A Year of Kaddish

Beth El’s gabbi, or ritual director, Rabbi Howard Sowalsky, gave me a Christmas present this morning. Not intentionally. More accurately, he gave me an honor: He asked me if I would lead the second part of the Shacharit service, the heart of the service, and a section I have never done before. Not true, I did it once before on a snowy morning earlier this month when we couldn’t muster a minyan – I think we had seven or eight brave souls that morning.

So this marked the second time I’d led, but the first time surrounded by a minyan. I had been practicing in spare moments at home, but I was still nervous when I began because several of the prayers contain – for me, at least – enough tricky Hebrew phrases that it felt like traversing an obstacle course. But I made it through that section unscathed so by the time we arrived at the Shemoneh Esrei, I took a deep breath of relief and relaxed.

Asking to lead and being able to say yes connected me back to that time in Sharon, Pennsylvania when one of the old-timers at the traditional minyan asked me to lead. That day I had to defer, knowing I hadn’t yet mastered all the prayer language or the nusach, the special melody used to signify different parts of the service and whether it’s a weekday, Shabbat or Festival.

But it goes deeper than that. We all have our own set of wants, desires, expectations, hopes and visions about how we want to live our lives. How we want to parent, how we want to show up with our life-partners; what careers we choose and how and what kind of work we perform from 9 to 5 or whenever we go to work; how we bring joy into our lives and how we express honestly the whole range of other emotions we feel in the course of a lifetime.

Leading my community in prayer just happens to be one of those things I’ve always imagined doing. And today I accepted a new challenge. I knew it was a stretch because for a moment, after being asked to lead, I felt dred. But I also believe we only grow when we stretch ourselves, even if our default reaction is to resist and stay in our comfort zone.