Praise then darkness, and creation unfinished

I went to synagogue with adrian_turtle last night. This was at an egalitarian, rather hippie-feeling place called Havurat Shalom, in Somerville. The reason she specifically wanted to go this week was to say kaddish for her father. (I'm not at all religious, and we don't have a huge amount of time together, so she doesn't generally go on weekends when I'm visiting.)

They meet in a converted house, rather than a building originally built as a synagogue. It's often a small group--very small, this week. We sat on cushions on the floor, with our shoes off (though Adrian assured me that was optional), while the youngest member of the congregation crawled around and kept asking us "What's your name?" (She's three, and it takes a while for things to sink in.) Adrian had introduced me by name and as her sweetie: one of the reasons she goes there is that it's a synagogue where she can do that without anyone blinking, though we did wind up explaining in friendly conversation afterwards that no, I'm not planning to move to Boston, the long-distance thing works for us.

The people who run the Hav are working, slowly, on a retranslated feminist prayer-book. At this point, what they have is a mix of recent translations using either non-gendered language or explicitly including the feminine; Hebrew transliterations; and an older, printed prayerbook whose translations use explicitly masculine terms for God, and refer to "fathers" rather than "ancestors," and so on. The Hav's home-made handouts include the Sh'ma in both feminine and masculine forms, depending on the speaker's gender [Adrian says I misunderstood, and it's whether the speaker wants to address God as female or male].

Near the beginning, as part of welcoming the Sabbath, we were led to meditate on the week just past, and then asked, in one word, what we wanted to put aside from that week. I said "impatience," thinking both of travel-related hassles and of having fretted about a nurse who had a very hard time finding a vein to draw blood at the doctor's that morning (just a check-up).

So I was there, singing some bits in Hebrew, and reading ahead in English (I can easily read a paragraph or two of English psalm in the time it took people to sing two or three lines of Hebrew), and alternately disagreeing with significant parts of what it meant, and feeling reasonably at home. A group that size, and the Hebrew, felt a bit like doing Passover or Hanukah with my family when I was growing up; there was an even higher proportion of women at the Hav than in my mother's family.

When the cup was passed around for kiddush. Miriam, who was leading this week, started to pour separate cups and then asked if people cared that much about germs, and we all declined separate cups. "All," in this case, was seven of us, which was unfortunate because it meant Adrian didn't have the minyan for kaddish, but she said it was worthwhile anyhow.