In case some of you are wondering where the alleged Judaica content of this website has gone, let me assure that it's gone... well, largely into actual classes I actually teach, plus bold new plans for the immediate future, plus my current focus on midterm grading (ugh). But I do have a couple of things in mind, most notably an answer to Rachel's question about whether there's any deeper significance to Purim. (Let's just say I'm not going in the direction of yonic hamentaschen.) But first I want to get a post about something less theological (er, for me) and more practical out here.

You see, last weekend, in honor of Shabbat Shekalim (well, possibly), I spent Sunday evening making calls for a charity telethon. I very much support the organization in question, and I was easily guilted by the telethon chair (whom I know from Temple Boondoggle), but I am never going to make it big as a telemarketer. For one thing, I do not deal well with training videos and object to people tossing around the phrase "tikkun olam" as if it were an exact synonym for "social responsibility"; for another, I couldn't really see the point in going through the whole script they gave us. "You've given before, so we know you care" is fine, but the whole paragraph about rising costs and increased need could be summarized thusly: "As you know, the economy sucks, and we need more money." Moreover, this particular calling session was sponsored by a young professionals' group, of which I can only say that I am apparently now a middle-aged professional and cranky to boot. But, hey, at least I did something better for the world than sitting home watching Angel reruns. And if God is good, they will pick a different telethon chair next year.

Since I had resigned myself in advance to the sad fact that nobody would want me to discuss Shabbat Shekalim on the phone, the surprise of the night -- besides the first few people who hung up on me, but I got over that quickly -- was the number of women who apparently do not handle their own $18 financial affairs. "Hold on, let me get my husband" was apparently the order of the evening. It made me feel like a radical feminist to fill out my own pledge card (I wouldn't raise money for anything I wouldn't donate money to) without consulting a male relation first. I mean, hello? Taken individually, these donations are peanuts, which is no doubt why they have basically untrained volunteers soliciting them. Taken collectively, they're pretty substantial: hence the telethon. But I don't think I contacted a single previous donor who'd given over $60, and while I get that plenty of people are on restricted incomes so that every dollar counts (I am also lousy at hard sells), I don't think that level of financial decision requires two people. Perhaps this explains my continued singlehood, or perhaps I was speaking to members of a more significantly Past Generation than I'd realized.*

It's gratifying to give money, though -- and to have it to give. It's been a year and a half since I started my current job, and it is only gradually dawning on me that I actually make a decent sum of money for a single woman with no terribly expensive habits. By the Pirke Avot standard, I am very nearly rich, because I am very nearly content. Eventually, of course, I will have to buy a new car and probably a new air-conditioning system for my house, and if I ever raise a family I'll need quite a lot more money, but for now I think I have a tiny bit extra. I am not exactly used to this: when I started earning a salary after college, I fretted about turning into a yuppie, bought a laptop, and went off to grad school. While there, of course, I enjoyed the usual amount of discretionary income for that stage in life, which is to say none. (Occasionally, in a burst of wild extravagance, I'd leave a dollar for an especially good street musician.) Now I have grown up and no longer worry about yuppification; I belong to a synagogue -- ack, dues! -- and do occasional financial things for the Marvelous Monthly Minyan. But I'm not sure that's tzedakah, exactly -- maybe community service, with the energy I put into making stuff happen, but it's all fairly self-serving.

Have I ever mentioned why I prefer the term "tzedakah" to "charity" or "philanthropy"? It's not just the Dickensian dystopias and class warfares evoked by the latter two; it's because I know my etymology and I am trying to focus on doing something for reasons of justice, not love. Giving because you are filled with love (however spiritual) for an individual person is halfway to worship; giving because you are filled with love (however familial) for humankind is probably a sub-category of mercy. But giving because you are trying to make things right in a world that isn't -- that's justice, or at least a vision of it. I occasionally wish I hung out more regularly in circles where groups of people say the Birkat (i.e., Grace After Meals), because I get a funny kind of thrill at the bit in the very last prayer taken from Psalm 37: "I was a youth and also have aged, and I have not seen a righteous man forsaken, with his children begging for bread." Considered objectively, that verse is either a lie or an absurdity. Of course I have seen a righteous man forsaken -- we all have. Presumably whoever wrote Psalm 37 had as well; it's attributed to David, whose history of witnessing (and occasionally causing) injustice is attested at length.

But we are not praying a lie after all: we are praying our vision of a just world and affirming our responsibility for working to fulfil that vision. At heart, I am the sort of person who thinks you go out and do things toward making the world work this way (or at least you organize a committee to get them done), but I am only one person. I try to do what I do well, but if I have a little money to spare, I'm fairly certain I should using it to support other people or causes who don't. The Psalm continues: "They [the unforsaken righteous, remember] are always generous and lend freely; their children shall be blessed." How, then, do people decide where to be generous? I asked my mother, who handles most of my family's semi-organized giving, and she said that at this point she mostly just returns the envelopes she gets sent. Unfortunately, the only fund-raising envelopes I get come either from my synagogue (which I tend to donate to mostly for memorials or gifts, plus the dues are kind of a huge chunk) or from Prepster College (to which I would only donate money if I won the lottery and could endow a series of scholarships for non-athletic humanities geeks).

I do have a few ideas. I should give money to the community orchestra whose free concerts I sometimes enjoy; I should join the ACLU and possibly the AAUW. I should keep supporting my community radio station, and given that I know the exact schedule of the Saturday home-programming bloc on my local PBS affiliate, it wouldn't hurt to send them something either. I should probably find a sane environmental group, a sane group advocating clearer separation of church and state, and a couple of sane groups advocating for better public education, since I care deeply about all those issues. (Hee -- looking back at this list, I'm such the old-school liberal.) Also, I am looking forward to feeling personally responsible for one or two of the minyan's new chumashim whenever we get around to getting those, but again I think that might be self-serving.** I suppose should work out a general budget, then figure out how much I can spend on tzedakah, but the word "budget" excites me not at all.

The word "justice," however, does, doubtless as a result of being sung to sleep with "If I Had A Hammer" one too many times when I was little, and growing up to believe that justice and freedom and love are all vitally important. I don't especially want an exclusively just world, you see, just a significantly less unjust one. Back when I first started reading Scholem, I took great yet childlike pleasure in cornering my overly sincere Reform Jewish brethren who liked to go on about tikkun olam and social responsibility so that I could explain in elaborate and esoteric detail how the whole concept originated in whacked-out Lurianic cosmology with God contracting and vessels breaking and sparks and husks flying every which way. Nowadays, of course, every other person (not to mention Madonna) knows all about "the Kabbalah," which sort of takes the fun away. Plus, I have since grown up. A bit. And so now I remind people that Lurianic kabbalah had its practical side: it argued that the world is in need of repair because justice and mercy were meant to coexist in the same space but couldn't.

See, I like practical, even if I'm not wild about the phrase "social responsibility." And so I guess I'll have to figure out a budget. And enter stuff for tax records. And a lot of other unfortunate paperwork -- which, however, will be made much less annoying by the thought that at least I'm not telemarketing.

* -- Not that either of my grandmothers, to the best of my knowledge, would have consulted their husbands. They both ran their household finances. And either of my parents, who maintain the now outmoded custom of joint accounts and assets, wouldn't think twice about making such a minor decision individually.
** -- Actually, the whole new-chumashim thing is kind of my idea. Let's just say that I got fed up with (a) dealing with a two-volume Hertz set where all the special haftarot are in volume II, and (b) dealing with some remarkably antediluvian footnotes. Who knew you could use the phrase "half-caste" quite so often in commentary? Ick. I don't object to Hertz on translation grounds, but that commentary has got to go. Time to check bulk pricing on Stone and Etz Chayim.

I know that this is my job. I know that this is, in fact, a rare moment of Cultural Relevance for my job. I know that I have educated at least a dozen people in the past week on what it means to refer to "the Christ," and I know I should get karmic brownie points for not launching into a rant on how the mixture of Greek- and Latin-derived words gets on my nerves. I know that I have only escaped being co-opted onto sundry discussion panels only by mercilessly dodging certain of my colleagues. And I know that this topic is actually, directly applicable to all the classes I am teaching this semester, which is a nice change.

That said, I would really love to have one freaking conversation this week which is both (a) not with my mother and (b) not about The Passion of the Christ. Also, I'm going to have to go see the dratted thing, and I hate both crowded theaters and onscreen violence; I'm thinking Sunday morning, back of the theater, so nobody notices when I hunch down in my seat and cover my eyes with my coat. (Hi, my name is Naomi, and I am a Total Movie Wimp.)

For those of you even marginally familiar with the culture of online media fandom, by the way, I heartily recommend a post by LJer Eodrakken on "PotC: No, the other one." I, personally, will be shocked if there's not a Passion fanfic autoarchive online before the end of the first week of Lent, a C&D order by the third week, and an abrupt change to legally unassailable "New Testament fic" archives by the fifth. In the sixth week, I will remind the archivists to include links to the etext of "Paradise Regained" and related works of early modern fanfiction.

Okay, now I feel better. Off to contemplate whether enough people will get the multiple implied jokes if I bring tuna salad on crispbread to tomorrow's lunch meeting.

[Edited 2/25 to add: I just discovered that one of the mt-blacklist entries I'd imported banned comments with "passion" and "movies" (among other things) too close together. I deleted that line and replaced it with the same line sans "passion"; I think that should clear up the problem. It's pretty funny to find my anti-spam program exercising its film-critical skills, though.

Also, last night my mother asked me if I'd heard about this new Jesus movie.]

When I was in my early teens, I discovered and enjoyed a succession of Andrew Greeley's mystery novels. They had decent whodunit plots (although they became rather easy to solve once you knew Greeley's character types), appealingly neat romance subplots, a fun cast of recurring characters, and a smidge of popular theology. Over the years, though, I began to lose interest, or perhaps Greeley began to repeat himself a little too often. I still find his novels reasonably entertaining in a pinch -- sure, the ethnic and religious stereotypes sometimes set my teeth on edge, and I do wish that just once there'd be an overweight or unattractive character who is neither evil nor insane (see note above re solving plots), but Blackie Ryan and company make for a brief period of reliable escapism.

But Greeley's latest, The Bishop Goes To The University, attracted me for altogether different reasons: it is set at The Divinity School of The University of Chicago, an institution with which both Greeley and I have a passing acquaintance, and it tackles head-on the topic of academic life. Naturally, Greeley rearranges various floor plans in order to further his plot; this is an author's prerogative. Just as naturally, he has invented characters to fill all the necessary faculty roles (although there is one passing mention to a current faculty member, and several allusions to the faculty of past decades). I initially picked up this potential roman á clef with the pleasant (if not entirely praiseworthy) intention of trying to see whether any of the fictional faculty members were in fact thinly disguised real faculty members whom I had perhaps met -- but Greeley is no fool, and he has changed around enough details that no entirely definite identifications can be made.*

Once I had finished reading, though, I was surprised to find myself hoping that Greeley did not intend to base any of his fictional faculty members on real faculty members. Even the sympathetic ones, all clearly minted from standard Greeley character stock, were unappealing when I considered them as potential colleagues or graduate mentors. For one thing, they all seem fixated on their love lives or lack thereof -- a natural human tendency, certainly, and a hallmark of Greeley's plots, but not the predominant focus one expects in a novel set in academe. More troublingly, there is exactly one class taught during the entire novel -- a class where Blackie is the much-admired and unannounced guest lecturer -- and the student population is otherwise absent from the story, despite the number of meetings and casual encounters Blackie enjoys with numerous faculty members. Staff members are equally nonexistent, apart from one faculty administrator, and the University's fictional president shows up only to rubber-stamp various of Blackie's decisions. In other words, Greeley's Divinity School and University are purely about the faculty.

Is this simply a matter of plot devices? Greeley's locked-room murder of a faculty member takes place in the evening during term-time and supposes that the building is empty except for four other faculty members -- a mild implausibility, but quite possible. Just as conveniently, Blackie is wined and dined repeatedly at a faculty-only club instead of at any of the half-dozen coffee shops and eateries which pepper the University's campus. By the end of the novel, he has solved the mystery, united the lovers, and been appointed a visiting lecturer at the Divinity School without encountering a single named person who is not faculty or higher administration. I suppose all of this is possible (leaving aside the mechanics of appointment to visiting lectureships, which Greeley likely knows better than I do), but I am absolutely certain that the result is a disturbingly inaccurate portrayal of the life of that (or any) academic institution as a whole.

When it comes to research -- admittedly the faculty focus at a place like Chicago -- things are even grimmer. The sympathetic characters -- both of them -- specialize in American Catholic theology and church history, respectively. They are also, needless to state, Catholic, and pleasantly traditional about it. The basically irrelevant but mildly unsympathetic Jewish faculty witness is a rabbi who works on "new manuscripts of the Babylonian Talmud." The two unsympathetic faculty members are a radical Marxist feminist who specializes in feminist theology (she was, of course, unlucky in love) and an agnostic high-church Anglican who studies -- wait for it -- New Testament origins. Finally and naturally, the deceased faculty member, described by one and all as a stereotypical vodka-swilling staff-banging Orthodox monk, studies the mystical theology of the Old Believers. Not one of these folks has gone beyond the boundaries of their tradition; all of their work is predictably dull. These are impressively thorough simultaneous ethnic and academic caricatures -- which, of course, bear only the dimmest relation to actual faculty fields at the actual Divinity School according to its actual website.

Finally, and most disturbingly, all the faculty except the sympathetic couple are snobbish academic elitists harboring a plethora of thinly disguised sexual, racial, and religious prejudices. The Marxist feminist theologian, not satisfied with being anti-Catholic, calls the nice Catholic lady dean a "whore" and insists that every man is obsessed with rape; some elements in the faculty are allegedly considering holding up the nice Catholic male professor's tenure decision because he is Catholic; the rabbi, bafflingly enough, continues to blame the Orthodox but not the Catholic Church for pogroms and other sorts of historical anti-Judaism.** He also believes in demons. Even the anonymous faculty members Blackie overhears chatting in the dining club are evil-minded snobs, plotting to sabotage younger colleagues' tenure or send them off to Lesser Universities. There is nothing unfamiliar about this caricature of academia: it was well-worn centuries before Gulliver sailed to Laputa. Greeley has merely reworked it with a side of something that feels unpleasantly like religious triumphalism.

Blackie -- properly Bishop Ryan -- is, of course, the University's salvation (so to speak) in terms of both faculty appointments and mystery-solving. It turns out that he had gotten his terminal degree from the Anglicans up in Evanston because the (calculating, elitist) University of Chicago rejected his Ph.D. application. He actually writes on a combination of Protestant and Catholic theologians; his imagined work sounds interesting and is acknowledged as superb by all the sympathetic characters. Furthermore, he is able to parry all the supposedly obscure references which the unsympathetic characters toss at him. His chat with the students, although so wide-ranging as to suppose an undergraduate gen-ed class, reveals him to be a potentially good teacher. In short, Blackie (Greeley's alter ego, as he is often identified in reviews) is the only member of the entire fictional U of C faculty with whom I'd be willing to spend an afternoon, and then only if he cut out the increasingly unfunny Irish jokes.

I am avoiding too much mention of the novel's main plot in case anyone wants to read it as a whodunit, but I must say that the outlook for a self-confessedly academic reader is rather bleak here. If I am to be cast as a humorless pedant, of course, I can oblige, and leaving aside minor infelicities (the male romantic lead is introduced leaning against a staircase while grading papers -- how does one do that?) there are several points which make me wish Greeley had had an editor more familiar with the history of Christian theology. For instance, the Council of Constance (not Basel) is generally considered to have ended the Great Western Schism; furthermore, it's spelled "Maritain" not "Maritan," "Yves" not "Ives," and (as a rule, and certainly at Chicago) "apophatic" not "apophactic." I am equally skeptical about the contemporary theological positions Greeley seems to endorse in this novel; it strikes me that there is rather more to the Orthodox/Catholic schism than the filioque clause, the Byzantine Catholics, and the need for the Orthodox to have Trent and Vatican II -- surely the whole "pope" thing would play a slightly larger role?*** Honestly, I find it a little disappointing to have read an entire novel mostly about Catholic-Orthodox relations and not have discovered a single new thing beyond my frankly rudimentary knowledge of Orthodox history and theology.

But I find it much more disappointing that I have read a novel set mostly at The Divinity School of The University of Chicago without recognizing any of the good qualities that I have seen in that institution, and in many others like it. And I find it most disappointing of all that many people will read this popular novel and take it as a relatively accurate portrayal of academia, especially the academic study of religion. In view of his long association with the University of Chicago, Greeley surely knows better; indeed, he confirms in a foreword that his portrayal of the University is "not drawing from life" One is surely entitled to wonder, in the elitist and narrow-minded way proper to an academic in Greeley's novels, where the heck exactly he is drawing from.

* -- Except perhaps for one rather peculiar narrative digression wherein Blackie is dismissed by "a short man, with blinking eyes behind thick glasses, little hair, and a red face" who complains that the Catholic Church used to preserve "the continuity and the traditions of the West" and is now destroying them. Blackie inquires: "Haven't I met you in a novel somewhere?" and the anonymous faculty member stomps off. Then the sympathetic characters show up and tell Blackie that the anonymous man used to have power, but not any longer, and is still fighting the battles of the '60s. I leave any further deductions as an exercise for the reader. (And, yes, there are plenty of less obvious homages or hints, and, no, I am not about to guess any of them publicly.)
** -- Has anyone, except perhaps specialists in nineteenth-century Russian history, actually come up with this opinion?
*** -- Why on earth any institution would , in retrospect, want to have Trent continues to elude me; I think the Church was in a considerably better place theologically, liturgically, and musically after, yes, Constance (although that whole business with John Hus and Jerome of Prague was not precisely a high point in ecumenical relations). But I am not a Catholic, so my opinions should be taken with a whole box of kosher salt.

Most of my blog-silence lately has been due to terminal busyness: I am teaching three classes, trying to finish an article, serving on at least one too many University committees, organizing lunch for the Marvelous Monthly Minyan, finalizing the schedule for the Minor Professional Conference in a few months, drawing up programming initiatives for adult education at Temple Boondoggle, trying to make time for lunches with friends, and staying on the phone with my family a lot. This semester has acquired a rhythm: Monday through Thursday nonstop meetings, Friday errands and relaxation, Saturday more meetings but of the Sabbathy variety, Sunday variable but with looming guilt if I'm not working. That's why my blog posts have tended to come in bursts lately: I date them whenever I start them, but I only have time to finish them up over the weekend.

And last weekend I didn't do a thing with Baraita because I was -- well, besides new curtains and Torah study and services and my ongoing quest for the perfect sixteen-quart stockpot -- I was busy being really bummed out about the cancellation of Angel. It's the only show I've ever watched faithfully for... over four years now. It's not perfect; it's had some incredibly bad episodes (one of which came just before the cancellation announcement) and some mind-numbingly inconsistent character choices, but it's been a lot of fun to watch, and even more fun to analyze and dissect and talk about and read about. I am not, at heart, a TV or movie person, because my brain does not run to visuals. I can love a book simply because it is a book; I have no analogous attachment to other forms. I only get involved in TV shows or movies because there are words and ideas associated with them. Sometimes I wonder why I bother.

The most recent episode of Angel, "Smile Time," offers an answer of sorts to this question: in one of the whackingly unsubtle symbolic moves inherited from Buffy, it featured evil demonic puppets on a kids' show (think anything on PBS Kids) who suck the lifeforce out of their viewers. (The mechanics of this are not worth thinking about too hard. Just trust me when I say it was extremely creepy.) I'm not planning to offer a detailed review -- I might discuss it more in my LiveJournal eventually -- but I was particularly struck by the way one demon-puppet ignored the standard Discussion Among Bad Guys About How We Must Kill Them All Now! because it was working on a new song about "the difference between analogy and metaphor." It all comes back to literary devices, doesn't it?

The whole episode can be viewed as a metaphor, of course, and not a very subtle one: it turned out that the puppet show's creator had made a deal with Forces of Evil so that his show would succeed, and wound up being made into a puppet himself (both literally and figuratively). Within the series, Angel himself made a similar deal to save his son at the end of the last season; meanwhile, outside the TV, a similar deal was made to keep Angel-the-series on the air for the current season. The logic of metaphor leads inexorably to a fairly unsettling conclusion for the Angel audience -- that is, we are the ones getting our lifeforces sucked. But is that really the message Angel wants to send? Some people -- including some of the show's creators -- have even suggested that the whole series is a metaphor for addiction, or alcoholism, or life in one's 20s, or something along those lines. I am impatient with these suggestions, not because I'm a dyed-in-the-wool literalist, but because I think they restrict the show's plot, characters, and ideas unnecessarily. If it's a metaphor, everything has to fit, has to have an equivalent.

But if the episode -- or the show -- is an analogy, there's something more interesting happening. An analogy offers an approximate (not exact) equivalence between two different relationships. The notion of analogy is polysemous in a way the notion of metaphor isn't: the possibilities for relationships are endless, and so are the approximations of equivalence. On a metaphorical level, the puppets' creator is Angel, both being played by the evil syndicates they sold out to. But on the level of analogy, the puppets' creator and his complicated relationship with the demon-puppets (part of which he, after all, created) is more or less like Angel's relationship to the other characters whose realities he reshaped via the aforementioned Deal With Forces of Evil last season. It's also more or less like Angel's relationship to the forces which are manipulating him, about which I have long held suspicions.* A metaphor, once set, only goes in one direction; an analogy goes in two, and involves four variables, leading to dozens of potentially "right" answers. I have always felt that analogy questions are poorly suited for their starring role in standardizing testing for that precise reason. The difference between analogy and metaphor is like the difference between Vermeer and paint-by-numbers.**

And so this post is a love letter of sorts to Angel, because at its best the show is really an analogy, something messier and more lively than metaphor, something all about the relationships and the variables and the approximate equivalences. Something that could be artwork. If Angel's cancellation is indeed final, as seems likely, my TV-watching next year may be reduced to This Old House (which is neither analogy nor metaphor, but homeowner porn) and the odd basketball game. I'd like to find another show or two to follow, but I already know I'm picky. See, shows and books that are only metaphors, like bad kids' TV or facile speculative fiction, wear on me quickly. It's like reading Aesop's fables multiple times, and how many of us want to do that? Shows and books that lack any layers at all, and pretend to offer "reality," bore me when they do not embarrass me. But shows and books that can be read as analogies -- now that's entertainment.

I'm still bummed out. Thank God for reruns and DVDs.

* -- I watch Angel as a sustained exercise in systematic atheistic theology (with a side of soap opera). It's not the only way to watch the show (QED herein), but it's definitely one of them.
** -- Didn't want the simile to feel left out.

I have been trying, on and off, to blog about teaching, and I find it remarkably unrewarding (the blogging, not the teaching). For one thing, I'm not comfortable publicizing individual student antics, which cuts down on the number of genuinely funny asides by at least 50%. For another, my posts tend to devolve into rants about how assorted members of the University community are seeking to "fix" the Intro Course with results best described in the veterinary sense of "fix," and that, in the words of the great Dana Carvey, "wouldn't be prudent." For a third -- well, how do you talk about the experience of teaching? I don't, really. I talk about the mishaps, the adrenaline rushes, the pedagogical questions, the sheer luminous joy of realizing that you have gotten two photocopiers with completely different copying tasks to finish within five seconds of each other. (Hey, I never said it was glamorous.)

Then I remembered that some of my readers had expressed interest in a post on dressing to teach. Well, that I can do. Indeed, the weather here in Boondoggle is oh-so-gradually warming up, to the point that I can seriously consider wearing skirts and skirt-suits and dresses again. Let me say at the outset that I generally like wearing skirts: they suit me better than most dress slacks (pleats do not work for people with hips), they allow me to trot out a variety of entertaining shoes, they come in a wide range of fabrics and designs, and they look intrinsically dressier than the equivalent fabric worked into trousers. I own more dress/business skirted things than slacks, and the only reasons I do not wear skirts to work on a daily basis are (a) time (not enough in the morning) and (b) temperature (ditto).* This is therefore a lean time of year for skirt-wearing.

But what skirts? More precisely, since cut is primarily a matter of aesthetic judgment, what length of skirt? When I first started making a conscious effort to dress professionally, I was finishing my senior year of college; I had decided to attend a small regional academic conference to figure out whether or not I wanted to adopt that lifestyle, and I needed clothes to blend in.** I went to the only women's clothing store within walking distance in Prepsterville and emerged with a tasteful white blouse, grey wool A-line jumper, and lavender-and-grey patterned scarf; the scarf came down nearly as far as the jumper, which ended someplace around mid-thigh. I still own the jumper and the scarf, but I only wear the latter; the mechanics of getting in and out of cars, or sitting without either crossing or spreading my legs, or never ever bending over, are too complicated to bother with on a regular basis. Also, wool is scratchy, and nobody I'm likely to meet at a conference will really appreciate my legs in any case.

After college, I met and fell in love with the mostly-straight suit-skirt, usually falling just below my knees (although I do have one suit-skirt considerably shorter and pastel, which I use to give papers on Buffy the Vampire Slayer). This is a nearly perfect length, since a skirt just below the knees on a standing woman will end up just above her knees when she sits down (lessening the chance of creases) and will remain basically decent even if she crosses her legs in a less-than-ladylike fashion. I also developed a formidable wardrobe of floaty tea-to-ankle-length*** summer skirts and dresses, many of which I remember to wear slips under; these are great unless (a) they start making their way up your legs due to static cling or (b) you plan to climb up several flights of stairs without a free hand to hold them out of the way. Recently, I've been acquiring a few just-below-the-knee lined winter skirts, which are fine unless it's actually winter, at which point I realize that one-third of my body is only covered by tights.

All of these are quite easy to convert to teaching purposes, always provided I remember the slips. The suits give a charmingly businesslike air to the proceedings; a mid-length skirt can be combined with a fuzzy sweater for something vaguely schoolmarmish, and a long floaty skirt can be worn with almost any sort of top (although one must avoid justifying student suspicions that all faculty regardless of evident age lived through the '60s; i.e., lovebeads are flat out). What stymies me is the small collection of above-the-knee skirts I own -- a couple in various neutral shades of corduroy, one in some thin black velvety stuff, a grey knit sweater-dress. I used to wear these with enjoyment during grad-school seminars, and I still slip into them for an afternoon or evening out, but I have tried to put them on in the morning as I go out to teach, and I have discovered that I am not quite comfortable in them.

None of these skirts is more than two inches above my knee, so it's not precisely a modesty issue; I wear jeans cutoffs (albeit mostly for gardening) that are a good deal shorter. It's also not about my legs -- I happen to think I have very nice legs -- and in most cases I am happy with the rest of my outfit. As far as I can tell, above-the-knee skirts are fine for most business situations, so it's not that it's a fundamentally inappropriate for a professional woman. I've even seen a few of my (young female) colleagues in them. It's just that I want to look... well, I used to say "older," and then a few months ago I thought I saw a grey hair in the mirror (it was just the light) and rapidly revised my phrasing. "Distinguished" is what I am going for,**** and for some reason that does not include flashing my kneecaps. Or maybe it's just that I want more layers between my knees and the students' gaze -- decreasing my cultural armor class by a few points, you might say. (I also find that the shorter the skirt, the more opaque I want the stockings to be.) I don't seriously think any of my students are ogling my legs -- if they are, I prefer to remain blissfully ignorant -- but there's something about a short skirt that doesn't fit with my idea of how I want to teach.

It's always been obvious to me that how you dress influences how people view you, whether or not they (and you) want to admit it; how you dress also, for most people, influences how you view yourself (and I am not one of the oblivious few). But I'm not sure which aspect of the previous sentence my kneecap dilemma is really addressing. Does anyone else have this same problem question complex of issues, or is it just me? And is this about teaching, or about cultural attitudes toward body image, or merely about my personal insecurities? (The way I have phrased it, these questions mostly applies to women, but if any male readers of Baraita have made it this far, I suppose some of you might ponder the wearing of Bermuda shorts at the beginning and end of your school years. Or really tight jeans. Or perhaps you wear kilts. If you have good legs and a tenured position, go for it.)

It may or may not be significant that writing this out leaves me with no particular urge to leap back into the classroom. It does, however, make me want to go clothes-shopping for something nice and warm and -- yeah, it's still winter. Hey, why did we stop lecturing in our academic gowns anyway? This time of year they'd be just about perfect.

* -- No matter what it says on the package, I have never discovered a pair of truly "thermal" tights. This makes sense to me -- it's one layer of thin fabric stretched across skin, how warm can it be? -- but I live in hope of discovering a counterexample.
** -- This was towards the end of a leggings-and-flannel-and-artistically-ripped-things stage, so working with my existing wardrobe wasn't really an option.
*** -- "Tea-length" is halfway between knee and ankle. The problem is that I am a bit over 5'3"; when I buy petite, I get short skirts, and when I buy regular-length, I get a lot of skirts and dresses designed for someone a few to several inches taller than me, so that depending on what sort of heels I wear, they run the gamut from Really Long to Only Moderately Long.
**** -- I think what I really want is lovely silver hair, like Jane Wyatt in her appearance as Amanda on Star Trek: TOS, but my stylist tells me that doesn't often happen in nature and would require me to make regular visits in order to accomplish by non-natural means. Again, not worth the bother without a compelling reason. Also, I'd look really silly with silver hair.

I have the sense that I have been unhappy for too many weeks -- and even worse, I do not appear to be gaining anything from this apart from the desire to distract myself with increasingly bad jokes. Objectively speaking, my life is going along fairly well -- it's only on the macro level that I'm miserable. On the micro level, Aunt Miriam is doing fine, my bills are paid, my quizzes are graded, it has not snowed very much recently, and I have figured out the exactly perfect way to set up my great-aunt's china in my new china cabinet. And if contemplating these small facts (especially the china cabinet) has the power to make me at least less unhappy, I see no reason not to share the, um, mild liking.

So, in lieu of a blow-by-blow description of what goes where on which plate rail of the aforementioned china cabinet (my mother was surprisingly unexcited by this), I am offering this more general-consumption list of Happy Thoughts.

- Possibly the only teaching tool more useful than the stop sign responses for emphasizing distinctions within Jewish thought is the ancient and contemporary Jewish thinkers' answers to "Why did the chicken cross the road?" (Although, oddly, I always find Daniel Boyarin perfectly intelligible.) Link courtesy of Kass.

- On Sunday I headed for the Soy Section of my not-very-yuppified local supermarket's produce area -- you know, with the five different types of tofu sandwiched in between the Organic Section and the Weird Ethnic Veggies Section? -- and discovered that it had expanded by a lot since I last felt a craving for sweet and sour tofu stir-fry. One can now purchase packages of sliced "veggie turkey," "veggie salami," "veggie bologna," and "veggie ham." I picked up not only the tofu I was shopping for but also a package of veggie ham; it is, of course, marked kosher pareve. Further reports as events warrant.

- Also, I finally bought a bag of rock salt. This had better mean that we're not getting any more ice for the rest of the season, because I don't especially care to find out how to use the stuff.

- There's a new musical called Faith. Apparently "Mary Magdalene and her lover, Barabbas, grow from orphans to dedicated zealots and alter the course of history in biblical times." Well, at least it's not The DaVinci Code. (Pity it's not getting more than one reading, or I'd make my way to Chicago somehow or other. But those of you in the Chicago area -- what are you waiting for?) Link courtesy of Lizbet.

- And speaking of Mary Magdalen, I had a lot of fun rambling about last week's Angel episode -- and the spoilers for the rest of the season so far -- over in my LiveJournal. Once I get the Marian-imagery thing straightened out, though, I think I'll post it here. (I have also been thinking about social structures in LJ versus Orkut, but that's its own post.)

- My Shabbat was lovely, thank you. (I even had afterglow all day Sunday; I believe normal people call this "taking the weekend off.") But, really, Friday night was fun and Saturday morning was a beautiful service (apart from that whole business where women worshipping together can't count as a minyan), and I wound up chatting with people at kiddush and getting an invitation to lunch with people I now like very much. Yay, community. Incidentally, if I had been brought up in a more observant household, would I have mastered the art of counting hand-washing manuevers while I recite the blessing? Because I can chew gum and walk, I swear.

- In further vaguely Jewish news, Temple Boondoggle is now the proud owner of an Adult Education Subcommittee, and while I am hardly the first person to come up with this concept, I am unquestionably the squeaky wheel behind its ongoing implementation. My motives are really very selfish -- I want more Talmud study in my week. And some programming control. And a pony. But we'll take it one step at a time.

- That chocolate cake recipe with the vinegar? (Google it if you're curious.) It's really tasty with some nice mild raspberry vinegar.

- The days really are getting longer -- you can tell as much when there's actually sunshine.

And, really, everything else in my life belongs in a separate post for one reason or another, but I wanted to remind myself (and possibly a few of you) that I'm fine. Or at least okay. We now return you to your regularly scheduled blogging.

I am not sure what to believe about the efficacy of healing prayer, but I think I am missing something. That is, I am familiar with enough studies to be certain that it helps receptive people to know that they are being prayed for, and I am also sure that it makes a believer feel better to have prayed, but I am not convinced that the prayer per se is powerful. On the other hand, I am not convinced that it is not powerful. (I am convinced that the people who seriously tout Gregorian chant as "healing" are kind of peculiar, but not really in a bad way.)

The Reform Judaism of my childhood wasn't exactly focused on healing prayers; I don't remember ever hearing a mishabeirach or its liturgical equivalent, probably because this was before everyone fell in love with the Debbie Friedman version. We also weren't big with the extemporizing. There was "silent meditation," as it says in the old Gates of Prayer, but people didn't get up and just say stuff. (Now they do the Debbie Friedman thing on Friday night and a real mishabeirach on Saturday morning -- the more I visit my old synagogue, the more I like it.) Anyway, my first encounter with extemporized communal prayer came in grad school, when my interest in interfaith worship landed me in a series of rather Protestant services which always featured a "prayers of the people" section. Whoever was leading that section -- I think I even did, once or twice -- would say a few initial words, then use some variant on the magic phrase: "For what else shall we pray?"

Now, I like to think of myself as a fairly private person, the exercise of keeping a personal weblog notwithstanding. I am especially scrupulous about the privacy of others when I feel I have some responsibility for those others (which is why I never get to tell Funny Student Stories). So I was gob-smacked when people started standing up and saying things like: "For Joe, in his struggle with heroin addiction" and "For Jane, who has gone into the hospital for breast reconstruction surgery after her double masectomy last fall, and for her children, who are coping with the resultant financial difficulties." Joe and Jane were not usually people I -- or most of the other congregants -- knew, but I still felt a certain embarrassment, not unlike the one I feel when I try to watch more than ten seconds of "reality" TV. Would this person really want a group of total strangers to know about his/her problems? I wondered. Is it possible to have invasive prayer? Also, has anyone ever told you guys that an extemporaneous prayer shouldn't go on for more than two minutes when people are standing up?

Undoubtedly I was missing something then -- I mean, besides comfortable yet stylish footwear. I never managed to feel entirely at home in that makeshift congregation; although I respected and loved many of the people involved, I could never extend that sense of belonging to everyone. I think I prayed out loud a handful of times during my years of attendance at those weekly services -- usually reminding everyone when students were going through qualifying exams, and very occasionally naming a name with no other background. (When people ask me to pray for them, I do take it seriously.) But part of it goes back to the basic fact that I am not a touchy-feely group worshipper, no matter what. I feel the same reluctance to share even in congregations where I am more at home -- Temple Boondoggle is big on talking about the power of its healing prayers at length, with illustrative examples on both the personal and the political levels, and I am big on restraining the urge to roll my eyes.

The Marvelous Monthly Minyan feels different, in part because I actually know and like every single person who attends semi-regularly, but largely because the healing prayers aren't just stuck out there like bumps on a (liturgical) log. I like the way they come in the middle of the Torah service, when we are all active in one way or another. I like the way nobody offers details -- although if I recognize the name I might ask at lunch. I like the way lots of people offer Hebrew names, some even in the traditional form for the healing prayers, with a matronymic rather than a patronymic (although our egalitarianism tends to confuse this distinction*), but I also like the way it's okay to offer a name in English. I am not a touchy-feely worshipper, but I am naturally superstitious, or at any rate it is difficult to glance over the history of religions and not become convinced that names -- if not simply words -- have power. And I am a lover of well-structured, historically layered ritual. So I kind of like our prayers there, even though I don't often add names.

I am also a bit of a hypocrite, or at least willing to try whatever, because I fully intend to mention my Aunt Miriam's name -- just her name, mind -- at both the Temple Boondoggle Friday-night service and the Orthodox women's prayer group I'll drop in on for Saturday morning and a proper Shabbat Shira service.** And maybe it will do her some good -- it will certainly entertain her if I tell the story right -- and maybe it will do me some good, which wouldn't be a bad thing either. (Of course, if God is unaware of the situation at this point, She must be remarkably careless, not to mention deaf. But a little reminder never hurt anyone.) I do have limits, though: I draw the line at submitting anything to Temple Boondoggle's emailed "prayer circle." My superstitious side does not stretch as far as believing that total strangers will help matters by repeating my aunt's name at a designated time each morning, my ritualistic side knows good and well that most of these strangers couldn't identify the eighth blessing of the weekday Amidah if it punched them in the nose,*** and my private side simply doesn't want to share. Apparently,this sort of thing comforts other people more than it comforts me. Which is why I wonder if I am missing something.

* -- And, of course, I completely lack a patronymic, unless I were to award my father a Hebrew name. (I have given this some thought, largely because my mother would like to be buried in a Jewish cemetary if possible and my father would like to be buried beside her. That's gonna be interesting to arrange sometime in the far, far distant future. But in case of emergency, because my father has a wildly non-Jewish name, I will be naming him after his favorite Hebrew prophet -- only then we hit making up a Hebrew name for my paternal grandparents, and I start getting frustrated with the way Dad's side of the family has chosen Anglo-Saxon and Scots names 95% of the time. Er, make this Another Intermarriage Issue Nobody Much Mentions #3,046.)
** -- What's the matter is a very, very minor heart attack now being treated with medication only, except that I am scared to death because people who are fifty years old should not be having heart attacks and I have a very good idea of who in my immediate family is supposed to be getting sick next and it's not her, dammit. For the record, this is actually the stage where I am coping relatively well. I do not blog when I am really upset, which explains most of this week.
*** -- Which, now that I think about the source of said blessing, goes to show that Jeremiah might be good for something after all. And I am favoring you all with this observation because otherwise this is an unthinkably morbid set of footnotes. ;)