By Deb Kraus
This year the high holidays are later in the fall: Rosh Hashanah lands on Sunday night, Sept 25 and Monday, Sept 26, and Yom Kippur will be on Tuesday night October 4 (Kol Nidre) and Wednesday, October 5 (Yom Kippur day). We hope you are making plans to join us for the full time, but as always you are welcome to join for any part. This gives us lots of time to plan.
We are proud to announce that this fall we will welcome Rabbi Debra Rappaport as our High Holiday rabbi for 5783. One of the many things she brings to us is a desire to empower us to participate broadly—through music, poetry, storytelling and of course, torah and haftarah readings.
As her partner in this endeavor, I want to include everyone in this process. Please read below to see how you can contribute your words, your voice, your presence. I’m dividing this into four “teams;” please respond to as many of these suit your interests and abilities:
Musical team: We will NOT have a cantorial soloist this year. Instead, we will divide up those cantorial pieces (Kol Nidre, Unetaney Tokef, HaMelech, Hineni, Ya’aleh, some of the Kaddishes) to those who can take these on. We will also have a group of singers with hopefully guitar accompaniment, who can lead us in communal song (all our old favorites plus some new selections). Let me know asap if you would like to be in the group (our own personal “davening team”!) or would like to do one of the solos. If you want to contribute with an instrument, let us know this as well, and because I don’t know where else to put this, please know that we are always looking for shofar blowers, both for RH day and for Ne’illah at the end of YK.
This team will be meeting to practice outdoors in Ann Arbor on:
Wednesday July 20
Thursday July 28
Wednesday August 3
Thursday August 11
Wednesday August 17
Thursday August 25
Kavanot team: We will be looking for poetry, your own or something that you already love or that you find, stories and liturgy. The initial meeting of this team will be July 31, from 1:30 – 3:00. Please let me know if you are interested!
Torah/haftarah team: We will have an opening for a Torah reader for both Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, so let me know if you would like dibs on one of these. And once again, haftarah for Yom Kippur will be done by the post B mitzvah teens. Several of these young adults have also moved on, so parents, please “voluntell” your kids to do this?
Workshop team: Once again, there will be workshops on Yom Kippur afternoon. If you have something that you would like to present for discussion, please let us know as soon as you can, with a blurb that explains your goals, along with what format (discussion, lecture, etc.) you plan to use. If there is competition for these slots, we might have a survey to determine which have the most likelihood of attendance.
We will also be needing our standard High Holidays Volunteers to help set up, staff the welcome table, and schlep the Mishkan to the Unitarian Church etc. Sign up to volunteer for these volunteer spots here.
If you would like to join any of the teams mentioned above, please email Deborah Kraus!
