opening and the closing sections.  For the second time now people have come up to me after services saying things like “why do we need to hire a new rabbi when we have you?”  I haven’t really come up with a good response to that other than just thanking them for the complements.  Today we even had people asking why every service can’t be like the Shir Hadash service.

My personal feeling when getting up to lead a service is that it should be engaging and accessible and people (the congregation) should want to be there.  There are definitely days when I have got up to lead and it has felt like a performance, like I was there singing and reading and everyone else was along for the ride.  Today, on the other hand, I really felt like everyone was on the same page and energy of the service was really amazing.  I felt like people found a way to be active and participatory and I really wish I could nail down what worked.

People told me that they love the energy and excitement (I am not sure if that is the right word) that I bring when I lead.  I certainly try to bring that all the time.  I try to use melodies that people know and can sing along with.  I don’t really like it when services turn into a concert.  We are all there to pray as a community, not to listen to the rabbi, cantor, or leader pray.  Everyone has to put something in to get something back.

The thing that really struck me today was all the people who I have now heard with sentiments like the one above: “why do we need to hire a new rabbi when we have you?”  While I consider myself fairly knowledgeable in my Jewish studies, it was never the focus of any of my studies thus far in life.  I have learned a great deal from going to Hebrew School (kinda like Sunday school for most Christian religions) through high school, and from attending a Jewish summer camp, but that education barely scratches the surface of what there is to learn.  I am not a fluent Hebrew speaker, I can read the language but I don’t know every word on every page.  I also have no formal training as a religious leader.  I don’t think that I am really qualified to dispense faith-based advice.

I enjoy learning and studying my religion.  I have an entire bookshelf dedicated to Jewish books.  After all, one of the most important ideas in Judaism, and in most religions, is to continue to study the teachings and texts of the religion.  While I am sure that I could probably find my way through studies on my own, I often seek the advice or knowledge of my religious leaders.  The most fun there is when you ask a question that they don’t have an answer to and then you can go study it together!

I just find it interesting that people in our congregation would consider, even for only a moment in praise, that I would make a good addition to the pulpit here.  I am happy to help out, happy to volunteer.  I would be happy to do so on a regular basis, but I think that we would quickly find that something was missing if we didn’t have an ordained rabbi.  On that note, I was very impressed with Rabbi Goldstein, he seemed to have very god ideas on how to really embrace the values of Judaism and put them to work making a stronger, more active community.  He seemed like the kind of person who could bring to the table a lot of the same ideas and talents that I do AND also bring the role of spiritual leader.  Now, he is only the second candidate that I have met, but I am still very impressed.

Where will the whole adventure take us? I am not really sure.  I don’t really know if there are many other religions out there who ever really lean on the congregants to lead services and such.  I would hope there are as I think that it gives a great sense of community.  What do you feel is important in religious/spiritual leaders.

So, we opened the fifth show of the season, I had my birthday, the Winter Olympics started, and I led part of services at temple this week.  Lots of exciting stuff.  It is nice to get to the weekend and have some time off, and what a good weekend for it.  The holiday weekend will be nice, with no work Monday I should be able to get some good skiing in.  We will just have to see how the crowds are.

The service on Saturday morning was nice.  Once a month we do a lay-led service that is known as our Shir Hadash (new song) service.  I know that there are some people in the congregation who don’t really love the service, but I think that it is nice.  I think that it is great to have a service that encourages more people to participate and is less of a concert by the cantor.  Today was a really great service.  I lead a large section of the service and I could tell that people were getting into it.  After the services, many people came up to myself and the other leaders to say how much they liked the service.

We are looking at ways to edit and update the service and how it is conducted so that we continue to keep people interested and excited about coming.  I will be meeting with a couple of the people responsible for such things this coming week to look at where the service came from and where it needs to go to stay good.

It also turns out that next weekend is the 13th anniversary of my Bar Mitzvah.  That is kinda cool.  I certainly haven’t really thought about it, but they were looking for torah and haftorah readers for next weekend which is how I found out that it was my parasha.  Go figure.  I still know most of it, and since the first time, I have actually learned how to learn it again.  So I will be reading the haftorah next weekend in honor of my Bar Mitzvah anniversary.  It seemed like a god thing to do.  So, if you are going to be in the SLC area next weekend, you should come!

The other new thing this week is that I started a photo project that has been going around the tubes, Project 365.  You can find the images from my project over at http://365.icewolf08.com.  The goal is just to take at least one photo every day for a year.  Since I kicked the project off on my birthday, it will end on my next birthday in 2011.  Hopefully I can make it work.

I am happy to report that the opening night of “Touch(ed)” here at PTC was a great success.  Despite all the craziness of the past few days I think that the cast and crew of the show deserve a hearty congratulations and so does playwright Bess Whol on the premier production of her new play.  The audience was very responsive last night despite the plunging temperatures in the theatre due to the fact that the heat had been off for over two days due to a burst steam pipe on campus.  I have been told that six buildings on campus are without heat until Sunday at the earliest, and we have heard on good authority that it may take until Tuesday to be back up and heating.  So even our audience deserve a round of applause for sticking it out through the cold!

The show is an amazing piece of work and I highly recommend it to anyone looking for something to see over the next two weeks.  There are plenty of tickets available and we are happy to fill more seats!  The show, as I mentioned in my last post, tells the story of two sisters, one diagnosed with schizophrenia and the other, younger sister, trying to care for her and get her out of the hospital and back into society.  It is a very moving show with many light-hearted sections that have made our audiences, laugh, clap, and “awww.”  In my personal opinion, this is a show that I would come to see multiple times if I were not working it!  There are so many nuances in the text that I keep picking up new ones every performance.

Yup, the jew did just say that!

I was invited to sped Christmas Eve and Christmas Day with Ruth and her family, that was certainly a first for me. It is definitely a little different and I sorta find it kinda awkward, but it was fun. I was probably the only one thinking it was awkward, and that probably only stems from being Jewish and not believing in what Christmas is all about.

I have to say, I enjoy spending time with Ruth and her family. They do their big dinner on Chrismas Eve, which is ironically a Jewish kinda mentality in starting the holiday the night before. Steve made a great dinner with turkey, ham (which I don’t eat), taters, rolls and more. We forgot to make the salad, so we didn’t end up having one. It happens.

After dinner we all watched Pixar’s “UP” which I hadn’t seen yet, so that was a lot of fun. All five of us “kids” piled into the living room to watch the movie. Midway through the movie we all got to have some of Steve’s cheesecake with caramel sauce, which was great.

Before going back to the movie we started in with the Jones’ traditions which include the opening of a Chrismas Eve gift which is always PJ’s. So we all got awesome hand made fleece PJ pants made by Ruth’s mother, they are pretty comfy. Ruth’s mother also made me the “Jew Stocking” (pictured above) that was hung with the rest of the stockings.

To the sound of Wendy’s most annoying cell phone alarm we were roused out of bed at 5:45AM for the Christmas morning festivities. I managed to score us a few more minutes of sleep by staying down as long as I could. They aren’t allowed to open presents without the entire family and they aren’t allowed to wake their parents without all of them being there.

There were lots of fun gifts, lots of things that people were excited to get, and then there were the projectile weapons. Yup, all the boys (Steve, Rob, and me) got marshmallow shooters. A bow and arrow one and a pump action one that shoot the mini mallows and a crazy single shot bolt action one that shoots big mallows. As can probably be imagined, hyjinx ensued. There were flying marshmallows all morning and mallows smushed into the carpet and into new PJs.

On top of all that, there was even a “Legendary Original, Red Rider 200 Shot carbine action, range-model air rifle…” Well it was actually a 600 shot and it didn’t have a compass and this thing which tells time built right into the stock. It was for Wendy, and she was pretty excited. She even managed to almost pull off an “A Christmas Story” moment when she took it out in the back yard, missed the target and had a BB ricochet around the yard off the fence. Pretty exciting, it even made the classic ricochet sound.

I very much appreciate the hospitality of the Jones’ and the gifts that I was given. It was a lot of fun, though I have to say, I am pretty darn tired now. The funny thing is that, according to Ruth, her mother wants to celebrate Hanukkah next year. I find that interesting because Hanukkah isn’t really a big deal holiday, but it is nice that they think of me like that.