It is not strictly true that all the Jewish holidays center around food -- Yom Kippur is characterized, but not defined, by the absence of food -- but it's a tolerably accurate generalization, especially given that we have an entire liturgical season of sorts devoted to counting out the measure of an obsolete grain sacrifice. On the other hand, I don't think every day is supposed to be a holiday. Ordinarily, I love to think and talk about food almost as much as I love to prepare and eat it -- I am the sort of woman who reads cookbooks for fun -- but I'm beginning to suspect that the universe is engineering some sort of low-grade conspiracy against me, because I'm really tired of thinking about food, and it's not even Pesach yet.

Awhile ago, I started keeping Kosher For Extremely Lazy People (aka vegetarian with occasional fish) in my house -- exactly why is another blog altogether, but the short version is that I ran out of reasons not to -- and while this turned out to require very little adjustment in my eating habits (most of it at the sandwiches-for-lunch stage), I have spent calendar year 2004 so far merrily experimenting with all the new products available since my last vegetarian phase a decade ago. (FYI, "veggie ham" is acceptable neither as veggie nor as ham. Tofurkey kielbasa, on the other hand, makes an excellent addition to red beans and rice.) This is not too terribly distracting, since I still eat virtually anything served to me outside my home (I maintain Ashkenazi stringency on locusts -- unless shrimp count as a type of locust, in which case never mind), but it does take a bit of advance planning from time to time.

A few months ago, I also decided to go on a diet -- and, no, it is not a "lifestyle choice," it is a diet. My lifestyle of choice involves a lot more milk chocolate and avocados, but lousy heredity with respect to coronary everything has inspired me to shake things up a bit. If nothing else, it can't very well hurt for me to watch calories, fat, fiber, etc. for awhile. I don't anticipate mentioning the diet thing often, and Baraita will become a diet blog sometime after heck freezes over, but the result of it is that I am spending even more of my nonexistent free time planning menus and shopping for novel food products. Really, I could have lived a long and happy life without trying to convince myself to like fat-free cheese, and the details of giving away (most of) the Girl Scout cookies I ordered pre-diet kept me busy for at least a week.

And then we come to Pesach -- or nearly so -- and in an attack of either insanity or deep familial love (probably both), I find myself convincing Aunt Miriam that, since her heart attack a few months ago has put her behind schedule with her annual Seder preparations, she should really let me bring the entree for the second Seder. Which must, of course, be chicken. Kosher chicken (I will be refinancing my mortgage any day now), prepared in large disposable foil pans two weeks in advance, frozen, and transported as carry-on luggage. Cooking in bulk is no problem -- it's mostly about picking the right recipes -- and I have brought everything from goldfish to kitchen chairs onto commercial flights, so I'm not particularly worried about that part. But converting half my kitchen from Naomi's-idea-of-kosher* dairy/pareve to Passover kosher meat in accordance with Aunt Miriam's specially-strict-for-Pesach standards of kashrut requires a good bit of forethought, some quick utensil purchases, a great deal of boiling water, and most of a roll of aluminum foil -- not to mention the actual Passover food items needed for my chicken dish, most of which are available only in suburban stores halfway to Ultima Thule.**

So now the chicken is safely cooked and in the freezer, and I have a shelf of Passover supplies in the pantry and a couple of boxes of dishes sitting in the kitchen. My diet is going nicely -- it turns out that chocolate syrup isn't especially high-fat, and that cheese made with 2% milk is actually pretty good. I have even started eating mostly fish and vegetarian at restaurants so that I can bring the leftovers home without a problem (and yes, I know where this is heading, but no way am I giving up pulled-pork barbecue when I visit my parents). But I will be eating out all next weekend during a Minor Professional Conference in Metropolis, returning to Boondoggle for 48 hours including a department potluck and one Seder, then flying off to Coast City for the rest of Passover -- while my mother's muttering about low carbs and my grandfather is supposed to be keeping an eye on his blood sugar and even Aunt Miriam (who is usually sensible about these sorts of things) has started sharing details about trans-fatty acids.

Oh God, my God, I am sick of thinking about food. Kosher food, diet food, whatever food. Where's a good fast day when you need one? Except... hmmmm. Just possibly, I could go for some ice cream nonfat frozen yogurt. With chocolate syrup.

* -- Which only differs from your average Orthodox rabbi's idea of at-home kosher in that (a) I am going with the Conservative position on cheese, (b) I sometimes read labels instead of hekshers, and (c) I have yet to toss out all my previously used stoneware, because that would be wasteful. I am, however, researching the minority opinion which allows me to kasher it after a year's disuse. Oh, yes, and (d) the front porch may or may not be okay for non-kosher takeout, but I'll figure that out once it gets warm enough to eat on the front porch.
** -- Is it really true that there are no kosher-for-Pesach capers? The chicken will be fine without them, but in a world with Passover cereals and egg noodles, I find it difficult to believe that nobody has plunked rabbinically examined caper buds into kosher-for-Pesach vinegar and marketed it at extortionate prices.

I think I am getting old; I used to be able to go two nights without sleep pretty easily, and I used to be able to grade without wishing for better task lighting. Alas, those days are gone forever, like the swallows in Vallombrosa of yesteryear. Or something along those general lines.

Midterm tests graded in past twenty-four hours: 62
Number of hours spent sequentially grading, pausing only to eat supper, make a cup of cocoa, watch Angel, call my father, and check my LJ friendslist: 14.5
Number of paragraph-response questions per test: 10
Number of essay questions per test: 1
Hours of sleep enjoyed in past twenty-four hours: 0.2 (I dozed off once)
Realization that all future tests must be take-home and open-book or otherwise formatted to allow for typing rather than handwriting: priceless.

And speaking of numbers, or rather Numbers, I would like to hunt down whoever is responsible for perpetuating the clichéd statement that "the God of the Old Testament is a God of wrath but the God of the New Testament is a God of love" and beat them to death with a hardcover version of the JPS Tanakh. In an extremely loving way. See, the problem is that my students really have no business animadverting about that topic -- it's certainly not what I teach! -- but they tend to think it's an acceptable truism to throw into an introduction for a dimly related in-class essay. And then I find myself wondering if it's best to write the necessary multi-paragraph rebuttal, leave a string of disconnected Scriptural citations for them to ignore, or just scribble "really?" in the margin and grimly subtract a point for unsupported argument.

In much more entertaining midterm news, Ellen Fremedon channels Gollum as TA in her journal. I'm not quite that fed up -- although I am indeed becoming more comfortable giving out lower grades as the semesters go by -- but give me time, precioussssss, give me time.

(Yes, it's The Purim Post. I could be fasting today, but seeing as how I haven't slept for the past 36 hours so that I could finish grading midterms, I'm not going to make it to Talmud study tonight without food. How's that for a piece of after-the-fact justification? It may be a slight improvement over claiming that I'm celebrating Nicanor Day -- but, at any rate, I hope I'm not too punchy to make this make sense.)

In the annual cycle of the Jewish calendar, there are holidays I have always loved (Rosh Hashanah, Pesach), holidays I have come to love (Yom Kippur, Shavuot), and holidays I have come to love a little less (Hanukkah, Tu bi'Shevat). But Purim is unique, because the reasons I love it seem to change every decade. When I was a little kid, I loved the costumes and noisemaking and Sunday carnivals and Purimspiels. When I was a teenager, I wanted to make my own hamentaschen and show off my fine set of lungs reading the Megillah and crack lots of not-terribly-clever jokes about getting drunk without ever actually doing so.* Now I am finishing out my twenties, and as (slightly) less of a show-off, I am coming to appreciate the hiddenness of Purim.

On the face of it, there is nothing particularly hidden about Purim: it is a holiday devoted to flashy costumes and raucous rituals. But Purim has its secrets. The most obvious is the not-even-remotely Hebrew name of its heroine: "Esther," the rabbinic tradition claims, comes from a Hebrew word meaning "hiddenness" or "concealment." (And if you buy that, I have a nice ziggurat for sale in Shushan -- but I'm getting to that in a minute.) The other great hiddenness of the Purim story is even less obvious unless you squint: God is missing from the action. Despite its squeaking into the Jewish scriptural canon alongside the equally godless Song of Songs, there is absolutely nothing in the Megillat Esther which would not pass muster with a relentless naturalist. It is a story of palace intrigue, political scandals, the meteoric rise and fall of royal favorites -- add in some explicit sex and you'd have a perfect candidate for a new cable series. Indeed, this state of affairs so upset the Hellenistic Jewish community that they expanded the Greek Esther to include prophetic dreams and pious prayers. Not surprisingly, nobody much reads the Greek Esther.

The rabbinic tradition, never at a loss for words, instead opted to make a silk purse out of a (you should excuse the expression) sow's ear. Purim was a hidden miracle, they proclaimed, and that was the whole point. The missing $DEITY was a feature, not a bug. Purim formed a matched set with the "open" miracle of Hanukkah; in the Purim story, God was working from below rather than from above. Esther and Mordechai, of course, knew that God was present all along, but Ahasuerus and Haman and most of the Persian Empire did just fine with the exterior account, the one where the king's gorgeous new wife manipulated him into terminating a trusted advisor and hiring her cousin in his place. Then generations of rabbinic exegetes brought in corroborative detail -- presumably, as the man says, "intended to give artistic verisimiltude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative." What they created was a brilliant polemic against assimilation, with the Jews of Shushan earning their near-massacre by watching complacently as Ahasuerus partied with the Temple vessels; Mordechai holding back from making aliyah only because of family responsibility to Esther but refusing to bow to Haman out of hardcore anti-idolatry; Esther herself hiding from the king as long as possible while remaining secretly observant; the Jews of Shushan praising God as they cheerfully fight back against their enemies; Mordechai as the reincarnation of Jacob facing off against Haman as the reincarnation of Esau; Esther and Ahasuerus producing King Darius, who of course supports the Temple in Jerusalem. To which I say: yeah, right.

Now about that ziggurat? I think it's fair to assume that most of Baraita's readers know the ABCs of Assyro-Babylonian mythology, but we may be too accustomed to hearing the names in the Purim story to pick up on how resoundingly un-Jewish they are. In fact, they're borrowed from the civilization that put the "die" in our diaspora. Our hero and heroine are called by thinly Hebraicized names of the deities Marduk and Ishtar -- for a rough parallel, try to imagine Jews named Jesús and Christina -- and if that weren't embarrassing enough, their narrative roles suggest that they're named after those deities on purpose. Moreover, Esther is married (quite happily, it would seem) to a distinctly non-Jewish king after winning a distinctly non-Jewish beauty contest. Mordechai is a multilingual, cosmopolitan man-about-town with a suspiciously good grasp of palace politics. Neither one seems to be spending free time weeping by rivers or singing songs of Zion. If Mordechai and Esther got any more assimilated into Persian culture they'd be running the countr--oh, wait. But the funny thing is, they're not Persians - or not just Persians. They're Jews.

Much has been made of the fact that Mordechai is the first recorded individual from a tribe other than Judah to be called an ish yehudi. The rabbinic tradition uses this as a launching-pad to tout our hero's anti-idolatry platform, and occasionally they try to explain it away by saying that he had a Judahite mother, but there's clearly something more to it than that. Whether the Persian imperial district of Yehud gave us the notion of ethno-religious "Judaism" or vice versa is almost beside the point; as Esther's story suggests, the same people could very well have been working both sides of that street. The notion of Judaism that makes it into the Hellenistic period and survives to the present against all expectations -- the religion going beyond tribal identity, beyond theocracy, beyond ever-changing cultural accretions -- that notion of Judaism starts here, with Mordechai and Esther. They're seamlessly integrated into Persian society, and they're not apologizing for it, but that doesn't mean they have to stop being Jewish. If anything, perhaps, it enhances their awareness of how special their Judaism is. And since they live in multiple worlds, they're perfectly equipped to disarm the forces of hatred and intolerance that depend on cultures staying ignorant of one another.

I'm not going to pretend I'm not reading my own experience into the Purim story. As a nice Jewish girl from a part of the country where nobody believes there are Jews, saddled with a spectacularly shiksa professional name and a family full of Christians... I identify perfectly well with Esther. She's a woman after my own heart: a happily intermarried Jewish girl with a thing for dressing up and a talent for catching flies with honey and then swatting the little suckers. You have to admire the way she snared the most eligible bachelor in the empire, then calmly proceeded to put her own people into positions of power in hubby's organization, making sure all the committee meetings were thoroughly pre-orchestrated and perfectly catered. Oh, and she's clearly willing to risk it all for her fellow Jews when it counts. Esther's got layers, she's got flair, and she's got chutzpah. I wish we could get together for lunch sometime, exchange dueling-holiday stories (didn't the Babylonian New Year hit right at Pesach?), and revel in ordering our salads with extra bacon bits.**

So this is not only my blog's version of a Purimspiel, but also my answer to Rachel, explaining why Purim turns me on without any particular need to reclaim Vashti or re-interpret hamentaschen.*** There's a certain amount of pure liturgy-geek fun to be had as well -- where better to play with the cultures and languages of the contemporary American Jewish experience than at the Megillah reading, the only sacred scroll which we can (whether or not we do) legally read in "the language of the land"? -- but this decade I love Purim for the way it fits into my life as an American Jew.

And, of course, for the costumes and the hamentaschen.

* -- Because the entertainment value of throwing up has always somehow passed me by, and because I keep getting stuck driving back from places lately anyway. But do check out Josh Yuter's "Drinking on Purim" for the relatively sobert truth behind the tradition.
** -- Actually, I think bacon bits on salad are kind of gross, but I was going with the metaphor.
*** -- Although if anyone has a low-fat hamentaschen dough recipe they can vouch for, my diet and I will be much obliged. Otherwise I'll just make the standard pareve-margarine-based yummies and give most of them away ASAP. ;)