(This is the long-delayed Angel S4 retrospective post; it contains no spoilers for the coming season other than widely-trumpeted casting news. Read at your own risk.)

I really enjoyed Angel S4, but I find myself nervous now that it's over and I've finally watched the finale episode. The seasonal arc was a thing of beauty -- well, apart from the ludicrously pointless appearance of Angelus at midseason and Charisma Carpenter's frequent confusion of Secretly Evil with Openly Bored. Still, S4 salvaged the worst of S3 -- from Connor's birth to Cordelia's glowiness to Wesley's isolation -- and retconned most of the show's history into a thought-provoking but ultimately unprovable conspiracy. It offered all the characters a chance to develop, and their actors a chance to shine. It ripped entire storylines from the Book of Revelation. It had some good research scenes. It referenced first-season prophecies. It ended with the strong suggestion that the Powers That Be weren't all they were cracked up to be and with our heroes apparently selling out, leading to a much more suspenseful summer than last year's "cliffhanger." S4 was, in short, spiffy, although some of that is by comparison to the train wreck that was the end of S3.

Still, the characters have changed a lot, and although I'm sure that's a good thing, I'm not sure I'm watching the same show any longer. I just barely recognize Angel, but I've never watched the show for Angel, and so much of his personality changes chameleon-like with his surroundings in any case. Cordelia wasn't really on the show this season, and I didn't care for the character using her body (although I loved the Evil Maternity Outfit). Wesley's character development was at least somewhat continuous, but his current Badass Demon Hunter persona is still a bit jarring from time to time.* Gunn... well, Gunn's never had a consistent character on which to build, although I thought the combination of "Supersymmetry" and "Players" gave us some potential insights this season; like everyone else, I have no clue what the deal was with that panther in the season finale. Fred finally got out of her godawful romantic triangle plot and made it back to where the character seemed to be heading at her introduction: interesting, smart, and more than slightly feral. Lilah has really good potential for next season. I enjoyed adult Connor but am glad he seems to be out of the picture, and I don't understand the Lorne adoration at all; I found him much more appealing as a recurring chaotic-neutral bartender than as a regular-character AI camp follower.

Then there's S5, and the stated "retooling" of the show around new jobs at Wolfram & Hart, and the huge wrinkle of James Marsters (as Spike, somehow or other) joining the regular cast. Since Spike hasn't been written consistently or in balance with the rest of his show since sometime early in Buffy S6, and since Marsters has considerable acting talent, I'm genuinely curious -- if a bit apprehensive -- about how he'll affect the Angel cast dynamic. I'm okay with the other casting changes, though, provided that the relevant storylines get a bit of closure, and provided that the ensuing show is still recognizable to its longtime fans. Since the S4 wish list worked so well, I'm going to try one for S5:

(1) More clarification on good, evil, and the Powers That Be. Jasmine was an excellent start, and working for W&H should help.
(2) More details on prophecy (we have at least two major ones up in the air) and fulfillment.
(3) Character continuity, especially for Gunn and Fred, who haven't had much.
(4) A decent sendoff for Cordelia -- leaving her in a coma all season just ain't right. Kill her off, give her a sitcom career, have her return to rule Pylea, have her elope with Xander to Cleveland, whatever; just let her exit with dignity and a couple of good one-liners.
(5) More Lilah, with the option of regular-character status open. The show needs more strong women, and the character's certainly got some great past history going with most of the cast.
(6) Storylines for the regular cast which do not center around romance, especially intracast romance. Wesley and Lilah doing the snarky doomed-lovers routine is plenty, thanks.
(7) The reappearance of recurring characters from past seasons. I've never lived in L.A., but I've lived in some good-sized cities, and the larger the city, the more noticeable it is when you keep running into the same people. In its new W&H setting, I'm afraid of Angel getting as claustrophobic as Buffy did in its last couple of seasons. (Bonus points if Lindsey comes back, because that would just be... perfect.)
(8) Whatever Angel did to rewrite Connor's past history had better not hold for his friends, because there's just no way they can retcon a remotely sane set of plotlines and relationships without the last season-and-a-half taking place. The show has already burned through its share of Get Out Of Plot Free tokens; I want to see them tackle this head-on. Besides, it's an ideal character-driven sweeps plot just waiting to happen, and better that than an Angel/Buffy/Spike "her choice changed everything" triangle. Better anything, in fact.

So... I'm not exactly confident about S5, but that's partially because my expectations have risen from their record lows this time last season. At least there is another season, which is a happy thought. And I'll definitely start out watching: W&H's holographic/magical volumes are just barely OK, but there had better not be research scenes involving solely Google or I will throw things at the screen.

* -- I am very probably biased on this point, because I prefer endearingly geeky to dangerous and unshaven -- but I don't expect TV to cater to my one-woman demographic, which is just as well.

One of the most famous questions attributed to the medieval scholastics -- used to belittle them, of course, and by extension to belittle the modern academy -- is "how many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" Regardless of your personal views on the reality of angels (or pins), this is not a pointless a question as it sounds, nor is it a completely imaginary one.* The context for such a question arose in the early thirteenth century at the University of Paris: Latin scholars trying to incorporate the recently translated metaphysical works of Aristotle and his Arabic commentators ran up against the Averroistic emphasis on the inextricable unity of matter and form. Philosophers called this doctrine "hylomorphism"; in a hylomorphic universe there could be nothing -- no object, being, creature or creation -- without accompanying matter. God, the Unmoved Mover, was a special case for Aristotle, but neither he nor Ibn Rushd allowed for the possibility of immaterial bodies otherwise.** Angels, which had traditionally been identified as immaterial intelligences or beings, were therefore impossible.

Thus, the question "How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" is not insoluble; rather, it is a test case for the limits of hylomorphism and has two possible correct answers: (1) if you believe that everything must be a composite of form and matter, the number of angels will depend on the size of the angels' matieral bodies versus the size of the pinhead; (2) if you believe that immaterial bodies are possible, then an infinite number of angels can dance on anything they please. I am also beginning to view this question as a test case for whether or not someone is paying reasonably close attention to the humanistic assumptions and implications of contemporary technology, because whether or not you believe that there can be immaterial bodies becomes sort of vital (so to speak) when it comes to questions of identity, embodiment, and existence in cyberspace. And the categories of form and matter aren't precisely out of fashion these days, either. Witness the term "meatworld," coined by William Gibson as part of an imagined futuristic patois and swiftly gaining ground as a respectable way of referring to non-cyberspatial existence.

I've joked that I dislike the term "meatworld" because it leaves out the vegetarians. What I really dislike about it is twofold, although the two points are related. On one hand, "meat" is clearly a stand-in for "matter," and not an especially flattering one (think about the contexts in which you might be described as "meat" -- are any of them flattering?). On the other hand, "meatworld" presupposes -- you guessed it -- a thoroughgoingly anti-hylomorphic stance, the sort of thing philosophers would probably wave a hand at and call "Platonic." (I'm using scarequotes because the "Platonic" tradition probably started with Empedocles, included Aristotle in some complicated ways (remember the God-exemption!) and got major assists from Stoicism and various elements of Ancient Near Eastern mythology; it's a trifle unfair to blame several thousand years' worth of developments on Plato.) One of "Platonism"'s central tenets was the notion that being is fundamentally distinct from matter.*** Anything in its most fully realized ("ideal") state would be pure form, and the less material something was, the more real and the higher up in the universe it would turn out to be. The underlying value system here is pretty difficult to avoid, and in short order (by the first couple of centuries of the Common Era at the latest), thinkers around the Mediterranean started turning out visions of a completely dualistic universe in which matter and the material world were inextricably associated with evil.

I don't mean to suggest that this was the only way people thought, or could think, about the universe; I will simply argue that it was a popular, and highly compelling, way of thinking. Dualism's handy that way. Occasionally it was flipped on its head -- I think that's part of what attracts people to The Matrix, although that's another post -- and occasionally there were important people and documents which insisted on blurring the line (the prologue to the Gospel of John comes rather strongly to mind). Still, the line existed, and it continues to exist as long as we talk about "the meatworld" versus... well, it's funny, but have you noticed there's not a matching term? Nobody wants to call cyberspace "the airworld" or "the spirit-world" or "the world of forms"; that would make some of the implicit assumptions in the term "meatworld" a little too clear.

I spent much of the Digital Genres Conference trying to think up value-free alternatives to "meatworld" and failing miserably. Of course, I realize that most of the people using it in conversation probably aren't trying to make a strong normative judgment; they're talking about the "meatworld" because their only obvious alternative is the opposite extreme, RL or "real life," which clearly dismisses everything happening online as "imaginary" and therefore lesser (That, too, is Platonic language, but I won't go there just now.) "Meat" as an isolated adjective sounds even less pleasant (not to mention less grammatical), but there's also no convenient value-free adjectival form: I've heard "analog," presumably to go with "digital," but the fact is that there's nothing especially "analog" about our offline world as opposed to cyberspace (not to mention that, in an electronic context, "analog" is pretty much always lesser-quality input than "digital," so we're back in a value system).**** I thought about "earthworld" or "earthspace" (to go with "cyberspace," natch): it would be less obviously pejorative, but it isn't quite ideal, since it remains focused on the material aspects of offline existence. I may be an avid gardener, but my offline existence involves an awful lot of idea-gathering, as does all of yours. Also, it's not like the Earthworld was a happy place to be on Doctor Who.

So I'm taking suggestions: I want a descriptive term for non-cyberspatiality that doesn't imply that one mode of existence is superior to the other. Once I get that, I'll see what I can do to explain how many digital identities can dance on the head of a microchip.

* -- My understanding is that this precise phrasing never appears as a scholastic quaestio, showing up only in Reformation-era anti-scholastic polemic. On the other hand, there are some very, very close matches to this question in the thirteenth century, and those are what I'm talking about.
** -- Please note that these two sentences constitute a vast and sweeping generalization which ignores a number of pertinent issues, especially the whole concept of prima materia or prime matter.
*** -- An even more vast and sweeping generalization, covering several thousand years, and ignoring a whole heck of a lot.
**** -- What's interesting about the world "analog" is that its technical use has almost completely eclipsed the standard meaning of "something which is analogous to something else." By that definition -- or according to the understanding in which analog input is continuous while digital input is discrete -- all our human experiences (with or without electronics) are at least somewhat "analog." But I suspect most people's first association with "analog" is like mine: cassette or VCR tape versus CD or DVD. Which would you rather have?

Reading Caveat Lector, I'm glad to see that I'm not the only one suffering from Invisible Adjunct withdrawal (as of this posting, the site is still down). Hopefully the problem is technical and can be resolved soon. Meanwhile, I'm thinking I should be keeping a file of all the good and fairly workable ideas people have had for reforming the academy. What impresses me about these ideas is that I can often figure out what I want to change but can't think of where to start. Namely and to wit, I can't figure out how to start fixing the Number One Thing Graduate Schools Should Be Doing And Aren't. And, no, it's not community relations or self-monitoring abuses of power or job placement or any other of dozens of extremely important things -- although it plays into most of them. If I could have one wish from the Academic-Reform Genie, I'd ask that doctoral programs (especially, but not exclusively, in the humanities) impart a deep-rooted sense of intellectual self-confidence to all their students.

Please note that intellectual self-confidence does not equal arrogance; the latter generally arises from a lack of the former. Intellectual self-confidence does not prevent people from continuing to learn, or realizing that they need to continue learning. Intellectual self-confidence also does not equal (or depend on) some prodigious level of knowledge; it can, I think, be best grounded in a combination of general knowledge and particular expertise, which is why it's handy that the whole point of a doctoral dissertation is original research which contributes materially to the field (if you're not the world's expert on your dissertation topic by the time you've finished, something's wrong). And intellectual self-confidence is precisely what a hefty majority of the folks with whom I went to graduate school have lost -- and it's made them miserable in grad school.

I was fortunate: some combination of parental support, learning, education, career experience, and no doubt a generous helping of natural chutzpah meant that I started graduate school thinking of myself as basically a smart cookie who knew what she was doing academically. Of course, I didn't know everything (as it turned out, I knew even less than I thought I did), but I knew that I knew something of value (as it turned out, I was right). That -- well, that and frequent phone calls to my extra-institutional support network of family and friends, plus the luck of experiencing no serious traumas inside or outside the school during those years -- got me through grad school with whopping long-distance bills but a fairly decent level of confidence in my own intellectual abilities.

Let me be clear here: I am not a poster girl for psychological health, nor am I God's gift to scholarship. I was -- and regularly am -- wrong about a lot of things. I died a thousand deaths every time I got an A minus or a negative comment on a paper. I had days when I wanted to curl up in bed and never move again, or box up all my books* and flee back to my mommy and daddy. I was nervous about seminar presentations, conference papers, qualifying exams, the job market. I even ran into the very occasional professor who wanted me to admit that I Knew Nothing before he (usually he) would grace me with his wisdom -- but I avoided those professors religiously; they were spreading a dumb pedagogical theory (anyone who thinks it's "Socratic" hasn't been reading those dialogues carefully) which gets even dumber in practice. And I was fortunate: I learned a lot, my mentors confirmed that I was learning a lot, and I never came to fundamentally doubt my ability to keep learning or teach what I had already learned. I could tell you how retaining my intellectual self-confidence helped me in practical terms -- applying for and getting grants/jobs/conference gigs I wasn't "supposed" to get, making a favorable impression on potential mentors and colleagues**, having fun during my oral qualifying exams, relaxing during job interviews (well, after that first one). But what's more important -- no, really -- is that I can honestly say that I enjoyed my years in grad school.

What infuriates me is that my experience was apparently abnormal. Okay, there are dysfunctional or exploitative programs, dysfunctional or exploitative advisors, catastrophically bad advisor-student matchups, unpredictable interpersonal traumas outside grad school, lousy timing, and acts of (a really unpleasant) God: any of these can screw up a grad-school experience but good. There are also people who fundamentally aren't interested in what they're doing in grad school (usually they were talked into doing it through a lack of said self-confidence) and people who just don't have, or can't cultivate, the particular set of skills and aptitudes it takes to succeed in the frankly artificial environment of graduate education or in the marginally less artificial environment of academia generally: these folks usually come to hate grad school sooner rather than later. I understand all of these reasons for being miserable in grad school: some might be fixable, some probably aren't, although I'd like to give them all a shot.

And if I waved a magic wand and fixed all those problems, that would leave... oh, most of the people I went to school with. Some of them quit partway through, feeling like failures; some are still at it; some have gotten good academic jobs; some are still looking; some have left the academy. But an awful lot of them -- not necessarily the ones who haven't "succeeded" in academia, either -- an awful lot of them spent or are spending much of grad school in a state of moderate-to-utter misery, convinced that at any moment the entire ivory tower might give voice: "You are a dunce and have no business being here!" Actually, some of my cohort were convinced that that had already happened: they read a lack of funding or caring from their institution or their advisor as confirmation of their own fundamental intellectual inadequacy (rather than, oh, confirmation of the practical inadequacy of the institution or the advisor). And I don't believe that most of these smart, capable people with strong undergraduate records came into grad school with profound psychological problems. Something in the grad-school experience broke them, something I was just arrogant and just lucky enough to avoid.

So how do we fix it? I think it's a systemic problem -- at last, I've found it near-impossible trying to figure out what event was the first straw for most of the people I know. I can tell from experience that being female ups the odds of this particular kind of brokenness, but that doesn't get me far toward the answer -- I gather that most girls exit middle school with less intellectual self-confidence than boys, so that's a whole different area in need of fixing. My own experience was happy, but I can't draw a great many useful morals out of it, and I'm not sure I want to be an exemplar in any case. At bottom, it's a paradox: graduate school, which is supposed to instill intellectual confidence as it transforms students into scholars, does exactly the opposite. But I for one really, really need to repair this particular part of my world. All issues of scholarship, knowledge, formation, and marketability aside, we don't live in grindingly depressing nineteenth-century novels (thank God). Since I started young and got through quick, my time in grad school was merely one-sixth of my lifespan to date -- but life's too short to be miserable for too long.

Any ideas besides turning it all into a musical?

* -- Even at my most despairing, I never seriously thought about giving away -- much less destroying -- books. This has nothing to do with scholarly dedication and everything to do with selfish bibliophilia. ;)
** -- People who need needy people around them are not people whom I need to need. (Three times, fast!)

As any of you who've been reading along with Baraita for awhile know, my mom's side of the family started out Orthodox Jewish at the beginning of the twentieth century: now it's assorted varieties of mainstream American Jewish -- mostly Conservative, but with sizable parties of Reform and (modern) Orthodox, and a handful of goyim marrying in. My father's side of the family started out Methodist at the beginning of the twentieth century: now it's assorted varieties of conservative Christian, mostly Methodist and Baptist but with the occasional Moravian, Catholic, or Seventh-Day Adventist, plus my mom and me.* My parents have been happily married for thirty-one years, no doubt aided by the fact that neither of them spends much time thinking about religion on a day-to-day basis. While I am obviously a throwback to some ancestral stock in that particular regard, about 99% of the time I will affirm that my mixed background is decidedly a good thing. Double the holidays, double the fun, and yes, I could get more serious, but that's a blog unto itself. Suffice it to say that there's really only one area where my two traditions really catch me out: the complexities of food, and more specifically, barbecue.

Now, if you immediately realize why barbecue is a topic for vehement theological disputation, we probably hail from the same Home State. You will enjoy this hilarious (but strongly sectarian) credal statement. (In fact, the rest of you might too -- here's an excerpt:

We believe in only one style,
shredded or chopped,
cooked for 12 hours and eaten with greens.
Eternally begotten from pigs,
hog from hog, pork from pork,
true swine from Lauch Faircloth....

The equally important issue of orthodox ACC expansion will be covered in another Baraita post someday.)

For the rest of you poor souls, or in case the link above gets bloggered, let me emphasize that "barbecue" has been believed at all times everywhere (that matters) to consist of nothing other than hickory-smoked** pulled pork anointed with a sauce composed of vinegar, hot peppers and assorted other spices, and -- here we get at the heart of the Great Porcine Schism -- possibly brown sugar along with ketchup or other tomato products. The with-ketchup variety is Western, or Lexington-style; the without-ketchup variety is Eastern, or Goldsboro-style.*** There tends to be a certain cosmopolitan ecumenism in the urban centers of the Piedmont, but move out into the country a ways and you will find that the contents of the One True Sauce are less and less open to question.

I'm a city girl, but only one generation removed from the heart of Western barbecue territory; I happen to enjoy both styles, although I lean toward the West. However... there's this other side of my family, see? And they're from a part of the country where it's usually okay for Jews to eat crabcakes (preferably at restaurants, and in my mother's childhood only under assumed Gentile names -- my grandfather refused to call in reservations under his own, very Jewish, surname) but where my aunt's family only found out five years ago, as a result of sharing a beach cottage with us for a week, that "grits" were not a form of breakfast meat. My mother's family has nothing to do with pork, never have, never will, and view it with roughly the same enthusiasm they'd view sautéed grubworm. The fact that a good third of that side of the family, including my Aunt Miriam's household, no longer keeps kosher (except during Passover) is blessedly irrelevant. Some things go beyond mere commandment and into the lower realms of prophetic insight.

And so you now realize the pitfall (no pun intended) of intermarriage: I will never be able to realize my childhood dream of a wedding in the neighborhood park with both sides of the family in attendance, a chuppah, and a table full of Lexington-style 'cue. (Of course, there's also the small detail that I don't have a groom in mind, but the only way this could get more complicated is if I married a vegan.) Of more immediate concern is the fact that I have several friends here in Boondoggle who are a few steps more observant than I, and I'd enjoy being able to invite them over to my new house, and... hmmm, I wonder if I could keep one set of dishes for meat, one for milk, and one for treyf (non-kosher foods)? This whole post is giving strangers an inappropriately carnivorous impression of me in any case: I was a vegetarian for about six years as a teenager and a poor graduate student in my 20s, so I don't eat much meat, and when it comes down to it I'd rather skip the meatballs than the Parmesan cheese atop my spaghetti. But I stopped being a vegetarian for the same reason I've never tried keeping full-contact kosher: I'm a sucker for tradition and for hospitality (both values from both sides of the family, for those keeping track). Dietary restrictions are, to put it mildly, in conflict with these values, and just lately -- preparing to move into the new house? Reading too much Leviticus? Reading too much Mary Douglas? -- I've been worrying about this.

Of course, having written it out, I'm suddenly craving two sandwiches, chopped, with extra slaw and a side of hush puppies. And maybe some ice cream left over from Shavuot.

* -- What we do not have is Episcopalians, but that's a class issue.
** -- That's l'chatchila, of course; b'dieved, we also accept slow-cooking. And if anyone except me thought that was hilariously funny, please let me know, because I could use a support group.
*** -- Beef, chicken, or ribs slathered with sauce are good eating, but not barbecue. Grilling hot dogs and hamburgers in your backyard is a "cookout." Mustard-based "low-country barbecue" from the state just south of us is viewed by liberals as a potentially tasty experiment and by conservatives as heretical; it is not, however, barbecue proper.

I slept through services this morning -- a normal sequel to staying up until 3 am the night before arguing about Ruth, but I'm still annoyed. I think I'll use this opportunity to finish up the Why I Like Leviticus post I've been promising for awhile. Thanks to the leap month, we've had more of Leviticus than usual this year -- some portions which are doubled up in ordinary years get separated -- and I think I've led Torah study, read Torah, or done a d'var Torah for a good third of them.

I should start by saying that "Leviticus" is a really unfair name, managing to imply boredom, monotony, and mild irrelevance in a mere four syllables. I like the Hebrew name better: Vayikra, "and [the Lord] called." In Lev. 1:1, the one being called is Moses, but the first Biblical appearance of the word vayikra is Genesis 1:5 ("God called the light Day and the darkness Night"). In English as in Hebrew, "call" clearly has the multiple senses of "speak to" and "identify/name"; there's also more than a hint of "charge/command." During the Book of Callings, then, God calls not only Moses but Aaron, Aaron's sons (only half of whom make it out of the book alive), the Kohanim or priests, the Levites or temple servers, the (all-male, Israelite-born) assembly, and the people with all their children and cattle and possessions and God (we hope) knows what. God also calls purity and impurity, and then starts telling the priests how to call them. Once you get over the sacrifices -- as a good Reform Jew, I find that it helps to think of them as primitive BBQ and to imagine the Kohanim putting together a vinegar-and-hot-pepper sauce -- I keep getting stuck on the idea that God is calling Her people to do (be? become?) something fairly astonishing.

One of the striking things which Mary Douglas points out in her commentaries is that the laws of pollution in Leviticus and Numbers don't quite follow typical standards for a self-selected enclave community (whether in the wilderness of Sin or just after the building of the Second Temple, when the books were likely edited). In Leviticus, pollution happens as a result of everyday (in many cases, unavoidable) acts, and foreigners have no special power to pollute. Let me repeat that: strangers do not pollute, at least not any more than standard-issue Israelites do (and remember, as the editors of Leviticus occasionally do, that not only Israelites but a "mixed multitude" of whoever wanted to skedaddle out of Egypt were wandering in the wilderness). The "son of the Israelite woman" (Lev. 24) is killed for blaspheming God's Name, not being born to an Egyptian father.* Plenty of well-descended Israelites, most spectacularly Aaron's two oldest sons, are also killed for trespasses against God. The laws sound almost egalitarian** sometimes, as when God addresses Himself to "anyone among the Israelites, or among the strangers residing in Israel" (20:2). Indeed, in Leviticus 19 a pro-stranger manifesto of sorts culminates with the blanket commandment to love the stranger as oneself, "for you were strangers in the land of Egypt; I the Lord am your God" (19:34).

On the other hand, God clearly expects some sort of exceptional behavior from the Israelites, and this is where we get into those uncomfortable issues of chosenness and separation. God repeatedly tells Her people -- in general and with ample illustrative detail -- not to behave like the Egyptians, the Canaanites, or any other people around them. Instead, dead in the middle of Leviticus, we have the standard of imitatio Dei around which Jewish ethics are built: "You shall be holy, for I, the Lord your God, am holy" (19:2). "Holy," of course, has the root meaning of "separate," and so when the book of Leviticus opens with detailed regulations about burnt offerings for God and closes with detailed regulations about redeeming people, animals, and possessions offered to or claimed by God, it's clear that it's all talking about the same basic problem: everything has the potential to be God's, but that potential means that we're all stuck in this mind-bogglingly contingent world of purity and impurity, cleanliness and uncleanliness.

Truthfully -- and this won't come as a great shock to my regular readers -- I don't like any of the available translations for the concepts of taharah ("pure," "clean") and tumah ("impure," "unclean"): they all imply an essentialist binarism in which x must be either a or b and that's all there is to say about it. There are structures which work that way, but the two states Leviticus is describing are considerably more complex. Anything can become "pure"; anything*** can also become "impure" -- the animal can develop a blemish, the maker of vows can fall short of the necessary sum, the land can be tilled and harvested (except for the corners left for the poor and stranger) six years out of seven. There are even middle states involving suspected-but-not-yet-confirmed or suspected-but-unconfirmable impurity. Even the priestly experts, who take over God's function of calling heads or tails for any given object/person/place and time, are susceptible to this uncertainty; in fact, they're vulnerable to state-switching even more easily than the average Joe. (One begins to feel sorry for them, free BBQ notwithstanding.)

Also, even though my immediate response to four-fifths of Leviticus is that I can't imagine structuring my life around a bunch of archaic purity regulations,**** there's something impressive about the sheer mindfulness they require. This is a "calling" in the grand, vocational sense: it's not the kind of religion you can do on the weekend and ignore the rest of the week. Leviticus is written for an agrarian society, and figuring harvest percentages in minute detail was as much part of a daily work experience for the Israelites as turning on a computer is for many of us. But were these rules ever followed? That isn't just a nasty biblical-scholar-type question; the rabbis tackled it, too, and their answer was occasionally "no." (For instance, one strand of opinion -- BT Sanhedrin 71a -- states that no house was ever afflicted with tzara'at, the word we inexplicably translate as "leprosy"; the information about locating and cleansing such houses in Lev. 14:33-53 exists only for our edification.) This shouldn't really come as a huge shock -- none of us doubts that a human society is going to have a tough time following "love your neighbor as yourself" -- but we're all too easily fooled into thinking that the "purely physical" commandments were easy (if perhaps annoying) to perform and should be correspondingly easy for us to ignore in favor of the good parts of the Bible. It doesn't work that way -- God's calling is, depending on your perspective, joyfully inclusive or woefully unselective. It all matters.*****

Perhaps I am naturally inclined to like Leviticus: if God is a control freak, I've got imitatio Dei down cold. But I think it's more than that. My favorite thing about Leviticus is the way it replicates our jumbled, messy world, with its constant blending of material and spiritual, with its ever-changing patchwork of purity and impurity. As such, Leviticus speaks to my lived reality in a way that prophecy or narrative sometimes doesn't. The more I study this book, the more I realize that, sure enough, God called it.

* -- Here we will (temporarily) ignore several millennia of rabbinic commentary which insist on making a connection. If the Romans had just squashed your hopes of rebuilding your temple, you'd be kind of xenophobic too.
** -- If you're male, that is. My feminist reading of Leviticus is going to be several more years in the making, although I have remembered that one seriously worthwhile thing about Jeremiah is his description of God as a mikvah.
*** -- With the exception of God (including God's Presence in the Tabernacle). God is absolute; everything else is relative. One starts to get just a glimpse of how the Israelites moved from monolatry (worshipping only one God) to monotheism (believing in only one God).
**** -- On the other hand, those of you currently congratulating yourselves on how far advanced our society has become are asked to spend a minute contemplating the significance of the phrase "feminine hygiene."
***** -- Which does not stop me from wondering whether it's possible to argue by parallel structure (gezeirah shavah) that the laws of niddah were only intended for edification as well. ;)

Speaking of holidays and interreligious dialogue, I never before realized that wishing someone a merry Christmas in Yiddish allows you to choose between phrases which mean "birth of the goyische messiah"* and "card game." Which of these is a funnier description of Christmas I can't say.

See the post and comments for this languagehat entry for further clarification. (And while you're there, read about Aristotle on blogs. You won't be sorry.)

* -- All I can do in Yiddish is curse, complain, describe food, and ask the Four Questions at the Seder, but I know that "goyische" is untranslatable.

From the My Religion Is Cooler Than Everyone Else's Religion department: I just bought ice cream for honest-to-God religious reasons. So there.

No, seriously: tonight's the beginning of Shavuot, when especially crazy pious Jews stay up all night studying (there's a traditional set of excerpts from sacred texts, or you can roll your own) and eating dairy products. "Dairy products" has customarily meant blintzes or cheese-filled kreplach (i.e. ravioli) or cheesecake, but what the heck, I'm a liberal Jew -- lowfat Rocky Road will just have to do. Other compromises make me less happy: Temple Boondoggle is holding their study party on Friday night instead of Thursday, which makes good practical sense for people who have to work Friday morning, but irritates me. (On the other hand, I didn't make it to the planning meeting for this shindig -- it was during the early-May period of conference-and-finals insanity -- so I suppose I should relax, enjoy my total lack of responsibility for this weekend, and plot make plans for next year. Maybe a party in my new house?)

Shavuot is one of those Jewish holidays that's come down in the world. In Temple days, it was one of the three great pilgrimage festivals complete with special grain offerings, and it coincided with the wheat harvest and first fruits in ancient Israel. That's all you'll find on it in the Torah. Sometime fairly early, though -- possibly as far back as the First Temple -- Shavuot was identified with the anniversary of Israel's receiving the Torah at Sinai. After the destruction of the Second Temple, this interpretation became the predominant one, and the result is a frankly schizophrenic holiday, featuring elaborate and largely unconvincing Sinai-related explanations for why we read the Book of Ruth (which basically takes place during a harvest season), eat dairy products (and occasionally cheese bread),* and decorate things with greenery. Modern liberal synagogues also tend to use this holiday for a Confirmation ceremony (yes, we borrowed it from the Christians) celebrating the end of formal Hebrew education for high-schoolers; this has absolutely nothing to do with either Sinai or agriculture. My Confirmation year was one of the ones I made it to religious school for, and one of my fondest memories of that year came from making the rabbi squirm as I demanded to know why he wouldn't let me refer to God as "She" while I was supposedly leading part of the service.**

Confirmation aside, I doubt that most Jews get excited about Shavuot; of course, most Jews aren't me and therefore don't get excited over a long history of people arguing about exactly when the seven weeks ("shavuot") mentioned in Leviticus 23:15 are being counted from. (Short version: mainstream Rabbinical Judaism follows the Pharisees and counts from the second day of Passover, but the Karaites follow the Sadducees and count from the Sunday during Passover. Western Christians usually*** count from the Sunday during Passover, too -- or, rather, they count from Easter, which is how you wind up at Pentecost. Orthodox Christians... okay, that's too complicated.) I'm not so thrilled about the calculations per se as interested in the situations you get when two groups are living side by side with basically the same sacred calendar, only a few days off from each other. How do they deal with celebrations? With fast days? With their kids' friends from the other tradition? With intermarriages? And where on earth would anyone get the idea that this is a new set of questions? Just... wondering.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go observe the holiday by coming up with a plausible connection between Sinai and hot fudge sauce. (Dulce de leche is a gimme.)

* -- Depending on which story you follow, the cheesecake is either because Sinai was where the promise of "a land flowing with milk and honey" started, because the Torah is compared to "milk and honey" in the traditional Jewish exegesis of Canticles 4:11, because the Jewish people stayed at Sinai so long their milk turned into cheese, because one celebrates the rebirth of receiving the Torah by consuming baby food i.e. milk, or because the Jewish people suddenly started keeping kosher at Sinai and -- since they couldn't kasher their pots on Shabbat -- had to consume a dairy meal. Some bright soul has also pointed out that the Hebrew word for "milk" adds up to 40, the number of days Moses spent on Sinai (because, hey, it's not like they use the number 40 anywhere else in the Bible!). Me, I think the likeliest story is the one pointing out that Shavuot took place shortly after calving and lambing and thus at a time of serious milk production -- but I like to offer a different explanation for each slice of cheesecake I consume. ;)
** -- Truthfully, that's my second fondest memory; my fondest memory came immediately afterwards, when a previously unfriendly classmate approached me and asked, with some concern, whether the debate had been really important to me. I told him that it wasn't -- I'd probably argue it a lot further now, but I've always had a good grasp on the fact that God exceeds personal pronouns, and I mostly wanted to get the rabbi's goat for refusing to allow us to actually, y'know, lead the service instead of offering carefully selected English readings. But it was astonishingly nice to know that somebody else cared about my well-being, if not about liturgical inclusivity. (There are, in fact, some interesting gender issues surrounding Shavuot in the milieu which brought us the all-nighter -- the Jewish people is an anxious bride, God is the groom, and the Torah is a marriage contract -- but that's a post for another year.)
*** -- "Usually" because the last rule of figuring Easter dates is that Easter Sunday cannot [ed.] can almost never fall on the first day of Passover; therefore, if the first day of Passover falls on a Sunday, Easter gets pushed forward one more week. At least, I think that's right -- Easter calculations make my head spin. [Ed: See comments for further elaboration.]

In case anyone has been trying to access Baraita for most of the day... I'm terribly sorry. Here -- go take a look at the Hello Kitty Tarot, make your Sanity roll, and everything will feel better. Or possibly not.

At any rate, welcome to the long-threatened Vaguely Talmudic layout.* I'm not a very monochromatic person, so the current state of the page feels odd, but it is a lot easier on the eyes. (Also, I finally set the font size so that you can change it from most browsers and so that it's decent-sized even in IE. I'm already about as nearsighted as I can get, but there's no reason the rest of you should have to suffer.)

I think most of the problems are ironed out now, except that the borders are still doing peculiar things in Opera (any ideas?), the heading starts layering if you create an incredibly narrow window (not so much my problem at this point), I haven't put in a searchbar yet (eventually), and I've given up on Netscape 4.x for reasons best summarized as "Netscape 4.x makes Baby Jesus cry."

Oh, and I'm taking suggestions on what (widely accessible) font will most accurately evoke Rashi script (scroll down to #7 on that page) -- only, of course, in the Roman alphabet and at a very small size.

Tomorrow, I will be doing something more fun than wrestling with CSS -- translating seventeenth-century Latin, for instance, or stabbing myself with a dull knife.**

* -- The Vilna Talmud -- look at the "Rashi script" link up above if you're curious -- has five, count'em five columns; it's also designed under the premise that Rashi and the Tosafists will be longer than the Talmud proper, which is fine except that I'd really rather my blog were in central position (hey, baraitot made it into the Gemara!), and the last howevermany entries of my blog are almost always going to be a lot longer than my blogroll. Someday, I will decide I can't live without inline comments, and they'll wind up in the Rashi position instead, but the same problem will arise.
** -- Which would presumably render it non-Kosher, and... whoa, I'm tired.

(post-DGC)

(1) How nice of everyone to keep my names straight. Bless you (taking AKMA's methodological caveats as read, of course).

(2) The Digital Genres Conference organizers are to be commended for their extremely good sense in scheduling the events to begin the day after the University of Chicago Divinity School Book Sale, take place during the Seminary Co-op's annual members' sale, and conclude the day before the first-of-the-month sales at Powell's Chicago and O'Gara & Wilson.

(3) The city of Chicago is also to be commended for those nifty free summer tourist trolleys, which are extremely handy for getting oneself, one's luggage, and one's three extra bags of books from Michigan Avenue to Union Station between Memorial and Labor Days.

(4) And now I'm exhausted again, but it's a happy exhaustion, except for the part where I'm thinking that the era of free bookshelf space in my office is quite definitely over.