Last weekend at the Marvelous Monthly Minyan I chanted Haftarah, thus concluding the Week Of Doing Things I Probably Should Have Done At Age Thirteen on a high note (literally). Apart from a few bobbles early on and some stumbling over the middle after-blessings (why is it so much more difficult to insert new words into the middle of a prayer I know than to add onto either end?), plus the realization that I need to figure out which Chumash or Tanakh has the largest and most readable print before I do this again, I managed well enough. And then I did the d'var, and brought lots of food for Kiddush, and went over a friend's house for a bit to chat about adult education at Temple Boondoggle, and went to the mincha/Mishnah/ma'ariv combo at Congregation Beth Boondoggle -- all pretty much my normal Saturday routine -- only now I keep thinking back to Deuteronomy 18:13, which JPS translates as "You must be wholehearted with the Lord your God."

The Hebrew starts Tamim tihiyeh: in Torah proper, the word tamim has textual echoes back to Noah and Abraham, where it's usually translated "blameless," and to Jacob, the ish tam, which is usually translated as "mild."* Tam also brings to mind the "simple son" of the Passover Haggadah and the medieval Rabbenu Tam, one of my favorite twisters of Talmud, for whom the sense of tam is something like "perfect." But in the context of commandment rather than description, "wholehearted" is an interesting choice, because Deuteronomy 18:13 -- Nachmanides counts it as a separate mitzvah, Maimonides as a general principle -- comes at the end of a sequence of commandments adjuring the Israelites to stay the heck away from neighboring cultures and their manifestations, however benign. I have something of a personal stake in that line of inquiry.

Of course, the call to separate oneself from neighboring cultures is one of the key themes of Mosaic (or, if you want to get historical-critical, Deuteronomic) Judaism. From about halfway through Exodus all the way through II Samuel, God is constantly warning the Israelites to stay way the heck away from Amorites and Hittites and Perizzites and Canaanites and Hivites and Jebusites and your little dog Toto too. Scratch a funny-sounding commandment anywhere in the Pentateuch, and nine times out of ten the explanation will be "don't act like your next-door neighbors." And the overriding message of the Book of Judges is probably "don't pal around with Philistines," although there's a good argument to be made for "life sucks and then you die." Things get a lot murkier once you get out of the Deuteronomic parts of the Tanakh -- possibly in response to the realities of diaspora, Ruth and Jonah and Esther take a stance on interacting with non-Israelites which differs significantly from that found in Nehemiah, Ezra, and most of Chronicles. And by then we are in the era of Hellenistic Judaism and passionately anti-Hellenistic polemic, the latter being a position I would respect a lot more were it not associated with a spectacularly Hellenized dynasty of *cough* priest-kings.

Issues of cultural cooperation and conflict between Jews and their neighbors are no clearer in the rabbinic, medieval, or early modern periods. The first generations of rabbis s proclaimed their lack of Greek influence at the same time they allowed certain holy writings to be written in Greek and borrowed Greek interpretative techniques to draw new laws from their scriptures. More recent historical records indicate that up through (at least) the end of the eighteenth century, Jews tended to have names and lifestyles not too much unlike their neighbors, whoever those neighbors happened to be; we also know that there was a lot of tension between Jews and non-Jews in certain times and places, but it can be tough to decide whether -- say -- Jews started wearing funny hats they'd gotten from farther east before medieval Christians made them a legal and cultural identifying marker for Jews, or whether the Christians required the Jews to wear the funny hats first and the Jews simply made the best of it. (Either way, the amount of free-floating anxiety about Jews passing for Christians in late medieval Europe indicates that they probably could.) But hats or no hats, the Jews (or even the Hebrews, who were, after all, accompanied by a mixed multitude on their way out of Egypt) were never monocultural. The notion of a single Jewish culture is a lot more recent, and I have described at some length why it annoys me.

Nevertheless, standard American "Jewish culture" is a bit like pornography, because I know it when I see it -- and, much as I dislike the concept, I also know that it is only with some effort that I can "pass" as a cultural Jew in large Jewish communities in the USA. Make no mistake: I am religiously Jewish by generally accepted standards of birth, creed, and practice -- but I can hide my religion if I so choose, because I am not quite "culturally" Jewish in the way mainstream American culture recognizes it. Most of the other American Jews I know, including people who have gone pretty far afield from religious Judaism at various points in their lives, tell me that they have always felt identified culturally as Jews by both insiders and outsiders; they attribute this to everything from appearance to name to body language to an innate dislike for pork. Me, I think bacon is delicious, even though I don't eat it anymore (er, usually). I think Christmas afternoon is for eating with family and playing with presents, not going out for a movie and Chinese food. I write "God" with an o, I love mayonnaise, and I am eligible to join the DAR. I have absolutely no interest in moving to New York City or its environs.

My name -- my legal name -- is generically Anglophone and not the tiniest bit suggestive of ethnicity; so is my everyday accent, and if you get me drunk all you'll find underneath is a mild Southern drawl.** My everyday vocabulary includes less Yiddish than your average New Yorker's, my coloring is pretty much Scotch-Irish, and despite my best efforts I'm likely to say "Jesus" when I stub my toe. I can operate my own power tools (yes, I've seriously been told this is thanks to my goyische heritage). If all of this strikes you as completely irrelevant to my religion, you're not alone. But before I started hanging out a lot at synagogues, where the little beanie cap tends to be a clue, I was used to people catching onto my religious identity only when I told them straight out or drew on my vast repertoire of subtle ways to work it into conversation -- and I needed that vast repertoire, because without a reference to "my Bat Mitzvah" or "after the High Holidays" everyone assumed I was Christian or secular. In short, I do not ping anyone's Jewdar.

This was never a problem when I was growing up because none of the Jews in my town pinged anyone's Jewdar -- except the ones fresh from New York, and what was really obvious about them was that they were Yankees, which was beyond help. In My Hometown, almost all the Jews (except the Yankees) had Anglo coloring and a couple of Christian relatives and the same names as everyone else; we did not eat bagels until everyone else started to, and you had to look pretty hard before you noticed we never wore crosses or got up early on Sunday mornings. Sometimes we turned down bacon-wrapped hors d'oeuvres at parties, and sometimes we didn't. We built sukkahs out of tobacco stakes, and we all got along with each other pretty well because there was one synagogue in town and what else were you going to do? We babysat for the church next door on Christmas and Easter, and they returned the favor on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. We wished our neighbors Merry Christmas, and sometimes we reminded them to wish us Happy Hanukkah. Every moment, it seemed, we could choose whether or not to be Jewish -- and we kept on choosing to be. And I couldn't say whether it was a cause or an effect of our cultural camouflage, but the closest thing to an anti-Semitic incident in my childhood was the time a girl at camp -- after being told I was Jewish -- said she wasn't surprised because I had a kind of big nose. (Not exactly blood-libel material there -- plus, I think she was a Yankee.) As I already suggested, a quick look at post-Exilic Jewish history will actually find us pretty ordinary in our collective comfort with our surrounding culture; a quick look at contemporary American "Jewish culture," even the liberal end of the observance spectrum, will find us strikingly outside the norm.

Of course, I did not grow up entirely ignorant of normative American Jewish culture: my mother is from Coast City, which is located squarely in the middle of the Northeastern Jewish population belt, and her mother (z"l) was a one-woman outreach team, importing me for summers and sending us scads of Jewish books and cassette tapes and bagels and (for awhile there) kosher meat. From the perspective of Coast City, you see, we had chosen to dwell in the Jewish equivalent of Outer Mongolia (and, no, they didn't know about the Khazars). Every time we were introduced to a friend or distant cousin for the first time, they would ask where we lived, and you didn't have to be telepathic to sense their thoughts: "Funny, I didn't know any Jews lived there. At least, outside of Chapel Hill." Now, I love Coast City, and I love Jewish community, but I don't particularly want to go through life never coming into contact with non-Jews except at the grocery-store checkout counter. I like being able to eat at my colleagues' houses, even if I sometimes plead vegetarianism these days. I like looking at light displays in December.

So I feel slightly schizophrenic -- or at least fraudulent -- when I plunge into the complex, self-contained, and rather sizeable Jewish community of Boondoggle. Where I come from, we do not have the regular social dilemma of choosing between multiple simchas on any given Saturday morning. We do not know the rabbis of half a dozen shuls in the area, and they most certainly do not know us. We do not have the finely honed instincts which allow us to take a person's congregational affiliation and draw mostly-accurate conclusions about his or her socioeconomic status, manner of living, and silverware patterns. We do not run into acquaintances at our local kosher markets or donate to our local yeshivas, because we have neither. We do not have a de facto Jewish university in town (where, by the way, I do not teach), and we do not have Jewish neighborhoods, much less entire Jewish suburbs. We do not have Reform congregations which meet on Sunday mornings (Midwestern Reform is very different from Southern Reform), but we also do not have Orthodox congregations at all, for obvious demographic reasons. We do not switch, without thinking about it, from Sephardic to Ashkenazic pronunciation of Hebrew phrases depending on context -- in fact, we don't use very many Hebrew phrases outside services. We do not have a drawerful of benchers and yarmulkes we picked up at other people's special events.

Only now I do. The other day I stopped by Borders to pick up a gift certificate for a Bat Mitzvah present, and they had Bat Mitzvah cards right there. A selection of them. And several types of Jewish calendars. I had to restrain the urge to stockpile. Then after Shabbos (note context), I was looking up the exact location of our local Young Israel, the better to attend a nifty-sounding lecture sponsored by an acquaintance of mine, and I recognized half a dozen names poking around their website. Young Israel. I know people at a Young Israel. (Also, I know that Young Israel is a synagogue and not an Israeli dancing club.) Did I miss the part where I fell down the rabbit hole? I like a traditional Jewish liturgy, more or less, but I don't really fit into what Boondoggle perceives as a traditional Jewish lifestyle. I just... fake it really, really well, apparently. (Which reminds me, I need to pick up another Bat Mitzvah present for this weekend.) But sometimes I get homesick, and sometimes I have trouble describing my Saturday to my father, and sometimes I realize that finding someone to date who would actually get along with both sides of my family is going to be more difficult than learning any number of new prayers.

I've finally noticed that all my close Jewish friends are equally "weird" from a normative-Jewish-cultural perspective -- we look like pillars of the community, but really we're converts or out-of-towners or people who live in the wrong neighborhoods and work in the wrong businesses, people who straddle a couple of cultures the same way I do -- so perhaps I should troll JDate for nice Southern Jewish boys. But there are advantages to my current situation: for one thing, the Jewish community in Boondoggle is large enough that there actually might be a nice liberal yet observance-conscious culture-straddler I just haven't met. Also, locating other people with whom to celebrate minor holidays continues to give me a pleasant frisson of exoticism, and for similar reasons (I suspect) I find myself in agreement with Barefoot Jewess when she suggests that guys in various combinations of tzitzit, tallit, and tefillin are immediately appealing. More seriously, I am proud of being brought up where and how I was: it left Judaism as something I didn't really need to rebel against, because it was always already what I had chosen.

As I have become more and more Jewishly active here in Boondoggle -- a long-delayed wish, a promise to myself that I've kept -- I have also been worrying about losing myself, or some fundamental part of myself. Some aspects of Boondoggle Jewish culture are simply alien to me, even when I like them, even when I can fake them, even when I can always call my cousins in Coast City for advice on proper Bar Mitzvah gifts. But as long as I answer proudly when asked where I'm from, as long as I can piece together the cassette tapes Bubbie sent me and how proud my father looked at my Bat Mitzvah and the Yom Kippur afternoon in college when I started reading Mishneh Torah for fun and singing in choirs and leading services pretty much everywhere they'd let me -- as long as I can remember all those things, and see exactly how I got to where I am today -- I remain wholehearted. With, as it happens, the Lord my God, whose Name I will continue to spell with vowels.

* -- Probably because "blameless" or "innocent" doesn't quite square with Jacob's status as Most Jaw-Droppingly Machiavellian Person in the Pentateuch.
** -- Unless, of course, I start demonstrating my ability to sing national anthems, as I sometimes do when I've had a little too much to drink; after four verses of "The Star-Spangled Banner," the only other one I know all the way through is "Hatikvah."

Lord, make me an instrument of your effectiveness.
Where there are patently ridiculous room assignments, let me offer a map of campus cross-indexed by classroom tech level.
Where there are predictable timetable clashes, a red pen.
Where there are underenrolled sections, advance warning.
Where there are impatient students, plausible excuses.
Where there are inept administrators, mass firings.

Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek
To be managed as to manage,
To be advised as to advise,
To be put on hold as to put on hold.
For it is in complaining that we receive,
It is in pardoning that we get absolutely nowhere,
It is in staving off homicidal mania that we are privileged to avoid prosecution.

P.S.: While the original of this verse was not written by St. Francis (warning: music), it's pretty definitely public-domain.

P.P.S.: Furthermore, its deeply questionable use in the season finale of Buffy S6 allows me to enjoy a warm and fuzzy feeling of identification with Willow "let the cleansing fires from the depths burn away the suffering souls and bring sweet death" Rosenberg.

P.P.P.S.: St. Cassian of Imola is, of course, the patron saint of schoolmasters. And of people getting stabbed to death slowly and painfully by their students. I cannot find a patron saint for faculty members stabbing their administrative liaisons to death, but considering that I am scheduled to teach two classes tomorrow, one of which lacks an adequate classroom and one of which lacks an adequate number of students (for complex programmatic reasons which should have been clear six months ago), I would be delighted to find one.

However, St. Cassian's story contains a very important lesson: the first week of school is a lot more fun if you're a student.

Via Incoming Signals, I am pleased to pass on a link to the Lord's Prayer in Klingon -- on vellum, or a vellum-like background, with faux illuminations and a script which the website calls "Carolingian miniscule"; I call it kinda-sorta humanist italic, which has the advantage of putting it in the correct century (fifteenth, more or less) for the Duc-de-Berry-Tres Riches Heures-inspired illustration.

Hi, my name is Naomi, and I am a shameless humanities geek, because right now I consider this to be the Best Thing Ever Not Counting Books and Chocolate. Unless it's the inevitability of some blogospheric Klingon scholar picking apart the translation.

I spoke too soon in proclaiming my cable internet healed last week, but after having made close personal friends with about half the local service techs in my area (seriously, I have multiple cell phone numbers!) and having gotten my amplifier box, cable, cable modem, and -- I think this was the kicker -- cable modem adapter replaced, the dread "intermittent channel locking" has been vanquished. Just as well -- I couldn't decide whether to bust out the holy water or recite Psalm 91 backwards. Also, I got to give away lots of tomatoes to the various cable guys.

While I was suffering through dialup, however, I finally caved to peer pressure and decided to check out Bloglines, promptly becoming an enthusiastic convert. Someday soon I may even use my Bloglines account to reconstruct my (sadly outdated) blogroll. But first I want to make a few decisions about other technical aspects of Baraita, and I was hoping I could get some input from my readers.

(1) As long as I'm caving in to peer pressure, should I bother switching the blog to Wordpress? That is, would any improvement be worth the minor hassle? I've had no real trouble installing and updating Movable Type ever since I started around release 1.4 -- it's been a great blogging tool apart from the issue of comment spam, and I'm even on their donor list somewhere -- but I don't care for the direction MT 3.0 has taken, and I'm attracted to the open-source development model and the lack of constant rebuilds in Wordpress. Lists of pros/cons and testimonials for any other forms of blogging software are welcome as well.

(2) Is there any reason why my RSS feed shouldn't include the whole post, instead of only the first x characters as it does now? (I know I got an email asking for a full-post feed once, and I suspect I never wrote back because I wasn't sure what the problem was. Now that I'm more familiar with the way blog aggregators work, it all makes sense.) While I'm at it, is there anything else you'd like to see tweaked feed-wise? Does my RSS release choice work for everyone? Do I need an Atom feed?

(3) How, exactly, do those of you with Unicode Hebrew all over your blogs go about, er, doing it? And am I correct in thinking it the best cross-platform and cross-browser way of representing the Hebrew alphabet? I can generally read Hebrew fonts as well as Unicode on my PC, but then I download every relevant language pack I can find. And, no, I do not propose to stop my thoroughly inconsistent transliterations, but from time to time I want to make a point about an actual Hebrew letter, and I really want to have "Baraita" up at the top of the blog in both Aramaic and English.

(4) Anything else? That is, are there any other desired features/glaring design flaws you've been longing to share with me? (I do want a "recent comments" sidebar sooner or later.)

This foray into web design has been brought to you by 3.0 meg download speeds, a series of desperate last-minute attempts to avoid firming up course syllabi, and the letter double-yud.

On Wednesday I received my final birthday present to myself in the mail at my office -- I went ahead and got them early because two of them are projects for the month of Elul in any case. The third present is a little bitty 1920s-ish oak dropleaf kitchen table with chairs and really nifty details, where I plan to spend lots of time sitting and playing with the second present, An Introductory Grammar of Mishnaic Hebrew. (I should probably be studying modern Hebrew -- in fact, I should be scouting out funding to go do an ulpan/yeshiva thing next summer -- but the It's My Birthday And I Want It NOW clause came into play.) The first present, however, is one that I have been agonizing about for most of the past year. Rachel finally helped talk me through it by pointing out that you can, really, view it as buying a bunch of little tiny manuscripts, which is like a book, which I have no problem spending money on.

I refer, of course, to my shiny new set of tefillin. The "shiny" part comes as a bit of a shock to me -- I am used to seeing well-worn tefillin, and can already tell that these straps will need considerable breaking-in to achieve that "still kosher but tastefully weathered" look all the cool kids' tefillin have. The straps are also stiff enough that they don't slide easily; I may need to re-tie the knot on the shel rosh so it fits a little better on my head. But they seem to be well-made (they're gasot/s, for those playing along at home) and they have nice sturdy plastic containers instead of those little cardboard doohickeys. There is also a heck of a lot of strap attached; I wonder if I might want to cut these down a bit, since they appear to have been designed for the pre-Jewish giants of Genesis 6 (who, to the best of my knowledge, aren't credited with wearing tefillin even in the wacky Enochian books).

Of course, wrestling with the straps is nothing compared to wrestling with the instructions for putting them on. Naturally, my first instinct was to check online for advice -- I figured I should do it before I tried to put on the shel yad, since I'm not entirely convinced one can type with the straps woven through one's fingers -- and the typical online instructions, like their printed counterparts, are good for establishing which parts to do when and when to say the blessings, but they tend to be very vague about what exactly you wrap exactly where. Standard illustrations are even less helpful: judging from the first image on this page, for instance, one's arm should be completely boneless in order to fasten the shel yad. Or perhaps that's a picture of a non-kosher insect larva, because the guy in the bottom picture, whose image I've seen on several different pages, looks like he just swallowed one -- although he could also be bitter about his receding hairline, or maybe he's just been trying to read online tefillin instructions.

The fact that Mr. Illustrated Tefillin Wearer is a guy is probably not irrelevant, either. In case you haven't figured it out by now, this is not the Big Serious Halakhic Post about how and why I am assuming the obligation of laying tefillin complete with brachot; I may or may not bother posting something along those lines eventually, but for the time being anyone who is curious may wish to read this article and know that I hold with Rabbenu Tam. But I can't help noticing that most of the tefillin instructions out there are aimed at Differently Gendered Than Me Persons. For one thing, there's the way many of the instructions tell you to place the shel yad "next to your heart"; quite apart from the etymological implications of the particular name of God we are putting as a sign upon our hands, I trust the Oral Torah does not require me to arrange for a masectomy. And then there are the impressively bulging biceps on most of the illustrated arms, which leave me feeling that I should go invest in some free weights ASAP to make sure I can position my shel yad correctly.

Moreover, there are a number of niggling questions which the average tefillin instructions simply do not cover thanks to their assumed audience. It's easy enough to figure out that I should not have any rings/bracelets/watches on the arm where I place the shel yad (I don't generally wear anything except a watch in any case), but I am not clear on whether I can put the shel rosh strap under my hair in the back -- does the square-or-daled-depending-on-minhag knot need to be visible? What if the hair is back in a high ponytail or bun -- does the strap go above or below?* On a slightly more serious note, I do know precisely which mysterious "bodily emissions" are supposed to be controlled while wearing tefillin -- if you were to read a few articles on the history of laying tefillin with special attention to gender, you'd know too -- but you couldn't tell it from the instructions, and I could wish more of them had footnotes, not only because these things are fascinating to look into but also because I don't approve of worrying anyone unnecessarily.**

Now, back to the shallow: judging from the illustrations online, all Jewish men everywhere wear button-down shirts. This is news to me, but I have always found button-down shirts somewhat sexy, so I can deal. The thing is, I am a bit more variable in my own attire, which means I will have to plan my tefillin-laying schedule in advance: if I intend to daven with a congregation, I must remember not to wear any tops or dresses with sleeves that I cannot roll up to the shoulder -- and I am still not comfortable wearing sleeveless tops to shul, so this will really cut into my summer habit of throwing a blazer or a little crocheted thing over my sleeveless top to satisfy self-imposed modesty restrictions and avoid freezing to death in the A/C at the same time.*** If I am praying in my house, of course, I can simply don a T-shirt for the duration -- but I do wonder whether there's any halakhic reason not to daven wearing one's (tasteful) underwear plus a head covering, apart from the principle of Not Giving People Any Ideas For Creepy Porn Sites. (I mean, the various tallit options would cover most of you anyway -- and I think Madonna's already gone there in the Die Another Day video, but I can't quite see citing her as precedent.)

The answers to some of these questions -- not to mention the actual pattern of finger-wrapping, which is the practical part I'm still fuzziest on -- would be intuitively obvious if I were accustomed to watching people lay tefillin. Obviously, I am not. The Judaism of my youth was entirely free of funny leather straps -- possibly because we didn't pray anytime one would logically have worn them -- and the Jewish side of my family is structured along matriarchal lines, which makes finding someone to show me the family customs slightly complicated. None of the women in my mother's generation would know; Aunt Miriam's kids, male and female, settled for one pre-B'nai-Mitzvah lesson apiece from my uncle -- who would be happy to teach me his family custom, were I planning to visit Coast City before Thanksgiving (when I may take him up on the offer). I am still debating whether to call Zadie and ask him about his minhag for wrapping towards or away from the arm; undoubtedly he learned from his father, but I don't think he's done it in years (the tefillin bag at Bubbie and Zadie's always lived in the spare bedroom), and I don't want to worry or embarrass him if he can't answer. It's probably standard Litvak, anyway, if I only knew what that was.

For non-family-specific issues, fortunately, I have several -- well, okay, four or five -- friends in the Boondoggle area who are both (a) observant enough to know how to attach tefillin to themselves and (b) liberal enough to show me. But careful readers of this blog will have noticed that I am very much a do-it-yourselfer. Moments of silliness and hairstyle quandaries notwithstanding, I managed to get a pretty good grasp (ahem) on the general practice using these instructions, which are nice and clear. And after I unwrapped my package, brought up the relevant webpage, and thought a bit about days and times, I figured I could probably go ahead and play with my new toys fulfill my newly assumed obligation. (Let me stress again that this is not a Big Serious Halakhic Post, but in case any of the actual yeshiva bochrim out there want to consider the problem -- noting that I have also accepted the mitzvah of davening at the prescribed times, more or less, on good days -- it was late morning on Rosh Chodesh, but I hadn't davened musaf because I was running late for a pre-semester meeting, and the special belted-out-in-the-car version of my morning prayers does not include musaf.) I will need to research the halakha on laying tefillin late in the day, since I'm sure it will come up again; there is a world where people get up at the same time every morning leaving a period for morning prayers, and I've already noticed that I do not live in that world.

At any rate, I concluded it was probably OK to lay tefillin, do a little Torah study, and take them off again. I mean, Torah study is always OK for rabbinic Jews, right? Except possibly in the middle of the Amidah? (Even on Tisha b'Av, as long as it's hideously depressing Torah study.) So I took my tefillin out of their assorted cases one at a time, put them on with appropriate brachot and frequent re-reading of the instructions -- I suspect my finger-wrapping isn't quite right, but no doubt it's a Kabbalistic name for God somewhere -- and immediately made a beeline for the mirror. (There is a mirror behind the door in my office so I can do something about my hair and possibly lipstick before I rush out to teach; since the only other mirrors in the building are in bathrooms, this is just as well.) Impression #1: I look significantly less silly in tefillin than I had expected. And while my friends had warned me that the straps would fall down and distract me, they actually... didn't. Either I am a natural at laying tefillin or this has something to do with that one semester in college when my flirtation with theatrical costume design led me to spend rehearsal after rehearsal tying corsets -- not my idea, by the way -- on absolutely everyone. (Who says a liberal-arts education teaches nothing practical?)

Impression #2: tefillin feel good. I had been told that I might find them uncomfortable at first, but while I wouldn't necessarily wrap leather straps around my head and arm for fun, the sensation of having them there turns out to be oddly... pleasant. Reassuring, in the way having a tallit wrapped around you also is, but tighter, and enjoyably tactile. One of the things I sometimes think I miss about the Temple is the way God was experienced in all five senses: we recreate some of it at Havdalah, with fire and spices and wine and song, but we fall short on the touch component. The Torah scroll itself is guarded from touch; the knots in tzitzit are all very well and good, but they're more a mnemonic device for mitzvot than a physical reminder of the divine, plus I can easily forget about them when the liturgy doesn't remind me. But tefillin are difficult to ignore -- at least so far. Every time I move my left arm or turn my head, I feel the straps stretching or the excess swinging, and the shel yad presses up against my side, moving with every breath.

I could go on, but this is not a serious post, so I will simply round it out by saying that I did eventually stop admiring myself and look up a few mishnayot. Then I took the tefillin off, very carefully, put them back in their boxes, and put the boxes back into their bag. And then I sat there, waiting for someone to hand me my certificate for Successful Tefillin Laying, until I realized that I was supposed to do it again the next morning. Impression #3: getting this down so I can do it without reading the instructions at each step... could take awhile. My plan for Elul (since I am frankly terribly at getting any kind of sound from a shofar) is to learn enough about tefillin that I can put them on without checking the instructions. And possibly to enhance my kavvanah enough that I can recite the verses about betrothal without being distracted by the desire to mount an advertising campaign encouraging men to give tefillin to the special women in their lives by parodying those annoying DeBeers commercials.

But buying my own birthday presents is working out just fine so far.

* -- We will pass over the problem of getting Tefillin Hair from the shel rosh, because I'm not that vain. Well, okay, I am, but I'm pretending otherwise. Also, I do not have the sort of hairstyle that would be seriously discommoded -- can you imagine putting tefillin over late'80s-style Big Hair complete with hairsprayed bangs? We will also pretend that I do not worry about matching my shoes and handbag to my tefillin.
** -- I've seen the Aryeh Kaplan book recommended as a good source for the halakha of tefillin; any other suggestions, ideally but not necessarily in English or a Romance language?
*** -- When in doubt about synagogue clothing, I tend to channel my Aunt Miriam and the Appropriate Clothing fights we engaged in throughout Bubbie's shiva week (I think we both wanted a distraction). Sleeves are required -- at least three-quarter-length if you're going Orthodox -- and nothing too low-cut. Skirts should go more or less below the knee standing. Trousers are OK for weekday services but inadvisable for Shabbat. Stockings in summer fall under the Eighth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution (that's me talking, not Aunt Miriam). At Temple Boondoggle, of course, this makes me one of the most formally dressed people there some Shabbats. ;)

The other day I promised that I would discuss how the notion of a prescribed order for prayer (very roughly translated "liturgy") got into rabbinic Judaism in the first place. Historically speaking, we can only go so far back: there were blessings spoken by the Temple priests, psalms sung by the Levites, and even some sort of prayers uttered by the average Israelites who were bringing their fruit or grain or cute little baby lambs up to the Temple, but many of them have been lost to time, and most of the rest were radically reinterpreted in a series of moves beginning over 2500 years ago, after the destruction of the First Temple and the consequent Babylonian Exile (586 BCE, give or take a year). Since plenty of Jews failed to move back within easy reach of the Temple even once it was rebuilt, and since Ezra's emphasis on reading the Law (and/or Prophets) turned out to be more portable than his equal emphasis on rebuilding the walls of Jerusalem, synagogues (the extent to which we adopted the Greek word should be a clue here) proliferated throughout the Diaspora and even in Judea proper during the later years of the Second Temple.*

Traditional (here as opposed to "historical-critical") Jewish scholarship asserts that our basic order of synagogal prayer was created by the men of the Great Assembly during the Second Temple era -- but exactly what happened in those early synagogues, beyond Scripture reading and its translation into local vernaculars, is pretty fuzzy. The content of the prayers offered in the Second Temple is also fairly vague, although we have some partial reports from the Mishnaic era. In any case, the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E. required a fundamental shift in how prayer was conceptualized: suddenly it was not merely an adjunct to or a guarantor of appropriate sacrifice, it was (of necessity) the only possible way to continue serving God as Jews. (Except possibly for Torah study, but that's another issue.) As it became more and more obvious that the Temple would not be rebuilt anytime soon, the first generations of rabbis, the Tannaim and the earliest Amoraim (second and third centuries C.E.), made that massive leap of faith and began to develop synagogal prayer services timed and themed to substitute for the Temple sacrifices.

These rabbis -- I don't mind calling them sages -- had a multitude of pre-existing regional synagogue customs to reconcile or ignore, and before long they were also having trouble finding anyone who remembered what the Temple practices had been, so they began writing things down. But most of what they wrote down had to do with finding appropriate occasions for prayer or reconciling it with the Temple system or making sense of conflicting traditions about a given prayer, not with the particular order inside each unit of the service. If you read the Mishnah tractate dealing with blessings, or even its Talmudic expansions (not that there's not relevant material elsewhere, but it's a logical place to start), you will immediately notice that the discussion assumes there are certain key passages -- Shema, "the Prayer," sometimes Torah reading -- and that you say certain of these passages at certain times of day, but nobody bothered to record precisely which words you used to describe God's holiness (or wisdom, or might), much less how you got from there to, say, the blessings before reading the Torah. We know Jews were praying in those early centuries of rabbinic Judaism, and praying in many of the same words we use today, but we simply do not have anything that a reasonable person could call a "liturgy" from that period.

The people who invented the siddur (literally "order") or Jewish prayerbook came quite a bit later, in an era less concerned about preserving or reworking traditions and more concerned about the precise ways in which words and traditions (across several different languages) have and hold power. For Christian theology, the period between the fourth and ninth centuries is one of Christological controversies -- from Nicaea to the last gasps of Iconoclasm in the East and Adoptionism in the West, a complicated series of theologico-political maneuvers around the apparent impossibility of worshipping a God-Man half borrowed from Hebrew and half from Greek (with most of the worship in the West conducted in Latin). Midway through, Islam emerged out of a sea of Amoraic arguments and post-Chalcedonian divisions, and it became the first Abrahamic faith to break conclusively with Hebrew and Greek language and tradition, retelling revelation and recasting prayer in an entirely new language. Meanwhile, back at the ranch transplanted centers of Jewish learning in the Middle East, Jews were also trying to codify their religion and to define certain groups as Approved and others as Off Limits.

If we take the fourth through the ninth centuries of the Common Era and translate them into Jewish periodization, it takes us from second- and third-generation Amoraim through the Saboraim into what is halakhically Rishonic and historically Gaonic -- but there's something to be said for considering these centuries as one unbroken crescendo of codification. Its accomplishments would include the exponential expansion and reinterpretation (and not a little translation) of most of the Mishnah to fit into the synagogal basis of rabbinic Judaism, the closing of rival Talmudic canons in Babylonia and Palestine, the creation of a poetic and liturgical framework around the stark declarations of rabbinic liturgy, the Masoretic editions of the Written Torah with all its fixed vowels and cantillation markers, the identification of the Oral Torah with the authority of the Talmud and its interpreters as against the Karaites, and -- at the very end, the turn of the ninth century -- the assembly of the earliest siddurim by the Geonim in response to disputes about proper procedure in outlying Jewish communities. You see, the Geonim -- literally "excellencies" -- were the heads of the great and sort-of-great Jewish academies in Babylon, the Jewish Establishment made flesh, big fans of sticking with a Tradition they themselves had helped to invent (in fact, they bequeathed to us the polemic position in which Moses checked each page of the Bavli for typos at Sinai), fighting the retroactively-declared-good fight against assorted forces of resistance to rabbinic (which was to say their) authority.*** They were exactly the sorts of people who would emerge out of centuries of codification and who would want an order of prayer written down and followed word by word.

As you may have guessed by now, the Gaonic era is not high on my list of time-machine destinations (although I would like to know more about Rabbanite/Karaite interaction, codification is a big historical turn-off for me). Also, I have a more than sneaking suspicion that the first prayerbooks, like many of their other theological innovations of the Geonim, were at least somewhat intended to define "Jewish community" in terms of agreement with the authority of the relevant Gaon. But I am sympathetic to problems of definition, and I am able to be downright magnanimous about the creation of siddurim because (a) they are good to think with and (b) they didn't work, at least not in the sense the Geonim probably intended. All Jews did not pray alike in the ninth century, when the first siddur we know of was written under the name of R. Amram ben Sheshna, Gaon of the academy at Sura, and addressed to the Jews of (probably) Barcelona; all Jews continued not to pray alike throughout the Middle Ages, when handwritten prayerbooks became increasingly popular and the composition of new liturgical poetry flourished, or in the early modern period, when the advent of the printing press allowed everyone to notice dozens of distinct regional and ideological liturgical minhagim, My modest assortment of twentieth-century Hebrew/English prayerbooks takes up about four feet of bookshelf space and is nowhere near complete.

Now, the Geonim did not care for piyyutim, the elaborately structured Hebrew poems which could easily place contemporary events within an historical framework or introduce innovative ways of talking about God. They were, of course, a Palestinian custom to begin with, and the Geonim were Babylonians fighting against Palestinian authority claims; they were also a chaotic and particularizing factor in the Gaonic drive to order and standardization. Fortunately, perhaps, people went right on writing piyyutim and incorporating them in the liturgy, especially in medieval Ashkenaz. And even the Geonim could not resist adding poetic expansions to their basic blessings, and in doing so they started to diverge from one another. The siddur of Amram Gaon (which survives only in later interpolated versions) seems to have included one variant of the Kedushah, the responsive readings which accompany the third prayer of the Amidah only when it is said in the presence of a minyan and repeated by a prayer leader. The siddur of Saadia Gaon, written half a century later and including Arabic rubrics, included a slightly different version.****

Today, the Kedushah begins one way in Ashkenazic synagogues (which follow Saadia) and another in Sephardic and Hasidic synagogues (which follow Amram). In both cases, the phrase introduces the congregational recitation of the famous words from Isaiah 6:3: "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts! The whole world is filled with His glory." The Sephardic version begins "Let us sanctify and acclaim You in the pleasant words of the assembly of holy seraphim," but I learned the Ashkenazic version, and I much prefer it: "Let us sanctify Your name in the world, just as it is sanctified in the heavens above." There is a participatory dimension to this sanctification -- we are not simply quoting or mimicking the seraphim; we are speaking in unison with them. And the Ashkenazic formulation always reminds me of something I read in R. Hayim Halevy Donin's To Pray As A Jew***** -- I should check the original, but have never gotten around to it -- that Onkelos (in the Targum, of course) explains the angels' repetition of "holy, holy, holy" as holy in the heavens, holy on earth, and holy in time.

I like this interpretation because it makes sense out of my approach to Jewish prayer. God is holy in the heavens, where there are angels carrying out some sort of ideal ur-praise; on earth, where we have countless different ways to sanctify the name of God (even confining it to how we do that in a synagogue); and last but not least, in time, from Sinai to this morning with all the stops in between. Different communal customs and historical change are no less sacred than the unchanging alleluias of the seraphim. And so there is actually something more than kneejerk antiquarianism behind my insistence that after a certain number of centuries, one needs a damn good reason for wanting to get rid of something in the liturgy (which is not to say that some things are not worth getting rid of, just that one should not do so lightly). Just as there is nothing wrong with me for not being an angel, so there is nothing wrong with the fact that I pray in not quite the same way that my neighbor does (provided I do not disturb my neighbor, which is a different issue), and there is nothing wrong with the fact that I pray in not quite the same way my great-grandparents did. But insofar as I do pray together with the angels, my neighbor, or my great-grandparents... it's another way of sanctifying God's name.

I'm not done thinking about liturgy -- in fact, I have a few more posts in mind -- but I might want to blog about something else from time to time, to say nothing of responding to other blogs, so I'll stop advertising coming attractions and go pick some zucchini instead.

* -- The New Testament includes some of the earliest written sources which attest to this latter development -- Jesus teaches at a synagogue in Capernaum, and Stephen's accusers come from a "synagogue of the freedmen" in Jerusalem, probably one of several such which were explicitly designated as meeting-places for various groups of foreign-born Jews.
** -- Which is one reason why trying to remove all the Temple-related language from the Jewish liturgy strikes me as... um... ill-advised. (What I actually say to other Reform Jews is "wannabe German Lutheran," but I don't necessarily want to defend that against outsiders right this second; classical Reform theology is more complex than I sometimes give it credit for being, and just because I make fun of the original Pittsburgh Platform doesn't mean I'm going to stand by and let you do it.)
*** -- I am not precisely complimenting the right wing of Modern Orthodoxy when I say that its response to other forms of Judaism sometimes reminds me rather strongly of the Geonim. (In fact, I'm a fan of Saadia, but for entirely different reasons.)
**** -- As most of you know, there are also special variants for the Musaf service on Shabbat and festivals, but I'm thinking about the "regular" Kedushah in the Amidah (which can also be distinguished from the kedushat yotzer or the kedusha d'sidra elsewhere in the service).
***** -- Which seems to be one of the standard Orthodox introductions to the Jewish liturgy. It's not the one I'd give out to people interested in history, since Donin doesn't really engage contemporary scholarship on that topic, but it is one I'd give out to people interested in how Jews conceptualize what they are doing in prayer. It also has useful tefillin-wrapping diagrams, but that's another post.

So, as I established yesterday, I'm still trying to understand this... thing... I seem to be having with the weekday liturgy. Of course, the strength of my attachment should not be overestimated: when it's not Shabbat, my desire to pray publicly with a congregation only occasionally outweighs my desire not to battle rush-hour traffic twice a day. Sometimes I do reflect, idly, that if I lived down the block from Congregation Beth Boondoggle (which is the nearest shul that would count me in a weekday minyan, and only a minute or two past the nearest shul that even has a weekday minyan) I could almost see myself turning into one of those little old men who show up every morning -- only, of course, with very differently distributed hair. As it stands, however, this is a summer fling, albeit not the type Cosmopolitan advises for my age group (should I seek therapy or kollel?). And I do dimly recall, from the days back before I started rejecting dates who weren't interested in discussing Mishnah*, that there are certain things to keep in mind at the beginning of any relationship, the most important of which is that I will not change fundamentals about myself to suit someone else's taste. Fortunately, rearranging the contents of my summer handbag so I can squeeze in a teeny-weeny siddur and reading glasses to go with it is not a fundamental change.**

But I am beginning to wonder whether I am changing something slightly more important than that when I pray. Possibly I spent too much of my childhood reading stories and too much of my adulthood trying to rewrite them, or possibly I studied one too many theories of ritual, but I have always known (because knowledge is easier than belief) that words have power, that there is a very important sense in which saying something does in fact make it so. That which name you use makes a difference. That translation is almost always betrayal and that speech is mostly performative (which goes double in a ritual context). That sometimes spells are broken through silence and other times through knowing the right phrase, that the question is whether you can make words mean so many different things, that the limits of language are the limits of the mind. That the world was created by ten statements. You get the idea.

There are certainly people who can pray things they do not believe in -- I personally know several atheists who attend the occasional Shabbat morning service and say the Shema, which puzzles me both theologically and epistemologically (and practically; if you want to get in touch with Jewish culture, wouldn't it be easier to have a nice brunch with bagels and lox?). The thing is, I am fairly certain that I am not one of those people. And one needn't be a screaming Sapir-Whorf fangirl to suspect that phrases repeated often enough are likely to jimmy a back-door lock and head straight for the subconscious -- or that liturgical prayer, or formal tefillah, or what-have-you,*** is a particularly strong contender for doing just that. After all, rabbinic Judaism replaced the action of sacrifice with the words (and occasional choreography) of prayer. ("Liturgy" is a poor translation for tefillah but a decent one for avodah; service does, after all, involve work.) The folks who insist that Judaism is a religion of orthopraxy rather than orthodoxy aren't merely wrong; they are imposing a thoroughly alien distinction on the rabbinic texts.

Now, all of this would be fine and dandy -- I am, after all, praying of my own free will -- if my summer fling wasn't starting to change the sorts of prayers I say. The prayerbook of my childhood (Shaarei Tefillah, FYI) omitted or altered a lot of the traditional liturgy, especially anything Temple-related: classical Reform Judaism wasn't big on renewing fire-offerings, and even I can sympathize with the desire not to recite lists of incense ingredients on a regular basis. Some were unambiguously about a personal Messiah, or certain aspects of the afterlife, or other doctrinal points that classical Reform preferred to elide and/or ignore. Plenty were about Jerusalem the holy city and Israel-the-place (as distinguised from Israel-the-person and Israel-the-people), although some of those have crept back in, and I suspect even more will pop up in the new Reform siddur that's due out next spring. And now I am putting some of those prayers back in myself, but I do wonder whether I will start to believe in something if I pray for it often enough and what I am doing praying for it if I don't already believe in it.

I think I've mentioned before that I first started noticing doctrinal prayer differences when I went away to college and joined a crowd of NYC-area Conservative Jews in the second prayer of the Amidah. The way I learned it before my Bat Mitzvah, it ends (and frequently repeats the phrase elsewhere) "mechayeh ha-kol," "who gives life to all." The way most of my college classmates davened, it ends "mechayeh ha-metim," "who gives life to the dead." (We did not have any Reconstructionists around, which is just as well, because they say "who gives life to all living things" and confuse the matter even further.) At age seventeen, of course, I was intensely fixated on myself, and for myself I was not quite sure what I believed about the afterlife. (I had lost very few people at age seventeen, so the topic was still fairly abstract.) But I was also very concerned about how people perceived me, so I mostly went along with what those around me were praying, and over the years both my default personal prayer and my belief have swung closer and closer to the more traditional viewpoint. This isn't really the best example of prayer influencing belief -- I was rather vague on the whole business to start with, and I tend to think that the loss of my grandparents' generation over the past decade may have had more to do with my change of heart -- but there is room for conjecture.

The thing is, there are not a great many parts of the traditional Ashkenazic liturgy to which I take violent exception (the Artscroll footnotes are another story). There are a handful of places where I do strongly prefer the customs I grew up with or the ones I have adopted elsewhere, but they are fairly minor: I stick the matriarchs in with the patriarchs at the beginning of the Amidah (in double-time, so I can catch up by "El Elyon"), I thank God loud and clear and with proper grammar for having made me a free Jewish woman (I studied all the possible alternatives first), and kosher pigs will fly before you catch me repeating the traditional three reasons women die in childbirth. Also, I occasionally do suffer from a momentary sensation of Psalm overload (the incense ingredients continue to interest me so far). But the alterations go both ways: when I'm at Temple Boondoggle on Shabbat mornings or holidays, I'll bop through the Modim from memory while the Bar or Bat Mitzvah kid's aunt is doing a special reading (no, I don't know why they chose that particular prayer to excise either), I'll sing some extra morning blessings to the tune of the niggun du jour, and every now and again I might shoehorn the Rabbis' Kaddish in after I teach a post-Kiddush class.

So much for changing prayers on the fly. Otherwise, I tend to pray together with a congregation when one is available, using whatever siddur is given to me, but the Conservative and Orthodox weekday liturgies include a lot of additional statements I didn't necessarily sign on for. It probably goes without saying that I think everyone should spend more time considering the fundamental hermeneutical principles underlying the development of halakhah (thank you, Rabbi Ishmael!). Moreover, a God who heals the sick or blesses the years is amply attested elsewhere, and rebuilding Jerusalem in a peaceful and multiculturally sane fashion will almost definitely require direct divine intervention. But do I really believe God will gather in the dispersed exiles anytime soon? (Well, will She let me retain dual citizenship?) Do I believe in a personal Messiah from the House of David? (Given how much Solomon got around in combination with the class stratification of the Babylonian exile, that's not much of a restriction, but I am still firmly in the tree-planting school of thought.) Do I want the fire-offerings of the Temple back? (Good question; I no longer have a good flip answer, which is its own species of scary.) There are also some items which apparently bother most liberal Jews a whole heck of a lot more than they bother me -- for instance, blessing out sectarians strikes me as kind of useful (I'll get to that later, okay?), and and militaristic and/or monarchical language with regard to God fails to upset me, as I think that's precisely Who it should be reserved for. But even if my private prayers often default to a skeletal Pesukei d'Zimra and the Cliff Notes Amidah (er, the Havineinu) for lack of time, I want to stay as conscious of what's been added in as what's been left out.

I also don't want to make prayer all about credal statements -- I just finished saying it was primarily about enjoyment, didn't I? And, after all, most of the Jewish liturgies (traditional or otherwise) are not breaking new ground in what they assert about God: the question is not why we are saying God is X but why we are saying God is X now and in this way and after W and before Y instead of the other way 'round. God Herself is probably not tremendously surprised to be greeted for the six gazillionth time as the resuscitator of the dead, abundantly able to save, all that and a bag of chips. In fact, my declaration that God gives life to the dead is, on some levels, more a statement about me and my allegiances than about God per se: belief in the resurrection of the dead was a shibboleth of Pharisaic, and later of rabbinic, Judaism (cf. Acts 23:6-8 and Mishnah Sanhedrin 10:1). It is about as well-attested a statement of Rabbinic Jewish Identification as it is reasonably possible to find.**** And as such, my personal belief in the resurrection of the dead comes very close to being beside the point: I want to participate in a chain of tradition reaching back more than two thousand years a lot more than I want to sit up nights wondering about Davidic Messiahs.*****

Still, I can't help wondering: am I changing? Am I supposed to be changing? Is God changing along with me? (I've never been a big fan of divine immutability; it works fine if you're a Platonist, but transferring it onto the God of the Tanakh has caused centuries of metaphysical headaches.) And while we're at it, what about the historically undeniable fact that the liturgy itself has changed quite a lot over those two thousand years? "Tradition," a term which I've been tossing around with abandon in these posts, is either imprecise or ideologically normative -- Hebrew would at least require me to distinguish between, say, kabbalah, mesorah, and torah in the larger sense -- but I feel reasonably safe in asserting that none of the siddurim I kvetch about and pray from landed smack in Moses' arms at Sinai (no matter what Artscroll calls their publishing house). So who got the bright idea of telling us that we have to pray certain things in a certain order anyway? And why?

Up next: I stop flailing around and go historical. Er, more so.

* -- It would be unrealistic to expect Gemara until the third date, right?
** -- I have temporarily given up toting my PDA in my handbag, which is slightly annoying, but made less so by the fact that said PDA is very nearly obsolete anyway. I realize that one can probably download siddurim onto a PDA, eliminating the space dilemma, but I am just old-fashioned enough to want to flip pages.
*** -- In most of my not-too-halakhic Judeo-blogging, I make a conscious effort to avoid using strings of Hebrew phrases unless absolutely necessary, because I know how frustrating I find such strings when I don't understand them. I also try not to dip too much into my academic register. Unfortunately, the resulting language is rather colorless when it comes to describing religious experience. Anyone who has a built-in mental English-to-yeshivish translator should feel free to use it as appropriate -- by "pray publicly with a congregation" I really mean "daven b'tzibbur," and so forth.
**** -- I suppose the only other contender for that title would be a prayer asserting that the Torah came from heaven, and I can think of several possibilities there.
***** -- Really, based on history going back well over two thousand years, there's roughly a one in three chance that a Davidic monarch would bother keeping any commandments. Seems like an odd candidate for divine anointment. But I, as usual, digress.

Now, continuing the Great Blog Catch-Up, I need to explain that I started writing a blog post on July 12th (according to Movable Type) and have still not published it. At a certain point, one simply has to accept that (a) one's blog post has ambitions of being an entire book manuscript and (b) it is not a book manuscript one can get tenure with. Thus, I am determined to cast it out onto the Web in some form or other and see whether it will get out of my head that way. And it is, in a roundabout way, the story of my third-life crisis, because what I wanted to post about back in July was how much fun I was having praying -- and why I am feeling a bit guilty about it. This appears to be part one of... several, which I will be posting over the next few weeks.

Across the last handful of millennia and all the Judaisms we know about, summer is mostly ritual dead space (so to speak). Rabbinic Judaism added a few new observances to what had previously been a virtually uninterrupted rush towards harvest, but the months between Shavuot and Rosh Hashanah are still slim pickings liturgically: a couple of fast days with heavy historicism, one largely inexplicable day in which I semi-seriously contemplate hitting up singles bars, a New Year nobody notices, and a manic-depressive penitence cycle to fill in the gaps. Now, it so happens that I find the historical bits endlessly fascinating and will tell people all about the fourth New Year at the drop of an axehead, but none of that helps to explain why I seem to be attending services this summer. Lots of services, including some services I used to confuse with one another (too many of them started with the letter M) and some services I grew up not knowing existed. Now I miss them when they're not there, which is unsettling. I still have a firm grasp on certain of my liberal Jewish principles (gender egalitarianism is a must, dashing anyone's infant's head against a rock is a bad idea, and sneakers do not look good with skirts), but I've also got the phrase breaks down for all the middle prayers in the Grace After Meals, I've become awfully fond of the full weekday Amidah, and I'm itching to learn weekday nusach from someone who can stay on key. It's possible that I just have way too much time on my hands, except that I don't.

There are some better explanations for this -- leaving aside the excuse that volunteering to read Torah for a 7 am morning service gets me out of bed and into the office by 8:30, because after a few weeks of telling myself that it occurred to me that setting an alarm clock halfway across the bedroom would be a heck of a lot easier. For instance, I've made friends with the Seudat Shlishit crowd over at Congregation Beth Boondoggle, and it's fun to see them at daily prayers when I happen to be in the neighborhood. Then there was Bubbie's yahrzeit, which comes smack in the middle of the Nine Days, and so of course I made it to several services for that. And I may have gotten just a tiny bit overenthusiastic at the novelty of actually being in the U.S. and getting to chant my way through Numbers and not moving anyplace and attending services instead of riding Italian trains over Tisha b'Av. Then there were a few celebrations, and a few... um, well, it wouldn't be very impressive to someone who actually grew up attending daily prayer services, but to me I've been spending an awful lot of time in shul. And sometimes I dig out a siddur when I can't get to shul -- not because I think God will zap me if I fail to do so (if so, face it, God is way behind on Her to-do list), but because actually doing the prayers makes me smile.

Someone who actually grew up attending daily prayer services probably wouldn't find these liturgies quite as baffling -- or quite as exciting -- as I do, either. Even sequences as short and supposedly familiar to me as the Grace After Meals or the prayers after Haftarah reading bring me up against a whole set of "extra" prayers -- or, to ratchet up the annoyance factor another notch, extra parts of prayers -- that were cut out of the (rather traditional compared to Midwestern) Reform liturgy I learned growing up. Some were doctrinally problematic, some were repetitious (I'm not sure I think that's a bad thing), and some probably just took too long for everyone to sit through. But I happen to be extremely good at sitting as long as I get to sing, read, or think, and so it probably shouldn't surprise that I enjoy a somewhat more traditional tefillah -- bearing in mind that my definition of "traditional tefillah" is fairly broad, and my definition of "enjoyment" is fairly idiosyncratic.

You see, I detest feeling uneducated or being unable to participate in almost any situation. So I've been working to familiarize myself with these clusters of new material sprouting, mushroom-like, from sections of the prayerbook I once thought I knew. This process has been going on for years, but it's accelerated over the last year or so as I found myself spending more and more time in Conservative and traditional-egalitarian and sometimes even Orthodox worship settings.* It's nowhere near complete, either, but I'm starting to see progress. The new-old prayers frustrate me sometimes, but the language is lovely, the learning is satisfying in and of itself, and some of the tunes have entered the informal ranks of Prayers That Get Stuck In My Head For Days. It might even be good for my knowledge of Hebrew, since the more traditional the prayerbook, the less likely it is to bother with transliteration or even translation (not that liberal Jewish "translations" are anything to write home about either). And all this learning -- to say nothing of the three or four different versions of certain prayers sharing space in my head -- have turned even my private or personal prayers into full-brain sport, equal parts musical and intellectual challenge, as I decide when and where to alter and adjust.

Sometimes I remind myself not to carry this too far -- it's prayer, not a reading list for a seminar in Jewish liturgical history, no matter how much parts of my home bookshelves are beginning to resemble the latter. I know that I am not praying only -- or even primarily -- to acquire esoteric knowledge (it's a side benefit), but that does rather leave open the question of why I am praying. According to mainstream rabbinic theology, I could be praying as a replacement for Temple services, but that gets horribly complicated when I reflect on how few Temple services I am particularly anxious to see re-instituted. According to some of my Catholic friends, I could be praying as a sort of spiritual exercise, but even though there's an endorphin rush I don't think it quite works that way, because I hate exercise.** According to the vaguely Protestant ideology floating around in American culture, I could be praying to talk to God, but I've never really had a problem doing that without the Hebrew, and getting God to talk back in a clear and unambiguous fashion doesn't seem to be helped much either way. I think I am praying because it challenges me and because I feel obligated to do so, but most of all because I enjoy it. It makes me feel good. (When it's not driving me nuts, that is -- but I say the same thing about my family.) It is, in short, fun. Can this be acceptable?

Perhaps I have repeated the matriarch-inclusive version of the first prayer of the Amidah once too often, but I am beginning to sympathize with Sarah. Unlike Rebecca who consults oracles, or Hagar who speaks to angels, Sarah does not have much truck with the supernatural in the non-midrashically-enhanced version of her story. She travels and tells lies and settles down and has her name changed when Abraham says God told him to, but her view of these developments goes unrecorded. We only get Sarah's opinion of the Abraham-God relationship once, the day she listens in on the conversation Abraham has with his quasi-angelic visitors one day at Mamre and she laughs to herself at the ridiculous notion that Abraham can sire a son on her at their impossible ages. God promptly tattles on her to Abraham, but God still does not speak to Sarah -- unless you count a one-line did-not-did-too exchange about the laughter. God never gives Sarah the benefit of the personal conversations he has with her husband, and Sarah returns the disfavor, seeming quite uninterested in sacrificing animals or otherwise luring Abraham's God into a tete-a-tete. Sarah, it is safe to say, would not have been the praying sort.

But one famine, two chapters, three bed-tricks, four destroyed cities, and a great many X-rated developments in the subplots later, Sarah gets her own visit from God -- that is the literal reading of the line which the Conservative moment uses to balance out "Shield of Abraham" in the first prayer of the Amidah -- and Sarah conceives a son (with Abraham, or so we hope). A few verses later, Sarah acknowledges God's role in giving her the son they named Laughter, and a few more verses later God's opinion of Sarah is sufficiently high that God tells Abraham to do whatever Sarah says. (Of course, Sarah never speaks again in the text; God is tricky that way.) What we do not know is what the visit consisted of -- whether Sarah ever spoke directly to God, or God to her. We do not know whether she had been speaking to Abraham's God all along, or whether she had her own personal pantheon, or whether she had ceased to believe in anything divine long ago. We only know that she gave God credit for making her laugh.

Between you, me, and all those bisected carcasses, Abraham's God is not really my all-time favorite manifestation of deity: He seems mostly concerned with spilling blood, sending plagues, masterminding wars, portioning out territories, making covenants, and occasionally playing eenie-meenie-mynie-mo with women's uteruses.*** But Sarah's God -- or the God who made Sarah laugh, which may or may not be the same God -- makes a little more sense to me, and so does Sarah's motivation for finally acknowledging a visit from God. I don't generally start laughing during services (although Temple Boondoggle services include some very small people who I enjoy making funny faces at), but laughter -- and more generally, joy -- is an important part of my prayer experience, even during the summer, when most of the liturgy is about as unlaughable as it's possible to get. I wonder if perhaps having fun is a better motivation for prayer than I have given it credit for.

Next up: the side effects.

* -- I find "post-denominational Jew" a bit pretentious, but I'd be willing to consider the possibility that I want to be a pre-denominational rabbinic Jew. Only with the feminism. Oh well.
** -- To put it less flippantly, I have Big Honkin' Issues with the ethic of spiritual athleticism which pervades so much of early Christianity and rabbinic Judaism. Requiring myself to say 100 blessings a day just so I will have done it sounds about as appealing to me as doing fifty situps each morning. I have been known to grit my teeth and do fifty situps, but I don't like doing them. That's not quite what I'm going for with regard to prayer.
*** -- The management will not be held responsible for any parallels readers might draw with contemporary American politics, but wishes to note for the record that there is a very fine line between playing God and imitating Her.