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Baraita

A blend of academic, religious, and pop-cultural esoterica.

RSS FEED IDEMS: Baraita

• Challah Day
  

  So Danya posted about learning to bake challah (why has it never occurred to me to take my bread dough out with me?), and then Simon posted his usual recipe. I think this is an excellent meme, because I love looking at everyone else's recipes, but it leaves me with one pressing question: how much bread does the average person eat over Shabbos? Does everyone Not Me routinely have a dozen guests over each week? Are people way the heck committed to producing enough dough to say the blessing for separating challah? Or is it just that I don't usually bake two loaves for Friday night, two for Saturday lunch, and one for the third meal? Because, seriously, I love bread at least as much as the next person, and freshly-baked challah enough to elbow the next person out of the way, but... wow, that's a lot of dough.

  I have made mass quantities of challah on on occasion, but my usual recipe makes two medium-to-small loaves (a little bigger than what's sold as "kiddush size," a little smaller than the average supermarket challah). This is much, much easier to work with than a larger amount of dough would be, and it provides ample bread for as many as 6-8 dinner guests (although D. and I can finish one loaf by ourselves when we're feeling gluttonous). If you double this recipe, you get two nice big loaves (also the right size if you want spiral loaves for Rosh Hashanah) or four smallish ones; the original recipe was actually three times the size, but I've monkeyed with a few proportions in slimming it down and now I prefer to triple this version.

  What follows is not the Quick Recipe Card version, but the version I would give if I were teaching someone how to make it in person, with all the little shortcuts I usually take. (I do assume that you probably know how to knead bread, but with a small amount of dough, it's pretty difficult to do it wrong.)

  
  
  
  
• On Crossing Lines
  

  A few weeks ago, I read something -- by accident -- that was not intended for me. I was sitting on the other side of my rabbi's desk in his office, waiting for him to finish a phone call on a program I was helping plan, and since listening to one-half of a phone conversation is only so enlightening, I found myself idly looking over various items on my side of the rabbi's desk while I waited for the call to conclude. Books, assorted ritual doohickeys, a few photocopied articles, and a handwritten letter on stationery, open and facing in my direction -- since I'd been reading the book titles and glancing over the articles, I'm afraid I got through the first paragraph of the letter before my brain caught up and said "wait, stop." Thankfully, it wasn't very personal; it was a letter from a congregational family I didn't know (the stationery had their name at the top) explaining that they were leaving Congregation Beth Boondoggle and joining the next shul to the right, which takes them outside the Conservative movement altogether. Now, the one thing I did know about this family was that they didn't care for our shul's increasingly public commitment to [gender] egalitarianism -- it had come up some time back when we were handing out honors -- so I wasn't immensely surprised to read that they were leaving. What puzzled me, though, was their statement that they were leaving because we had hired a female cantor. Women have been leading all the services at our shul regularly and prominently over the past couple of years, and have been participating in all services on the same level as men for the past four, so why leave now? Wouldn't it have made better sense to leave (a) years ago, (b) after waiting to actually meet the new cantor, or (c) never?

  Of course, my judgment is blissfully irrelevant to these folks, and I had no business beginning to read their letter anyway (hey, maybe there was a fuller explanation a few paragraphs down); the proper thing to do is to forget all about it. And I'm trying, but the universe is conspiring to present me with a handful of further examples of people who switch from an Egalitarian/Conservative to a Non-Egalitarian/Orthodox synagogue, or people who alternate easily between the two -- including a few good friends of mine -- and I am increasingly baffled. I simply do not understand what the heck is going on in these people's minds. While there is immense variation by congregation and a lot of grey area in between Conservative and Orthodox, and while the kiddush food and the social programming and the prayers and even the congregation's observance level may be very similar, it seems obvious to me the average Conservative shul (which is, these days, thoroughly egalitarian) and the average Orthodox shul offer radically different worship experiences. In the average Conservative shul, families sit together; in the average Orthodox shul, men and women sit separately, while children move back and forth but mostly wind up on the women's side. In the average Conservative shul, women are up on the bimah in the same ritual roles as men at virtually every service; in the average Orthodox shul, the bimah is a male-only preserve, and if women lead services at all they do so in all-female services. Perhaps a single man immersed in his prayers would find his experience in both synagogues similar, but a man with a family -- or a woman of any description -- would find things very different indeed. I know and respect people who prefer a Conservative service, and I know and respect people who prefer an Orthodox service -- I have attended wonderful services in both environments myself -- but I have no clue how on earth anyone can move from Conservative to Orthodox worship, or between both types of shuls, without a major paradigm shift.

  In particular, I'm confused by people like the family from my synagogue. Plenty of lists and blogs claim that the most observant Conservative Jews tend to wind up Orthodox, or at any rate their children do. (Whether this is said with triumph or despair depends on the ideological position of the poster.) This claim has always puzzled me, and while it's not really a trend in my synagogue or my community, I've run into enough individual examples to verify that it sometimes happens. I just don't understand why. Personally, I've encountered some very similar-feeling Orthodox and Conservative congregations (to say nothing of the Traditional folks and all the others in the middle), and I couldn't differentiate between my Conservative and my Orthodox cousins if I didn't happen to know where they daven, but I find attending Orthodox services to be categorically different from attending non-Orthodox services of whatever stripe -- and I don't think it's just that women's ritual participation is my personal bugaboo, because it's also become the effective boundary line between Conservative and Orthodox Judaism (which seems kind of depressing for Orthodoxy). Given the broad social, cultural, and even halakhic diversity of contemporary Jewish "Orthodoxy," honestly, I can't come up with a single additional factor uniting every form of Judaism to the right of the Conservative movement.* So is there a single well-defined attraction of Orthodoxy qua Orthodoxy, other than the lack of women's ritual participation, to which I happen to be tone-deaf? Or is it just that everyone is attracted to or away from a specific congregation, and there's no general rule to be derived anywhere?

  As longtime Baraita readers will have noticed, I don't much care for denominational labels, and at different times my actions have given people the impression that I'm almost everything across the Jewish spectrum.** My beliefs and convictions about Judaism can be phrased in ways that make sense across a good deal of that spectrum as well. So it's not that I can't understand being flexible about one's affiliation. It just seems to me that there's a huge barrier between "traditional" and "traditional/egalitarian" services -- that's certainly how I experience it -- and the folks who don't seem to notice it, or who discount it with relative ease... well, I don't understand them. I wish I did -- it seems to me that some insight would come in handy as I try to formulate halakhic explanations of my own egalitarian position -- but I don't. Any thoughts? Heck, any reading recommendations?***

  
  * -- Well, possibly agreement about the binding quality of the Shulchan Aruch as read through subculturally appropriate commentaries, for 99% of the relevant parties, and for maybe 95% of the relevant laws. But that isn't the sort of thing that people generally cite as the Number One Reason Why I Love My Shul, y'know?
  ** -- Nobody's ever mistaken me for, say, haredi. Can't imagine why not. *cough*
  *** -- I seem to be able to think of a few interesting and provocative but not offensive memoirs by people who went from Orthodox to non-Orthodox, but not the other way 'round. This has to be a deficit in my reading....

  
  
  
  
• Come And Play
  

  This entry is my husband's fault.

  You see, we were lying in bed the other night, relaxing after a tough morning of trying to gabbai Simchat Torah* and the World's Fastest Sukkah Dismantling in the evening**, when the conversation turned to the extreme creepiness of Tickle Me Extreme Elmo, which led logically to references to Elmo Martyr, The Passion of the Elmo, Zoe as Mary Magdalen, and someone doing a spot-on vocalization of "My God, my God, why have you forsaken Elmo?" All of this, I'm sure you'll agree, could happen to anyone.

  But then my beloved husband said, "So would you cast Big Bird and Snuffleupagus as David and Jonathan?" I made a face. "Nah. Maybe Bert and Ernie, though." By the time I realized that Sesame Street actually has fewer significant female muppets than the Tanakh has significant female characters, it was too late -- my brain had already started casting -- and between my own childhood and that of assorted cousins, I have pretty decent Muppet recall. So here are the Chana family's casting decisions for Torah mi-Sesame Street, with commentary:

  Adam: Aloysius "Snuffy" Snuffleupagus [This is not random: Snuffy does embarrassed better than anyone else in the cast, and he has a large enough body to be animated by two actors, lending credence to the primordial-hermaphrodite theory of Midrash. But please try not to think about whether this makes Big Bird God or Lilith.]
  Eve: Alice Snuffleupagus [Yes, that's Snuffy's baby sister. And Eve was related to Adam how again?]
  The Serpent: Slimey the Worm [Typecasting. Sorry.]
  Noah: Forgetful Jones [Since Sesame Street lacks an openly alcoholic Muppet, we are going with a more subtle choice. This presumably makes Clementine Noah's long-suffering wife.]
  Abraham: Cookie Monster [Again, we are leaning on midrash, but even the recorded instance of Abraham's hospitality to guests must've brought him into an awful lot of contact with food. Of course, all of this works better if you imagine Alistair Cookie in Bedouin garb.]
  Sarah: Rosita, Monstrua de las Cuevas [OK, bad Machpelah joke.]
  Lot: Oscar the Grouch [And wouldn't you be, too, stuck with that role? I bet Grouchetta wouldn't enjoy getting turned into a pillar of salt, either.]
  Isaac: Telly Monster ["Perpetually nervous" seems like a good way to play ol' Yitz -- although for the later scenes, Google tells me that there was once a blind Muppet named Aristotle.]
  Rebecca: Betty Lou [Manipulates her dolls.]
  Esau: Herry Monster [Big, strong, dumb... yeah?]
  Jacob: [Super-]Grover! [Alternatively, E. and J. could be played by the Two-Headed Monster, but there would be serious problems with the whole leaving-town plotline.]
  Laban: Mr. Johnson [AKA The Fat Blue Customer In All The Skits Where Grover Is A Waiter. I trust this speaks for itself.]
  Leah and Rachel: Pearl and Deena [Does anyone besides me remember Pearl and Deena? Depending on how you look at it, they were the female Bert and Ernie or the Muppet Thelma and Louise.]
  Joseph: Guy Smiley [There aren't a ton of successful muppet politicians, are there?]
  Pharoah: Count von Count ["... six, seven cows! Muahahahaha!"]
  Moses: Bert
  Aaron: Ernie [At least, we're told Aaron is the people-pleaser.]
  Miriam: Prairie Dawn [Who used to write scripts for all the other Muppets to act out and in general function as an older sister. Also, please note that I categorically refuse to cast Abby Cadabby in anything not calling for Tinkerbell.]
  Parah Adumah: Gladys the Cow [Also doubling as the Golden Calf with help from the makeup crew.]
  Balaam: Mumford the Magician
  Joshua: Elmo? [And suddenly it becomes clear why nobody listened to Joshua when the spies returned....]

  Amendments, or suggestions for the characters we left out, are always welcome. Failing that, tune in next week when we seriously consider re-enacting Nevi'im using the characters from The Muppet Show! (And I was wrong -- I think Kermit and Fozzie get to be David and Jonathan.) This post has been brought to you by the letter bet, the number 5, and the blissful sensation of no more holidays for the foreseeable future.

  
  * -- Why oh why do average-strength women persist in believing that they are not physically fit to carry an average-size Torah scroll? I'm maybe 5'5" in heels, I haven't worked out in close to a month, and while I may not be quite up for leaping in the air and spinning with the sefer Torah, I can certainly carry that sucker, circle with a bit of rhythm, and sing simultaneously for a hosafa or so!
  ** -- It was looking like rain, and we didn't want to repeat last year's fiasco when it stayed up for a week and a half extra and I finally had to take it down by myself because D. wasn't feeling well and there was a storm coming.

  
  
  
  
• Toy Story (What I Love About Sukkot)
  

  I usually do Yom Kippur posts, but this year I had a very odd YK for personal reasons, and the most cogent YK post I feel like making is a plea for new and inventive ideas in break-fast foods.* Instead, I want to talk about Sukkot, the holiday I often neglect to write about because I'm exhausted from the others, although last year I focused on Sukkot apocalypticism, of which there is plenty.

  This year, by contrast, I want to talk about happy and decidedly non-apocalyptic memories of Sukkot. I've managed to surprise people before by talking about how much I'd enjoyed Sukkot as a child -- even though I didn't grow up in a Jewish enclave, even though I'm old enough to be behind the curve on the home Sukkot observance meme that's been spreading like crazy over the past 10-20 years. And it's not that Temple Hometown did much in the way of special Sukkot services (trust me, I was Bat Mitzvahed on Shabbat Hol Hamoed Sukkot), or that I ever saw a lulav and etrog outside a rabbi's hands, or even that we had special Sukkot foods to speak of.** But Temple Hometown had the standard semi-permanent synagogue sukkah, and in the early years of my intermittent Sunday School attendance I remember making paper chains to decorate it, standing under its newly cut branches, snagging cake squares from a table inside it, and feeling very simply happy to be outside in a succession of sunny green-and-yellow autumns. That is what Sukkot still feels like to me: sunshine-and-leaves-in-your-hair happy, the sort of happy you can start very young but you never get too old for.

  I started young. At some point in my early childhood, probably influenced by a book (certainly, nobody in my family did this at the time), I decided that I wanted a sukkah at home too. So my (non-Jewish, remember) father and I came up with a solution which worked for some years: we took several old tobacco stakes (which usually held up tomato vines), drove two or three of them a little ways into the soft ground under a big crabapple tree's diagonally climbing trunks in the back yard, tied them all together and to the tree with twine, and cut appropriate greenery to drape over the crabapple trunks; one year I think we even managed to attach some cloth walls. The resultant lean-to, which a brisk wind could (and sometimes did) blow over, was just big enough to fit my child-sized picnic table underneath. And so, for as many days as it stood or until I tired of it, I ceremoniously carried some sort of snack out there and ate in my itty-bitty "sukkah."*** There, uh, may occasionally have been dolls involved (shut up). But it seemed obvious that a holiday where you got to build your own playhouse was a Good Idea. Eventually I outgrew the crabapple sukkah -- that tree came down in an ice storm several years back -- and I spent several decades wishing for a good replacement.

  The next time I remember feeling happy at Sukkot, though, it was a different set of toys that drew me in. It was midway through grad school, and I was walking to the library with a friend when I noticed a truck parked on the adjacent street. This was the first Chabad "mitzvahmobile" I had seen in person -- I think they were just moving into the neighborhood then -- and the man and two young boys on the truck bed were sitting under a sukkah, holding lulavim, and scanning the crowd for likely-looking prospects. "Ooooh, a sukkah!" I said, loudly, half in surprise and half trying to get them to look at me. They didn't notice me -- perhaps they were looking for men first, perhaps I didn't seem very Jewish, or perhaps they'd overheard me discussing signification in De doctrina christiana a moment before, who knows? -- so I continued on to the library with my friend but doubled back on my own as soon as I'd finished my errand. A few seconds of concentrated staring right next to their vehicle (I was too shy to come out and ask) produced the desired questions: yes, I was Jewish, and yes, I'd like to bench (I would have said "play with") the lulav and etrog. I must have looked spectacularly clueless, since the Chabad guy prompted me to say "Baruch" then "Atah" -- I gave him a disgusted look and went through "vitzivanu" -- but he gamely supplied the final three words of the blessing, showed me the appropriate shaking sequence, and left me with a Chabad calendar and the fragrance of citron and myrtle clinging to my hands like a memory I'd just recovered. I sniffed my palms all the way back to my apartment.

  It took several more years, and a move to Boondoggle, before I fell in with people who took sukkah-building and lulav-shaking for granted. Three years ago, telling myself that it was really a sensible purchase because I could show it to my Judaism survey classes and anyway it was the cheap one, I bought my first lulav and etrog set. Last year, a week after moving into our new house in a sukkah-friendly neighborhood and several years after realizing that tobacco stakes are difficult to come by in this part of the country, I finally gave in to common sense and bought a relatively affordable 8x12' steel-tubing sukkah kit from the Sukkah Project, complete with bamboo mats. As I said last year, I would certainly recommend the same kit to others (now that we know what we're doing, it takes less than an hour to put up).

  This year, having acquired all the necessary paraphernalia, I am on a mission to get my husband to enjoy Sukkot (I have told him as much). You see, he did not grow up with a sukkah, however halachically dubious, and his feelings about building and eating in one boil down to the repeated statement that he Doesn't Do Camping.**** It was obvious last year that he was indulging me in the whole business of acquiring Sukkot accessories, and the part where he had to go out of town for business the first several days of the holiday didn't really help. Also, while we both love singing Hallel, the 6:30 am starting time for morning minyan during Chol Hamoed Sukkot is not precisely a selling point. But this year there were no business trips, and the first days of Sukkot conveniently fell on a weekend. My mother-in-law even helped out by sending us some appealingly goofy sukkah decorations. D. made it home from work just early enough on Friday (we got the sukkah up with a whole forty minutes to spare before candlelighting), and we actually had a dinner invitation with friends that night, so he got to hang out and eat brisket in someone else's sukkah. Then it was relatively easy to talk him into coming to services with me on Sunday as well as Saturday, and I thoughtfully shoved our lulav and etrog***** into his hands at every opportunity. After systematic guilting from the morning minyan crowd, we even made it to services yesterday******, where there were enough spare lulav-and-etrog sets that he got his own, and I think I saw him starting to smile during the hoshannot. Finally, last night, in search of reading material, he actually started flipping through our less-annoying translation of Mishnah Sukkah of his own free will. Muahahahaha.

  Today I will be making pumpkin-pecan bread, and tonight we will have our usual study group celebrating a conveniently timed siyyum in our sukkah -- after I put back the mats that blew off in the storm last night, but that's OK, since it'll give me a chance to put the grape lights on properly. And maybe next year we'll have people over to the sukkah a few more times, and perhaps I can talk D. into eating dinner there by ourselves a little more regularly. One of these years I'd sort of like to cut branches for schach instead of the mats, too. Oh, and eventually we should acquire some small people to make us paper chains, because Sukkot is really all about the toys. And the happy. I don't think this is anything like the original reason we call Sukkot z'man simchateinu -- in Temple times, it probably had more to do with "thank God we got the harvest in OK" -- but it works for me.

  Moadim l'simcha, everyone!

  * -- Must be dairy/pareve, able to be made at least 24 hours in advance, good cold or at room temperature or after a very short microwave zap, and serve at least 6. Should probably harmonize with bagels & lox. I am basically running through my dairy potluck repertoire.
  ** -- Actually, Sukkot registers in my mind as the Last Plausible Time To Make Honey Cake, as well as the point at which you start making other honey-sweetened baked goods (pumpkin-pecan bread, yum) to use up any excess honey-cake supplies.
  *** -- From a technical point of view, the major problem with this sukkah was that it was invalid because it was underneath overhanging tree branches -- also, most years it didn't have enough walls. Fortunately, these facts do not prevent me from wallowing in nostalgia or identifying it as the Best Sukkah Ever.
  **** -- Well, neither do I. Sukkot is different -- that whole indoor plumbing thing, for one. It's like camping for five-year-olds, in the backyard under a sheet with snacks your mom packed in the kitchen.
  ***** -- If I purchase them using our joint accounts, they belong to both of us, or so I am assuming.
  ****** -- One or the other of us has been reading weekday Torah for the past four weeks, so we can only be guilted so far.

  
  
  
  
• We Apologize For The Inconvenience
  

  Anyone who has tried to access Baraita's comments since around about Friday probably got the same exciting error message I did -- it turns out my webhost changed the directory structure of their new servers pretty substantially, thus breaking all my MT scripts which depended on a certain static directory address (but leaving the blog's front page intact). I had to exchange emails with the webhost's tech support a couple of times before I figured out the new path and could FTP in to change it, and between the weekend and assorted holidays it was not a particularly good few days for prompt email exchange (I don't pretend to be strictly shomer anything, but avoiding email generally seems like the least I can do). Between this and the hairstylist who announced she could only have worked me in yesterday afternoon over a two-week period, I would like to request better support (and possibly new highlights) from the universe at large.

  I plan to get back to more substantial posts shortly -- but first I have to catch up on a few other things I couldn't do over the weekend. Hope everyone had an easy fast / good holiday / relatively un-awful Monday!

  
  
  
  
• Not So Fast
  

  Today will, I think, be the last day my family can eat exclusively from our Rosh Hashanah leftovers -- after dinner tonight we will merely have a bit of stuffed cabbage and some mock chopped liver in the fridge, and one of us will have to start cooking again. It does not feel like fasting season, to put it mildly, but we're in between the two closest fasts of the year for Jews -- and of course it's Ramadan now for Muslims, who undoubtedly think us six-day-a-year fasters* are wimps.**

  Yesterday was Tzom (or "the Fast of") Gedaliah, one of the best-kept secrets of the Jewish calendar. This is, I suspect, almost completely a result of timing: it usually falls on the third day of Tishri, the day after many Jews have just spent the past two days in Rosh Hasnanah services, and a week before the much better-known fast of Yom Kippur, not to mention all the other holidays later in the month. If someone moved Tzom Gedaliah to, say, the subsequent and blissfully holiday-free month of Heshvan, I bet it would get much better PR: as minor fasts go, it's got by far the best independent story. The eponymous Gedaliah (ben Ahikam ben Shaphan, which connects his family with the reforming wing of the Judean nobility under Josiah) was appointed Babylonian governor over Judah after the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and overthrew the last Davidic king in 586 BCE. His conciliatory rule was initially very popular, as it did not involve the near-constant rebellion and siege warfare of the previous three decades, but it was brought to an premature end when a conspiracy of disgruntled Davidic scions funded by the kingdom of Ammon assassinated him and many of his supporters (both Judean and Babylonian) on the above-mentioned inconvenient date, only two months after his appointment.

  That is the story from Jeremiah and Kings, of course, and parts of it seem engineered precisely to bring about the fulfillment of Deuteronomic prophecy*** -- but Gedaliah may actually be attested in archaeological evidence and/or the Septuagint (see here for a quick summary), which gives him a better historical pedigree than ninety percent of the Hebrew Bible. What Jeremiah and Kings add to the likely facts is the perception that Gedaliah was the last best hope for Judean self-rule under the Babylonians, and that his assassination sealed the fate of the Judean exiles, at least for the next seventy years and perhaps (depending on your theology) for all non-messianic time.**** If history and/or Judean self-rule aren't your thing, though, Gedaliah's story still has obvious resonance for today. Which is the best reaction to occupation: violence (including quite a lot of collateral death) or cooperation? When does cooperation become collaboration? Who gets to decide what's best for the Jewish people -- or for any people? Does it always have to be the guy who's quickest on the trigger? I wish we could say that assassination is now an archaic method of regime change, but recent events have proven otherwise (pick a random cross-section of the Middle East, not forgetting Israel and Rabin).

  So Tzom Gedaliah stands for a number of important concepts -- some theological, some historical, some political. It's still like pulling teeth to get people together (and at least some of them fasting) for the standard afternoon service for minor fasts; we didn't quite manage it this year at Congregation Beth Boondoggle, but I'm told this is the first year in ages we've even tried. (Next year, I feel certain, with a little more advance coordination and a weekend date, it should be doable.) I showed up for the service in question, but I am ambivalent about minor fasts in general, not only because some of the ones we have are difficult to relate to contemporary Judaism (as I hope I've indicated, this is not the case with Tzom Gedaliah) but also because our ritual procedure for all four very different fasts is identically uninspiring. I have no intrinsic objection to the standard "communal fast day" Torah and Haftarah readings -- they're pretty and all -- but they do bupkis for getting across what seems to be the very distinct messages of, well, three of the four minor fasts in question.***** When Jewish communities proclaim their own impromptu communal fasts (e.g., after the recent Monsey Meat Scandal), presumably everyone knows (and, ideally, feels) exactly why they're fasting from the get-go, but the same cannot (unfortunately) be said for Tzom Gedaliah and the other minor fasts of historical memory. And so we have people fasting for reasons they often don't even understand, when I can't help thinking that if it weren't for the weight of tradition I'd rather get them to attend a quick text-study on Gedaliah and Co. accompanied by bagels and lox.******

  I'm not discounting the weight of tradition, though; I will always a little too halakhically lenient by someone's standards, but I have packrat archival instincts like you wouldn't believe, and if there's one thing I've realized about my reluctance to throw anything away because It Might Come In Handy Someday, it's that I am completely in harmony with the general trend of rabbinic Judaism.******* But I don't like keeping things around when they're broken unless I plan to fix them eventually, and it seems to me that Tzom Gedaliah is just a little bit broken. The problem is, I know how to sew a button onto that sweater I've been hanging onto for months, but nobody taught me how to do halakhic transformation, darnit. My all-purpose remedy for something is to throw education at it (which would make education either safety pins or duct tape, and I think it's time to drop this metaphor); sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. I feel like I should be able to do more, though. Because Tzom Gedaliah is actually my favorite of the minor fasts. And I'm getting tired of leftovers.

  
  * -- Unless you get into the whole routine of fasting several days a week, adding onto Taanit Esther, before Rosh Chodesh, and so forth. I'm not so much into gratuitous fasting, but it's very well-attested in rabbinic tradition.
  ** -- I've picked up some great tips about surviving daytime fasts from reading Muslim blogs during Ramadan, though. I'm not aware of any Christian traditions which fast particularly at this season (well, some years the Elevation of the Cross probably fits in), but they'll get theirs in the spring, as well as possibly several other times per year, depending on what flavor of Christianity and what we mean by "fasting."
  *** -- Specifically, the bits about the conspirators fleeing to Egypt, thus undoing the Exodus. On the other hand, if you were trying to make tracks out of Babylonian territory from Judah at that time, Egypt was certainly the logical direction to go....
  **** -- Of course, it turned out not to be such a bad fate, as the tacked-on bit at the end of Kings about Jehoachin's cushy life in Babylon suggests. But still.
  ***** -- Anyone who'd like to clearly distinguish 10 Tevet and 17 Tammuz in terms of message (yes, I know the respective historical events) is welcome to do so, bearing in mind that 9 Av is also a separate fast.
  ****** -- Or mourning food (eggs, lentils, etc.). Or thematic food, although for an assassination that could get tricky -- maybe fresh pomegranates, so that everyone winds up with little crimson splotches all over their clothes?
  ******* -- Except, come to think of it, possibly the people who wrote the law codes.

  
  
  
  
• On Running Out Of Time
  

  Over at Jewschool, comments are still accumulating on a post asking about the role of rabbis in the independent minyan movement. (In brief: the poster wants there to be a role; many of the commenters, not so much.) Over at Hirhurim, on the other hand, there's a post addressing some of the complicated halakhic history of when and how it became acceptable to simply rule from the Shulchan Aruch (or any other of the law codes beginning in the twelfth-century Sephardic world) instead of going back to Talmudic and other sources.* I don't think there are a ton of crossover commenters between Jewschool and Hirhurim, and that's a pity -- the Hirhurim post is a valuable reminder of the long-running debate over the role of the rabbi vs. the non-rabbi in "rabbinic" Judaism, of which the independent-minyan question is merely the latest wrinkle.

  What concerns me about the inclusion of both rabbis and cantors in the independent minyan movement is that all Jews -- ordained and that other L-word -- are not always clear on the fact that instinctive deference is not an appropriate choice. I have seen active, well-educated members of independent minyanim who feel obligated to invite a cantor or rabbi to speak or daven on the spot simply because s/he has chosen to join the minyan community for that service -- and while I can't speak for the rabbi/cantor (possibly s/he wanted a morning off from performing?), the sudden appearance of unwanted external "authority" certainly interfered with my davening experience. Of course, respect for the "crown of Torah" is and should continue to be a central value of rabbinic Judaism, and I recognize that the whole question becomes exponentially more complicated when you belong to a minyan (as I do) where most of the members also have synagogue affiliations and therefore a potential mara d'atra lurking in the wings.** But if I were to become a rabbi -- something I've contemplated and continue to contemplate, albeit with no immediate luck thanks to the small problem of geography -- I would do so because (a) it would more easily allow me to get paid to do the things I already do and love, plus (b) intensive halakhic training and the accompanying ability to pasken for others would be more fun than puppies or chocolate. Having people instinctively assume that I must be asked to lead every service I stumble into, on the other hand, would be about as much fun as puppies and chocolate together (emergency trip to vet, lots of puking).

  I'm glad that the independent minyan movement is causing (some) Jews to re-open the question of the rabbi's role in Jewish community life. It remains to be seen whether anyone could (or wants to) return to an earlier view of rabbinic authority; I long for a Jewish community of fully functioning adult Jews, but I fear the creation of further divisions within the Jewish people. And, practically speaking, clocks cannot be turned back, nor history undone. (My to-do list for Rosh Hashanah is getting no shorter as I write this.) We stand here today, all of us, before the Lord our God,*** trying to figure out the best way to move on from where we have been, and where we are. And some of us are making this the second year running that we swear our independent minyan is going to have some High Holidays services next year, because the whole performance/circus/fashion-show of the "traditional" American HHD experience is more a hindrance than a help in making our prayers rise up to God. On the other hand, I know that there are many wonderful people at my "traditional" synagogue working their tails off to ensure that I and my family will have as good an experience as possible, so... yeah, it's complicated. More complicated, I think, than any law code can allow for. I hope some of you will help me unravel this one whenever you have a chance.

  Finally: I have several other things I wanted to post about before the New Year, but my in-laws show up in 24 hours, and I really wouldn't bet on my having a lot of blogging time between now and then. Instead, let me close by asking pardon for any wrongs I have committed, any insults (intentional or not) I have delivered), and any emails I have left unanswered (is there any way we can reword Kol Nidre to address this pressing modern crisis?). I wish all who read this blog a happy and sweet New Year!

  
  * -- When I joke that I am a pre-denominational Ashkenazic Jew and that I heart Rabbenu Tam liek woah -- or when I simply state that the Conservative Movement's method of halakhic decision-making has a great deal going for it historically -- this is what I mean. In historical retrospect, it seems to me that the move from case law to code law (something that happened gradually, between the twelfth and the eighteenth centuries, and much more slowly in Ashkenaz than in the Mediterranean world) impoverished halakhah and set us off on a path in which Talmudic learning became fetishized (after all, what is its practical purpose if the codes do almost everything?) and Jewish creativity was instead channeled through everything from kabbalah to, um, weblogs (neither of them bad things, but halakhah used to be a hell of a lot more creative).
  ** -- I have recently been toying with asking my rabbi an honest-to-Moses halakhic question on a confusing topic which is personally relevant to me and about to come up in the holiday season, but have so far rejected doing so on the grounds that I would not especially want to abide by his answer. (It's not that I don't ask my rabbi halakhic questions; it's that I only ask him puzzlers I've come up with, for fun, in casual conversation, and well away from any season or situation when they might be relevant. In other words, I treat him as a colleague with considerable expertise in fields other than mine. Also, he's awesome about lending books.) This is one of the reasons I occasionally suspect that I make a lousy Conservative Jew.
  *** -- Yes, I know, that was last week's Torah portion. It's one of my favorites.

  
  
  
  
• Why I Am Not In Israel
  

  The thing is, I was supposed to be in Israel right now -- in fact, my husband and I were supposed to be there for nearly two weeks, including my birthday, for a long-planned trip covering several cities and conveniently situated before the holidays and before most of our semester-related responsibilities kicked in. I had started making tentative arrangements with people I knew in Jerusalem, and I was working up to emailing a few Israelis I knew only from blogging and asking if they wanted to get together for coffee or dinner (with the usual reassurances about my lack of psycho axe-murdering habits). Unfortunately, our travel plans were built around a professional conference D. had been invited to attend, and around about the second week of the Lebanon War the conference was suddenly moved to... January, just in time for everyone to get hit with massive fare-change fees from the airlines.* As D. pointed out, a major conference in his field will next be held in Israel some time after the Messiah offers to give the keynote from the Mount of Olives.**

  In retrospect, it was probably for the best that I did not spend the past weekend being intermittently ill in a foreign country, and I got to read my favorite part of Deuteronomy instead, but my appointment calendar still looks awfully sparse this week, and I am not entirely over being deprived of a Proper Beach Vacation this summer. Naturally, I would like someone to blame. Candidates (in no particular order) include Hezbollah, the Lebanese government, the Israeli government, the conference organizers, the other conference invitees (I'm sure a significant portion of them were threatening to withdraw), and my husband (it was his stupid conference). Only one of these parties has provided me with a birthday dinner, presents, and compensatory snuggling, so that still leaves plenty of blame to go around.

  In theory, then, we still have tickets for late January; in practice, I have no idea what commitments I may be unable to avoid by then, and the whole January business seems about as real as trips to Israel usually do to me. See, when I was young, Israel was a mysterious land of Incredibly Glamorous Jewish People, all of whom wrote fluently in Hebrew cursive, ate exotic foods like hummus and felafel, and never came anywhere near my Home State. Aunt Miriam had been to Israel for an extended visit -- had seriously considered making aliyah -- and this meant that Israel was just slightly realer than Middle-Earth, but she had also returned with a habit of correcting my Hebrew pronunciation, which only confirmed my suspicion that I would never be Jewish Enough to get anywhere near Israel.

  As I grew up and started moving through institutions of higher education, I encountered more Jews who had been to Israel, usually as part of the great Jewish Summer Camp experience which I also missed.*** They were all intimidatingly willing to break into Hebrew at the drop of a hat, and a good portion of them were more-observant-than-thou (or at least than me). They also tended toward Israel-centered political activism, which -- like most campus-based "activism" -- struck me as both ineffective and (usually) rude. I became convinced that if I was going to go to Israel, it wouldn't be on anyone else's religious or political agenda. (I have never liked guided tours in any case.) And so I ignored the existence of Birthright Israel, and (much more regretfully) selected a course of graduate study which did not include ulpanim or study at the Hartman Institute. Some of that was sheer pragmatism -- I wanted to get through grad school as quickly as possible -- but looking back on it, I really, genuinely, spent my first 25 or so years convinced that I was not Jewish Enough to go to Israel.

  Since I moved to Boondoggle four years ago, a lot has changed. For one thing, I have mostly gotten over my fear that I am not Jewish Enough for, well, anything. For another, I have met a lot more local folks who regularly go back and forth to Israel, or who have made/are about to make aliyah. I have also met a lot more Israelis (some permanently in the U.S., others visiting), and the blogosphere has let me into the lives of still others. It turns out that Israelis are not -- on the whole -- Special Glamorous People.**** Entire suburbs of Jerusalem sound suspiciously as though they might be inhabited by the same sorts of people -- and perhaps by relatives of the people -- who inhabit my neighborhood in Boondoggle (except that apparently Israelis have superior coffee shops). And everyone I have met assures me that the real language problem will be getting anyone to let me practice my Hebrew.

  Now the problem is that I don't have enough time to visit Israel properly -- or, more precisely at the moment, that my husband doesn't have enough time and I am not especially thrilled about spending long periods away from him. I am also not exactly wealthy, so flitting across a few continents for brief visits is unlikely to be a regular event, and funding exists mostly for longer-term trips. And I am starting to resent the way people in the Jewish community react when it comes up in conversation that I've never been to Israel. Well, yeah, I'd love to go, and if someone gave me a free international vacation I'd be there in a flash, but it's not actually the number-one priority in my life. Call me weird, but I sort of thought it was more important to build a community where I was, to establish a Jewish life among family and friends, to continue my Jewish learning, to work on -- what're they called? -- oh, yeah, mitzvot. I am a Zionist in the sense that I support Israel as a functioning democracy in the Middle East, and even in the sense that I sniffle at "Hatikvah", but I'm pretty sure I'm not the permanent aliyah type -- the lure of one-day yom tov notwithstanding, I'm much happier as a Diaspora Jew than I think I'd be as an Israeli. And it's not -- it's really not -- that I don't want to visit Israel; it's just that I never seem to get there.

  At least I am in excellent historical company. And, even if everyone else around me has been to Israel a zillion times, I still might get there ahead of the Messiah.

  
  * -- The conference in question was/will be in Eilat. While my Israeli geography is pitiful, I am well aware that Eilat is at the opposite end of Israel from Lebanon. Just sayin'.
  ** -- And my husband's field has plenty of Israeli scholars, but no ties to religion of any sort.
  *** -- I think I may be the only Jewishly active adult I know who has neither been to Israel nor attended a Jewish camp or day school. If there are any more of you out there, let me know!
  **** -- Any Israelis reading this are, of course, entitled to still consider themselves Special Glamorous People. Especially since I am still fascinated by large parts of the Israeli foods aisle at my local international market. Apparently, Israelis have an obsession with layered wafer-and-cream cookies of which I heartily approve.

  
  
  
  
• On Honors, Dubious and Otherwise
  

  Finally, I am going to make an Elul-appropriate post. Elul, as we all know, is the month leading up to the New Year -- the month for thinking over the past year's successes and failures -- the month for engaging in some sort of spiritual accounting -- in short, the month for assigning High Holiday honors.

  By "honors" our synagogue means pretty much what most synagogues mean: a variety of roles in the services in question, some of which require considerable technical skill (e.g., chanting Haftarah) but many of which do not (e.g., opening the Ark doors for a Special Holiday Prayer, of which there are approximately ten billion). A number of these honors revolve around the Torah services: if I am counting correctly, this year* the two days of Rosh Hashanah and one day of Yom Kippur will involve a total of twenty-four aliyot (including the four maftir aliyot for the Haftarah readers) and seven separate occasions on which a Torah scroll must be raised and re-dressed after it has been read from. In some places, or so I am told, all these honors are auctioned off (the presumption must be that anyone who bids on them is capable of performing them); in others, a select cabal of synagogue insiders determine the honors using complicated formulas blending past congregational service, future likelihood of major donations, and a Ouija board. No doubt there is even a synagogue somewhere -- probably in Chelm -- where the honors are assigned by lot so as not to admit the faintest whiff of favoritism.

  At Congregation Beth Boondoggle, it is the job of the Ritual Committee to assign at least the major HH honors, a job which has traditionally fallen to the chairperson of said committee.** This year, however, in a display of masterful management skill as well as basic self-preservation, our chair decided to delegate the assigning. D. and I are wise in the ways of committees (we've spent a lot of years in academia), so we immediately volunteered to assign the easiest category of honors: hagbahah, the act of holding the Torah scroll up by its bottom rollers and displaying the just-read columns of letters to the congregation. Of course, the reason hagbahah is easy to assign is because (a) you only need seven people total, and (b) there are only a handful of possible candidates -- relatively few people in our congregation are comfortable raising the humongous scrolls we drag out for the High Holy Days, and especially for the RH morning portions from midway through Genesis.*** And when I say "people," I actually mean "men," because hagbahah is the only role in a traditional service where I will agree that men are, on the whole, better qualified by biology. So I've spent some time the last several evenings telephoning or leaving messages for nice men with broad shoulders whom I've seen perform this feat in the past, or whom someone else has identified as a "shtarker."

  Meanwhile, I got called myself, probably thanks to someone emailing us to be sure and include committee chairs. I was asked to do an English reading from Eyleh ezkerah, which is my favorite part of the Yom Kippur services.**** Now, I tend to prefer doing service-y things with a little more technical skill -- and perhaps prestige -- attached, but I seem to have absorbed the ethic that declining an honor (without a good reason) is as rude as declining a dish your host is offering at a dinner party (again, without a good reason), only it's God's dinner party. Also, it's not like I can't receive other "honors" on, um, all those other days of the year when I come to services. Finally, I didn't want to make my fellow assigners' lives any more difficult than they had to be. So, after a microscopic hesitation, I said yes.

  This would have been fine and dandy, except that I was working both sides, and so I was emailed a copy of the Honors Spreadsheet with everyone's contributions so far. We all look for our own names on lists, don't we? It was the work of several seconds to glance down the columns for the other English readers, as well as to note that I had been listed as a potential candidate only for English readings, which probably had more to do with the diligence of those assigners than anything else, but did not add to my joy. "Oh, shoot," I said, rather more loudly than necessary.***** "It's a Girly Honor. I HATE Girly Honors!" Let me explain: what I have dubbed a Girly Honor, at Congregation Beth Boondoggle, is a service role requiring relatively little technical skill or advance preparation (English-language readings as opposed to Hebrew ones, dressing the Torah as opposed to lifting or blessing it) and which is almost invariably performed by a woman (or in the case of Ark opening, a mixed couple) under regular (i.e., non-simcha) circumstances. Girly Honors are contextual, so that opening the Ark is not a Girly Honor at weekday morning minyan (rather, it is an honor reserved for That One Guy who expects to do it whenever he shows up), but it is for Shabbat and holidays. Despite these complications, it is very easy to identify a Girly Honor in my congregation: go up to a traditionally-minded male (pick anyone over 60 in a big tallit and you should be fine), ask him to do X, and see if he winces. Gelilah? Girly honor. Torah schlepping: not a girly honor, and overwhelmingly assigned to men, even though you'd have to be awfully frail to have a physical problem with it. Ark opening? Girly honor unless it's with your wife, and even then sort of. English-language readings? Girly honor. Aliyah? Never a girly honor.

  Practically speaking, I'm pretty sure Girly Honors are a holdover from CBB's decades of not-quite-egalitarianism -- after all, there are still many older women in our congregation who are not comfortable taking aliyot but are willing to dress a Torah or do an English reading, which is fine for them. But me -- well, I hate Girly Honors with a completely irrational passion. It's not that I'm uncomfortable with my femininity, or external markers thereof. It may be, a little, that I'm proud of my service-related skills, enjoy showing them off, and resent the Girly Honor's implication that I can't do anything more challenging -- but most of the standard service honors are tasks we expect any ritually confident thirteen-year-old to be able to perform on a few minutes' notice,****** and I don't feel especially accomplished after an aliyah. Finally, honors qua honors are not a huge deal to me, simply because I do attend a lot of smaller services where everyone gets something to do by default. (If I ever really want a given honor, well, I also know all the people who assign them. I could ask.)

  I think my objection to Girly Honors boils down to a well-established distaste for gendered (or, frankly, most any exclusive) ritual roles in public Judaism. In a private household setting, I don't much care if Mom usually lights the Shabbat candles and Dad makes Kiddush, or vice versa, or if they switch off every week; I do think it's important for their sons and daughters to be willing and able to perform both sets of functions (after all, they'll probably live alone at some point). But in a public setting -- say a synagogue which defines itself as egalitarian -- I think it's vitally important that kids not see certain functions as things they Don't Do, or even worse, things they Can't Do. Eventually, everyone is going to choose their own set of favorite synagogue activities -- I love reading Torah, which isn't technically an "honor" and which most people view as a chore -- but there's no reason to artificially limit those choices.

  And having made those bold pronouncements, I will add that sometime during Elul (bli neder) I want to follow this up by explaining why I feel this way, and indeed why I would argue that all ethically and/or halakhically committed Jews ought to agree with me. (It's not like they will, but I figure I should aim high.) For now, though, it's still early in the month (i.e., I am not ready to start in on freezing the chicken soup for RH), and I'm trying to massage my soul into a configuration where I can stop feeling personally offended about the Girly Honors, because I'm pretty certain this isn't (or at any rate should not be) All About Me.

  ... I guess I could always start a weightlifting program and request hagbahah next year, couldn't I?

  
  * -- Because the first day of Rosh Hashanah falls on Shabbat, we get two extra aliyot that day.
  ** -- With on-the-spot assignments and substitutions at the discretion of the assorted floor gabbaim -- but rather less of that this year. I believe we would all prefer not to repeat last year's contretemps, in which various people (not necessarily the assigned ones) got to read Haftarah on about ten minutes' notice.
  *** -- Hagbahah is more difficult the more unbalanced the two halves of the scroll are, and there are three categories of difficulty among the High Holy Days readings, corresponding exactly to how far from the "middle" the reading falls: two from mid-Genesis, three from mid-Numbers, and two from mid-Leviticus. In any event, hoisting and keeping the Torah scroll in the air involves a certain amount of skill (here's a comment thread full of tips), but it also requires a good bit of upper-body, arm, and wrist strength. One doesn't have to be Superman -- given an average-to-light scroll somewhere not too far toward either end, I can do hagbahah just fine -- but I'm not touching those monsters we use for the holidays, and my view is shared by easily 98% of the congregation.
  **** -- Although I am dubious about the English rendition in Machtzor Hadash, and by "dubious" I mean "frankly rather irritated that they cut most of the Ten Sages in favor of lots of Holocaust stuff." The thing interweaving the Kaddish with the names of death camps can stay -- that gets me every year -- but I want Yeshavav the Scribe and Chutzpit the Translator.
  ***** -- I may not have said "shoot," but do we really want to get off into a tangent about Jesus Christ and pogo sticks?
  ****** -- The exceptions are maftir/reading Haftarah, which normally requires at least some advance practice, and hagbahah, as discussed above.

  
  
  
  
• On Getting Laid
  

  [Dear random Googlers: Nope, sorry, this is almost definitely not what you're looking for.]

  It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single Jew in possession of a good education, must be in want of a past. In fact, Jews have wanted to return to an idyllic past state of perfect harmony with God and freedom from foreign influences since well before they became "Jews" -- the call to disentangle from the disastrous present and return to earlier perfection begins at the point when Moses encounters the "God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob" and only gets more strident as the later books of the Hebrew Bible unfold their tales of woe and call for return ("as in days of old") and renewal. Today, everyone across the self-confessedly Jewish spectrum (rabbinic, Karaite, Orthodox, Reform, whatever) has a specific -- and often idiosyncratic -- concept of what Ideal Judaism looked like and what has gone wrong to take us away from it. So I will tell you a little tiny piece of my own plan for tikkun olam: I would like to return to the idyllic time before American Judaism started using the adjective "lay".

  I'm not sure how recently it become acceptable for Jews to refer to some of their coreligionists as "laypeople"; the term "lay" (or the noun form "laity") has an almost impeccably Hellenistic and Christian pedigree. According to the OED, its principle meaning "of persons: belonging to the ‘people’ as contradistinguished from the clergy; not in orders, non-clerical." It derived from Greek λαός, "people" or "folk," but very quickly came to mean "the people as opposed to those of us who are elite" -- so "civilian" or "common" -- in Hellenistic-era sources.* Translations of the Hebrew Bible into Greek by Jews and Jewish Christians (Aquila, Symmachus, Theodotion) employed λαϊκός in a couple of places as a synonym for "non-consecrated" or "non-holy" -- referring, I should stress, to things rather than people.** From there, it was a short leap for Christian sources to adopt λαϊκός and the Latinized laicus for "not in orders; non-clerical." On the other hand, early rabbinic Jewish sources borrowed a lot of Greek words, but not that one.***

  Today, however, the habit is good and entrenched. The term "lay" is no longer exclusively Christian -- it can simply mean "non-professional" or "non-specialist," the way academics talk about writing for a "lay audience." But in a Jewish context, "lay" does not mean "non-professional," it means "non-ordained." A synagogue's executive director, for instance, is still a layperson; we can also have "lay cantors" who have not been through a formal ordination program. For that matter, I have been called a "lay educator," which is slightly bizarre given my training and experience as an academic. But I have also been referred to as a "lay worship leader," a "lay board member," and a "lay committee chair." All of these are accurate descriptions of things I do at my synagogue, and all of them make me want to, well, deliver a lay sermon on precisely this topic, or possibly just lay down and cry.****

  Personally, I think it was a good thing that the Pharisees won out in the aftermath of the destruction of the Second Temple, and that Judaism's hereditary priesthood has relatively little to do as a result.***** Whatever you think of that development, however, the first generations of rabbis did not replace priests; if anything, they replaced assorted sages, judges, and teachers, some of whom were/are priests or Levites and some of whom were/are not. They did not, by and large, function as leaders of worship or as community leaders except by coincidence. And many Jews -- by which we mean "Jewish men," an element of the past I do not at all yearn for -- many Jews received semicha, may or may not be translated correctly as "rabbinic ordination," because they loved to study or teach or answer particularly complicated halakhic questions. Others did so due to family or community expectations. Some were accorded the title of "rabbi" out of respect for their apparent learning, as it had been used before Yochanan ben Zakkai introduced the whole concept of semicha (Jesus of Nazareth is a prominent example here); human nature being what it is, some probably adopted the title "rabbi" for purposes of self-inflation without any formal right. Or perhaps not -- after all, semicha was a lot easier to get before seminary study (another Christian idea) became its standard prerequisite. (It was even easier to become a chazzan -- professional cantors run all the way back to the eighteenth century, and the concept of cantorial ordination is even more recent.) It's not that rabbinic Judaism wasn't elitist in many ways, but throughout most of Jewish history, "rabbinic" Jews did not rely on rabbis, much less a rabbi, to conduct their day-to-day Jewish lives. They prayed, worked, cooked, and celebrated with only occasional resort to a rabbinic authority for judgment or advice. In many communities, there was nobody competent to give judgment or advice nearby in any case, and while one could dispatch a messenger to Sura or Mainz or Vilna for an opinion, the chickens would be eaten and the services finished long before an answer could return.

  That's what I miss. I miss the idea that you could be fully Jewish as long as you had a minyan, a Torah scroll, and perhaps a shochet/mohel (now there's a vital Jewish community position!), with access to scribes and rabbis for special occasions. If your community got large enough, you could build a proper mikvah and a synagogue. If your community was especially large, or if there was a center of rabbinic scholarship nearby, you might be able to bring in one of the less promising students to give quicker answers about whether or not those chickens were kosher, and maybe to write divorce and marriage contracts on the side -- but you could get along just fine without him, too. I'm not sure exactly when it happened, and I'm pretty sure it was a gradual process, but the laicization of American Judaism is my hands-down least favorite element of contemporary Jewish life.****** One day a lot of us went to sleep Jews and woke up lay.

  So what's a Jew to do? Well, there are obvious answers for individuals: go be a rabbi yourself if that's what you want (if we still had a system where I could study with the rabbis in my community, I'd be all over that), or maybe form a rabbi-and-cantor-free community (but are those sustainable? I note with interest that Kehilat Hadar now has a rabbinic "scholar-in-residence"). Neither of those responses do anything to address the larger problem, though. And it's not that I have anything against rabbis and cantors -- I have learned a great deal from many such people. I concede the usefulness of Jewish professionals in the contemporary "synagogue center," but I will resist to my dying breath the implication that therefore there are second-class Jews, or (more to the point) Jews who think of themselves as such. Last year our synagogue was searching for a cantor (or, as we have been instructed to say, chazzan), and in a valiant effort to avoid the (also very Christian) terminology of "clergy" and "ordination," reference was made to our need for additional klei kodesh, literally "holy vessels" or "instruments of holiness." This is nice and all, but I kind of thought -- in my demure little lay way -- that we were supposed to be a holy people. A, y'know, kingdom of priests. And that each one of us was supposed to be, oh, individually holy. Instead, we have a dumbed-down system in which holiness requires a proxy and in which we are scandalized when our unfortunate klei kodesh fail to live up to the standards of holiness we set for them (but not for ourselves). That's not just silly, that's pathetic. And also -- I hardly ever say this, so make a note of it -- un-Jewish.

  So I don't know where to start, and it makes me miserable when every Jewish community I encounter seems to have a more or less severe degree of the same disease. There's got to be a tactful yet effective way to educate people about all this "lay" stuff, but I don't know what it is. Do you think it involves fewer puns?

  
  * -- It's interesting to compare this development to an obvious Hebrew parallel, the word גוי, which came to mean "non-Jew."
  ** -- At least, in the case of Ezek. 48:15 (clearly translating חל). The other case the online LSJ lists is 1 Kgs 21:4/5, and I suspect some typesetting or scanning error, because there's simply no word anywhere near there that would so translate. My Greek lexicons are currently boxed, so unless anyone is just dying to know, I think I'll leave it at that for the moment.
  *** -- Am ha-aretz is probably the closest synonym for "layperson," but I trust many of my readers will realize that it's still not very close. My personal suspicion is that Jews referring to other Jews as "lay" snuck in sometime in the nineteenth century, along with the German Reform movement's early (and largely abandoned) efforts to dub their rabbis "ministers" or "pastors." That early Reform movement was itself "lay," or rather, there were very few rabbis involved in its earliest phases, but it was drawing heavily on a German vocabulary and culture which had set aside the famous Lutheran (and, er, Biblical) emphasis on a priesthood of all believers in favor of retaining the vernacular laie and a pronounced respect for ordination in a religious context. That early Reform movement also contributed a number of ideas which -- a little under 200 years later -- have spread across virtually every part of the Jewish spectrum (for instance, regular sermons preached in the vernacular), so it is my hypothesis that the concept of Jewish "laity" spread in much the same way. That's just a guess, though, and I'd want to go back and see how everything from the Mishnaic am ha-aretz to the Hasidic notion of a rabbi-tzaddik could have contributed to the conceptual development of rabbi-as-clergy, too. (Note to self: find publisher first.)
  **** -- I think the problem may be exacerbated in the field of Jewish education, a field where rabbis and cantors always get the benefit of their titles and I find myself in the awkward position of wanting to explain I'm rather specifically qualified but having been trained to commit seppuku before actually introducing myself as "Dr. Naomi Chana." However, I gave examples from synagogue life instead, because that's a more common experience.
  ***** -- I don't begrudge them the first aliyah or duchening -- both of which take place at my synagogue -- but I also don't feel that priestly privilege is a key element of rabbinic Judaism, any more than (equally well-attested) royal privilege. (This in no way stops me from being amused that I'm the only Israelite among my Jewish grandparents, parent, husband, and future children.)
  ****** -- The #2 and #3 spots are filled by, respectively, the Myth of Eternal Orthodoxy and niggunim. However, these are subject to change at whim.

  
  
  
  
• The Perils of Potlucks
  

  I swear, I wanted to spend Elul blogging about teshuvah (at least a little bit), and instead I'm blogging about food. Oh well. I don't generally blog just to announce new things on my Bloglines aggregator (someday I will update the bloglist on my main page as well), but the other day BZ mentioned a new blog called Two Heads of Lettuce and devoted to the promulgation of really awesome kosher-dairy and/or vegetarian potluck recipes, along with a post here and there about basic potluck etiquette for independent minyanim and similar groups of co-eaters. I, personally, view this as an answer to prayer, because (a) I can always use more good potluck recipes, and (b) I would love to get everyone in my community clued in about the Halakhah Of Potlucks.

  You see, the Marvelous Monthly Minyan here in Boondoggle* has featured a potluck dairy kiddush for the past 3+ years; in fact, I spent a year or more as the chief kiddush organizer, and I am now the chief Person Who Reminds The Chief Kiddush Organizer To Send Out Emails And Then Calls The Chief Kiddush Organizer On Friday Morning To See What Else I Need To Bring, which is a very slight improvement. I am also, effectively, one of two people/households who serve as the minyan's Potluck Completists, bringing everything that seems likely to fall by the wayside; I sometimes wonder what would happen if neither of us brought food one month, but since together we're also the central organizers of minyan activities, that seems unlikely. Last month I brought: whole-wheat challah (homemade), salmon/cream-cheese ball (homemade) with crackers, grape juice, orange juice, seltzer, a bowl of fresh cherries, and a tray of assorted desserts (not homemade, but left over from another minyan function). This is unusual only in that someone else usually brings the grape juice and I usually do a more utilitarian main dish than the salmon ball**.

  Now, I come by this approach to potlucking honestly if idiosyncratically. My father's side of the family has organized its gatherings around potluck dinners since time immemorial, or at any rate before my birth. (My father is one of eight siblings, all of whom have kids and most of whom now have grandkids, so nobody can feed all of us single-handedly.) These family potlucks are run with tremendous efficiency, usually by a particular aunt of mine who knows what everyone else in the family tends to fix for these events and simply tells them that they are bringing the (applesauce, green salad, one of the turkey breasts, a potato dish, a couple of pies, that great chocolate cake of yours). But my father -- out of some complex sense of pride or possibly competitiveness -- has always insisted on exceeding his assignments, such that we typically arrive with enough delicious homemade items to feed a small Third-World country and with plenty of moral high ground from which to mutter about how tacky it is that Cousin So-and-So probably just bought that pie. It is only while writing this post that I realized I've carried my paternal family potluck minhag seamlessly into minyan potlucking. (Must call Dad tonight and inform him that it's all his fault.)

  Our minyan potlucks have finally advanced to the point where they come out pretty well without too much shepherding, but that does presume that the (few) core people are going to show up with the (many) core ingredients.*** I actually kind of worry about our minyan's long-term viability, simply because right now we don't have anyone obvious to turn over leadership to when one of us gets burned out -- we just toss the various jobs back and forth like hot potatoes every year or so. Also, I wonder about advancing a two-table system (strictly-hekshered-kosher and lacto-ovo-pesco-vegetarian), mostly to help out the folks who worry that their non-kosher kitchen means they can only bring fruit and to allow me to confidently invite strictly-kosher guests to eat whatever.**** And every now and then I fantasize about a minyan weekend where all I do is read Torah, lead a service, give a d'var, and bring the cream cheese.

  Still -- last month we had a visitor to our minyan, a nice young man who was in town over Shabbat (for a non-Jewish friend's wedding) and found us quite by accident. His hosts had arranged a kosher meal for him for Saturday night, but he didn't have any meal plans for lunch (other than eating the baba ghanoush he'd stashed in his hotel room), and I was thrilled that we were able to feed him, and feed him well. I love feeding people; I love cooking for that purpose; I love eating with friends; I love celebrating Shabbat with special food. And I love potlucks, because they make all of that easier and more frequent, plus they allow everyone to feel proud of the collective meal.*****

  So, Two Heads of Lettuce folks -- I'm behind you all the way, holding my own serving implements. And if you want an all-purpose super-adaptable spinach kugel recipe, just let me know.

  
  * -- Someday I will just stop with the cute nicknames already and give you a link to its website, but first I have to finish its website.
  ** -- I'd promised it to someone in exchange for his early attendance, since I was concerned about having a minyan in time for the Torah service (August is a tough month).
  *** -- Wine and grape juice, challah, bagels, multiple cream cheeses, lox and veggie platter, some sort of dessert item, cold beverages, tea and coffee bags for the hot-water urn. Everything after that can be added on at will.
  **** -- But what if you make, say, a pasta salad with all hekshered ingredients but non-hekshered feta cheese because you keep Conservative-standard kosher? More problematically, what about the folks who want their dried cranberries hekshered vs. the folks who see no reason to bother with hekshers? I don't care to alienate people either way, and I especially don't want to add amateur mashgiach to my list of minyan responsibilities.
  ***** -- My single biggest wedding-related concession was agreeing to have the reception catered instead of potluck, and that was largely because (a) all the venues I wanted had catering contracts attached and (b) my husband had already seen what happens to me when I have to organize potlucks. Oh well. Possibly we will have a potluck bris or baby-naming or something.

  
  
  
  
• Soy and the City
  

  So. I know Judaism, especially in America, is shifting to the right like nobody's business. I know we're all susceptible to creeping historical nostalgia, whether it's for the mythical pre-modern Golden Age when everyone was observant to the point of OCD* or for the wild-and-woolly diversity of halakhic opinions in thirteenth-century Ashkenaz**. And I know that just about everyone is disgusted with some element or other of the contemporary political scene. However, I would like to float the argument that there has never been a better time to be Jewish than the year of our Lord 5767, and for a reason most of our Jewish communal organizations have failed to highlight in their brochures: it's so easy to keep a kosher kitchen with all the new products out there!

  Now, possibly I have some readers who have never contemplated not keeping kosher. I would suggest that they continue through this post in the spirit of developing empathy. Ditto for lifelong committed vegetarians. For the rest of us -- those of us who don't keep kosher, those of us who used to keep kosher and now don't, those of us who've started keeping kosher after a period without it, and of course those of us who don't see why on earth they should keep kosher (a category including both Jews and non-Jews) -- anyway, for the rest of us, let's be honest here. There are really delicious non-kosher foods and food combinations out there. Possibly you have a thing for pan-fried scallops, or shrimp cocktail, or BLTs, or chicken cordon bleu. Perhaps you yearn for cheeseburgers, or turkey tetrazzini, or just some really creamy mashed potatoes next to your steak. Maybe you just wonder what it'd be like to open the fancy-shmancy food magazine you bought to read on a trip and start preparing all those "vegetable" dishes that call for chicken broth, cream, and a little prosciutto.***

  Once upon a time, or so I am given to understand, Jews either didn't eat these items, or they ate them and felt more or less guilty depending on their personality and upbringing. They were always good at adapting to the culinary vernacular of the cultures they lived with, and invariably contributed dishes to non-Jewish tables (think carciofi alla giudia, or for that matter bagels). All the same, there were some foods that Just Didn't Work. Today, however, there are a lot fewer such foods.**** I think the trend must have started in the '60s, with the development of non-dairy creamer. Suddenly, a whole host of meat-based dishes involving milk products -- not to mention desserts to be served immediately after those meat meals -- could be adapted to kosher living. Then there was soy: when I was a child in the 80s, tofu and tempeh were exotic foods available only at health-food stores and in the utopian world of Laurel's Kitchen, but sometime around about the late 90s soy burgers and soymilk became part of the standard supermarket fare. Today we can get (with varying degrees of imitative success) soy-based fake chicken, soy-based cheese, soy-based steak strips, and of course soy-based chorizo. And now, just in this decade, kosher food has become trendy. All sorts of things have hekshers, including things that don't so much need them.

  So now you have your choice of beef or soy bacon for that BLT, and if you crave seafood salad, there's lovely hekshered surimi (both fake crab and fake shrimp) out there. There are soy sausages, beef sausages, and (finally, in my local store!) poultry sausages. There are, in short, very few foodstuffs that anyone has to do without. Then there are the recipes that need rewriting. Now, my usual method of dealing with intractably non-kosher food combinations is to cut the Gordian knot in favor of dairy products: given a choice between fake meat and fake cheese, I will go with the fake meat (soy protein, beans, whatever) nine times out of ten. You will take away my cheese drawer when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers. But the other day, I came down with a serious craving for one of my favorite childhood foods -- I don't think my parents have made it in years -- beef stroganoff. Not, of course, the classic version with strips of steak and sour cream, but the all-American variant with ground beef, Campbell's cream of mushroom soup, and sour cream. Either way, not one of the great kosher foods of the world.

  It would have been child's play to use soy-based "ground meat" or even appropriately seasoned TVP as the protein in this dish, but I was in the mood for honest-to-goodness animal flesh. And just the other day we had made the exciting discover that pareve Tofutti "sour cream" does not, in fact, suck. (It has a very faint soy aftertaste if you take a spoonful of it and swirl it around your mouth, but mixed into a dish with other flavors -- we were doing turkey chili -- it's excellent.) So I took my pound of kosher meat (buffalo, but that's another story), sauteed it with finely chopped onion, a ton of sliced mushrooms, and appropriate spices (mmmm, paprika), then tipped in half a box of Imagine "creamy portabella" soup (yes, it's soy-based) and let it reduce until I was ready to stir in half a container of pareve sour cream. We had it over whole-wheat egg noodles, and I swear it was better than my childhood memories.*****

  I realize that there are people out there who don't want to take the Iron Balabusta approach to kosher cooking -- that's why we have all the prepackaged stuff from Manischewitz and Osem and Morningstar Farms, nu? -- but for those of us who think adapting dishes for kashrut is fun, this is a marvelous time to be Jewish. So far, I am dubious about nutritional yeast as a substitute for parmigiano-reggiano (really, I am dubious about anything as a substitute for parmigiano-reggiano , although I will agree that there are some nice domestic Parmesans), but soy "meat" goes perfectly in a variety of pasta-and-cheese casseroles, and I do enough baking that I routinely switch cakes and muffins from dairy to pareve on the fly while I'm also trying to cut down on fat and amp up some of the flavor. (I, er, have trouble following recipes.)

  And the question arises -- mostly from friends who aren't into the whole kosher thing -- why am I faking it? Shouldn't I accept the idea that God just doesn't want me to have beef stroganoff or BLTs? Well, no, I shouldn't. There's something about serving with joy (God, not food, although the two are mentioned together) midway through the really depressing bits of Deuteronomy 28, and something about inquiring after God in quite a few places, including the seasonally appropriate Psalm 27, and there's that whole riff on tasting God's goodness at the beginning of Psalm 34, but what stands out for me is the simple and literal reading of the circumstances under which the laws of kashrut were given. No matter whose Torah chronology you follow, and no matter whether you're looking at Leviticus or Deuteronomy, everyone agrees that these laws (well, the basics at any rate) were given at some point during the Israelites' wandering in the wilderness. And as we all know, during that period of wandering, they ate -- no, not chicken soup with matzo balls -- they ate manna from heaven (plus occasional quails). The amazing thing about this manna stuff, apparently, was that it could taste like anything you wanted -- rather like today's soy products.****** And yet God shows up with a series of rules about what foods to eat, what not to eat, and in what combination they could be eaten -- why is this? Either we assume that God is a sadist (I refuse to go any further than theorizing that She enjoys practical jokes), or we assume that God wants us to experiment with the plethora of foods we have available, allowing us to imitate the food of heaven and (working within God's rules, however we define them) assemble whatever culinary masterpieces we're in the mood for.

  I prefer the latter view, and not only because it produces better food -- it also produces better Judaism, a way of living with and for God's teachings that's not insulated from the world around it or reliant on nostalgia for a nonexistent past.******* But the food doesn't hurt either. And... y'know, I could really use a snack right about now.

  
  * -- This works better if you define "everyone" very narrowly.
  ** -- That's probably just me, right?
  *** -- I read once -- I think in Matzo Ball Gumbo -- about southern Jewish cooks simmering kosher salami ends with their greens to achieve the mandatory salt/meat flavor. (Personally, I prefer my greens stirred into a little olive oil and garlic, then lightly wilted.)
  **** -- There is no proper substitute for pulled-pork barbecue. Chicken is OK; tempeh-and-seitan is, er, different. Neither quite work, though. Also, I am still searching for an effective substitute for scallops.
  ***** -- I'd like to say it was the spiritual fulfillment of maintaining kashrut, but I'm pretty sure it was that the Imagine soup tastes like mushrooms (there can never be too much mushroom flavor), while Campbell's cream of mushroom tastes like Campbell's cream of mushroom and has only a nodding acquaintance with actual fungus.
  ****** -- Except, according to some commentators, it couldn't taste like foods which were thought to be harmful to nursing mothers. (This is how they explain the Israelites' longing for "cucumbers, melons, onion, and garlic" in Numbers 11:5.) My personal suspicion is that manna didn't have the right crunch and it didn't brown up properly when you cooked it with the quail.
  ******* -- If the Jews of the mythical Eastern European shtetl could've gotten their hands on pareve sour cream, you know they totally would've eaten it. Probably swirled with schmaltz and topped with gribnes, on some nice pumpernickel bread.

  
  
  
  
• Right In Your Eyes
  

  So tomorrow morning we're reading Parshat Re'eh -- by "we" in this case I mean the Marvelous Monthly Minyan -- and the first aliyah, which I will be slogging through, includes the phrase איׂש כל הישר בעיניו -- translated literally as "every man what is right/proper in his [own] eyes," or less literally, "everyone as s/he pleases."

  What this means in the context of Parshat Re'eh is somewhat trickier: is the state of איׂש כל הישר בעיניו positive or negative? The Torah portion is burbling along about the new rules which will fall into place when the Israelites enter their Promised Land, and at Deuteronomy 12:8, we get a clear summary statement "you shall not act/do as we are now acting/doing here" (that is, in the wilderness). The words immediately following, and ending the verse, are איׂש כל הישר בעיניו, with no obvious connector to the first half. Does "every man what is right in his own eyes" refer to the (chaotic) state of the wilderness? That's how JPS would translate it: "You shall not act at all as we now act here, every man as he pleases." But my Artscroll text argues the opposite: "You shall not do like everything that we do here today -- [rather,] every man what is proper in his eyes." That bracketed "rather" implies that "every man what is right in his own eyes" is in fact the appropriate state of affairs in the Land.

  I lean towards the JPS reading, myself, and that's because there's another use of the same basic phrase with which I'm much more familiar. The words which conclude the final verse of the Book of Judges are איש הישר בעיניו יעשה -- "every man did what was right in his [own] eyes" -- and so this apparently describes a series of ever-more-horrific stories, climaxing with a deeply unedifying account of hospitality violation, gang-rape, murder, dismemberment, and intertribal warfare. I think we can all be reasonably certain that in this context איׂש כל הישר בעיניו is Not A Good Thing.

  Is "every man what is right in his own eyes" ever a workable way of living, though? How much tolerance is necessary, and how much is deadly? I do wonder, sometimes -- not so much about the generations in the wilderness as about the Jewish world I blog in today. It's easier for me to assume the best about everyone when I know them in person; it's trickier online, when we're missing so many cues and connections and consequences. I do prefer to err on the side of assuming the best, though, and I've answered more than a few potentially-troll-like comments with the straightest response I could give, just in case they were serious.

  That said, I draw the line somewhere significantly before the scenarios at the end of Judges. I never thought I'd need to post about this blog's comment policy, since it consists of passing everything through that isn't:

  - an obvious mistake (double comment, code gone wrong, etc.);
  - blatant advertising, spamming, or phishing;
  - offensive/obscene language;
  - or extensive slanderous remarks about other people, especially (but not exclusively) parties who are not participating in the comments.

  That final item is the latest addition, and the one which prompted me to make this post. I can't imagine who would consider my blog's comments a halfway useful forum for publicizing their accusations against assorted members of the Jewish world whose names I barely recognize (maybe they're just trying to Googlebomb?), but that's not why I write this blog or make commenting available on it. Like most Jews, I can't claim to have read the Chofetz Chaim or other classic works on lashon hara in their entirety, but I have a fairly firm grasp on what I consider appropriate modes of speech about third parties, and I try (not always successfully) to police my own speech accordingly. Slightly unkind but basically well-meaning gossip about mutual acquaintances between friends should probably make me uneasy; more-than-slightly unkind gossip from anonymous commenters about people I don't know for God knows what purpose is clearly Right Out. And while blogs can certainly serve an important whistleblowing purpose, in or out of the Jewish community (see some thoughts on this here and here), that's not really what Baraita's about, either. Baraita tends to be -- and I try to encourage it to be -- a quintessentially civil commenting community.

  This is partly for my own comfort, of course. I may be a wimp, but there are some otherwise excellent and thoughtful blogs out there -- and this applies across a number of religious and political spectrums -- whose comment sections make me distinctly uncomfortable because people are so nasty to each other and about each other. But I also believe that the great thing about civility is how it kicks in even when our moral sense fails: when I'm secretly dying to hear what So-and-So did, when I have temporarily forgotten the whole concept of lashon hara, I still have the sense that such behavior is Not Nice. Unfortunately, the problem with civility is that Not Nice isn't always enough, because people have very different interpretations of what is Nice, and my Nice may be your Downright Nasty. A couple of moral concepts (lashon hara, for instance) are also important to have around for when Nice won't cut it.

  However, my inclination is to read איׂש כל הישר בעיניו as referring to a collective sense of etiquette or civility, not morals. The Israelites' idea of proper behavior by the end of Judges was obviously completely bankrupt -- the "heroes" of the final story collude in destroying a neutral city and arranging for girls to be seized as wives against their will -- so that "what is right in [their] eyes" is a devastating condemnation of their cultural norms. But in the wilderness, where everyone still shared a commitment to a central mission,* it could have worked as a standard. And maybe even in some corners of the wild, wild blogosphere... well, we can try.

  What's the phrase? Oh, yes. Shabbat shalom!

  
  * -- Possibly, in Deuteronomic retrospect, the mission of getting Moses to take a deep breath and allow the crowd a bathroom break.

  
  
  
  
• Die! Die! Die! (How I Feel About Niggunim)
  

  [For anyone who just had two other posts pop up on their feed, I've been catching up with accumulated blogging from last week's conference. Things should be back on schedule about now.]

  One of the advantages of attending lots of Jewishly oriented events, I am discovering, is that they tend to have Regularly Scheduled Worship Experiences described variously as "prayer," "davening" "shacharit" (or mincha or maariv), or of course "meditation/yoga." And with the possible exception of the yoga*, I will attend pretty much any egalitarian worship option** out of sheer curiosity. What prayerbook are they using? (OK, nine times out of 10 the answer is some variation on Sim Shalom, but I live in hope.) Which optional and semi-optional*** passages are being left out, and which ones absolutely have to stay in? Can I pick up any useful tricks for keeping the service running smoothly? And, best of all: what new tunes can I learn?

  I have spent a good portion of my life singing in a choir; naturally, then, I enjoy learning new tunes on a fairly regular basis, although I am always a bit nervous about having them introduced in mid-prayer. In order for them to be workable in that context they have to be (a) properly taught, or at any rate repeated a few times so I can join in, as well as (b) blended into the rest of the service in terms of key, mode, mood, and overall complexity. (I love elaborate eight-part choral harmony as much as the next girl, but not in the middle of an otherwise-mumbled ten-minute afternoon service.) Finally, (c) they have to be significant -- or, to put it in words of one syllable (this will become important later), they have to mean something. Normally, this is not a problem: people introduce new tunes to elements of the prayer service which are already there (how many tunes to Mah Tovu do you know?), and so the words (be they in Hebrew or another language) have meaning both on their own and in the context of the service. The tune simply amplifies that meaning. I love to sing, I love to daven, what's the problem here?

  Well, you see, there is one gigantic class of New Tunes which resoundingly fails requirement (c), and those are niggunim. In case you have stumbled onto this post from outside the world of Jewish Prayer Geeks, I should explain that a niggun is a (usually) repetitive tune made up of either hums or nonsense syllables (there are some exceptions) and originally associated with the Hasidic (that is, Eastern European mystical/pietist) movement within Judaism which began in the eighteenth century. The Hasids (and here I am generalizing about a vast and varied historical phenomenon) de-emphasized formal Jewish learning, which was only available to an elite class of men at that time, and urged average Jews (er, Jewish men) to focus on the devotional and affective elements of prayer. In keeping with this philosophy, niggunim and accompanying joyful singing and dancing were touted as an often more genuine method of pouring out one's heart to God than a repetitively mumbled mouthful of words crafted some centuries back. Somewhere around about the 1960s and '70s, for reasons significantly beyond the scope of this post****, Hasidic spirituality became the new black, and nowadays niggunim are very popular with services and service leaders across most of the Jewish denominational spectrum. Practically speaking, then, when you walk into a twenty-first-century Jewish prayer service and someone says "And now we're going to continue with a niggun," what they almost invariably sing is a minor-ish, catchy tune to the syllables "yi/li di di di di" (etc., all pronounced with long i) at pretty much any possible point in the service.

  What I usually do on such occasions (once I finish rolling my eyes) is to join in -- really, what else can you do? -- and given a few reps, I generally start harmonizing. They're often lovely tunes, and my intermittent choral experience takes over in no time flat; after all, the only thing more fun than getting the hang of a new tune is making up new harmonies for it. The thing is, the niggun has absolutely nothing to do with prayer in my head. "Yi di di di di," I carol, trying to sort out whether or not I can get away with going up instead of down on the fourteenth "di," and the part where we're praying and I'm supposed to be preparing my mind to concentrate on the Amidah or Kaddish or Torah service or what-have-you is temporarily out the window. I am a Text Person; it is not that I am unmystical, but the mysticism I like is Text Mysticism (a phrase which covers most of pre-Lurianic Kabbalah, but that's another post). I would make a lousy Hasid. Trying to make myself get prayerful about singing nonsense syllables works about as well for me as getting prayerful about yoga does: both can give me a feeling of elevation and joy, even a sense of being close to God, but no more so than baking bread or smelling flowers or seeing a rainbow or any of the million little daily things for which the rabbinic Jewish tradition recommends -- wait for it -- saying a blessing. (I like to think of rabbinic Judaism as a support group for Text People.) In an ideal more-or-less traditional prayer service -- and God knows I am not always able to get myself into the proper frame of mind -- I am having myself a great time up in the Great Yeshiva in the Sky.***** In a non-ideal prayer service, I am more likely to flip to the back of the siddur and start scanning Pirke Avot or the weekday Torah readings. Either way, I am happily browsing through layers of text dating from as far back as the twelfth century B.C.E. and as recently as the twentieth century, an experience which -- I cannot stress this enough -- gives me a feeling of great spiritual and religious satisfaction. The last thing I need is someone trying to get me to sing "li di di."

  And yet... I am puzzled, because the Entire Jewish Universe adores niggunim these days. The only exceptions seem to be my husband -- whose testimony is not precisely unbiased -- and people so far to the right of me Jewishly that they may, in fact, still be hashing out those eighteenth-century debates.****** And I don't actually want to stop people from praying in a way that's meaningful to them; I just wish it got on my nerves a little less. Who died and named me Grungetta the Grouch? Perhaps my reading of the mainstream rabbinic Jewish tradition is all wrong? Perhaps I suffer from a rare form of spiritual tone-deafness? Perhaps I have completely repressed some early childhood trauma involving the syllables "yi di di"?

  Sigh. Sigh sigh sigh sigh sigh... excuse me, I think I need to go read something now.

  * -- I would actually enjoy a morning yoga workout, but it does not ping me as a substitute for prayer. Your mileage may, of course, vary.
  ** -- And in the absence of an egalitarian option, I would probably attend a non-egalitarian option, but then we get into the difficulty of trying to sort out whether or not there actually is a mechitzah and whether or not I can sing out loud. (Someday I must remember to blog about how Orthodox shuls in major cities need a Female Tourist Welcome Rating, especially for weekday services.)
  *** -- That is, the Prayers Everyone Knows You're Supposed To Do But You Might Get Away With Leaving Them Out. (See also Tachanun.)
  **** -- Although we can certainly have a blamefest in the comments.
  ***** -- Possibly my favorite ever of the many Jewish afterlife alternatives, if not so much with the egalitarianism in the classic texts.
  ****** -- When everyone knows the thirteenth-century ones were a lot more interesting.

  
  
  
  
• The Woman Who Mistook Her Job For A Hat
  

  I have become accustomed to a particular round of Major Professional Conferences, but now that I am switching careers -- or splitting time between two careers -- or easing over into a closely related career -- or possibly just deeply confused about... wait, where was I? Oh, yes, conferences. I appear to have acquired a new one: the Coalition for the Advancement of Jewish Education conference, which seems to locate itself somewhere early in August. As I have been telling people, it's very much like an academic conference only with a lot more singalongs. And, of course, it features a lot more options for Jewish prayer spiritual enrichment -- egal minyan, non-egal minyan, nature walk, and yoga.

  However, my enjoyment of the first option (it's more fun to hear how other people daven than to see how they bend) led to a decidedly non-academic dilemma. I would get up early, grab my ritual paraphernalia, and clip on a kippah just before the tallit and tefillin (entering a dorm room, unlike a synagogue, does not ping my headgear radar). After the service, I'd take off the tefillin and tallit, but my next date was breakfast, and it seemed a bit odd to whip off an item of headgear designed to show reverence for God just before blessing my carefully kosher-supervised breakfast -- or, um, sincerely intending to remember to bless my breakfast -- so I'd switch the spiffy tallit-matching kippah for the plain knit one I carry in my purse. Then, after breakfast, there were conference sessions -- some on education in a Jewish context, others on Judaic topics. Well, a kippah is supposed to be worn for Torah study as well as blessing, and while I tended toward the education topics (I was more familiar with most of the Judaic subjects), I did treat myself to a few text studies. So I started wearing my kippah all day -- except for the day-long grantwriting workshop -- and a funny thing happened.

  If you wear a kippah enough -- even at an event packed with Jewish educators -- and you occasionally sound off about Torah and/or prayer and/or Jewish history (what, you want me to stop breathing?) -- people will frequently assume that you are a rabbi. I was asked this question easily a dozen times over the course of the conference. And it's not an unreasonable question, because most of the other people I saw wandering around being full-time kavod kippah turned out to be (a) obviously Orthodox men and/or (b) rabbis, as far as I could tell. There were a handful of exceptions, most of them working in educational positions where one could reasonably expect to find a rabbi instead, and there were one or two ordained cantors to throw off the calculations, but on balance it is a correct assumption that kippah = rabbi.

  Now, I am not a rabbi, and do not wish to mislead anyone about my non-rabbinical status*, but this is not the first time I've wondered when I should wear my kippah. As a professor at a non-Jewish (but religiously affiliated) university, teaching both Judaism and other religious traditions, I was tempted to don a kippah when we studied my sacred texts, especially in classes devoted to the Jewish perspective on them -- but I worried that it would intimidate my (mostly non-Jewish) students, so I didn't. As a Jewish educator, I have my kippah on when I'm inside a non-Orthodox synagogue building regardless**, but when I teach at a Jewish community organization, I wear one because we are after all studying Torah. When I teach at a church, I wear one because it's a useful way of indicating "hi, I'm Jewish, I'm the guest speaker you're looking for, and I'm happy to answer questions about my religion." When I leave the synagogue, Jewish community organization, or church and go out for lunch or errands, I usually remember to take off the kippah, because I'm not sure whether I'm up for being question-answering-woman full-time, and I'm also not sure whether every moment of my day-to-day behavior makes me an appropriate public representative for Judaism.*** And if I am going out to a kosher restaurant, I definitely remember to take off the kippah (yeah, yeah, I know). If I am entering an Orthodox synagogue as a guest, the context will determine whether I wear a standard kippah, a girly kippah****, or a hat; if I am entering an Orthodox synagogue as an educator of some sort, I generally figure they can cope with whatever headcovering I have available.

  Simple, huh? On sober reflection, it might be easier to just become a rabbi. Or shave my head and wear a wig, whichever. But I do sometimes wish we had a reasonable understanding of what the role of a Jewish Educator is -- because then I could decide what kind of hat to wear.

  
  * -- Although the post in which I rant about Jewish use of the word "lay" is upcoming.
  ** -- We will not even get into my brief stint as the person stuck with writing up a kippah policy for Congregation Beth Boondoggle, except to say that I think adult Jewish women in an egalitarian setting should be required to cover their heads anytime adult Jewish men are required to do so, and I can back up my position with about five pages of written notes from assorted texts and teshuvot. A few meetings revealed that nobody else really cared about my notes, though, so I wrote up a reasonable description of their current custom (everyone has to cover heads on the bimah but only men elsewhere) with emphasis on how strongly we "encouraged" women to cover their heads.
  *** -- Of course, sometimes I forget to remove the kippah, and so far nobody has demanded to know what business I as a Jew have trying on discount sandals or buying groceries or ordering soup.
  **** -- At least, I keep meaning to own a girly kippah (you know, with lace and stuff) so that I have this as an option. I tend to assume that color-coordinating my kippah with my outfit gives a sufficiently harmless impression, though.

  
  
  
  

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