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Davenen
This year's Rosh Hashanah was really dramatically different from previous years, it feels like. Even though last year I was at services just to attend, not to gabbay, I was still somewhere where I'd been and where I was both well connected and seen rather as an expert, from the interpersonal perspective- people were asking me questions about how things ran, when should they do x, etc. From an internal perspective, it was a very powerful holiday because I was in the midst of some rather intense relationship stuff, and I was trying to deal with that in relation to the holiday liturgy and content as well as trying to engage the content on its own.
THis year, I was really on my own- I had choices about where to daven and what to do and when to show up, which was an odd feeling: that's not how I'm used to perceiving the high holidays (I've still only sort of gotten used to it for shabbos, etc), and the issues in my personal life are completely different. So I stayed at JTS for davening the first day, then was at KOE for davening the second day, and hit Hadar and Ramat Orah for shabbos and various mincha-ma'ariv combinations.
The JTS service was a bit more cut-down and dried off than I really wanted, with more basic instructions than I needed or found interesting. I picked up a few interesting tidbits, but some of the talking from the bima was more annoying than helpful and some of it was certainly halakhically problematic at the very least as far as location in the service. It was a reasonable service, but not thrilling, and I have to admit that some of that was because I was not fond of the musical choices. The other big problem was that for a long time it felt like the folks leading the service/the few of us who knew how to daven were trying to pull everyone else along, and I could Feel the strain of it, and that was very much not helpful. On the other hand, it felt like I was doing something productive by being there. From a communal perspective, I think it is something important to do- to give some sort of example, to be there as something for people to latch on to as a way of seeing that Really praying is ok. And I think that that's a significant thing to do, especially at this time of year.
At the same time, it's a difficult thing to do, and it does make one's own prayer experience more difficult. So between that and curiosity and some practical thoughts about where I was eating lunch the second day, I went to a very different service the second day, which was in many ways the opposite of the JTS service: there was nothing at all cut (in fact, I had to go get one of their machzorim, because mine which is reasonably complete was missing things), there were no instructions besides an explanation that the drash was being given before the shofar service started because one shouldn't talk from the first shofar blast until the last one. There were also moments where the musical choices and style made me a bit crazy, but it was overall a better personal prayer experience. It was certainly different from any other high holiday service I'd been to. It was a much quieter sort of experience, with a different sort of intensity that felt a bit more diffuse and harder to pinpoint for me.
After all of that, davening over shabbod felt anticlimactic, soothing and spacey all at once. It was also a rather different crowd from the usual there- a much higher percentage of older people (rather than the usual crowd of mostly students and young professionals etc, etc). Made for an interesting time, but they handled it very well, I think.
This year's Rosh Hashanah was really dramatically different from previous years, it feels like. Even though last year I was at services just to attend, not to gabbay, I was still somewhere where I'd been and where I was both well connected and seen rather as an expert, from the interpersonal perspective- people were asking me questions about how things ran, when should they do x, etc. From an internal perspective, it was a very powerful holiday because I was in the midst of some rather intense relationship stuff, and I was trying to deal with that in relation to the holiday liturgy and content as well as trying to engage the content on its own.
THis year, I was really on my own- I had choices about where to daven and what to do and when to show up, which was an odd feeling: that's not how I'm used to perceiving the high holidays (I've still only sort of gotten used to it for shabbos, etc), and the issues in my personal life are completely different. So I stayed at JTS for davening the first day, then was at KOE for davening the second day, and hit Hadar and Ramat Orah for shabbos and various mincha-ma'ariv combinations.
The JTS service was a bit more cut-down and dried off than I really wanted, with more basic instructions than I needed or found interesting. I picked up a few interesting tidbits, but some of the talking from the bima was more annoying than helpful and some of it was certainly halakhically problematic at the very least as far as location in the service. It was a reasonable service, but not thrilling, and I have to admit that some of that was because I was not fond of the musical choices. The other big problem was that for a long time it felt like the folks leading the service/the few of us who knew how to daven were trying to pull everyone else along, and I could Feel the strain of it, and that was very much not helpful. On the other hand, it felt like I was doing something productive by being there. From a communal perspective, I think it is something important to do- to give some sort of example, to be there as something for people to latch on to as a way of seeing that Really praying is ok. And I think that that's a significant thing to do, especially at this time of year.
At the same time, it's a difficult thing to do, and it does make one's own prayer experience more difficult. So between that and curiosity and some practical thoughts about where I was eating lunch the second day, I went to a very different service the second day, which was in many ways the opposite of the JTS service: there was nothing at all cut (in fact, I had to go get one of their machzorim, because mine which is reasonably complete was missing things), there were no instructions besides an explanation that the drash was being given before the shofar service started because one shouldn't talk from the first shofar blast until the last one. There were also moments where the musical choices and style made me a bit crazy, but it was overall a better personal prayer experience. It was certainly different from any other high holiday service I'd been to. It was a much quieter sort of experience, with a different sort of intensity that felt a bit more diffuse and harder to pinpoint for me.
After all of that, davening over shabbod felt anticlimactic, soothing and spacey all at once. It was also a rather different crowd from the usual there- a much higher percentage of older people (rather than the usual crowd of mostly students and young professionals etc, etc). Made for an interesting time, but they handled it very well, I think.