The good news: this year, for once, my aunt and I have actually gotten a start on revising the family Haggadah before April.* The bad news: nobody except me knows how to do layout in Word. This probably shows good sense on everyone else's part; I don't want to use Word for much of anything involving pictures, but it's the only program we all have in common. And, yes, the Haggadah is several years past needing to be placed in some sort of non-paper format for easy distribution and editing; once I get it to a stage where I'm satisfied with it (no earlier than Passover 2005), I'll turn it into a PDF file (unless there's a better format by then) and maybe put it online for other people to borrow from. We've certainly borrowed enough material from other online Hagaddot over the years, although I flatter myself that our combination of showtune-based Passover filk and fascinating historical trivia about the formation of the Seder ritual is fairly unique. Also, the food's always great.

This year, in addition to scanning and fighting with Word, I tackled a long-overdue rewriting of the Maggid, the longest single part of the Seder; at its simplest, it involves telling the Passover story, and we do most of it in English. Our last version of the Maggid was taken directly from a children's Haggadah; since the youngest participant in our Seder is now thirteen, I thought it was time we re-introduced a few of the traditional digressions and a few details beyond the bowdlerized Ten Commandments-style Story of Moses. It so happens that, depending on how you view it, there are at least two and possibly three different retellings of the "Passover story" (whatever that is) sandwiched into the traditional Haggadah. I am currently trying to include key bits from all three in the proper order without (a) boring people, (b) confusing people, or (c) giving people the impression that the festival meal proper will occur about five years into the Messanic era. We'll see how it works out this year. By the way, anyone who'd like to offer a halfway sane reading of that goofy midrash about Laban being worse than Pharaoh (apart from the happy consonantal coincidence of Arami and Romi in Hebrew allowing the rabbis to say nasty things about the Romans without ticking off the authorities), please speak up.

As long as I'm rewriting, re-typing, or re-scanning everything up through the Maggid, I've also been trying to make some of the first-half material a little more appropriate for what has been for years been a female-led Seder. (We stuck in a Miriam's Cup to go with Elijah's several years back, although I want to revise that somewhat next year.) Including women's voices is less impossible than it might at first seem: after all, the first half-chapter of Exodus is entirely populated by women, and even afterwards you have Zipporah and Miriam popping up in unexpected places, not to mention loads of fun midrash traditions. The recaps in Deuteronomy and Joshua which show up in the traditional haggadah are entirely patrilineal, but I think I did enough harm by mixing up my favorite bits of various translations that nobody will notice if I also throw in "and Sarah" after "Abraham," or refer to "ancestors" instead of "forefathers." At least, my aunt let it pass without comment.

She decided that I had gone too far, however, when I wondered aloud whether we should consider changing the Four Sons to the Four Children. "The Four Sons" is a section (one of the digressions everyone likes) in the Maggid. The traditional version goes something like this:

The Torah speaks** about four sons: one who is wise and one who is contrary; one who is simple and one who does not even know how to ask a question.

The wise son asks "What is the meaning of the rules, laws, and customs which the Eternal our God has commanded us?" You shall explain to him all the laws of Passover, down to the very last detail about the Afikomen.

The wicked son asks: "What is the meaning of this service to you? Saying you, he excludes himself, and because he excludes himself from the group, he denies a basic principle. You may therefore tell him plainly***: "Because of what the Eternal did for me when I came forth from Egypt" I do this. "For me" and not for him; had he been there he would not have been redeemed.

The simple son asks: "What is this?" To him you shall say: "With a strong hand the Eternal brought us out of Egypt, from the house of bondage."

As for the son who does not even know how to ask a question, you must begin for him, as it is written in the Bible, "You shall tell your children on that day; This is done because of that which the Eternal did for me when I came forth out of Egypt."

My aunt pointed out, sensibly enough, that she'd never had trouble identifying with one or another of the four sons across gender lines, then reminded me that I enjoyed traditional liturgy and was therefore somewhat inconsistent in wanting to mess with the Haggadah this way. Now, I would argue that one must create categories in any sort of liturgical revision project; mine include direct quotes from Scripture (not changing 'em), pieces of poetry (not changing 'em in the original language but reserving the right to adjust the translation a bit for modern comprehension and/or taste), formulaic prayers (willing to change the grammatical endings, add current issues, and make some strategic omissions here and there, but object to leaving them out entirely or wilfully mistranslating them), and pieced-together sections held together only by fairly recent**** custom (have computer, will edit, but will try to avoid deleting whenever possible because I like layers). I would also argue that singing the Four Songs to the tune of "My Darling Clementine" is a lot more disturbing than making them gender-neutral. In this case, however, I didn't argue any of it, largely because my aunt had a good first point, it's her house, and there are other issues I feel much more strongly about.

Still, I do not, precisely, identify with any of the Four Sons. I've been asking questions since I learned how to talk, and they haven't been simple questions for years now, so that narrows it down to the first two sons. My interest in the statutes and customs of the holiday should make me the wise son, but I'm not so sure about that. By definition, as a woman, I almost have to be the wicked son in this context, the one who asks: "What does this service mean to you?" This is wicked, of course, because it implies that the asker is not part of the group performing the service (and, yes, the ambiguity of the English word "service" -- worship or servitude -- applies in Hebrew as well). But I wouldn't've been part of the group performing any Jewish service the vast majority of the time before the 1970s. I was, not coincidentally, born in the '70s; I've read some of the responsa on, for instance, rabbinic ordination of women, and yet I have trouble imagining -- and, when I spend time with Orthodox acquaintances, mixing comfortably in -- a world where women couldn't be ordained if they wanted to. I'm glad I was born in the '70s.

That, by the way -- and I didn't tell my aunt this, either -- is why I prefer Rav's beginning to the Maggid to Shmuel's. Shmuel starts from "we were slaves to Pharaoh in Egypt"; liberation in question is physical and political, and is pretty well over. Rav starts from "long ago, our ancestors worshipped idols beyond the Euphrates"; the liberation in question is spiritual, and it's entirely possible to argue from the traditional Haggadah text that it's still ongoing. Of course, both beginnings are in the Haggadah proper. I like layers, and I like overdetermination, and that's why the Four Sons will probably stay sons.

But I haven't ruled out the possibility of adding a song about Four Daughters.

* -- For the non-Jewishly-literate, the Haggadah is the Big Book O' Passover Fun which gets everyone through the parts of the Passover Seder not devoted solely to eating. The traditional Haggadah ossified somewhere after the sixteenth century; I'm extremely fond of medieval liturgical poetry myself, but a little updating is common enough in most families. Making one's own Haggadah from scratch -- with some scanning thrown in for the Hebrew parts, because I am not learning the Hebrew keyboard layout if I can possibly help it -- is not entirely normal, but well within the bounds of sanity.
** -- Actually, it doesn't. Well, sort of -- if you take the three completely unrelated verses used to answer the sons' questions, squint at them, and remember an offhand comment about answers in Mishnah Pesachim 10. But even by my screamingly liberal standards of exegetical freedom, this is a stretch.
*** -- More precisely: "Therefore, you should strike his teeth and tell him...."
**** -- In my liturgical revisions, "fairly recent" means after the middle of the sixteenth century (that is, Aharonic). Your mileage may vary.

Even though I'm putting off my grading, the universe loves me. The rain is melting away the snow, I'm off to Coast City this coming weekend (not, sadly, the Coast many of my fannish acquaintances will be on, but still), and the latest batch of Angel spoilers is not only straight off of my S4 wish list, but is just so damn cool. (The following post contains spoilers for Angel S4 through episode 18 and for the Revelation to Saint John the Divine through chapter 22.)

Now, I'm not 100% sure about these spoilers -- in light of the other information we've gotten about upcoming episodes, they presuppose that an awful lot has happened in Ep. 17, although I suppose there might also be more to Ep. 16 than the Gunn/Gwen plot. But they're internally consistent, they come from a fairly reliable source, and I really really want to believe them. If these come true, I will take back every nasty thing -- OK, every nasty thing except for my comments about "Provider," which were completely justified -- every other nasty thing I've said about Angel recently. See, my fannish buttons aren't pushed by deftly portrayed romance, or slick production values, or even clever plotting (although that's always nice). But give me a good juicy apocalypse borrowed in large part from the middle of the least canonical book in the canonical New Testament, and I'm in loooooove.

[Edited to note in passing that, judging from the reaction over in the Angel-centric sections of my LiveJournal friends list, I'm the only person who thinks this way. Lucky me. ;)]

So... we've got the Beast down, Angelus resouled, and DisCordy temporarily out of action (probably so Charisma Carpenter can give birth -- drat these actors with lives outside the show!), but instead we have Angel being set up for yet another rude awakening, which is always good, and the mytharc is going to be awesome. Gina Torres (late of Firefly) is playing a media-savvy Antichrist figure (for those playing along at home, yes, we've already had a beast coming up out of the earth and -- 'way back in "Deep Down" -- Angel(us) himself coming up out of the sea, to say nothing of Cordelia the Whore of Babylon). We've got the ongoing destruction of Babylon the Great, fitting in with the fact that the sun's blotting out, the rain of blood, and the earth's shaking took place a few chapters episodes ago. Best of all, we now have Fred -- who I was just wishing would have a decent plot arc -- cast as Persecuted Witness Number Two or, just possibly, the woman clothed with the sun (even though Darla's the one who gave birth to the miracle child), fleeing into the wilderness after she learns the truth about Antichrist from Persecuted Witness Number One, a young man who is clearly Not Long For This World named... John.

Yes, it's obvious that someone at Mutant Enemy has been reading either their Bible -- did I mention that the casting sides also include a "Martha Jane"? -- or the Left Behind books (which would also explain that new character said to be showing up for May sweeps on Buffy, come to think of it). Me, I'm looking forward to seeing (a) what's going to happen to Connor, because there's no way he's not important here, and (b) how they're going to get out of this one without actually finding themselves in the heavenly Jerusalem and/or the lake of burning fire.

If Fred sprouts eagle wings, though, don't say I didn't warn you.

Alternate entry title: What I Did Instead of Grading Essay Questions and While Printing Out Grant Applications. Yes, it's one of Those Days. I am trying to work from home while narrowly resisting the urge to put a vacation message on my school email saying "Dear Student: Can't it wait until class tomorrow morning?" It finally stopped snowing, but I do not happen to like snow, except in cones and cups topped with flavored syrup during the summer months. Finally, my favorite TV pasttimes, Buffy and Angel, are ticking me off lately, even though I'm mostly enjoying watching them. Let me see if I can explain why without resorting to advance spoilers or scary academic jargon. This is going to take a little detour -- but give me two paragraphs, OK?

The later Middle Ages produced a lot of saints' lives and prospective saints' lives in Western Christendom; although increasingly and unprecedentedly large numbers of the saint-candidates were female, 99% of the saints' lives were written by men. And one of the things that almost everyone has noticed about these saints' lives by now is that lives of female saints and lives of male saints tend to be cast in very different molds. Some of this has to do with simple fact, of course; no woman would be able to hold offices in the Church (although certain of them did quite a lot to affect and influence said Church's officers), and very few of them were able to lead armies (Joan of Arc, who did, ran into a few problems). But the overwhelming trends in these accounts are crystal-clear: men demonstrate sanctity through their actions, while women demonstrate sanctity through their bodies. Men go on crusade or dispute against heretics; women fast or subsist only on the Eucharist, develop Christ-like wounds,* and experience a full range of somatic phenomena indicating the progression of their attachment to Christ. This is a massive generalization, of course, and I'm sure many of my medievalist readers can offer counterexamples, but it's a largely accurate generalization.

Please bear in mind that this distinction appears mostly in texts written by men and doesn't necessarily correspond to lived experience; as a matter of fact, on the occasions when we have a holy woman's own writing about herself to compare with the account of her male hagiographer, the man has almost always invented or rearranged elements to play up the corporeal component of female sanctity. OK, so, wacky medieval people... but wait. You promised to give me two paragraphs, remember? The problem here is that textual representations of gender and sanctity apparently haven't changed enough since the fourteenth century or thereabouts. Specifically, I'm disturbed to find that most of the female characters on Buffy and Angel are being increasingly reduced to bodies, usually with a relationship or two (although not to Christ) attached. I can name three or four female characters about whom my current thinking is as follows: "I'd really like her if it weren't for all that pseudo-romantic tripe they keep putting her through." I can only think of one male character I feel that way about (and as I point out later, he's being feminized in terms of plot elements); even those male characters for whom I think a romantic subplot is ill-conceived usually have other things going for or against them. (The following analysis contains spoilers through Buffy "First Date" and Angel "Calvary.")

Take Fred on Angel (please!). There's no reason why Fred shouldn't be the favorite character of geek-girls everywhere: she's smart, resourceful, attractive but not unrealistically so, loves to eat unhealthy food, wears glasses, has slightly clueless but basically cool parents, and has rescued pretty much every other character on the show at one point or another. Heck, even someone as well-adjusted as myself felt a little cheer bubbling up when Fred prepared to throw her scheming advisor into the interdimensional portal through which he had sucked other promising graduate students. (Metaphor? What metaphor?) Fred should be the next Hermione Granger, or at least the next Willow Rosenberg, the smart girl whom everyone secretly wants to be. Instead, Fred's character development got sucked into the propeller of developing tension between two male characters, both of whom had (and still have) crushes on her. Once she finally picked a guy, we had the tedious subplots of Combining Relationship With Work, Figuring Out The Feelings Of The Other Guy, Combating Continued Jealousy From The Boyfriend, Being Saved By Both Guys Putting Aside Differences And Working Together, Letting The Other Guy Kiss Her For No Apparent Reason, and now Breaking Up With The First Guy But Refusing To Get Together With The Other Guy Because He Slept With Someone Else. Now, if this were Sweet Valley High: The Series, I'm sure these would be valid plot choices, but Angel is supposed to be primarily a show about adults who are dedicated to fighting (or at least holding a defensive position against) the forces of capital-e Evil. There's nothing the matter with some romance in there -- I like romance, really I do -- but how is it that Fred's two suitors get non-Fred-related subplots, action-packed fights, clever deductions during research, etc., whereas every time Fred says anything it's made to be All About Her Choice? Poor Fred. She couldn't even wreak vengeance on her former graduate advisor without those stupid boyfriend types getting in the way.

The other women on Angel are even easier to define in somatic terms. Last season, we had Cordelia the Seer, whose physical symptoms of divine visions (not, by the way, entirely unlike those in late medieval hagiography, especially with the suffering) eventually caused her to transcend humanity, performing miracles right and left by touching people. This season, Cordelia's back and seemingly human, but her "visions" are still accompanied by various physical "tells," and she's also locked lips (and/or other body parts) or come within a hair's breadth of doing so with one of her two suitors in -- counting dream sequences -- a good two-thirds of this season's episodes.** In the recurring lineup, we also have (had?) Lilah the Evil Lawyer, whose role in previous seasons had mostly involved being threatened by Angel, but who, in S4, gets full-on sex scenes with Wesley followed by an unhealing gut wound and now an apparent stabbing. And then there's new girl Gwen Raiden (aka "Spandexia"), whose attractively packaged powers of electricity make it impossible for anyone except Angel to touch her (whereupon they of course have sexual tension). Contrast Lilah and Gwen with the only major male recurring character of S4, the demon Krevlornswath, who seems to be blissfully free of romantic entanglements and who recovered in record time from having a hole drilled in his head earlier in the season. Or consider how many things besides the same girl stand between Angel and Connor, or Wes and Gunn. See the difference?

Over on Buffy, the last half-dozen episodes have mostly been the Buffy-'n'-Spike show, with a lot of excess characters and a villain who seems to have no coherent plan except to precipitate lots of plot devices and bad speeches. In recent episodes, Buffy (who used to be a fascinating, multidimensional character) got to demonstrate her feelings for Spike Above All Else and engage in some quality cuddling time yet again, Willow's recovery from her plunge into dark magic at the end of last season got turned into a plot about her new relationship with Slayer-in-Training Kennedy, and Anya... well, Anya didn't offer to have sex with someone for one whole episode, which makes a nice change from her characterization since "Selfless" (when I could've sworn she made the opposite choice). There was a villain or two, but they didn't amount to much. Meanwhile, our male characters were characterized by, if anything, lack of bodily contact and an important outside mission (Giles); frustration of romantic impulses, ability to repair items the women couldn't handle, and comic relief (Xander); and... oh, heck, I'm not even going to talk about Andrew except to say that I don't see the point. Principal Wood at least has a nifty storyline in the making. And Spike, of course, is the exception I mentioned above. Spike is getting a sort of feminized treatment this season: regularly in need of getting rescued, lots of focus on his partly clothed and/or agonized body, lots of physical suffering, every concern subordinated to his Twue Wuv. Mercifully, this last point isn't too far out of character for Spike, even if it seems as though the acquisition of a soul and possession by the First Evil should've had a teeny-tiny impact -- but the rest of it's starting to bore me, just as it does when it happens to a female character.***

So... yeah. I'm frustrated, because we should've made progress in how we imagine men and women over the past half-millennium just as we've made progress (perhaps not enough, but some) in how we treat men and women in everyday life. After all, I can own property, vote, control my salary, start in almost any profession I choose, wander around town unaccompanied at will, and pay for my own dinner after a date -- which, by the way, I'm fairly sure Buffy failed to do the other night. Why can't the supposedly kickass female characters on my favorite TV shows do as much?

Mind you, at least Buffy -- and, to a lesser extent, Angel -- are periodically aware of the problems they perpetuate. But that discussion will have to wait until after tomorrow's (or, in my case, Friday's) Buffy, which -- contrary to the impression I may have created -- I am actually looking forward to very much.

* -- Yes, after Francis started the fashion -- but Francis is the exception to all these rules, and his vitae (especially the early ones) read remarkably "feminine," as everyone from Caroline Walker Bynum forward has pointed out.
** -- The exceptions: "Ground State," "The House Always Wins," "Long Day's Journey," and now "Calvary."
*** -- And now I'll be in the corner scrubbing out my brain to get rid of the inevitable comparison between St. Francis and Spike. But before I do that, please observe the prominent role nakedness plays in both conversion narratives. And the strategically placed wounds. And... this is what people mean by "special hell," right?

No, I haven't dropped off the face of the earth; I've just been delivering mini-lectures on random cultural topics to my classes and some local Torah study groups instead of this blog. (If you read enough commentaries, all that stuff about constructing the Tabernacle is actually kinda nifty.) Also, I keep having to meet job candidates for the department, I'm reading Torah again on Saturday, I offered to pick up some kiddush supplies at various kosher establishments before they close for Shabbat, and I still have a book review to pound out and a classful of tests to grade. I may get around to back-posting over the weekend, or I may not.

This post, however, has been brought to you by the realization that nobody told me to go watch Madonna's "Die Another Day" video until this morning. Now, I'm militantly indifferent to music videos (I tend to think that they distract from or trivialize otherwise good songs), but I'm fond of Madonna -- have been ever since I encountered the "Like A Prayer" video during an undergrad lecture in a compromising position with Donne's Holy Sonnet XIV ("Batter my heart") and Teresa of Avila's description of the fourth stage of prayer in her Life.* Most of Madonna's songs aren't too terribly deep, so there's nothing for the video to trivialize -- and, heck, the tunes are catchy. I think I own two of her albums without even trying. But the woman has her finger (or possibly some other body part) on the pulse of our greater pop-cultural symbolic mishmash, and her more overtly religious videos are neverending sources of entertainment for yours truly.

So... "Die Another Day," for those of you even more out of the loop than I am, is the title soundtrack to the most recent James Bond movie, in which Madonna apparently has a small acting role as well. This probably accounts for the fight scenes (well, some of the fight scenes) the presence of brutish interrogators, and the astonishing number of large glass cases smashed during the making of the video. I'm not so sure about the gigantic swords, axes, and what looked for all the world like a blowgun. And, really, I have no clue what the phrase "Sigmund Freud" is doing in there. Or the thing with the drowning. But I am downright hurt that nobody thought to let me know that Ms. Ciccone (a) features a crystal-clear visual comparison between strapping on tefillin and being strapped into an electric chair; (b) engages in extended, apparently mental, dueling with some sort of evil twin/psychic double; (c) has a temporary tattoo of a supposed name of God**, which is Wrong in at least three different ways;*** and (d) uses some combination of killing her black-clad double and the tattoo to escape from the electric chair at the moment the switch is thrown.

Possibly the only thing more entertaining than analyzing the video -- you can view it off Yahoo's page for the Bond movie, here -- is reading the responses by "some scholars of Judaism" -- who, apparently, consist of people from the Anti-Defamation League, MyJewishLearning.com, and Madonna's own hangout, the L.A. Kabbalah Center -- in the New York Daily News, speculating that the video might be offensive to some Orthodox Jews because... wait for it... it shows a woman putting on something like tefillin.

Tefillin are pricey, which is the main reason I don't own a pair at the moment. Madonna's new album, on the other hand, would probably fit into my budget just dandy. I'll see if I can pick it up on my way back from the Kosher deli Friday morning.

* -- This, come to think of it, explains a disturbing amount about my psyche. But what's sad is that "Like A Prayer" is now a cultural relic; if I tried to show it to my students -- and the thought has crossed my mind a time or two -- they wouldn't even think I was hip. At least, that's my assumption. Any college-age readers out there care to weigh in?
** -- The name, FYI, is lamed-aleph-vav, one of the 72 three-letter combinations derived from reading Exodus 14:19-21 while on crack (in the metaphorical sense only because crack is a twentieth-century invention). It's supposedly unpronounceable, which is just as well. The number one Google hit for info on Madonna's tattoo and the source of the information about verses from Exodus, is a fascinating blog called Ghost of a Flea, which is going up on the blogroll whenever I get around to it.
*** -- Having a tattoo with a name of God is wrong (unless, of course, you want to practice dark magic, but we'll go into peculiar Jewish stories about Jesus some other time). Having a temporary anything with a name of God is wrong. And, finally, "secrecy" and "esotericism" don't precisely go with "global video release." On the other hand, taboo-smashing is a fairly well-established trait of radical Kabbalistic movements from the early modern period (climaxing, so to speak, with the Sabbateans, and eventually trickling down into Reform Judaism for those still playing along at home). I seriously doubt that that's what the Kabbalah Center people are after, though.