It's April-showers season in Boondoggle, and I am between piles of grading, so I've taken the day off from academia: I would have liked to have spent it in my vegetable garden, but my vegetable garden has yet to be tilled thanks to all this rain. I have a number of small plants cheerfully growing on my back porch, and a very few seedlings in the kitchen (I really do need a decent cold frame), but they are going nowhere today. Sunday if it stops raining tomorrow, or Tuesday at the latest, I suppose -- they will be in the ground before I leave for Major Professional Conference #3 if I have to spade up wet clay soil by hand. This afternoon, however, I am sitting out on my front porch with my laptop and a glass of iced tea, listening to the rain and thinking about Torah. Yes, I'm a humanities geek. My non-gardening plans for my day off involve sleeping as late as possible (which I have accomplished), doing laundry (which I have put off), and writing about Leviticus. Longtime Baraita readers will remember that I love Leviticus, partially out of sheer perversity -- it shares the questionable honor of Worst Septuagint PR with Numbers -- and partially because it is good to think.

This year, what strikes me first and last about Leviticus is how the book is saturated with the mystery of God's presence: calling, commanding, burning, descending, moving in for keeps. It makes good narrative sense -- the frame story is taking place as the Israelites gather around Mount Sinai and dedicate the Tabernacle -- but also good theological sense. This is a God who has moved from separating light from dark and Israelites from idolaters into the more delicate task of separating the sacred from the profane. This is a God who inhabits us, who wants us to embody God's holiness in our every action. This is, although few recognize it, the God of Lurianic tikkun olam, the God with bits stuck in everything from your neighbor to your clay pot to your field (which are every one of them not yours but God's, and don't you forget it, buster). And yet this is no abstract, airy-fairy God. This is a blood-and-guts God in the most literal way possible, a God obsessed with the small as well as the large details of human existence. This is a God who wants bread and meat and bread and fruit and human servants, who can tell you which bugs to eat and which parts of your fields you must leave for the poor: this is a God who lives in the world with us.

This is a God who recognizes the profane and the ritually impure, but has no clue about the secular. What you eat, what comes out the other end, who you sleep with and who you employ, what you do for a living and when you do it -- all come under God's commandments. In Her attitude toward Her creation, the God of Leviticus reminds me a bit of the ideal Enlightenment scholar, examining and evaluating everything but attributing innate qualities to very little -- so that certain animals are abominable to the Israelites, and certain skin diseases make people ineligible to offer sacrifices, but only because God says so. If this God recoils from anything, perhaps, it is uncontrolled death, and there is a kind of beauty in the internal logic of impurity: dead humans, the near-death experience of childbirth, the corpse-like appearance of some skin diseases, the animals which feed on the dead, the presence of meat not slaughtered explicitly for God. People do not die with a kiss from God in Leviticus: they are consumed, as some of the sacrifices are, or they are executed at a distance and by human agents. God does not come into contact with the dead. And yet this God accepts death, prescribes rituals for returning from it or from contact with it.

I guess it's no wonder I can't get my Torah-study friends at Temple Boondoggle to appreciate Leviticus: only a handful of them believe in God, and only another (partially overlapping) handful of them have minds which delight in structure and symbolism for its own sake. One or the other of these qualities is pretty well necessary for Leviticus. I have both, which means that I love giving d'var Torahs (d'varim Torah?) during these months and try to stay away from Torah study as much as possible. It's not so much a problem when I lead Torah study, because I have more patience with people I am teaching -- and I'm quite capable of being entertained by suggestions that the whole business of offerings was a pyramid scheme to keep the priests fed. Increasingly, though, the friend who "runs" the sessions prefers to lead himself but looks to me as his go-to girl for pretty much every traditional interpretation from the Hasmoneans to Hasidism. This leaves me tense (because I am not getting to choose what we focus on, but am expected to somehow contribute to it) and ready to strangle the next person who asks if God isn't really just energy anyway or why we are bothering with all this ooky stuff about tail-fat and leprosy in the first place.

My answer for the former is usually a poorly stifled groan and rolled eyes -- but the tradition does, in fact, have several answers for the latter. According to Rashi, whose source I have temporarily misplaced, Rabbi Shmuel bar Yitzchak (elsewhere the Talmud's only recorded juggler*) read a proof-text from Malachi 3:4, "Then the offerings of Judah and Jerusalem shall be pleasing to the Lord as in the days of yore and in the years of old" as corresponding to Leviticus's treatment of male and female bodily emissions -- that is, that "Judeh and Jerusalem" is as seemingly redundant as the sequential description of each gender's emissions. If you accept that connection, it is possible to read the outwardly unpleasant laws of Leviticus into a verse promising future sweetness. The problem is, of course, "future." Malachi is clearly talking about a desired eschatological event, Elijah's return, blah blah blah Messiahcakes. So, you see, in the Messianic era (what? we're Reform), my Torah study group will be able to appreciate the "unpleasantness" of Leviticus. Reassuring, nu?

Meanwhile, I will be skipping Torah study this weekend -- I feel a reactionary urge to attend the monthly Orthodox women's prayer service instead, and I rather think the Temple Boondoggle crowd can get through the Happy Social Justice sections of Leviticus** without an assist from Rabbinics Girl. But writing about Leviticus on my front porch makes me oddly happy. Possibly Malachi is still inspiring me: "For I am the Lord -- I have not changed; and you are the children of Jacob -- you have not ceased to be." Or possibly I'm just wondering what the heck I'm supposed to be doing about leaving the corners of my vegetable garden for the poor -- would it be wrong to plant the marigolds there?

* -- At least, I haven't noticed any other Talmudic references to juggling apart from Ketubot 17a. I wonder if they have concordances which include that sort of thing....
** -- See, I would want to talk about forbidden sexual relations, and they will want to talk about remembering strangers and loving neighbors (in a non-forbidden sense of both).

Henry over at Crooked Timber is discussing the Invisible Adjunct question in terms of academic Calvinism -- that is, why "some tenured or tenure track commenters on IA’s site were quite convinced that the distinction between adjuncts and tenure track faculty reflected the judgement of the market on their respective quality as academics." I had intended to comment in that thread, but since my comments got a little out of hand and off the point, I thought I'd bring them over here. If nothing else, I feel certain Gideon can tell me how badly I am misconstruing Calvin.

Of course, the debate here is not about Calvin but Calvinism, and the Weberian rather than the Reformed understanding of it at that. What we are actually discussing, as per the famous "Protestant Ethic" essay, is the subjection of moral theology to economics -- that "the earning of money within the modern economic order is, so long as it is done legally, the result and the expression of virtue and proficiency in a calling." But theology was not Weber's strong point in my opinion,* and I'd argue that what is going on with the adjunct problem in the academy is not precisely Calvinism because it does not involve double predestination -- that is, predestination of the elect to grace or holiness, and predestination of the reprobate to sin and damnation. For one thing, very few tenured or tenure-track faculty members believe that they got their jobs purely by the grace of God or by the grace of their advisors or even by pure luck; mostly we believe in some vague combination of works and grace. A few of us believe that we acquired jobs purely by our own efficacious merit**, but there are (thank God) fewer and fewer of those. We do, with some justice, argue that we continue to hold jobs by merit, but that's another matter altogether.

So if we do not believe in predestination to holiness, or at least tenure -- that's "election" in the old-fashioned vocabulary of Christian theology -- what do we believe about its opposite, predestination to sin or reprobation? I Googled the latter term, and came up with a handy definition by nineteenth-century American revivalist Charles Finney:

The term [reprobation] signifies something refuse, good for nothing, rejected as of no use. To reprobate a thing is to pronounce it good for nothing, rejected, cast away. The reprobate among mankind are they who are to be lost, to be cast out from the presence of God, and the glory of his power for ever. It is no part of my present design to prove that any part of mankind will be finally lost. I am preaching to a congregation who admit this to be true. To attempt to prove this, therefore, is unnecessary and irrelevant on the present occasion. It is only necessary now, to say that those who will be finally rejected and lost, are the reprobates.

Note that Finney accepts the impossibility of universal salvation as axiomatic. We tend to refer vaguely to "market forces" instead, but there is a tendency to believe much the same thing: that the rejected will be with us always, and there is nothing we can do about it. But Finney was writing in a system involving double predestination (that is, to both holiness/grace and sin). The alternate position, for him as for most of Western Christianity after Augustine, would be teaching only predestination to holiness.

The interesting thing about the choice between single (to holiness) and double predestination is that they amount to the same thing in practice. In double predestination, the reprobate are separately destined to be damned; in single predestination to holiness, God simply allows the reprobate to suffer the consequences of sin, which naturally (heh) damns them anyway. The same people get damned: the distinction between the two doctrines lies purely in what they say about these people. Can the reprobate -- the rejected -- blame God, or must they blame themselves?*** The academic attitude Henry is pointing to isn't any kind of predestination at all; it argues that the perpetually un- or underemployed denizens of academia are inferior scholars or teachers and it's their own damn faults. ("He's been on the job market how many years now? Well, what's the matter with him?") Technically, we are dealing here with a form of academic Pelagianism, or perhaps Arminianism, depending on whether your epithet derives from the patristic or Reformation period.

What we need, in fact, is a bit of academic Calvinism -- but in a form which would (quite rightly) set Calvin spinning in his grave. The belief in predestination to sin without a corresponding belief in predestination to grace (or holiness) is, to the best of my knowledge, unprecedented in Christian theology -- although it's probably possible to read Job that way if you squint. But a stand-alone doctrine of reprobation would be a good starting point from which to address the adjunct problem. It's past time we recognized that some people have been doomed to fail by forces far outside their own control. None of us has been predestined to academic success -- for all we know, the elect have been saved by really spiffy stationery -- but some of us, it seems, have been inevitably doomed to failure. This is a messed-up system, involving a seriously nasty God, which is why nobody's tried to foist it on Christian theology. It does, however, fit the academic "job market" almost perfectly: "the market" is omnipotent, essentially omnipresent, and about as benevolent as a nuclear bomb.

Perhaps I'm reading this wrong, but it seems to me that the logical solution would involve either finding a new God or drastically renovating the old one along with His half-cocked system of salvation. The only possible Reformer for me to traduce at this point**** is Michael Servetus, detested by Catholics and Calvinists alike for his observation that if you were really doing sola Scriptura it was past time to take a hard look at that whole "Trinity" thing. There's no academic equivalent for Scripture, but the idea of unifying the "market" -- of making sure the doctoral programs and the schools who employ those newly-minted PhDs actually agree with one another on matters such as appropriate training and approximate number of required candidates -- would be a good start. And perhaps it would also be smart to finish thinking through these analogies and wonder exactly how and when we became comfortable identifying "God" and "market" in the first place, even analogically. One of the few points on which I agree with Calvin is our innate ability to become master craftsmen of idols.

* -- I can follow "The Protestant Ethic," with some trepidation, through chapter five -- at that point, Weber first holds that he can consider all forms of "ascetical Protestantism" together, and then goes and leaps from Richard Baxter to rabbinic Judaism (yes, really), thus demonstrating remarkably little knowledge of the latter beyond the evident fact that Jews of his acquaintance were apparently good at and comfortable with making money. And I get cranky.
** -- Which, if I have my epithets straight, would make us Pharisees from a Christian standpoint. But that's a whole 'nother post.
*** -- Assuming that the reprobate wouldn't blame sin on God, which strikes me as a fairly valid point -- but, then, I am no kind of Christian, and if I were I'd flee to the East so I could avoid offending anyone with my views on original sin.
**** -- Because, tempting as the prospect of a new Jerusalem may be, nobody wants to wind up being an academic Münsterite.

I think I may have confused a few people by titling a recent post "On Separating." I was making two simultaneous allusions, neither of which I actually explained (which, as you will see in a minute, is a Bad Idea). The first was to the widely-known fact that the Hebrew root q-d-sh, usually translated "holy," literally means "separate" -- and many of the commandments prescribed for the Israelites at Sinai involve not only separation between sacred and profane or ritual purity and impurity, but also separation from the customs of the peoples living around them. Many of the rabbinic proscriptions (kosher wine, anyone?) are likewise cast in terms of separating Jews from their non-Jewish neighbors, co-workers, and friends. On a practical level, turning down Saturday-morning plans and keeping Kosher for Lazy People at home creates a kind of separation between me and some of my friends, not to mention some of my family. I am not especially thrilled about this.

The other famous allusion to separation in a Jewish-community context shows up twice in Pirke Avot, once attributed to Hillel and once to the more obscure Rabbi Tzadok: "Do not separate yourself from the community." And, God knows, I try. I just wish someone had specified which community. There's family, academia, my assorted disciplinary affiliations, my university, my department and various programs, my synagogue, my minyan-and-associated-stuff, my friends in media fandom, my friends in blogging, my friends in online theological debate... and I haven't even started telling you about my gardens this spring, have I? Anyway, I've got all these communities -- even if we keep this within a Jewish framework, I've got at least three or four overlapping but distinct groups plus an informal blogging kollel, at least in my mind -- and I occasionally feel like an overstretched piece of deluxe Silly Putty, clinging in all directions until I lose my ability to glow in the dark. Or, more prosaically, until I fall off.

Backing away slowly from that metaphor, I want to concentrate for the moment on Pirke Avot 2:4/5 (depending on the edition), a verse which begins with the attribution to Hillel of the statement "Do not separate...." Using my nice gender-neutral Reform translation, it runs:

Do not separate yourself from the community; do not be sure of yourself until the day of your death; do not judge another until you are in that one's position; do not say something that cannot be easily understood in the hope it will be understood eventually; do not say, when I have leisure I shall study, for you may never be free.

The penultimate statement is good general advice for teachers of all sorts (and why I usually remember to explain my not-so-obvious post titles), but the final one is the one I've started living by. Pity I can't get enough other people to go along. I refer, of course, not to the various adult-ed initiatives we're implementing nor to the gratifying attendance at Temple Boondoggle's Pirke Avot study sessions so far (although I could've lived without knowing that now people are skipping the Shabbat morning Torah study on the theory that they'd rather do PA than Leviticus). I'm just bitter because I can't get my congregation to stay up all night with me on Shavuot.

You'd think, really, with the enthusiasm people exhibit every time you mention the word "kabbalah" (whatever that means), that a kabbalistic tradition of all-night studying would go over great. You'd think that scheduling it just after a cheesecake party is sheer logistical brilliance. You'd think people would be lining up around the block to join a series of nifty one-time classes. You would merely have forgotten congregational demographics. Every time I bring this up in various committee meetings, you see, I get about ten fifty-to-seventy-year-olds giving me the Look, and sometimes even saying out loud: "So you're still young enough to stay up all night and function the next morning?" Well, yeah, I am, and hope to remain so; somewhere around age fifty I will consider developing a caffeine habit. But that's not actually the point here -- this is once a year.* Most of our congregants are professionals; if they wished, they could arrange to come in late or take off the next day (this year Shavuot begins on Tuesday night).

Then we get the argument from tradition, and I don't mean Pirke Avot. "We did that once," they say, "about twelve years ago. We all brought sleeping bags. It was fun, but tiring. We don't need to do it again." I think I deserve the Hillel Memorial Non-Separating Award for not asking whether they felt the same way about the Passover Seder, or Kol Nidre, or any other favorite holiday experience which is ordinarily done once a year (because, yeah, it's tiring). But if you wonder why more people my age aren't participating in synagogue life until we maybe want to enroll our kids in Hebrew school, here's a lovely example. Maybe next year I'll suggest we make it a Singles Sleepover just to catch some people who won't be horrified at the idea of (gasp) pulling an all-nighter and who weren't, you know, part of the congregation twelve years ago. Or to catch someone so I can have kids and join the regular congregational demographic, whichever. Meanwhile, I am bitter, because I do not really want an Event (and guys only hit on me when I am shopping for power tools, anyway). I want an all-night study party. With cheesecake.

Rachel is having the same problem, and for her it's a choice between sticking with her congregation or heading to Elat Chayyim. For me, I suppose my best bet locally would be at the not-terribly-local-to-me Conservative synagogue, because the Marvelous Monthly Minyan has the same demographics problem and more will but not enough size to overcome it (yet). Or I could go visit people I know in NYC, in Baltimore, in Chicago, even in the Berkshires (hi, Rachel!). But I want to stay at my synagogue. We have excellent cheesecake. We have a lovely building. The library needs work, but it's a good start. Unlike last year, we are even studying on the correct night. And, of course, we are including a segment in the evening's programming which will neatly tie in the Pirke Avot sessions with the question of what, exactly, "we" got at Sinai. It should go perfectly apart from the whole rest-of-my-congregation-are-apparently-wimps thing. They want to wrap up by midnight, for crying out loud.

Oh well. If I'm going to deal with the inconveniences of being a Reform Jew, including the one where everyone whines because the rabbis don't want to move Shavuot to the weekend (this must be a weird Midwestern Reform thing, because we never did that Where I Come From), the least I can do is take advantage of some of the benefits, including the freedom to play online anytime as long as I turn the sound off during services. So if anyone else is going to be in the same fix and wants to try a study group via AOL around 3 am, just let me know. Otherwise -- always barring the identification of a local group who can cope with someone showing up at 1 am -- I'll probably go to my office (nearer shul for morning services, plus faster Internet access than home) and haul out my favorite books. Maybe I'll work on not judging people blah blah blah, since that's clearly the part of the Hillel quote I'm having the least success with. Or maybe I'll just blog.

* -- Or possibly twice a year, but Hoshana Rabba is pretty much beyond help with this crowd.

First, an important advisory: if you are not Jewish, and a Jewish friend tells you anytime during the Passover holiday how tired s/he is of matzah, do not say, "Oh, I love that stuff!! It's delicious!" We appreciate that you know what matzah is. We may even believe that you enjoy it. At any other time of the year, we would find this to be an interesting tidbit of culinary information, or perhaps further proof of pleasant eccentricity on your part. But liking matzah does not establish you as a member of the tribe, and if you avow your love for matzah anytime after about day three of Pesach (especially if you are munching on toast/pasta/baklava at the time), it will be all your Jewish friend can do not to beat you to death with a large canister of matzo meal. This has been a public service announcement, because I run into people who say this every blessed year, and there is no tactful way to explain this in person.

Matzah aside, I mostly enjoy Passover cooking -- and, yes, I do a fair bit of it -- because it allows me to trot out a whole series of family recipes I never make at any other time. Also, I like cooking for a crowd, and I certainly get to do that while I'm staying at Aunt Miriam's. But this year, what with everyone either dieting or on health restrictions or both, we've been looking for alternatives to the usual panoply of egg, meat, and matzo meal dishes. And so, about a month ago, after hanging out with a lot of Jewish vegetarians and reading one too many articles on the precise limits of kitniot rules, I decided to suggest a new family menu item for Pesach. I told my mother it was high in protein and fiber, I told Aunt Miriam it made a great pilaf, and I explained to both at great length that it was pronounced "keen-wa" for no apparent reason. I refer, of course, to quinoa.

Quinoa is kosher for Pesach among Ashkenazim (and Sephardim, but it's the wacky Ashkenazic rules we're working with here) for the same reason potatoes are kosher for Pesach: it wasn't around in late medieval Europe when said wacky Ashkenazic rules were first formulated, and it doesn't fall into any botanical or linguistic categories* which might already be covered by the rules. Pinto beans, corn, and other New World imports can be equated with their legume or cereal-grass counterparts in the Old World if you try really hard, but potatoes are okay. So is quinoa -- it's either the seed or the fruit of a leafy plant, related somehow or other to things like sugar beets and spinach (botany is not my strong point, okay?). Moreover, it's only been distributed outside South America in the last 25 or so years, which means there's very little chance of any Ashkenazic Jewish community having developed a pre-existing custom of avoiding it for Pesach (which is basically what's happening to peanuts). In summary, quinoa is kosher for Pesach because nobody can come up with a reason for it not to be.

Of course, none of this lucid and elegant reasoning (which you can find on any number of websites) had any immediate impact on Aunt Miriam: she is Conservative, and she very sensibly views me as an authority only on things of lesser import, such as leading Torah discussions. I did urge her to Google "quinoa passover," which I believe she did, and to consult her rabbi, which she kept saying she would get around to doing. Fortunately, Cousin A.J.'s Jewish day school discussed quinoa in some class or other and even sent home a pilaf recipe. That settled the matter -- well, that and the part where I bought several boxes of heirloom red quinoa before Pesach and brought them to Coast City along with the chicken. I made the pilaf for a non-holiday dinner during Pesach, and although Aunt Miriam thinks she would prefer less celery and perhaps some carrots next time, we agreed that it was quite tasty.

Meanwhile, I have been telling friends and casual acquaintances all over Boondoggle about quinoa. I am a one-woman quinoa booster organization, at least during conversations about kitniot rules, of which I have had an awful lot over the last several weeks. I think I am beginning to identify with quinoa -- not so much that I come from the Andes, or in red and white varieties, but I do tend to slip through halakhic loopholes, and I like other things which do the same. I like the continuity of tradition and the (sociologically and historically sensible) notion that custom effectively becomes law, but I also like it when modernity plays tiny practical jokes on halakhah, or at least halakhic minchag. I like -- I am, perhaps by necessity, sympathetic to -- anything that simply isn't accounted for in the system. I like applying the system to new questions, watching it extend and transform and (brace yourselves) change.** And I don't want to get rid of the system, because that would take all the fun out of eating quinoa during Passover.

You see, I keep full-contact Ashkenazic Pesach -- or at least it's creeping up on me, so that last year I started avoiding canola oil and using disposables, and this year I seem to have acquired most of a set of Passover dishes -- but I keep it for reasons which do not include the belief that God will be upset if I drink a Diet Coke sweetened with something which might have been derived from corn. God, I suspect, has bigger fish to fry (in matzo meal batter with safflower oil). I am also less than convinced that a gezeirah from some Rishonim in thirteenth-century Provence should outweigh the collected opinions in BT Pesachim 114b plus dozens of Sephardic and not a few Ashkenazic commentators of the same generation. In fact, if you want halakha to be rational, I suspect that the basis for the whole kitniot thing is less substantial than the Sephardic arguments against adding matzo meal to water (because it will eventually get leavened again). It's just as well that I don't seriously expect halakha to be rational -- internally consistent, but not rational. It's rather like good speculative fiction that way, if good speculative fiction spent more time citing proof-texts from the (written) Torah.

But I keep the kitniot rules because they pose entertaining intellectual and culinary challenges, because they make me feel closer to a bunch of my (obviously crazy) ancestors and at least one set of my grandparents, and because -- let's go ahead and admit it -- I never met a set of rules that I didn't immediately start thinking how to get around. Maybe the rules aren't rational, but getting rid of them altogether would spoil the game, to say nothing of the tradition. Fortunately, eating quinoa isn't getting rid of the rules; it's playing by them and taking advantage of them in the nicest possible way. Also, quinoa's pretty tasty.

Not that I'm not counting the hours until I can have a Diet Coke and black-bean tacos. Then maybe cinnamon toast for breakfast. And I'm still bitter about having to turn down the baklava this afternoon. But... still. It's the last day of Passover, and I continue to maintain that playing by the rules is fun. If you like this kind of thing -- and I do.

* -- Frankly, the most convincing explanation I've heard for prohibiting corn (maize to my European readers) is that "corn" is used to describe wheat in British English and rye in Yiddish.
** -- If I do eventually lose my mind and become a rabbi, it will be so I can write responsa. Reform responsa. (For anyone puzzled about the precise form of insanity involved, I should explain that Reform responsa are like Anglican councils, only less binding.) But that's probably just low blood sugar talking.

I usually leave meme responses in my LiveJournal (if anywhere), but here's luck started a meme in which people started naming their ten "most important" (as in formative) books -- Melymbrosia is keeping track of the entries -- and I thought it would be fun to promote it outside LJ. After all, our culture's plethora of top-whatever lists testifies to the intrinsic entertainment value of list-making, and the proliferation of fellow humanities geeks in the blogging world testifies to the continued allure of educated navel-gazing (see item #8 below). I'd love to see some of my regular commenters' lists if any of you are game.

Please bear in mind that these are not my ten favorite books nor yet the ten best books I have read; they are the ten books which, as far as I can tell, have had the most influence on how I've turned out to date. As a result of this criterion, the list is weighted heavily toward my childhood reading -- turns out it's a good thing I started reading early.

1) Picture Stories from the Bible: The Old Testament in Full-Color Comic-Strip Form. Really remarkably complete, if you allow for the lack of non-narrative books (i.e. most of the prophets and wisdom literature); it skipped Lot's daughters and the Benjaminite's concubine but depicted the Sarah/Abraham/Hagar and David/Bathsheba incidents in their full dysfunctional glory. The family friends who gave me this around age four had no idea that they were starting me on a long career of knowing slightly too much about religion for anyone else's comfort.

2) Robin Hood, Howard Pyle. I read this around about age five during a car trip to Florida and have been stuck on the imagined Middle Ages ever since.

3) The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley. Rewriting stories through a series of takes on religion and feminism -- other than dubious historicity, what's not to like? I read this during an all-nighter around age nine, and it doesn't re-read well, but I still respect it. (I debated including The Lord of the Rings on this list instead, but it wasn't all that formative -- my prejudices were already well-established. Mists of Avalon rocked my male-hero-centered world.)

4) Sun Songs: Creation Myths From Around The World, ed. Raymond van Over. I had to look up the editor's name for this one, but I remember it distinctly as the first mythology book I'd read which really made me feel the power of the stories, not just Judeo-Christian or Western but all of them. It was one of the things I pulled down from my parents' bookshelves, and I was in sixth grade, so aged eleven.

5) Gaudy Night, Dorothy Sayers. I have been rereading this book continuously since I was about fourteen, and while I find new angles each time, I am still wrestling with all the same issues about love and scholarship and integrity -- and what does one do with both a heart and a brain?

6) Jephthe's Daughter, Naomi Ragen. I seem to have an interest in the female bildungsroman, don't I? Anyway, you can laugh, but I loved this book the first time I read it (somewhere late in high school), and it was my first inkling that observant Judaism could be intellectually and spiritually fulfilling. Re-reading it, as I do occasionally, makes me yearn to move to Jerusalem.

7) Collected Poems, Dylan Thomas. It might be cheating to count this as one book, because I had been reading sections of Thomas's poetry out of anthologies for several years before I finally bought a separate copy on my way to college. Oh well. Another instance of really brilliant myth-melding, and one outstanding example of my lifelong love for post-Romantic poetry. (If you are wondering about this post's title -- or about my reading tastes and the sort of poetry I wish I could write -- you could do worse than look at the last stanza of "Today, This Insect, and This World I Breathe.")

8) Confessions, Augustine of Hippo. I read it in translation for the first time my freshman year of college, and in Latin a few years later. I have moved from identifying with Augustine's confusion to identifying with his clarity, but I have always found something in this conversation between Augustine and his God worth listening to.

9) The Mystic Fable, Michel de Certeau. Read it in translation at the beginning of my senior year of college and decided I wanted to write books like it. Read it (mostly) in French the next semester. Still working on writing books like it. (I have been equally influenced by several of de Certeau's essays in The Writing of History, but it seems wrong to give him two slots.)

10) The Guide of the Perplexed, Moses Maimonides. I tried to read this in high school and got nowhere; in college, and got slightly further to nowhere. This frustrated me, because very few books resist me to this extent. It took graduate school and a seminar (not to mention the Pines translation) to get me far enough in that I started learning how to read it. I'm not finished reading it yet, of course -- I have read through the entire Pines translation at least three times, but that's a translation. I still need to learn Judeo-Arabic.

There will be more real posts here eventually, but I sort of need to get my taxes done first. Lists may be inherently entertaining, but some lists are more entertaining than others.

I am beginning to notice a pattern: when I am overwhelmed with work/life/whatever, I let things pile up until the pile takes on a life of its own -- and the "things" in question can be student papers, dirty dishes, or blog posts. I finally caught up on the dishes before I skipped town for Pesach, and the student papers will get done on a plane eventually, but the blog posts are still loitering on Movable Type in draft status waiting for me to dispose of the latest round of comment spam (I just did) and finish upgrading to 2.661 (my webhost's FTP server appears to be Having Issues). If I wait much longer, nobody will even consider back-reading the whole lot -- and I really post these things for the (non-spam) comments.

So I am freeing a series of questionably coherent thoughts into the blogosphere, giving any of you who do not read this in syndication the completely false impression that I've been keeping up with posting, when in fact I've been keeping up with starting posts. I have a properly Pesach-related post in mind, actually, and a few other things in the hopper (A Simple Story, for one), but I figure this is why we have eight-day holidays. I also look forward to catching up on my usual blogroll reading, since after week one of radio silence I start feeling too guilty to observe others' timely productivity. I've missed y'all.

Possibly I should make blog updates part of my Friday-afternoon routine, in between rehearsing Torah, doing last-minute dinner prep, and wondering what new shows will inexplicably be introduced on a night when nobody I know watches TV. Or possibly I should just go back to counting the Omer days until the end of the semester and glorious, glorious summer vacation.

I have been trying to write this post for the past month -- the original draft date was March 7th -- and even though I have spun parts of it off into other blogs, its text file continues to sit on my desktop, mocking me and contributing to an overall sense of blogger's block. Now it is the second day of Passover and still Yom Tov, but I am making a sort of statement by blogging now, because I am not (and cannot imagine being) the sort of Jew who objects to using her computer on the second day of Pesach. If anything, I am the sort of Jew who looks forward to downloading several different public-domain siddurs onto her PDA and comparing them at regular intervals during services on the second day of Pesach. But if I hadn't slept late this morning, I wouldn't've minded attending the services, either -- and that is the crux (so to speak) of the problem.

If asked what kind of Jew I am -- and people do ask me this, more frequently than I would expect -- I am most likely to answer "observant Reform." This is neater than "Reform, but not just by default" or "mostly liberal by politics, mostly traditional by liturgy" or "basically just a Rambam fangirl," all of which I have considered. Of course, nobody has yet gotten up the chutzpah to ask me what I mean by "observant Reform," which is just as well, since I'm not sure I know. Over the past couple of years I have gone from wanting to attend synagogue more regularly and learn more about Talmud to wanting to keep a kosher kitchen and... okay, learn more about Talmud. Occasionally I worry that there is a slippery slope and I will wake up one morning in Meah Shearim with a wig, a husband in yeshiva, six kids, and the belief that I should not be learning Gemara.* Then I shake my yarmulke'd-in-synagogue head, remind myself to eat a cheeseburger or something next time I go out (because my kosher kitchen does not include restaurants), and go back to cruising eBay for the latest addition to my burgeoning collection of Hebrew/English siddurim.

Halakhically speaking, I am a Reform Jew (albeit one who uses phrases such as "halakhically speaking"). I act as my own rabbi whenever possible (I've always thought that was the literal interpretation of Deuteronomy 17:8-9), I try to determine which commandments are binding upon me (and which I accept) individually, I think tikkun olam is pretty damn important in a post-Lurianic sense, I think halakhic change is not an oxymoron, I think a Jewish form of homosexual marriage is an excellent (if halakhically mind-boggling) idea, and so on and so forth. I do not apologize for the fact that my father is not a Jew, or for the way we celebrate some Christian holidays as secular festivals. If pressed, I will even concede that God probably doesn't worry all that deeply about my observances of the laws of kashrut (not that She's seen fit to explain the details to me in person). On the other hand, I care about them (and I suspect that God cares about my caring).

Furthermore, I care about finding an opinion from a preceding generation to support my legal conclusions, I care about making the study of the (broadly understood) Torah a part of my daily life, I care about achieving a state of tranquility on the Sabbath (probably a good reason to stop driving, if I could manage it practically), and I care about praying three times a day if at all possible. I can daven from an Artscroll siddur (I can also do a mean MST3King of its footnotes), chant Torah twice a month, deliver a mean d'var, and comparison-shop for tefillin. Heck, I can even affirm all thirteen of Maimonides' principles of faith with only slight prevarication around the ninth and the twelfth.** If I were a rabbi, I could almost be Conservative, and if I were a man, I could almost be Orthodox; as it stands I am a woman who has never quite gotten around to getting semicha, which makes me Reform.

None of this would bother me particularly were it not for the existence of other Jews. At Temple Boondoggle, my Torah-study friends joke that I am holding down the Orthodox position when I assert that some of the detailed legalities of Sabbath observance are kind of nifty (or at least not altogether risible). At the Marvelous Monthly Minyan, which is Conservative by default because it's traditional-egalitarian, I do my best to steer conversation away from the twin shoals of Reform Jews Do Nothing But Intermarry And Encourage The Homosexuals (yeah, that's my congregation they're talking about) and The Orthodox Establishment Does Nothing But Diss The Rest of Us (I kind of know who they're talking about there too, but the few members of the Orthodox Establishment I've met in person are very nice people). At our weekly shiur, dominated by Orthodox or wannabe-Orthodox men, I grit my teeth through a series of Hasidic folktales (come to think of it, I do that at Temple Boondoggle, too -- Martin Buber has a great deal to answer for) and wish for Gemara, not to mention some momentary recognition that the entire Bartenura commentary was not given to Moses at Sinai.

Then there's my family. Last week on the phone, my father called me "conservative," which is about the nastiest thing he could say in polite conversation (since he knows I'm not a Yankee). When I complained, he explained that he meant "conservative in religion." Ouch. Dad thinks religion is the opiate of the masses, which is a fairly logical conclusion from the period of history he studies, but it seems not to have occurred to him that even Marx believed in reaping whirlwinds -- if you send your daughter to synagogue because your wife wants it and because you have some vague idea that religious principles are good for children, you run the risk of having her fuse the religious enthusiasm from your side of the family with the religious tradition from the other side. My mother is even less thrilled with my Judaic hobbies, if possible: she was trying to raise me Jewish in an unobtrusive way which would involve joining a synagogue once I had school-age kids and (preferably) a Jewish husband. Going to shul is fine (not that she bothers), but spending the entire day at shul is, she feels, out of whack. Also, she worries that the whole vegetarian-kosher thing means I'm not getting enough protein, and that the whole observant-Reform thing means I'm never going to give her grandchildren. (She might have a point about that last -- I mean, how many nice Jewish guys are interested in arguing Talmud with a woman who might decide to put a Christmas tree in her living room any year now?***)

So now I travel with a tiny book of Psalms in Hebrew and English stuffed into my purse next to my cell phone, a wavering commitment to taking off at least Saturday mornings to go to shul, and a vague sense of unease about how I define myself. I don't particularly care to be a target for Orthodox "outreach" or Reform social programming, I can't find enough people who think late medieval Ashkenaz is genuinely awesome, and I am not even sure I like the word "observant," since it suggests some sort of either/or binary opposition which has nothing to do with my decidedly both/and eilu v'eilu tradition. But I do occasionally wish I could find a ringtone for my cell phone to the traditional tune of "Yigdal." And maybe next year I'll set the cell-phone alarm to wake me up in time to make it to services on the second day of Pesach.

* -- Provided that the husband is primary caretaker for the kids (and hence part-time at the yeshiva), the only parts of that scenario I really object to are the wig and the lack of Gemara. And I could probably compromise on really spiffy hats.
** -- And the eighth, if it's interpreted in such a matter as to ban a historical-critical interpretation of the Torah, but I feel that if it was good enough for ibn Ezra, it's good enough for me.
*** -- Plus, synagogues are a lousy way to pick up dates -- almost everyone is at least ten years older than me and married -- and Jewish singles organizations appear to focus on such crucial shared traditions as cocktail parties. Any regular readers of Baraita can probably imagine my preferred topics for cocktail-party chatter. I'm fairly sure they wouldn't go over well at singles events.