Signs That You Are A Hopeless Humanities Geek, #3,048:

(a) You find yourself getting genuinely peeved at your persistent inability to properly pronounce Nahuatl names and phrases, possibly due to your complete lack of instruction in the language and its unconventional orthography.

(b) You realize that you can listen to samples of sung Nahuatl, because there happen to be a couple of tracks on one of the CDs Of Vague Academic Interest in your office multimedia sorter thingy, and nobody's showing up to office hours anyway.

(c) You get a Nahuatl lullaby (yes, that's the title -- according to the liner notes it means "go to sleep, go to sleep, little babe") stuck in your head for the rest of the afternoon.

(d) You start thinking of ways to work it into tomorrow's 8 am class. (Hey, it's a peppy lullaby.)

I should be writing the Vastly Overdue Book Review, or an article, or something, but I just thought it was time for a quick I Love My Job post. :)

P.S.: In my copious free time, I am giggling over the Yiddishkeit Code. This is because I am easily amused by Cthulhu and halakha jokes in the same document.

P.P.S.: If anyone's curious about my take on Joan of Arcadia, it's over in my LiveJournal. My favorite sentence also provides a handy summary: "This God [on Joan of Arcadia] wouldn't know the mysterium tremendum et fascinans if it walked up and stuck its tongue down His/Her throat." (See, I don't get to write things like that as an academic until after I get tenure.)

Nobody in my line of work has been able to ignore the widespread hoo-ha over Mel Gibson's The Passion, which has recently been retitled The Passion of Christ -- not, unfortunately, for the benefit of people who never learned that "passion" comes from the Latin for "suffering," but because Miramax already had rights to the shorter title. I blogged ages ago about the improbability of director Gibson's stated plan to recreate the last twelve hours of Christ's life drawing on accounts in the Gospels. (Truthfully, my first thought was that I'd stumbled upon an elaborate joke among Bible scholars. "Yeah, it's in Aramaic. And we're going to have John Dominic Crossan playing Pontius Pilate. And the glass elevator from the SBL meeting in Orlando will get people up to the Mount of Olives.") Once I realized that it was really happening, I tried to keep an eye on the media coverage -- while thinking that there would be no point in posting about it again until I'd, you know, actually seen the movie. Or at least read a script.

A few months ago, however, my interest was piqued anew when I read disputed claims that Gibson was supplementing the gaps and contradictions in the Gospels with a couple of more recent visionary accounts of Jesus' final days. It so happens that I have some small expertise in this area: within western Christianity, the tradition of detailed visual meditation on events in the life of Christ, frequently accompanied by injunctions to insert oneself into the narrative as a bystander/participant, dates back to Francis of Assisi and the Christmas crib at Greccio. Over the next several hundred years, a plethora of famous and not-so-famous works (in the former category, cf. Thomas a Kempis's Imitation of Christ and Ignatius Loyola's Spiritual Exercises) drew on this tradition. After the Reformation, it flourished within Catholic spiritual circles but made regular guest appearances among Lutheran Pietists, Methodist Episcopalians, and so forth.

As it happens, the two texts mentioned in connection with Gibson's movie stand firmly in the dual categories of Catholic and not-so-famous: The Mystical City of God, or the Divine History of the Virgin Mother of God by María de Agreda (1602-1665), and The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ by Anne Catherine Emmerich (1774-1824). As luck (or, more precisely, class prep) would have it, I had actually read significant parts of The Mystical City of God in translation, and it took only a moment for me to locate The Dolorous Passion in the Boondoggle U. library.* These are not, frankly, the most readable things around, and if Gibson did manage to soldier through both works in their entirety he has my sincere respect. I myself think they go down best with a chaser of historical background.

María de Agreda was a Franciscan nun of moderately noble descent and notorious holiness -- including neat tricks such as bilocation, whereby her image appeared to Indians in the American Southwest throughout the 1620s, according to the testimony of fellow Franciscan missionaries. After a series of confessorial commands and several drafts, Sor María's privileged visions were collected in The Mystical City of God. This work retells Mary's life -- and hence Christ's contained within it -- in elaborate detail, interspersed with prayers and various sorts of spiritual advice conveyed to Maria by the Virgin. It is usually considered to represent an extreme of early modern Catholic devotion to the Virgin, the crowning achievement (so to speak -- it does end with Mary's coronation in heaven) of 1500 years' worth of Christian elaboration on the few mentions of Jesus' mother in the Gospels.

In The Mystical City of God, Mary appears in every important Gospel scene, including many from which she was allegedly absent. Readers also learn hitherto-unknown details ranging from Mary's mother's complexion to Mary's prayers driving off a band of men who wanted to "dishonor" Jesus as he lay in prison the night before his crucifixion. Mary was not, of course, on the scene during this episode: she was at another house praying. She was alerted by angels, but she already knew about the situation, because Mary is the 24/7 Queen of Heaven throughout The Mystical City of God, and we are repeatedly told that she only refrained from saving Jesus from crucifixion because she (like her son) was obedient to God's will. During María's lifetime, the Spanish Inquisition raised questions about her additions to the Gospel text and to Mariological doctrine (neither the Immaculate Conception nor the Assumption were Catholic dogma at the time); she was called in for a series of examinations lasting over a decade, but her Franciscan connections kept her secure. Her text was only printed in 1670, five years after its author's death, and it was condemned at both Rome and the Sorbonne in the 1680s and 1690s, staying on the Index of Prohibited Books for over 65 years before the furor died out.

Anne Catherine Emmerich was a Westphalian peasant girl; unlike María, she had to spend years trying to find a convent which would take her without a dowry, a problem exacerbated by the bleeding wounds from an invisible crown of thorns Christ had laid upon her head in a vision. She eventually became an Augustinian nun, but when Napoleon arranged for the dissolution of the German convents, Sister Anne's flight to another house left her bedridden and brought her assorted mystical wounds to light -- now including a cross of blisters on her chest and stigmata in her hands and feet (these later closed). A governmental inquiry concluded that there was fraud involved, but took no measures; meanwhile, during her remaining decade of life, Anne went on spiritual journeys to the Holy Land (past and present) and dictated the high points of her trips to a local poet. The resultant work sparked little controversy, perhaps because the Church had more pressing problems to deal with at the time.

The Dolorous Passion is Anne's detailed account of the Last Supper and the Passion, diverging here and there from the order of events recounted in the Gospels (although the Gospels themselves are seldom unified on these points) and offering innumerable new details. For instance, it turns out that the room where the Last Supper took place was not only rented by the brother-in-law of the man in whose house Jesus had announced the death of John the Baptist, but it was also the site at which the Ark of the Covenant had rested before it was moved into the Temple and where the prophet Malachi had taken refuge, centuries before Nicodemus had bought it as a studio for his hobby of sculpture. Anne describes the room's skylight (covered with transparent blue gauze), the garnish of the Paschal Lamb (garlic), "the Blessed Virgin receiving the Holy Sacrament in a spiritual manner" (although she was not in the room), and Jesus' concluding lecture on the proper proportion of oil to balm for anointment (the apostles took notes on rolls of parchment they happened to have in their robes).

In both accounts, of course, the role played by "the Jews" -- by which is meant all the Jews who are not followers of Jesus -- is greatly expanded from the Gospel texts -- but so is virtually everything else. (In The Dolorous Passion, in fact, the Jews demonstrate great initiative by setting up shifts in order to insult and spit on Jesus while he lies in prison.) But it's entirely possible to resolve the debate over Gibson's sources before opening that can of worms. Once the movie comes out, it should be relatively easy to pick a not-so-politicized scene or three, as I have done, and run through it item by item, comparing it with the Gospel accounts and the latest in Bible scholarship on one hand and The Mystical City of God and The Dolorous Passion on the other. Does the Virgin Mary show up in odd places? Are devils frolicking around Judas's feet at the Last Supper? Is there a "Herodian" sect in Jerusalem bearing a suspicious resemblance to Freemasons? Fortunately, we will soon have the sources available to judge for ourselves.

I for one plan to object loudly and strenuously if Gibson's supposedly "true to the Gospel" account has been informed by readings from early modern and modern visionary texts instead of Biblical archaeology (and there are numerous points where the two differ drastically). The average moviegoer is quite ignorant enough about ancient history (not to mention Second Temple Judaism and early Christianity) without throwing Hollywood PR into the mix. But I can't help feeling that this rush to source criticism may be missing the point. When I try to read the New Testament objectively, I find it difficult not to draw a dangerously anti-Jewish attitude from the Gospels (especially John; whatever its author meant by Iudaioi, it's been translated "Jews" for about 1700 years). By setting up the Gospels as his most important source, regardless of anything else he uses, Gibson may well find himself producing a movie which reminds people of all faiths (and people of no faith at all) that the New Testament is not composed entirely of adorable stories told by Jesus to little children, and that it can be used to inspire great evil as well as profound and long-lasting good.

I would like to think that The Passion will inspire fruitful inter- and intra-faith dialogue; I suspect, however, that it will inspire more overheated rhetoric and sadly unscholarly accusations. But at least I have done my part to demystify some of the potential sources. If we are very, very lucky, Gibson's movie will lead to something other than more suffering.

* -- There is also an etext edition of The Dolorous Passion available here, and an etext abridgement of The Mystical City of God available here.

You know, the real reason I've never tried to add categories to Baraita is the way most of my posts fall into four or five of them at once. A case in point is this upcoming cinematic event -- I am insufficiently hip to keep up with the latest from Cannes and Toronto, which explains why I hadn't heard this working through the pipeline up until now. (Ide Cyan pointed me to the post at greenfireburning, but the quote here is from Zap2it:)

"The Hebrew Hammer" will get a two-week window on the cable network starting on Dec. 8. The film will then be pulled from Comedy Central and will get a multi-city release (courtesy of Cowboy Pictures), timed to coincide with Hanukkah.

The flick stars Goldberg as Mordechai Jefferson Carver, also known as The Hebrew Hammer, an Orthodox Jewish superhero. He has to work with the forces of the J.J.L. (Jewish Justice League) to prevent Santa's evil son, Damien Claus (Andy Dick) from destroying Hanukkah. Nora Dunn, Peter Coyote, Judy Greer and Melvin Van Peebles co-star in a film compared by its director to "Shaft."

Other summaries let us know that Mordecai is working together with Esther, daughter of the JJL leader, and Mohammed, an African-American hero making a pre-emptive strike on behalf of Kwanzaa. But, really? Just from the name "Damien Claus," I can already tell that this is going to be the Best Hanukkah Movie Ever. (I mean, really -- its competition is , what, Eight Crazy Nights?)

Damien Claus. Bwahahahahahaha.

Every time I try to write about I Capture The Castle I circle back around to thinking about the first books I can distinctly remember reading -- namely, the old Nancy Drew mysteries by "Carolyn Keene." After about ten of them I achieved my first moment of spontaneous literary awareness: Nancy's investigation and Nancy's father's investigation (he was an attorney) always, always turned out to be about the same thing. I didn't mind; in fact, I liked the symmetry, and figuring out the pattern made it a lot easier for me to tell what was going to happen in each individual novel (although it seemed to me that Nancy should've wised up and started asking her father useful questions about five books back). But what I really liked was the way each book could be described as more than one story -- in this case, either Nancy's or Carson Drew's case.

Twenty-plus years later, I still like my books to consist of more than one story -- in fact, I pretty well require it if I'm to bother rereading them (and I reread a lot). This isn't necessarily a question of multiple plot threads, although that's an easy way to achieve the effect; it's a question of multiple interests and themes woven into a single unified narrative. For example, I just reread Dorothy L. Sayers's The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club, which is either a classic Golden Age mystery or a hard-hitting but ultimately somewhat hopeful novel about the long-term effects World War I had on English society. E. Annie Proulx's The Shipping News, on the other hand, told a very good story but just the one; I read it once and that sufficed. It gets even worse if you look at the average Woman's Novel: gobs of free-floating symbolism, some interesting backdrops, or even some godawful Social Message tacked on do not make for multiple stories. I like books that tell the truth and tell it slant.

I Capture The Castle is either a novel about a young girl's coming of age in England between the World Wars or a novel about modern literary forms and their development during more or less the same period. (I suppose one could also read it as a romantic comedy, but only if one can also read Love's Labour Lost as a romantic comedy, which I can't.) It's written by Dodie Smith, who (I can't believe how long it took me to sort this out) also wrote The Hundred and One Dalmatians and its even quirkier sequel, The Starlight Barking. Both are significantly better than any of the related movies, and they fall into the category of children's literature that continues to draw you in well after you have ceased to be a child. (I cannot say the same for Nancy Drew, although I've been known to reread those out of sentiment.)

Anyway, I Capture The Castle isn't a child's book; in some ways it's a teenager's book, since the protagonist starts out a very young seventeen and doesn't get nearly as much older as she thinks she does. Cassandra has the sort of unremitting focus on herself I had at age seventeen -- we even have a spot of culture shock in common, except that mine came from transplanting myself to New England -- and reading her constant quest for love and a dash of respectability, I couldn't help but remember some of the sturm-und-drang-tossed passages in the journals I kept on and off at that age. But Smith manages to convey to the reader that Cassandra's abortive romances aren't quite as much the point as Cassandra thinks they are -- or, rather, they are collectively important, but the individual details not so much. "I have grown out of wanting to write about myself," Cassandra writes at the end, and I think we must take her at her word. (I wonder if the recent ICTC movie preserved this -- all the promotional materials focused strongly on the romance angle.)

I have also grown out of wanting to write about myself, though, and Cassandra's travails aren't really my cup of tea after the first read-through. At times, I found myself skimming passages of cleverly-sketched adolescent rapture, waiting for the other story to pop back into focus. The other story, you see, is about Cassandra's father James Mortmain and his efforts to write a pathbreaking modern novel as good as his first pathbreaking modern novel, the much-ballyhooed Jacob Wrestling. I don't care for Mortmain at all -- after a decade of writer's block I think I'd've taken a job to support the family! -- but I was entertained by all the references people kept dropping about Jacob Wrestling, and by Simon Cotton, who is "the Henry James type of American" and therefore quite logically enthralled by modern literature. Not incidentally, everyone in the book is trying to create something modern -- literature, film, art, romance, ranching, even religion (although that would be a post in itself if I got going).

In the end -- I am giving away what most people regard as the B plot, I suppose, since I am not telling you who ends up with whom on the romance front -- Mortmain gets started on his second novel, which adopts a style Simon calls "Enigmatism" and incorporates children's repetitions ("the cat sat on the mat") and puzzles and crosswords and comic strips and so forth. Enigmatism is, Simon says, "an extension of metaphor"; it is intended "to stimulate that potential creativeness [in every human being] -- to make those who study his work share in its actual creation. Of course, [Mortmain] sees creation as discovery." Simon is the only competent literary critic in the novel (I quite like Simon), and he articulates what Cassandra unconsciously senses: they are being drawn into Mortmain's novel at the same time that he tempts them to go back through childhood, into that moment of playful discovery, and start creating themselves. (Yes, I did notice the way my Nancy Drew anecdote fits in there. Two stories, after all.)

Creating (for) herself is exactly what Cassandra winds up doing, although in a more subtle form that her father did: instead of beginning with "the cat sat on the mat," she ends her journal with "I love you, I love you, I love you." Equally foundational words but in a different direction. And when Cassandra says she has grown out of writing about herself, she is speaking for the modern novel as well as the Bildungsroman hidden in I Capture The Castle: framed as Cassandra's journal, the novel practices a quiet Enigmatism of its own, encouraging its readers to remember back to their own childhood and adolescence, featuring "puzzles, problems, patterns, progressions" -- as Simon says about Mortmain's novel. There's even "a detective section."

Nancy Drew would be impressed, don't you think?

See, what happens when you start posting lots of big fat essays is that you accumulate essays'-worth of quick points you've been meaning to make. For those of my readers tired of the Jewish trivia already, the I Capture the Castle post is almost done, honest! Right now, however, I just want to ramble in no particular order.

- First, one semi-important blog announcement: I've started using the MT-Blacklist plugin to combat comment spam. So far, so good -- and the installation's very simple. However, if you are a regular commenter here and are disturbed by your sudden inability to offer me bodily modifications for which I have no obvious application, do let me know.

- In a rare burst of shopping energy yesterday, I bought a lot of stuff, including an electric lawnmower. (Thank goodness I have a hatchback. The next vehicle will likely be a pickup truck.) I did not buy a table saw, despite seeing some nice ones on sale at Sears. Mmmmmm, power tools. The great disadvantage to living alone is that there is nobody to congratulate me on my self-restraint, then sneak out and buy it for my next major gift-receiving holiday.

- I got my midterm grades in a whole two hours ahead of time, and now I am free of the piles of mildly-overdue grading I drag back and forth each day on the theory that they will somehow get graded by osmosis. Whee! Also, I seem not to have any failing students this semester, which is always a happy thing. Now I'm supposed to decide what I'm teaching for 2004-05. Shyeah.

- In Religion of Reason From the Sources of Judaism, Hermann Cohen (the most readable disciple of Kant IMO) asks about God: "How can one love an idea?" The answer is another question: "How can one love anything save an idea?" I must be a Platonist at heart, because that exchange always gives me a little thrill.

- Trying to prepare to read the second aliyah this weekend, I keep wanting to say "eloheinu" when I know perfectly well it's "elohim." The disorienting thing about starting over the Torah cycle is that God isn't "eloheinu" yet. Again. But it's kind of cool. And, yes, this is when I start thinking that the Eliadan distinction between linear and circular notions of time is vastly overrated.

- Two years and a bit ago, when I started Baraita, I poked around the blogosphere looking for Jewish blogs that focused on religion (as opposed to Israel/political issues). I found surprisingly little. I don't know whether it's the increase in blogging or my own improved search skills, but things have definitely changed for the better these days. Now that I've finally updated my blogroll (it was long overdue) I'm adding three new Judaica-related blogs that I'm really enjoying so far: Zackary Sholem Berger, Out of Step Jew, and Velveteen Rabbi. Go and learn. ;)

- I know people love me when they send me links to eMezuzah software. (Windows-only, I'm afraid. But how can you not admire a program which gives you the option of either Sephardi or Ashkenazi scroll configurations?)

- Much more dubious is the online Gematriculator (via Ghost of a Flea). I make this judgment not because I am especially skilled at inventing new bits of gematria-related cleverness, but because I'm pretty certain it's not usually done with the Finnish alphabet. And, you know, that site's definition of gematria isn't quite what I'd always thought it to be, plus its insistence on "infallible methods," "incontestable argument[s]," and "absolutely correct results" bother me. Still, it claims Baraita is 72% good and pure -- how can I argue with that?

- Words cannot express how little I want to see Kill Bill. I do, however, plan to go see the Luther movie sometime soonish. I am torn about the upcoming Harry Potter movie: it sounds like fun, but having the students in regular clothes instead of robes is Just Plain Wrong.

- Now, see, instead of blaming "Jewish" Barbies for the breakdown of cultural mores, what the Saudis should do is order in some Razanne dolls (via Cranky Professor). Today's doll-playing kids are fortunate in their ability to assemble a cheerfully multicultural fashion-doll gang: I mostly played with buxom blonde dolls in bathing suits, which wreaked havoc on my youthful aspiration to direct an all-doll cast of As You Like It (although in retrospect the production would probably have been a great advance in experimental theater). Even better, Razanne has more to offer little kids than just a hijab: "On the drawing board for future dolls are Dr. Razanne and possibly even Astronaut Razanne." Go, Razanne!

- I think I'll spend part of my next vacation reading reading autobiographies -- that is, autobiographies that deal in some interesting way with reading. (Yep, the genre started with Augustine.) Top of the list: Primo Levi's The Search For Roots (see this Dooney's article) and Larry McMurtry's Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen. Both get immediate points for good titles.

- Angel tomorrow night: Spike Sees Dead People. I'm not all that enthused about the plot (Now With Added Violence! See above re: Kill Bill), but the sweeps spoilers sound pretty interesting, and the eschatology of the Buffyverse is now pretty well Unimaginably Screwed Up.

- I might actually have free time this weekend -- which I can use to finish writing the article I planned to finish last weekend. And the book review I planned to finish last month. And so forth. How on earth do people manage to blog daily? Could it be that they don't post quite so much each time? Hmmmm....

It's Shemini Atzeret -- which in the Reform tradition gets mixed up with Simchat Torah, usually to the former's detriment -- and it's also a Yizkor service, which makes it almost right for what I want to post about today. Yesterday, just after the end of Hoshanah Rabbah, I lost sleep in order to plan this morning's Very Special Torah Study (with handouts!). I don't begrudge a minute of it, as I now attend probably the only Reform Torah-study group in the country which knows (a) exactly why and how the Torah scroll "defiles the hands" and (b) Rabbi Ishmael's thirteen rules for deriving laws from Torah. (The former -- along with lots of stuff about historical canon formation -- was certainly on topic for the holiday, and the latter is what I'm sneakily trying to turn into a theme for the coming year. And, yeah, I really should've covered those topics in two concurrent sessions instead of squeezing them into one, but it worked fairly well nonetheless.)

I've been wanting to make this post for awhile -- since somewhere shortly after Tisha b'Av, in fact, because that's when I started considering the role the Temple(s) -- or, more precisely, the absence of a Temple -- ought to play in contemporary liberal (i.e. non-Orthodox) Judaism. To begin with, I don't think the former is irrelevant to the latter, and to say otherwise is to be deplorably ignorant of one's own history.* Let me explain myself in a roundabout way: this morning in Torah study, I handed out a timeline running from the Exodus to the editing of the Babylonian Talmud. Then I asked everyone to calculate how long it would've taken for anyone who could remember the details of Temple sacrifices to die off after the year 70 C.E. How long before there was no living memory of the Temple's interior courts? How long before nobody remained alive who could remember how the skyline of Jerusalem used to look? Between war, famine, disease, death, and pure mischance, how much knowledge was lost forever?

The Tannaim, the rabbis who compiled the traditions which led up to the Mishnah, were working against time to save some of that knowledge, and just when Akiba and Ishmael and the rest might've felt ready to relax, the Bar Kokhba mess happened and another generation had to put together the pieces. My main Talmud-by-email list is working through the tractates dealing with different types of sacrifices, and while most of the details either baffle or bore me, I am in awe of the labor they represent. You see, I am not a halakhist by either training or inclination -- I am a storyteller with delusions of necromancy, which is to say an historian. I find it easy to believe that a good story from Jerusalem would stick in the collective unconscious, waiting to be picked up generations later in Yavneh or Usha or Pumbedita. But, my God, all those fiddly little details about sacrifices which nobody had performed in living memory? We lost the tradition of pronouncing the proper name of God -- no surprise, given how closely it was guarded -- but how amazingly, improbably wonderful is it that we preserved the quotidian details of Temple life?

What's even more astonishing is that the Tannaim weren't just death-defying cultural archivists (Dayenu!). They put the pieces back together again, but in different configurations, with both deep integrity and marvelous creativity. Contemporary Jews sometimes use charter tours to Israel to ignite their spirituality, but the Tannaim were denied even that level of access: the physical spaces where the Temple had been, where the Great Sanhedrin had sat, where Jewish life had flourished for centuries were largely destroyed and in any case forbidden to them after Bar Kokhba.** Nevertheless, they wrote about holidays which had been celebrated by going on pilgrimage to a Temple that no longer existed to offer tithes to a priesthood which could no longer accept them out of harvests from a land they no longer grew crops in -- and then they provided or created rituals and stories to keep those holidays relevant to Jews in another place and time. In short, they crafted a religion, a religion that continued the one before just as strongly as it broke away from it, a religion that has continued to thrive and send out offshoots for nearly two millennia.

Nothing comes from nothing, of course: the new religious forms of the rabbis built on ideas from the Prophets and the Writings and borrowed from the mishmash of ideas floating around in the diverse world of Second Temple Judaism. A succession of tetchy prophets had proclaimed that God preferred obedience and prayer to offerings and sacrifices,*** and while the Tannaim refused to subscribe to Jeremiah's overwrought claim that God had never wanted sacrifices (7:22), they were practical men. Sacrificing was out of the question for the foreseeable future. They were also devout men, and they had written feelingly about the necessary conditions for meaningful prayer. They echoed Jeremiah, Isaiah, and Amos in saying that prayer could stand in for sacrifice. But when it came to ordering the prayers, they made them mimic the timing and order of those laboriously and lovingly reconstructed Temple services, sneaking in many of the details -- the Psalms the Levites had once sung, the recipes for the incense which burned on the golden altar.

The Tannaim were the prototypical liturgical reformers, blending old customs with new concerns into a seamless, stunningly relevant whole -- that alone should endear them to liberal Jews. Using cutting-edge methodologies (some of them familiar to contemporary Greek allegorists), they derived all sorts of amazing moral and ethical teachings from divinely inspired verses about the architecture of the Tabernacle and the procedure for making sin-offerings. And yet... they never forgot about the original details. They preserved them, in oral and written tradition and then -- because they had learned that traditions often get lost or warped-- they preserved the memory of a lost Temple and a lost culture in practice, in prayer, in the sorts of services people remember from their childhoods and (seized by some uneasy impulse) drag their own children to in turn. The prayer service, that miracle of rabbinic Judaism, was equally a memorial to the Judaism which had come -- and gone -- before it.

Yom Kippur, the day when the lost name of God was once pronounced, is probably the most Temple-heavy liturgy in the whole Jewish year; once it was celebrated almost exclusively inside the Temple. The rabbis gave us special services instead of special sacrifices: the Avodah borrows from the ritual the High Priest himself would have performed on Yom Kippur (the Tannaim were democratizers as well), and the Eyleh ezkerah remembers the human sacrifices which allowed rabbinic Judaism to come into existence and survive down the centuries. My first Judaica-oriented post on Baraita was about Eyleh ezkerah and the aftermath of 9/11; it's my favorite service of the Yom Kippur cycle, and I still view it as incredibly important and timely. But I couldn't've explained at the time why I also wanted to join in the Avodah. I have had to explain it recently: although the Reform synagogue of my childhood -- and even the Reform synagogue in Large Midwestern University Town where I attended Yom Kippur services two years ago -- included those extra services, none of the Reform synagogues in Boondoggle (to my knowledge) do them.

I have so far asked two rabbis from different synagogues about this practice -- it is difficult, but not impossible, to work a demand for explanation of the congregation's liturgical philosophy into casual conversation -- and the results have been decidedly mixed. In the first case, I got a patronizing response that Reform Jews Don't Do That, You Know: the rabbi in question didn't know me from Adam at the time and I was interested in joining that congregation, so I resisted the urge to crack open a can of Pittsburgh Platform whoop-ass and ask him if I'd been hallucinating the relevant services in the Reform machtzor all these years. Instead, I smiled insincerely and changed the subject. In the second case -- someone who knows me in my professional identity but does not count me as a congregant -- I got what I suspect is a more truthful explanation: "If we only get people into services one day a year, is that really what we want to teach them?" I, of course, said "yes," and that caused my interlocutor to smile insincerely and change the subject, probably thinking I had graded one too many student papers that morning.

The Jewish liturgy (any Jewish liturgy) can't go two prayers without reminding everyone that God got us out of Egypt with some help from Moses and Aaron and Miriam. If it's possible to measure amazement, though, I am even more amazed that God -- with some help from Yochanan and Joshua and Akiba and Ishmael and Meir and half a dozen guys named Judah or Simeon or Eliezer -- got us out of Jerusalem. I can no more imagine a service without reminders of the Temple than a service without reminders of the Exodus. Those far-off eras shaped what we are today, and whether or not we celebrate them, we definitely need to remember them -- and, in remembering, transform them.

Really, it's about as liberal as you get.

* -- And that is the nastiest thing I can say without using the words "Yankee" or "reductionist."
** -- In the aftermath of the Bar Kokhba Revolt, Jews were forbidden to dwell in the precincts of Jerusalem until 638. That period saw the compilation of the Mishnah and both Talmuds; I would argue that it was the most intensively creative period in Jewish history. Further speculation on this topic is left as an exercise to the reader. ;)
*** -- Capsule summary of prophetic passages in question: "Bad Israelites, no biscuit." The prophets must've been a real pain to hang out with on a regular basis, don't you think? Re-reading Jeremiah makes me want to rush right out and get busy preparing cakes for the Queen of Heaven; all available evidence suggests that his contemporaries felt the same way, only less friendly.

This is an incredibly belated Rosh Hashanah post of sorts. In keeping with midrashic tradition, however, I believe that High Holy Days-related posts are acceptable to God until Hoshanah Rabbah, at which point She feels that we should move on and start thinking about rainfall in the land of Israel or something. Plus, sheep jokes are acceptable any time of year.

You see, deep down -- well, somewhat deep down -- I have the sense of humor of a twelve-year-old. A smart-aleck twelve-year-old. Back in college, when a student singing group performed a madrigal-ish version of "We Like Sheep Have Gone Astray" featuring a several-minute riff on the line "we like sheep," I would snicker ever single time. Back when I was a twelve-year-old, on the other hand, I used to laugh during the sheep parts of Unetaneh Tokef -- not so much because there were real sheep-lovin' jokes in the choir as because we had a Very Dignified rabbi (the one I constantly clashed with) who, during the singing of that particular section, managed to bob his head up and down in rhythm. And it looked for all the world as though he was counting sheep jumping over a fence. And one of the tenors usually managed to mouth "Baa!" somewhere in there, and since it was a solo piece up until the last paragraph, the rest of us got to laugh ourselves silly -- but very quietly.

Apart from its vague mental association with sheep jokes, though, what I remember about Unetaneh Tokef is the story. The earliest version comes from the thirteenth-century Sefer Or Zarua (on which see here), where it's attributed to the twelfth-century crusade chronicler and part-time poet Ephraim of Bonn. But I'd bet that most Jews, like me, remember it from its strictly unofficial inclusion in Rosh Hashanah services -- it's too good a story not to repeat every few years. Rabbi Amnon of Mainz, so the story goes, was a pious medieval sage and community leader who was being pressured by his local bishop to convert to Christianity. At one point, he temporized, saying he'd return in three days with an answer. He immediately regretted even this moment of weakness and promptly decided to go for atonement via martyrdom, which he accomplished by the simple act of neither showing up for his date with the bishop nor getting the heck out of town. When the bishop's forces seized him and he continued to refuse baptism, he was tortured by having his arms and legs removed bit by bit; then, in extremis, he was carried to the synagogue where he spoke the Unetaneh Tokef right after the Rosh Hashanah Kedushah prayer and right before kicking the bucket.*

Unfortunately, there's no record of a Rabbi Amnon in Mainz during the relevant time period, and the UT shows clear linguistic and stylistic evidence of having been composed by one or more sixth- or seventh-century Palestinian liturgists -- the same folks who came up with the matching Kedushah prayer.** This discrepancy, and the logical conclusion to be drawn from it, doesn't bother me at all, but I may not be the best judge of such matters -- reasonably attentive readers of Baraita will have noticed my partiality for (a) apocryphal legends and (b) martyr narratives, not to mention (c) my love-hate relationship with medieval Ashkenaz. Even if you don't share my tastes, however, dating the UT backwards an extra five or so centuries doesn't make Rabbi Amnon's story irrelevant or wrong. It makes it a commentary, a sort of midrash in the loosest sense of that term. And people write commentaries for a reason.

I can offer a number of reasonably informed hypotheses about why someone (Ephraim of Bonn is a likely suspect) would've invented the Rabbi Amnon story in the first place. There are the reasons most medieval Ashkenazic martyr-narratives were constructed: identity definition, community formation, invocation of a Jewish past, imitation of a Christian present (yes, Jews invented martyrdom, but it took us awhile to catch up after the way J.C. and his boys ran with it), explicit moral lessons, implicit enforcement of societal and cultural norms, the social prestige of composing good piyyutim, and the desire to preserve a few grains of historical record back in there somewhere. If there wasn't a "real" Rabbi Amnon, there were certainly "real" scenarios very much like the one in his story, and I can't help thinking it's good for us to remember that.

The reasons for constructing this particular martyr narrative and attaching it to the Unetaneh Tokef poem are a little trickier to reel off. Granted, there were various precedents for attaching a liturgical piece to a martyr narrative -- the prayerful martyrdoms of the Ten Sages were being collated at around the same time and by the same people -- but why this story and this piece? I suspect it's got something to do with the most popular misreading of UT, the one in which God is a big fat meanie who's sentencing people to death right and left for no apparent reason. Of course, if you read the piece carefully, you will notice that God is modeling the Book of Life off the Book of Remembrance, and the latter is one in which we human beings write ourselves -- "every man has signed it with his deeds," according to the delightfully uninclusive translation I learned as a child. Moreover, even once the Book of Life is written and sealed, human beings can still switch things around via last-minute "repentance, prayer, and charity" (am trying desperately not to get sidetracked by translation issues). There's quite a lot of human agency floating around in this text.

Also, God isn't quite as much of a meanie as She appears at first blush -- we learn that the foundations of God's rule are "truth" and "compassion," which indicates that someone's been memorizing their Thirteen Attributes but also that God's justice is tempered by mercy. On a less serious note, there's that moment of schaudenfreude when the text points out that even the angels are freaked out at the onset of a Day of Judgment. And the Day of Judgment itself is described in terms which welcome a Messianic reading, in case you'd rather not envision the sheep-like population of the multiverse parading before God every Yom Kippur. (In a Reform setting, you know, we worry about the potential parking problems.) I don't think Unetaneh Tokef has to be read as a quasi-Calvinist hymn to an angry God unless you really, really want to read it that way.

The thing is, most people do want to read it that way -- I suspect that they focus on the violent parts, the stranging and the stoning (between that and Rabbi Amnon's amputations, the UT is a sure crowd-pleaser), and then they transfer their dislike for the resultant reminders of human mortality onto the God of the poem. I get impatient with those people, which is why it's good that I'm not a congregational rabbi. But the story of Rabbi Amnon says more or less what I want to say, and in a slightly more subtle way. "Listen up, guys," I think together with a twelfth-century storyteller. "Once upon a time there lived a pious and learned man, dealing with a bad and unfair situation completely outside his control; his punishment was wildly disproportionate to any mistakes he might have made, and yet he was able to not only to recite but to compose the Unetaneh Tokef. While dying. Horribly. In one of those ways that you'd think God only reserved for the Really Bad People. This is like Job without the happy ending. You think God cut you a raw deal? Next to Rabbi Amnon, you are a poser."

Well, possibly a twelfth-century storyteller wouldn't use the word "poser," but you get the general idea. In case it's not obvious, I like Unetaneh Tokef. I also like the Rabbi Amnon story. And, hey, who doesn't like the occasional sheep joke?

* -- The SOZ version continues with an account of R. Amnon's posthumous appearance in the dream of another, more historically verifiable sage three days later: apparently the late Amnon wanted his colleague to write down his new composition along with its proper tune. This strikes me as a perfectly logical reason to return from the afterlife; I, personally, fantasize about haunting people who cite me incorrectly. ;)
** -- The gentlemen at Protocols posted a link to a recent article in Haaretz about just this topic; at this time, however, only the Google cache is still accessible.

One of the blogging situations I've never quite figured out how to handle is the one in which I currently find myself: bloggus interruptus. You see, I've been working on several different posts over the last couple of weeks, been extremely busy catching up with other responsibilities as well, keep having these dang religious holidays every weekend, and now realize that not only have I not updated in some time, but I have at least a week's worth of material to post at once, and I know from experience that people don't get around to commenting much if I drown them in material. Meanwhile, I'm not entirely comfortable posting little updates when I imagine that most of you are waiting for Real Posts -- I mean, I didn't intend this blog to turn into a progression of ten-thousand-word essays, but I said I'd write about the High Holy Days, didn't I?

I knew things had gotten out of hand yesterday morning: I wanted to post a note about Carolyn Heilbrun's death, but I realized I didn't have time to update all the things which ought to come before that. (I posted in my LiveJournal instead -- I've taken to using it for particularly silly media-fandom commentary, but every now and then something important slips through.) Of course, it took me another 36 hours (taught two classes, attended three meetings, graded twenty-four tests, returned library books, made meatloaf, finished travel-funds application, got a flu shot, etc.) to make time for updating, and now I realize I've let another minor scholarly duty slip in the past hour.

What do the A-list bloggers do under these circumstances? Do they avoid jobs which suck up quite so much of their writing time and energy? Do they invent brilliant and entertaining stories about the secret CIA mission which kept them from updating? Do they keep a folderful of non-time-specific, amusing posts which they can throw into service to avoid a hiatus? And how do they deal with the backlog? I could keep all the posts at the date on which I started them, of course, but might confuse matters for people who read this blog with aggregators. Also, there's something slightly dishonest about it. And when would I date this post? We still don't have a workable form of away-from-blog notification, do we?

Fortunately, now that I've started fooling with the blog, I realize that I have a Higher Calling -- namely, the Goofy Werewolf Episode of Angel which will be on in another few hours and a stack of tests which needs grading before then (yep, it's midterm week). So I'm just going to pop several things up in the next several minutes and deal with the rest of it over the weekend. Consider this a cry of "Incoming!" -- or possibly a nice change from ten-thousand-word essays.