(Seventh in a very occasional series about Jewish prayer.)

I PWN TEFILLAH. Er, more precisely, I davened Shacharit this morning, with the full weekday Amidah rep, on time. And while I want to smooth over some melodic issues, I'm actually pretty satisfied with my performance. I want to do it a couple more times to get really comfortable with the words and tunes, but at this point I can basically lead the entire cycle of weekday non-holiday services (with Torah if necessary) and sound like I know what I'm doing. Yes, this makes me ridiculously happy. Yes, I have a mental list of which services I have left to lead (Kabbalat Shabbat, Shabbat Shacharit, and most of the festivals). Yes, I probably am a hopeless geek, but you all knew that, right?

And so I often wonder why, even in a traditionally lay-led participatory minyan environment, more people don't offer to daven for the amud. I mean, I have a pretty good memory for tunes and words, but my Hebrew skills are nowhere near where they ought to be, and I don't attend weekday minyan more than half a dozen times in the average month. I am clearly not God's gift to Jewish prayer. Still, I've picked it up service by service with no more exotic aid than listening and reading closely. Some of our regular minyaneers have been turning up like clockwork for decades -- they can probably recite most of the prayers in their sleep, which is a handy trick in the morning -- and yet they won't lead, even with a chiyuv, even if there's nobody else to do it. Surely they don't all suffer from either major fear of public performance or major tin ear*?

It is also just barely possible that the world at large does not share my unabashed glee in learning and leading elements of Jewish ritual. For instance, if I were to call up my mother and announce that I had just led weekday Shacharit, I'm pretty sure she'd say "That's nice, dear" and hastily change the subject. Even my husband, who enjoys learning new tunes himself, thinks I am slightly eccentric in my pursuit of nusach. Come to think of it, I am the only person I know who will admit to actively enjoying leading services. Am I pathological (control freak, attention grabber, religious nutcase)? I don't think so -- it feels to me as though I am picking up things I should have learned as a child, words and tunes and skills that sit comfortably on my lips and in my life.

It amuses me when friends or acquaintances tell me that I have become more observant over the last several years, because it doesn't feel like a particularly huge change to me. As I told my friend L. the other day, I'm just getting around to a lot of things I'd been meaning to do for a long time. These prayers are mine, part of my heritage, and they always were; even at my most alienated, my most miserably certain that I would never fit in with groups of Jews,** I missed participating in services. I was unhappy not simply because I didn't know all the right words, but because I should have known all the right words. And now I feel that I am not so much learning new skills as re-acquiring the ones which, if I never knew myself, some ancestor of mine certainly did.

The nouns "redeemer" and "redemption" are almost impossible to use in English without evoking Christian imagery, but the original Hebrew goel was a redeeming kinsman, responsible for continuing a lost bloodline*** or buying back lost ancestral land. God becomes Israel's goel only by an extension of this very human example. And so I need to speak very precisely when I say that, for me, there is something redemptive about leading prayer. I am carrying on something that was almost lost; I am taking back something that is rightfully mine. These prayers belong to my people, and I -- like every Jewish adult -- I am the next of kin. Acquiring these skills is my obligation, but it is also my privilege and my honor. And, happily, my pleasure.

If Rabbi Judah the Pious could envision God wearing tefillin, I figure it's OK for me to contemplate the possibility that God also leads prayers. And enjoys it.

* -- Which, let's face it, doesn't always stop people.
** -- Yes, I had teen angst.
*** -- I haven't double-checked, but I believe that the first Biblical use of goel is in this week's parsha (Gen. 38:8), and my, that's a doozy of an example.

So it's December -- OK, more than a week into December, but I've been busy with grading and so forth. We have a departmental party on Friday night and a block party on Saturday night; I just located the bag with the birthday-candle menorah and assorted tacky decorations after searching in various not-quite-unpacked boxes; the classical music station on our clock/radio has temporarily ditched random snippets of Arcangelo Corelli in favor of random snippets of Handel's "Messiah." And to complete the signs of impending Holiday Season, Congregation Beth Boondoggle is holding a lunch-and-learn this coming Shabbat on the Topic That Dare Not Speak Its Name In Front Of Me If It Knows What's Good For It. I refer, of course, to The December -- I am only saying this once -- "Dilemma."

Apparently we American Jews are supposed to spend the month of Kislev engaged in a nonstop angstfest about -- well, mostly how we will decorate our homes. Single candles in windows are out; nine-branched candelabras are in; seven-branched candelabras depend heavily on context. Greenery is dubious,* especially triangular shapes, and circles are questionable, but any medium which can reasonably be shaped into a four-sided top is cool. Blue lights are fine; clear lights are fine unless they look too much like the ones the neighbors have strung around their creche scene; multicolored lights are Right Out. Also, lighted reindeer forms are frowned upon; my search for a lighted elephant form (preferably stepping on a lighted Eleazar Maccabee) has so far been in vain, but I like to think that would be OK.

Of course, you say, this is not really about such trivial details as yard displays. (You must not live on my block.) No, you say: this is about what we believe, what we stand for. And clearly, on all the available evidence, we Jews proudly stand for what generations of our more erudite Ashkenazi forefathers (along with their Christian neighbors) stood for: Jews Not Looking Too Much Like Christians And Vice Versa. What we believe is a little trickier, since the rabbinic tradition has effectively watered down Hanukkah's blessings into the politically safe statement that God performed lots of miracles for our ancestors way back when -- not a terribly high threshhold of belief. It has never been altogether clear to me how an errant jingle bell or an ill-considered fruitcake would interfere with this affirmation,** and it is even less clear to me how a traumatic early encounter with a candy cane would encourage someone to affirm Jesus as Messiah and/or God. The "December D******" is not about discouraging Jews from accepting baptism; it is about discouraging Jews from accepting Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, regardless of how allegorically Jewish he reads.

Indeed, I believe that -- pardon my Greek -- it is really fucking offensive to claim that this conjunction of December holidays constitutes a Jewish "dilemma." You want a real dilemma involving Judaism and American culture? Try "whether or not to run errands on Shabbat." Or if you are too immersed in a certain kind of Jewish world for that to be even be a question in your mind, try "what (if anything) to eat at a non-kosher restaurant, and how to explain it to your lunchmate(s) and/or waitperson." These dilemmas run up against Jewish fundamentals. What you tell your kids about the white-bearded, red-suited guy in the mall is probably not that kind of dilemma.*** Indeed, the extent to which Jew Q. Public participates in patently non-worshipful activities vaguely associated with the multilayered pagan-Christian-nationalist festival we call Christmas-And-New-Year**** is... well, really, a pretty minor issue in the greater Jewish scheme of things. Even Hanukkah, the only Jewish holiday remotely in the way of this celebrational juggernaut, is itself a pretty minor festival which (handily enough) shares the overall Midwinter Festival Of Light format with half a dozen other similar holidays.

For that matter, Hanukkah has scarcely remained aloof from outside influence over the centuries of its transformation from Hasmonean Veterans' Day to rabbinic Thanksgiving to our contemporary potlatch. Why are we not rising up to disavow the obviously modern custom of potato latkes, made as they are with a key ingredient associated with idolatrous ritual? (Oh, right, because lighted llamas are even more difficult to find than lighted elephants.) If anything, we Jews should probably be delighted that the midwinter celebrations of our neighbors today have little or no content which can be conclusively identified as avodah zarah, sparing us all sorts of nasty halakhic dilemmas. I mean, really, which would you rather find yourself humming songs about as you walk through the mall: the Birthday of the Unconquered Sun, or the Birthday of This One Nice Jewish Boy Who Some People Thought Was Anointed By God But We Think Otherwise?

It's difficult for me to be entirely serious about this topic, because it's either too offensive for me to deal with rationally (if you really think avoiding a Christmas tree is more important than being shomer Shabbos, we probably don't have room for dialogue) or it's just so silly. Even if you call it "the Christmas season," it's dubiously Christian these days -- some megachurches have started closing down for Christmas Day (nevermind that it's also, y'know, Sunday this year), and my Christian friends have been saying for years that we are currently in the Advent season. But even if Christmas were the most sacred day in the Christian year -- so what? There's the halakhic issue of minhag akum, which suggests that we want to avoid doing anything which gives the appearance of condoning idol worship (again, it's not clear whether Christianity fits into this category), but in practice Jews have cheerfully borrowed customs, foods, and really goofy hats from cultures around the world including many Christian ones.***** We've painted eggs for Lag b'Omer, or possibly Purim, but never Easter. We've given the Messiah's mother, whose name is definitely not Mary, a starring role in the End Times. At various points, we've changed our names, changed our clothes, dyed our hair, and bobbed our noses to fit in -- but, amazingly enough, we have remained Jewish and continued to celebrate identifiably Jewish holidays. Even the ones of us who adopted Greek names and became priest-kings.

In the Chana household this year, with three Jews and one ex-Christian (my dad) in residence, things will be a little more confused than usual: we are going to have a houseplant strung with lights and neutral ornaments, a series of Hanukkah socks (I knew those would come in handy eventually) stuffed with nondenominational candy plus gelt and a few dreidels, a really good turkey breast with stuffing on Erev Hanukkah because none of us got to make it for ourselves on Thanksgiving, hanukkiot lit all 'round as appropriate, and several variations on potato latkes. We are also hosting the second annual Marvelous Monthly Minyan Hanukkah Shindig And Marathon Birkat Ha-Mazon (this year with strategically delayed Havdalah!) on New Year's Eve. I'm not sure how we would capture a more authentically Hanukkah spirit, really, but I'm willing to give it a shot. Maybe we could display a model of the rededicated Temple? I hear you can do amazing things with gingerbread and gumdrops....

* -- I continue to maintain that there is nothing wrong with putting up the decorations for Second Sukkot just a bit early.
** -- Indeed, one might reasonably cite the famous verse from Pirke Avot which includes never-stale loaves of showbread among the miracles God performed during Temple days. Exchanges of notoriously long-lived fruitcake can be seen as a way of paying tribute to the meal-offerings of our ancestors in Judah and Jerusalem. Or, y'know, not.
*** -- Unless you tell them he's the Second Coming of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, who has shaved his payyes and is wearing karbolta garments to indicate that the forbidden is now permitted. But that's kind of a different subset of problem.
**** -- Those of you who object to naming seasons after foreign deities might want to rethink parts of the Hebrew-language calendar, not to mention the standard English-language week.
***** -- While there may have been little or no distinction between religious and civic aspects of festivals under the Romans, things are a wee bit different today. 've been wondering for awhile now how we distinguish in halakhah between customs of idol-worshippers and customs of Jews who simply happen to live in significantly different cultures than we do. Yemenite Jews aren't all that into the potato latkes, and we aren't all that into expecting "presents" from Father Salim (that's wicks for the hanukkiah, not PlayStations), yet somehow we remain klal Yisrael. But an American Jew who puts up a wreath? Oh, the horror!

What do you do with a problem like a cantor? More precisely, what do you do with a cantor?

This is not a rhetorical question. You see, the synagogue where I grew up didn't have a cantor (just a nice young man who came in for the High Holy Days), but the rabbi liked to be front and center on the bimah anyway, so that I can't imagine how a cantor would have added anything unless s/he were willing to go mano-a-mano with the rabbi. (Today, Temple Hometown still has one rabbi and no cantor, but the rabbi is much more in the "songleader-with-guitar" mode.) The Marvelous Monthly Minyan doesn't have a cantor, of course; we have people who get up and daven with varying degrees of vocal virtuosity, and if I have to sit through really awful davening every six months from That One Guy who can't seem to pronounce the Kaddish clearly... well, there are worse problems. Finally, Congregation Beth Boondoggle hasn't had a cantor for about a year now, which seems to really bother a lot of people who aren't me.

I have, in fact, been to plenty of services across the Jewish denominational spectrum led in whole or in part by either ordained or lay cantors, and while I have grown to know and appreciate several of these cantors as individual shlichim and/or teachers, on the whole I am left cold by the phenomenon of contemporary hazzanut. Cantors tend to chant prayers in ways that are difficult to follow (if I wanted to sing opera, I'd sing opera), hang out in vocal ranges I prefer not to emulate (are there going to be that many really high sopranos and tenors in a congregation?), encourage restricted choral support (thereby giving the rest of the congregation mixed messages as to whether or not they should join in), and on the whole move the entire experience several big steps along the continuum from "one individual praying on his/her own behalf and repeating bits for the benefit of the equally prayerful congregation where strictly necessary" towards "one individual putting on a performance while the rest of the congregation listens politely."

Now, CBB's most recent cantor was reluctant to stray outside Shabbat morning services, and since those were the last services I started attending, I got a slightly topsy-turvy view of the congregation. I had been invited there by friends from our minyan, and so virtually everyone I knew davened and/or layned; I was frequently invited to daven myself, and eventually I started taking people up on the offer. On the whole, then, davening at CBB struck me as a great participatory experience, not unlike an independent minyan but with a building of its own and food I hadn't had to organize. So when I finally started attending on Shabbat mornings, it was a bit of a letdown. I found the cantor personally very nice, and his voice was lovely (if a bit overwhelming volume-wise), but having to put that sense of congregational participation on hold after Pesukei d'Zimra in favor of the Official Version With Lots Of Trills... well, I don't know, it just never floated my boat quite the same way.

I hadn't been attending long when we let the cantor go, though, and I wasn't particularly surprised when my friends (and for that matter the guy I married) stepped in to fill the gap. These were the people who already led services during the rest of the week, and many of them had honed Shabbat-specific ritual skills at the Marvelous Monthly Minyan.* I now belong to one of the three or four Households Most Likely To Get An Emergency Call On Thursday Night, and while I wish we could put a staff person on assigning Shabbat davening in advance (the volunteer who does it now is doing so on top of another job), I actually kind of like the exhausting but thrilling weekends when Shabbat is the Chana Household Show. I also like the weekends when other people I know are up there, and D. and I can relax in our seats and enjoy the tiny variations in each person's nusach. We hired someone for the High Holy Days, and the rabbi is getting stuck with most of the festival services (although if he'd hand out CDs and plan ahead we could fix that); perhaps I lack some finer aesthetic sensibility here, but I really enjoy the informal rotation of congregants leading us in prayer.

So why, I wonder, are we searching for a new cantor? I'm all in favor of having new blood to help out with davening or leyning, but we seem to be getting along rather well, and I object strongly to the idea that it's no longer our right as congregants to do these things. Anyway, we already pay a part-time baal koreh for Shabbat; the rest of it's not so difficult, and none of the people doing it at the moment are getting paid bupkis, trust me. Someone to tutor Bar and Bat Mitzvah students? Sure -- but we don't have a ton of students, and I can name plenty of people in this community who'd be qualified to tutor, a good handful of whom might actually want to do so. Also, is that really what the average cantor is going to look forward to doing? Or, as some suggest, do we want a cantor to "inject new life" into certain services, which appears to mean introducing instrumental music on Shabbat to a largely resistant congregation in hopes of increasing youth membership?** I don't think resurrection -- or membership manipulation -- is really a specialty of the average cantor, but what do I know?

More seriously, could we use another full-time trained clergyperson to address "pastoral concerns" -- counseling congregants, visiting the sick, and so forth? I'm told we could, but in that case wouldn't rabbinical training be at least somewhat better-suited than cantorial training? (And if our major reason for wanting a cantor instead of a junior rabbi is that (according to those on the search committee) cantors come slightly cheaper, this does not strike me as a brilliant decision.) We do need someone for the High Holidays -- well, probably; we actually do significant chunks of them now with our own congregants -- but that's not really justification for a year-round salary either. Or perhaps if we were to put all these things together, and let our baal koreh retire, we'd actually have a respectable full-time job for one person who's very good at multitasking. Yeah, probably so. Only... I want to keep the services, darn it. I like those.

Historically there have generally been chazzanim well before congregational rabbis... but historically the rabbi had a lot less to do with the shul, and the shul had a lot more to do with community affairs, and at a certain point even I have to admit that historical precedent will only carry us so far. Still, I suspect that I am missing something obvious here, or that my checkered background has left me Cantorially Challenged, or that I am just a hard-shell chavurah girl at heart. Some of my best friends -- OK, one or two of my online acquaintances -- are cantors themselves, even. There are schools across the world turning out new cantors as we speak. And yet I don't quite know what I am -- what we are -- supposed to hope for or expect from a new cantor. Can anyone out there formulate the advantages of full-time dedicated Cantorial Leadership in terms which will make sense to me?

At the rate the search is going, we should be getting this new cantor just in time to sideline him/her for my first child's Bar or Bat Mitzvah, so there's plenty of time for discussion.

* -- Mercifully, That One Guy attends another shul.
** -- I grew up with the dreaded organ, and I don't dread it at all; I've also participated in some lovely guitar-based services. On balance, I prefer a non-instrumental Shabbat for both aesthetic and halakhic reasons, but I'm willing to allow for a little flexibility on both fronts (especially around Kabbalat Shabbat). As far as I can tell, some people high up in Ye Olde Circles of Power think instrumental music would be a fine thing, but the thing is, I have heard both the Ritual Committee and the daily minyan attendees discuss this, and I stand out by miles as having the most positive take on instruments. So... I think I feel sorry for whoever winds up as cantor.

It so happens that I am reading Haftarah this weekend -- the Torah portion is Toledot, the beginning of the Jacob and Esau story, so the Haftarah is Malachi 1:1-2:7. Like many of the prophetic readings for Genesis, its connection to its Torah portion is extremely slim: God begins by casually mentioning His favoring Jacob over Esau and predicting the utter destruction of Edom, but then He pitches a fit over substandard Temple offerings which lasts for most of the reading, concluding with a sublimely Sadduccean reading of God's covenant with Levi and the status of the Aaronic priest as malach (messenger -> angel) to the Lord of Hosts.* While substandard Temple offerings do not precisely strike me as integral to my Jewish existence, it could be a lot worse; next week I would've had to read (Hosea, I think) about how God plans to destroy Samaria by killing its infants and splitting its pregnant women open. Blargh. When people claim to follow the Judaism (or for that matter the Christianity) of the prophets, I always suspect them of doing some seriously selective reading.

The good news is that, despite occasional discomfort with subject matter, I really enjoy both chanting and listening to well-chanted Haftarah: the cantillation is a lot more dramatic than Torah reading, and I am a sucker for those nifty not-quite-minor intervals which characterize much of traditional Jewish music. Congregation Beth Boondoggle is fortunate in that we possess a great many regulars who read Haftarah well both technically and aesthetically,** and the occasional Bar or Bat Mitzvah usually acquits him- or herself well. But I do wonder how much of the story we are getting when someone calmly chants their way note-perfect through a few columns of, say, Ezekiel foaming at the mouth, or Samson's parents freaking out at an angel. Not all the Haftarot are narrative, of course -- a larger portion come from the oracular prophetic books than from the histories -- but even Isaiah at his least linear has a sequence of thoughts or events, points of emphasis and de-emphasis, and indirect or direct dialogue between God, the prophet, and various sets of peoples.

The thing is, when I read a garden-variety story with dialogue, I like to do subtle but noticeable voices. This owes something to reading out loud to small children (one of my favorite pasttimes -- on both ends, if my parents are to be believed) and something else again to being a Speech & Debate nerd in high school (I did Dramatic Storytelling along with Lincoln-Douglas, and achieved various degrees of runner-updom). Now, doing Haftarah cantillation properly (which I do) prevents one from changing pitch to indicate voice (at least, I don't think I have sufficient vocal range to switch between octaves with abandon), but it positively encourages dynamic changes (most of the "high notes" and particularly showy sequences are on logical points of emphasis, which is more than I can say for Torah cantillation). And then there is the hint of a whine that, to my mind, characterizes most of the prophets themselves, and the various voices of prayer or disbelief or warning who enter into the narrative Haftarot, and the thunder of God's voice in the oracular messages (although this can get overwhelming if that's 99% of the reading), and the interesting situation (featured heavily in my upcoming Haftarah) in which God says that the people say X but they are, like, so wrong, gag me with a spoon.

What I wonder is how much of this it is appropriate to put into the public Haftarah reading. On the one hand, there is considerable halakhic support for encouraging people to pay attention and understand what's going on in the reading; if that takes straight-out operatic belting at the top of my range ("Yo, people! Apocalypse ahead!") or dropping to a whisper ("still small voice," get it?) or exuding smug satisfaction ("But I, the Lord Thy God, shall kick thine enemies' butts for all eternity") or confusion ("You want me to tell the king WHAT?"), I am quite happy to do so. But I am a little nervous about treading on the fine line between dramatizing a reading and making fun of it -- I mean, am I the only person who thinks Jeremiah must've had one of those squeaky nasal voices, judging from his near-total inability to get anyone to take him seriously? And what about my ongoing objection to, say, most of Hosea -- should I politely refuse to do any Haftarot which I am inclined to chant in the sweeping cadences of "Yeah Right As If"? Or should I just play it straight on those? Also, would it be, strictly speaking, breaking any commandments if I were chant God's voice in Valley Girl?

I can only imagine that people from traditions in which Scripture readings are read rather than chanted have even greater temptations in this area, but this is my cross to -- no, wait -- my discussion to bear. And since I would not care for the look of panic on my rabbi's face if I confessed the fleeting urge to ventriloquize the God of certain prophets as closer to Boss Hogg or John Cleese than Charlton Heston, I figured I'd ask around online. Haftarah chanting (or more generally Scripture reading) with voices: yea or nay? And what are the boundaries of acceptable dramatization?

Like, omigod.

* -- All of which makes a great deal more sense if you assume that Malachi's source text is not Genesis but something resembling Jubilees.
** -- In fact, I can think of three people off the top of my head who sing flat in nusach and/or Torah trupp but pitch their Haftarah perfectly. I wonder what's up with that?