Limmud NY Notes: Communal Kiddush

I went to Limmud NY 2011 and wrote a lot of posts about it. Here’s a guide to them.

At Limmud NY, we have had a communal Friday night Kiddush some years and not others. This year we did. We also had a communal Shabbat morning Kiddush this year, which I believe was a new thing.

I think this was a major mistake.

The way meals work at Limmud NY is that all meals take place at the same time as sessions. Each meal is served buffet style for about two hours. People can skip a session and relax over a meal or they can get a to-go box and grab food to eat in their next session.

The only exception to this is Friday night dinner. There are no sessions going on simultaneously and the meal is seated rather than buffet. In some years, there has been a communal Kiddush and in some, there have been various benchers on the table for people to lead their own table-by-table, if they choose to.

At my table, which had a few Limmud NY regulars at it, we assumed that there were benchers on the table because we were doing Kiddush table-by-table. I was asked to lead Kiddush at our table and I did so. Just as I finished, three of the musicians at the conference came to the center of the room, the crowd was shushed, and they led Kiddush.

All three, as you might have guessed, were men. Overall, everyone seemed to like it. Indeed, their voices were great and it was nice to do it communally.

Problems

Here are the three problems. After these, I’ll outline my potential solution.

1. A woman will never be able to do it. At Limmud NY, there is not one single other ritual event that takes place communally, except for Havdalah. There is a big communal, concert-y Havdalah, but there is also Havdalah in the Traditional-Egalitarian minyan and in the mechitza minyan so that those groups can do it according to their standards before the communal one. Kiddush is problematic because a woman cannot lead it ever. Limmud NY is run entirely by volunteers, but we’ve created a volunteer opportunity that 60-70% of the Limmud NY population may not do because a minority will be offended by the woman’s voice, Kol Isha. I would rather forgo the the community-building opportunity presented by Kiddush than either turn off people who think women should be able to lead it or turn off people who would be offended by a woman leading it. In this problem, we fall prey to frummest common denominator pluralism, which is a style of pluralism that Limmud NY has generally succeeded in avoiding. (I’m intentionally staying away from the fact that we forbid the use of electronic devices in communal spaces on Shabbat. That’s an issue for another post.)
2. We’re imposing ritual. This is the only time at Limmud NY when we force ritual on people. Like Friday night dinner, communal Havdalah is scheduled such that there are no sessions at the same time. The difference is that people are essentially forced to sit through communal Kiddush before they can eat. The majority of Limmud NY-goers fall somewhere between Modern Orthodox, Open Orthodox, Conservadox, Trad-Egal, and Conservative. (I put that clumsily, but you see what I’m saying about the religious nature of the community.) Despite this, we cannot ignore that there are secular and cultural Jews at Limmud NY who do not want ritual imposed on them. They are a relatively small group at the conference, but they shouldn’t fall prey to the tyranny of the majority. The community’s communal spaces need to be as welcoming to as many Jews as possible.
3. It makes everything take forever. Between Handwashing and Motzi, some Jews won’t talk. When 700 people need to wash, this stuff starts taking forever, the niguning goes on and on and I get hungry. This is a minor issue in the grand scheme and doesn’t bother me overly much so I won’t try to solve it here. However, it was pointed out as a problem by a few people who feel strongly about not talking during the period between Kiddush and Handwashing, so it seemed worth mentioning here.

Solutions

We have other semi-communal ritual moments at Limmud NY. Every year, after the opening event and before people trickle off to the various Kabbalat Shabbat options or to a session, there are tea lights and matches set out on tables in the lobby so that everyone who wishes to can light candles on their own time and in their own way. (Note that we offer not only a wide range of services, but a couple of sessions during services for folks who don’t want to go to services.) If people want to light candles, they do–if they don’t, they move on with life. It’s nice because it is communal, but you can opt out.

Shabbat morning kiddush was a little different. It was led by a man, but it was done in the lobby before going into lunch. I certainly couldn’t hear him and it bore a stronger resemblance to our semi-communal candle lighting because it was in a space that people could wander in and out of if they wanted. There was also a table full of little glasses of wine and grape juice that reminded me of the table of little candles, which made me think of two solutions:

1. The best solution: We can do communal candle lighting, Friday Kiddush and Saturday Kiddush all in the same way. We can do each one in the lobby, communally. The explicit ritual itself–as well as all details of the ritual–becomes entirely optional, but the overall event is communal. There is nothing being done by a volunteer in an official capacity that is potentially exclusive. This solves both of the major problems identifies above: the problem caused by the divisiveness of Kol Isha and the problem of imposing ritual on non-religious Jews.
2. An adequate compromise: We could also do Friday and Saturday communal Kiddush the way we did Saturday communal Kiddush. If we did that, we would solve the issue of imposed ritual, to some extent. Though people who did not want to be involved in the ritual would be unable to be in the lobby, it would be more like Havdalah, when they would be free to go somewhere else in the hotel, without forcing them to sit through Kiddush so that they can eat.

Thoughts, Limmud NYks? Thoughts, anyone else? Thoughts, BZ?

BTW, BZ, I see Hilchot Pluralism: The Limmud NY Edition in your future. Eh? Eh?

If my pen is offensive, I’m gonna need some kind of warning.

Crossposted to Jewschool

If your communal standards are non-standard, do us all a favor and have some signs made. Please?

Last year, I spent all of Yom Kipur and the morning of Simchat Torah at Kehilat Hadar. I did a repeat performance this year, adding several hours at Bnai Jeshurun on the night of Simchat Torah.

On Yom Kipur this year, a gabai told me to stop writing in the margin of my machzor at Hadar. When all is said and done, it was frustrating, but not out of line. Hadar uses no amplification or anything on yom tov. It’s a community that defines its communal spaces as shomer shabbat. So I stopped writing.

But BJ is a whole other story. I have a whole list of regular complaints about BJ (it’s a meat market, etc), but Simchat Torah had me more miffed than usual. I’m often told that on the evening of Simchat Torah, BJ is the place to be. So I went.

Far beyond my usual complaints, it was a night club, complete with Israeli bouncers at all entrances and exits. The only thing to distinguish the gyrating mass of Jews from night club was the sprinkling of people dancing with sifrei Torah.

For me, events like this are a spectator sport. I felt most comfortable when the dancing was over and the Torah reading began. During the dancing hakafot, I stood off to the side, sporadically annotating my siddur and chatting with the many friends I was running into. It all reminded me a lot of summer camp. I was always that kid standing off to the side during Israeli dancing, grotesquely fascinated, but utterly unwilling to join in.

Amid all of this, there’s a piano playing, rabbis are singing loudly into microphones. Everything sounds beautiful.

Except for one thing. Four of five times during each half-hour dance hakafah, one rabbi or another would shout over the music into the microphone, “No pictures, please!” People were indeed taking pictures–with flash!–of the rotating clod of Jews. To me, far more distracting than the odd flash here and there were the announcements admonishing us all to stop taking pictures.

But I can understand it. The flashes distract. One person I chatted with said the flashes were more distracting to her than the announcements. Fine. The microphones enhanced the dancing worship, while the flashes detract. I get it.

But more than anything else, I was amused by the notion of shouting into a microphone to tell people not to take pictures. There’s something halachically hilarious about it.

And then some rather officious woman in fanny pack decided that my note-taking was a problem and told me to stop.

So now we come back to my original point: If your communal standards are non-standard, do us all a favor and have some signs made.

If there will be amplification, mixed dancing, totally nonreligious Jewish high school students, at least two well-known Orthodox rabbis (that I spotted), admonishments over the mics not to take pictures, My Number One Fan, a handful of Jewschoolers (hey guys!), etc., there’s no way to know what’s appropriate.

In a Conservative shul, in a Reform shul, in and Orthodox shul it is, with the occasional exception, pretty easy for someone as ritually literate as I am to know what it’s acceptable to do and not do.

So, fanny pack lady, despite the look of disgust on your face, it was perfectly non-obvious that what I was doing was wrong in any way.

If I can’t write in your shul, please have a sign made to go along with your no cell phones sign. How else is anyone to know what is appropriate? (Or, dare I say, allowed?)

If you read carefully, I admit to being a real ass in this post

I’ve been back at Drew for my senior year for about a week and a half, but it already feels much longer. And some Jewy things have happened. Here they are.

The Anti-Nadler

I dropped Alan Nadler’s class, Major Jewish Thinkers. I’ve had him for four or five different classes at this point, which is quite enough. The real reason I dropped it was that my current schedule doesn’t include time to eat dinner on Mondays. So that plan was right out.

I told my advisor, Chris Taylor, that I was gonna drop it. I was about to ask him if he had any ideas about what I could take instead. Before I could ask, he was already off and running about a visiting professor in the Theo School (Drew’s oldest school, our United Methodist seminary, where I’ve enjoyed taking a couple of classes before). The guy’s name is Yehezkel Landau, not a name you expect to find in a protestant institution. His whole thing is interfaith work and he teaches full time at Hartford Seminary, one of those non-denominational protestant far-out lefty outfits. At Drew, he’s teaching a course this fall called Jewish Spirituality, mostly to a bunch of Methodist seminary students.

Chris said I should go and meet him, at least. He was afraid that the course might be too basic for me, but he seemed pretty sure I’d enjoy meeting Landau. Yehezkel Landau, Chris told me, is the anti-Nadler. Where Nadler is negative, and full of himself, not to mention bile, Landau, Chris said, is life-affirming and positive. But they’re friends anyway, he added. This I had to see.