Liturgical Obligations
March 10, 2010
Defining Reform | Shabbat
(12 comments)
by Monica Cellio
Temple Sinai, Pittsburgh PA
Also posted on LiveJournal
I was recently in a discussion about the choices that worship leaders make, and I realized that the Reform Movement's approach imposes a higher literacy burden than I think most realize.
In an Orthodox service, the decisions made by the sh'liach tzibbur, the leader, pretty much boil down to what melodies to use. The actual text is fixed; you do what the the siddur tells you to do (and remember seasonal variations if the siddur doesn't mark them). I'm not saying it's easy, but I am saying it's not too complex. While (in my experience) most Orthodox Jews who would be in a position to lead services are thoroughly fluent, technically the leader doesn't have to know what it all means and why the service is structured that way and so on.
Now consider the Reform movement, which from the beginning declined to follow the fixed liturgy. The early reformers eliminated some parts of the service (like musaf and many of the kaddishes) because they were repetitive, changed the texts of some prayers for ideological reasons (like objecting to resurrection of the dead), and introduced English readings that did not necessarily strictly follow the Hebrew they replaced. My impression is that they did the vast majority of this thoughtfully; later generations might disagree with their reasons, but they had reasons.
At least since the publication of Gates of Prayer, a siddur that offered many (and quite varied) alternatives to the leader, Reform services have tended to vary from one time to another, skip some of the Hebrew readings, use very "creative" English readings, and vary the music (which sometimes means varying the text because you want to use so-and-so's setting and it's a little different). The publishers of the siddur stuck to the same service structure, but at least from what I've seen in the last 12 years or so (as long as I've been watching), leaders have used it pretty freely. So it wasn't uncommon to do the Sh'ma/v'ahavta in both Hebrew and English (despite the repetition) but skip ahavat olam entirely, for instance. (Why yes, that does bother me, but that's a different essay.)
 Mishkan T'filah, the new Reform siddur, corrects some of the problems in GOP. The theory is brilliant: here is a two-page spread including the Hebrew, a decent translation, and some alternative English readings; choose exactly one thing from this spread and then turn the page. But some of the English readings really aren't connected to what's supposed to be going on at that point in the service, so I see leaders break the pattern -- skip a few pages, then do both the Hebrew and one of the English readings from one spread, and so on. (That the editors sometimes violated their own format doesn't help this.) I was recently talking with a lay person who sometimes leads services in her congregation, and she told me she picks and chooses "just like [she] did with GOP". She didn't realize that she was repeating some things and entirely skipping others.
Why didn't she realize this? Because she is not highly fluent in the service -- she doesn't understand why the (Shabbat) amidah has seven sections and what each of them is for (and why that one English reading is terrible in that place...), or that kri'at sh'ma has more structure than "something before, sh'ma, mi chamocha" and that skipping parts breaks the theme, or why the v'shamru earlier in the service doesn't cover you for the sanctification of the day later even though they're both "yay, shabbat" texts, and so on. She hasn't studied this stuff and doesn't engage with it like I do. And I realized: most Reform Jews don't study this stuff. In another movement they might not have to, but in the Reform Movement, the leader is more likely to be making decisions about the content of the service and so, in my opinion, has an obligation to become fluent. By the nature of its siddur and its history, the Movement imposes, or ought to impose, a higher burden of fluency than would have been necessary if we'd just stuck with the traditional text.
Of course our rabbis are fluent, and often they are the ones leading services. We have occasional geeks like me who are also fluent and have occasional opportunities to lead. But sometimes we have people who have occasional opportunities to lead who aren't fluent and don't even realize it matters. As a community we apparently aren't willing to say to those people "get fluent or follow instructions without varying or get off the bimah". So we get services that are sometimes haphazard and disjointed, which makes it really hard for people who do know what's going on to achieve kavannah (intentionality).
Once people know a little about the service structure I suspect they're more likely to not mess with it, but how -- aside from one conversation at a time -- do we get people to that "a ha!" moment that causes them to even notice the issue?
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Monica -- Wonderful essay! Without regard to the knowledge needed to lead a service in Reform vs. that needed in the other streams, let's talk about what a Reform lay service leader needs to know, and how to provide that knowledge.
Let's hypothesize a situation in a Reform congregation where a variety of lay volunteers is (are?) called upon to lead services from time to time -- some of whom may be less than fluent in shatzing. (Shatzing = serving as SHAliach TZIbur, messenger for the community.)
Mishkan T'filah, with its transliteration, empowers those who don't know the Hebrew to lead anyway. How about giving the unschooled leader a crib sheet, itemizing those prayers that MUST be included, perhaps also stipulating those where Hebrew is mandatory. (Or this could be handled by stipulating those spreads that must be utilized, maintaining the leader's authority to choose the Hebrew, or the English, or one of the left-hand page variants/alternatives.)
Let me end with a favorite story -- I belonged to a congregation that had a lay-led service every day but Saturday. (The Friday evening lay-led service was augmented by a clergy-led service later in the evening.) We used the daily service from Gates of Prayer, essentially in its entirety; and a fairly regular cadre of volunteers took turns leading. One Sunday morning, when it was my turn to lead, I looked out at the small assembly (sub-minyan in number, which our congregation had determined was not a barrier to proceeding) and saw that everyone in the chapel was also a service leader from time to time, and familiar with the service. After the Mourner's Kaddish (we typically did not do a closing hymn) I asked if anyone had noticed anything special about the day's worship. No one had. I then commented that, possibly for the first time in the history of this once-Classic Reform congregation, we had held a service entirely in Hebrew. Whereupon one of my worship colleagues blurted out -- You shouldn't have done that without permission! What if there had been someone here who didn't know Hebrew?
So hidden there is another message for would-be shlichei tzibur: it's not just a matter of knowing your liturgy, but also a matter of knowing your crowd.