Shabbath Shalom!

Hi: just want to tell you about my Friday night. I went to a Jewish Shabbath (pronounced shabbat), or service. It was at six, and usually they go to the terrace dining hall afterwards and have a kosher meal. So I went to the service part at Muller Chapel, where they also have Catholic and Protestant masses. It was really cool, and I even met a girl there who was in my freshman seminar class last semester. It was a small group, and we all sat on one side of the chapel, facing Yishrael (if I am remembering the spelling of "Israel" right.) Shabbath consisted of constant praying, singing the prayers out of individual copies of the prayer book (Torah, I think), with some brief teachings by the rabbi to explain and give a brief history of some of the prayers. Some prayers we said in unison, some were only said by the rabbi; all were sung and most were in Hebrew (or was it Yiddish?). Sometimes we stood up, but mostly sat. I'm sure everyone could tell I had never been to a Shabbath before, because I started reading the Torah from left to right (it's supposed to be read right to left, turning the pages to the right). It was difficult at first too to try and follow along because it wasn't in English. But the copys of the scripture we had had Hebrew (Yiddish?) written in Arabic, hebrew written for pronunciation (with western letters), english translation, and english explainations of the scripture for each part of the prayers. It was very free-form (of course that might be because I didn't understand the reasons each prayer was said), and an interesting break from the Christian tradition. A very relaxing and meditative gathering. Sadly, I didn't attend the dinner.