Adult Education with Cantor Kate
On Zoom Only (Contact for details.)
Did you ever wonder how a Jewish prayer service is constructed? Or why certain prayers happen when they do? Are you ever curious about the history of the service? Do you sometimes feel baffled by what we do in a service?
Abraham Joshua Heschel famously said, “The Sabbaths are our great cathedrals…an architecture of time.” Within Shabbat, and indeed in weekdays and holidays as well, we have “rooms” of sacred time: our prayer services.
All Jewish services share the same basic structure, on which special services like Friday nights and holidays build and elaborate. This isn’t immediately obvious, however. Although our current siddur kindly tells us where we are in the service, many of us remember the “Gates of Red” or other older prayer books that weren’t so helpful.
In this introductory class, we will explore the building blocks of a service, with special attention to Friday night Kabbalat Shabbat and Ma’ariv. We’ll look at the overall intentions of a prayer service—how it wants to make us feel—stopping off to visit some background and a little history of each “room” in the building.
If there is interest, this class will be followed by additional sessions that will delve more deeply into particular sections of the service, exploring “choreography,” history, liturgy, and poetry, and offering the option of constructing and/or leading a portion of a service, or writing your own liturgy.