So apparently everyone liked my Avinu Malkeinu chant -- or at least nobody told me otherwise, and I got some very nice compliments. (I think I started too high, did a lousy job of breathing at the proper points due to nervousness, and had trouble reading some of the words due to glare off the glass-topped reading table, but I mostly know better than to say that in response.) And while nobody picked up on precisely what I was doing with the nusach, several people asked if it was a traditional "Rosh Hashanah tune," which is close enough for klezmer. (Which we also had at one point this morning.) I'm thinking that if I write it down in standard Western notation -- can anyone recommend some decent free-or-cheap musical composition software for Windows? -- I might be able to start teaching it to people next year. And if everyone learns the Hebrew, perhaps we can edge the English lines right on out of the picture. At least, that's my fantasy.

I've never been sure exactly what it is about Avinu Malkeinu that bothers the average liberal-minded Jew so much, but it certainly does bother them: our Junior Rabbi mentioned that back in rabbi school he attended one service where the participants alternated between Hebrew phrases for "Our Father Our King," "Our Mother Our Queen," and some gender-neutral (in concept if not grammar) option I forget. Here is another option with alternating masculine/feminine/neutral epithets, this time in English. At Temple Boondoggle, we stick with the (abridged) traditional "Avinu Malkeinu" in Hebrew but alternate those Hebrew lines (the ones I chanted) with English interpretative quasi-translations which refer to God both as "Our Father, Our King" and as "Gentle Mother." The Senior Rabbi recently told us that this came about early in the congregation's career, when the soloist for Avinu Malkeinu that year was visibly pregnant. The Senior Rabbi -- who, she explained, had never previously cared for Avinu Malkeinu, but felt she had to include it in the service for reasons of tradition -- had a wonderful soothing image of God as a pregnant mother and promptly came up with the idea of putting it into English.

Once I bit back my initial reaction to this heartwarming story ("oh, so you mean the nausea I feel every time we read this is morning sickness?"), I had so many objections I wasn't even sure where to begin. First off, I have never been pregnant (unlike our Senior Rabbi), but I've known a great many pregnant woman, and I would not say "gentleness" was their defining characteristic. When I think about being pregnant -- which I do from time to time -- I suspect my own defining characteristic will in fact be teeth-baring protectiveness, but that's just a guess. At any rate, if you want to talk about a pregnant God, I say go for it, and conveniently there is an excellent place in the traditional High Holy Days liturgy to start from, namely the recitation of the divine attributes including El Rahum. (Of course, we seem to have edited that out of our machtzor in favor of lame congregational readings. Oops.) But "gentle mother" makes no sense whatsoever; it seems intended to express some sort of fruitful (ahem) tension with Our King while breaking up the gender hierarchy of Our Father, but it fails on both counts. Gentleness is neither the opposite of sovereignty nor a value I think it particularly progressive to associate exclusively with women (any more than I like to associate sovereignty exclusively with men).

Based on this story, though, I'm going to hypothesize that there are three problems people have with Avinu Malkeinu: its gendered language, its use of the metaphor of sovereignty, and its status as fixed/traditional prayer. (No one seems too terribly exercised about calling God our parent, which suggests that Western culture is collectively mostly over Freud. Whew.) Naturally, being me, I think all three of these problems stem from not having done enough background research. Most half-educated Jews have at some point run across the story that Avinu Malkeinu originated as a successful drought-ending prayer uttered by Rabbi Akiba once upon a time. Successive generations decided to go with what had worked and tacked on more and more petitions beginning with the words "Avinu Malkeinu," until there are some traditions with more than 50 lines to the prayer.

But the full story comes from a baraita (of course) in BT Taanit 25b and its associated expansions and commentaries down through the centuries. As our story begins, the drought had led to the declaration of an emergency public fast day (the Tannaim being disturbingly fond of such things), and so the famous Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus led the assembly in fervent prayer -- I think it's the commentary tradition which places him at the the late-afternoon Mincha service, the very end of the fast day -- before the Holy Ark. But R. Eliezer finished uttering twenty-four different prayers for rain (some later authors identify this as the leader's repetition of the Amidah complete with all the appropriate additions for a fast day*), and the skies remained stubbornly clear. It was at that point that the (then) much less famous Rabbi Akiba went up to the front of the assembly and said -- later tradition insists he sang -- something along the lines of the following: "Our Father, our King: we have no king but you. Our Father, our King: for Your sake have compassion upon us." At last, the rain began to fall.

Now, let's consider our three potential problems with the prayer in light of the story. Gendered language? Some of you have probably been wondering why a woman who likes to stick the matriarchs in with the patriarchs in the Amidah doesn't feel just as strongly about Avinu Malkeinu. Here's the thing: I want our language to be egalitarian when we refer to specific human beings: members of the congregation of Israel, sharers in the covenant, God-fearers. We have ample evidence of both male and female communication with the divine throughout our tradition: in the two Torah readings for Rosh Hashanah, an angel appears to both a woman (Hagar) and a man (Abraham) and God tells a man (Abraham) to listen to a woman (Sarah). In the Haftarah reading for the first day, one of the classical sources for Jewish discussions of kavvanah, both agency and prayer come from a woman (Hannah). God, on the other hand, is not human -- the fact that She created both male and female in Her image should be a clue here -- and much as I get a kick out of using those feminine pronouns, I am well aware that God is beyond (blessing and song, praise and consolation, and) human gender categories.

Rabbi Akiba was using grammatically male-gendered language to address God -- the standard way of referring to the God of Israel in his time and place -- but it is crucial to remember that grammatical gender does not imply physical or social gender: otherwise we are theologically screwed, as Hebrew does not have a neuter or indefinite gender last I checked, and I don't care for the implication that God cannot be thought outside some sort of masculine/feminine binary.** That said, I wouldn't be too upset by some sort of alternation between Father/King and Mother/Queen in the Avinu Malkeinu prayer except that there's also a kind of ritual aesthetic which I wish more people considered. What strikes me as key about Avinu Malkeinu -- and this is not exactly a revolutionary observation -- is its repetitive quality. (I like to think of it as paralleling the two repetitions of the Amidah led by R. Eliezer ben Hyrcanus.) Rabbi Akiba posed his prayer in the form of a litany, which was clear from the original two verses and is gobsmackingly obvious once you pass twenty or thereabouts. Furthermore, it is a petitionary litany, so the words "Avinu Malkeinu" clearly signal that we are making a formal request of God, just as the words "Dear Sir or Madam" signal that we are making a formal request of an unknown individual.*** Switching forms of address every other line is not how one asks for a favor.

One also uses formal language to ask for a serious favor, a detail I wish more of my students picked up on.**** This is one reason reference to God as King (Ruler, Sovereign, Monarch, Head Honcho) strikes me as entirely reasonable. Of course, "King" has a charming quaintness-- rather like "Dear Sir or Madam," now that I come to think of it -- to my American ears. The only contemporary monarch whom I know anything about is a nice elderly lady in England with tasteful hats and unfortunate children, and she does not precisely inspire awe in me. But one need not be modern or republican (small R, people!) to understand that, again, there is a very important distinction between using human language about human beings and using human language about God; Rambam said it a lot better than I can, and at much greater length.***** Even Rabbi Akiba, who mixed theology and politics with disastrous consequences later in life, articulated this distinction very clearly: "Our Father, Our King, we have no king but you." The point of "Malkeinu" is not only that God runs things in some sense or other (although if you don't buy into that, what are you doing asking God for things, especially during a holiday season devoted precisely to hailing God as King?). The point of "Malkeinu" is also that God is in fact the only proper referent for the notion of rulership.

Finally, we come to the third problem: what about people who do not care for fixed or traditional prayer in the first place, and so think it appropriate to change Avinu Malkeinu at whim or leave it out altogether? I do not fundamentally comprehend these people, because I happen to love liturgical structure, and my entire approach to Judaism is based on Not Changing Tradition Without An Awfully Good Reason. Back to our story: drought is a good reason, especially in the Middle East. (Boredom is not a good reason.) And Rabbi Akiba was, in fact, changing tradition, or (more correctly) adding onto it: he uttered an extemporaneous prayer, born of desperation, and it worked when traditional prayers did not. Generations of Jews then tacked their own heartfelt prayers (for peace, for deliverance, for mercy, for their children) onto R. Akiba's, so that the "traditional" Avinu Malkeinu is in fact a beautiful record of liturgical innovation through the centuries. I wish more people knew this. I myself try to bear it in mind whenever I am tempted to start rolling my eyes at all the personal testimonies Temple Boondoggle incorporates into its service (leaving out perfectly good umpteen-verse medieval piyyutim, darnit).

Maybe this year it will be a congregant's poem or narrative or retelling of another's story that will make God listen up. And maybe the rest of the universe is entitled to occasionally enjoy faith without footnotes. That doesn't mean I'm any fonder of "Gentle Mother," though. Or gratuitous liturgical renditions of "What A Wonderful World" (you don't really want to know). I'm thinking it's just as well I have a whole eight days left to do teshuvah. Our Father, Our King, we have no king but you. Our Father, Our King -- if all else fails, make sure I keep my sense of humor, OK?

* -- Yes, the story includes liturgical anachronisms. In fact, the whole story is very probably a later fabrication, and the "Avinu Malkeinu" litany may have existed from the late Second Temple period -- it can be usefully compared with the beginning of the Lord's Prayer. It is also useful to point out that the connection of Avinu Malkeinu with the repetition of the Amidah is the reason why it is not ordinarily said at evening services. But the point here happens to be the story.
** -- I don't insist on expanding "avoteinu" to "avoteinu v'imoteinu" every time the phrase pops up in prayer, either, although I'll say it if the congregation I'm praying with is saying it.
*** -- God is, of course, known to us. That's the point of Deuteronomy, nu?
**** -- I try not to respond differently to being emailed for an extension as "Dear Naomi" and "Dear Dr. Chana" (to say nothing of "Mrs. Chana," which shows a lack of consideration and attention). I'm not sure I always succeed.
***** -- That is: Moses Maimonides, The Guide of the Perplexed, Book One, in the Pines translation if you please. When the Hebrew examples start getting on your nerves and you skip forward, be sure to take in chapters 26, 35, 46-7, and 50, wherein there is one of my guiding principles for theological reflection: "If you belong to those who are satisfied with expressing in speech the opinions that are correct or that you deem to be correct, without representing them to yourself and believing them, and still less without seeking certain knowledge regarding them, you take a very easy road. In accordance with this, you will find many stupid people holding to beliefs to which, in their representation, they do not attach any meaning whatsoever."

This is not my Official New Year post, although it's likely to be the last one until after the New Year; this is a Synagogue Story. There are eight million stories in the naked Jewish community, and... oh, here, let me just start at the beginning and go on until I get to the end.

It started several weeks ago with a message on my answering machine: "Hello, Dr. Chana? This is the rabbis' secretary. They'd like you to read a prayer for Erev Rosh Hashanah; please call back and let me know if you'll be available." Naturally, I called back, and the Rabbis' Secretary told me that I was down for Avinu Malkeinu and that it was in Hebrew (with the congregation reading the English in between) and could I do that? (I could.) And would I be able to sit in the area reserved for the readers? (No, I'm in the choir, but leave the part where I gracefully elbow past two sopranoes up to me.) And would I like a copy of the reading in advance? (I sure would.)

A few days ago, I got another message: "Hello, Dr. Chana? This is the rabbis' secretary. We want to make sure you know you're chanting Avinu Malkeinu in Hebrew for Erev Rosh Hashanah, and I was late getting the reading out, but I just put it in the mail yesterday." I didn't respond to that one; it didn't sound as though I needed to, and I was tired enough to focus on the "Hebrew" part and ignore another key word: "chanting." It was only this morning, when I opened the reading which had finally showed up in my mail yesterday and perused the attached note, that I realized the Rabbis' Secretary actually meant chanting, as opposed to the perfectly normal monotone reading I'm fairly sure someone did last year. (I also realized that I hate, loathe, despise, and abhor the English part of the responsive reading, but that's another post.) Apparently, I was supposed to give a solo performance, so I guess it's lucky I noticed.

Fortunately, we had our final choir practice tonight, so I seized the chance to ask the regular cantorial soloist about it. "I know both of the Avinu Malkeinu tunes we use in choir [Janowski and that Chasidic tune everyone likes], but what do you think I'm supposed to do for the reading part?" I asked. "Or did you want something really traditional?" "Oh," she said, "you chant all sorts of things. I'm sure you can come up with something good, and that can be our tradition for next year." I blinked and nodded, wondering what someone had slipped into the synagogue water cooler -- because I chant Torah, the regular trupp, not the High Holy Days version. And just lately I do a little Haftarah on the side. I do not improvise vocally -- well, okay, I do, but only during really boring niggunim, which is not at all the same thing as reading Avinu Malkeinu in front of a couple thousand people -- and I think it's especially tacky to do so during the High Holy Days. And while I could certainly belt out the cantorial part to the Janowski Avinu Malkeinu (transposed down about half an octave), I have the funny idea that an a capella prayer should ideally be done in something approaching the traditional High Holy Days nusach. Not that Temple Boondoggle does that as a rule, but they asked me to chant, right?

At this point the other shoe dropped somewhere in my subconscious: unless I have gone completely mad (always a possibility), there is no Avinu Malkeinu in the traditional Erev Rosh Hashanah service or any other Maariv service. Now, I am just Orthodox enough not to mind adding extra prayers back in, and just Reform enough to see the practical value of the move: given that all the RH morning services this year are on work days, I wouldn't be surprised if some people turn up only in the evening, especially since Temple Boondoggle runs the local open-access services and gets a lot of people who don't even manage three days a year in shul. So for once I am not grumbling about Reform liturgical innovation. But, in any event, there is no traditional tune for Avinu Malkeinu during Erev Rosh Hashanah, which left me a bit up the creek with regard to anything I would be willing to chant during Erev Rosh Hashanah services. At least, it would have done so had I been thinking this through a decade ago.

Fortunately, Judith had left a lot of links to chazzanut resources in the comments to a previous post, and I had promptly bookmarked some for future study, so when choir practice let out I headed home and straight to the computer in hopes of not having to invent a tune off the top of my head. Surfing the Avodah archives and listening to lots of MP3s (I particularly like virtualcantor.com) was not precisely how I had planned to spend the evening, but I am relieved to discover that I know more bits of nusach ha-tefilah, aka Those High Holy Days Melodies, than I had realized. It seems that years of seasonal choirs have drummed the relevant Bar'chu and Mi Chamocha into my head, and that gives me a good start on the standard nusach. In fact, we do both of these prayers traditionally at Temple Boondoggle, so I hope some of our congregants will recognize what I am about. And I managed to work out some nice phrasing and alternation of motifs, so that in the unlikely event a classically trained cantor gets horribly lost and wanders into our services tomorrow night, s/he might even identify my rendition of Avinu Malkeinu as recognizably for that service -- borrowing liberally from the Ma'ariv Chatzi Kaddish, which seems to have an especially high quota of Really Nifty Holiday Motifs, and with the last line delivered in that recurring major-ish tune that everyone associates with the season (it shows up for both Bar'chu and Mi Chamocha).

Now I just have to sing Avinu Malkeinu with something approaching conviction, ignoring the very real possibility that nobody will notice my cleverness, and move on to the next holiday challenge, deciding whether having someone read Torah on Shabbat Shuvah is worth enough to me that I will learn enough Torah in the next 72 hours to do so. In addition to layning Haftarah, which I have already volunteered to do along much the same lines. Yes, if I have anything to say about it, Temple Boondoggle will be having several simultaneous moments of connection to traditional Jewish, er, musical geekery. I sometimes think it would be much less tiring to join a right-wing Conservative shul and be the liberal one -- I'd have to do what, tell them to read more English?

But this is kind of fun. Presuming I survive and don't humiliate myself and all that, of course. And I'm getting the afflicting-oneself parts of Yom Kippur started early. Happy New Year, everyone -- go chant something for me.

Every now and then, when I'm tired and my common sense is at its lowest, I think it would be a spiffy idea to set up a semi-serious, semi-humorous online discussion forum through which Jewish children of intermarried families could exchange stories. Possible topic headings would include "Yes, Actually, We Do Exist," "It's Called A Hanukkah Tree, Okay?" "You're Right, That's Not A Jewish Name," and "Beanies of Doom: Making Your Non-Jewish Relatives Comfortable at Services." But there are a few things even I can't quite figure out how to joke about (much), including the ever-popular question of How To Get Your Parents Buried Together and the equally pressing issues of the mourner's Kaddish. For whom in your family do you say it, and by whose wishes -- stated or extrapolated -- do you abide?

Bubbie, my mother's mother, died in 2000, and I say Kaddish on her Hebrew-calendar Yahrzeit, on the premises that (a) my mother lives nowhere near a daily minyan but likes to know that I am carrying out that obligation, and (b) I want to. I also try to read Torah at a nearby service -- easy enough, as it falls toward the end of the Three Weeks -- and next year I plan to lead at least one of the services that day; since Bubbie put forth a lot of effort to make sure I turned out Jewish, I figure she'd appreciate it. Grandpa, my father's father, died twenty years earlier; it hasn't occurred to me to say Kaddish for him, but he was extremely proud of his service in WWII, and it's partly in his memory that I put out a flag for Memorial and Veterans' Day. I was fortunate enough to spend the intervening years without any other serious losses, but the Kaddish issue would not have likely come up in any case -- the synagogue in My Hometown says Kaddish all together in memory of the six (or possibly twelve) million, so that individual losses are marked only by the list the rabbi reads out beforehand.

At Temple Boondoggle, where I am now a member, we practice what I find to be an uncomfortable fusion of the tradition that only mourners stand and the newer practice of standing in unison. The service leader invites any mourners to stand, goes around the room with each mourner naming the one(s) s/he is remembering, reads a list of congregational names, and then invites everyone to stand up and say Kaddish together. Some people just say a name; most share details about how they knew the person, and occasionally our senior rabbi favors us with a short remembrance of some congregational departee, so that the whole process drags on for quite some time. Timing aside, I am by nature a fairly private person, so I might be comfortable with this practice in a small, intimate setting of friends; I was just barely OK with telling everyone I was saying Kaddish for Bubbie this summer. But since Temple Boondoggle's typical non-summer Saturday morning service is a large Bar or Bat Mitzvah composed mostly of total strangers, I would be reluctant to let myself be singled out enough to even divulge a name, and I am oddly embarrassed at the way people I don't know insist on sharing intimate details of their lives in public. I know this is my problem, not theirs -- but I also can't help finding it ironic that I of all people so dislike this sort of testimony, which I realize is a custom more closely linked with evangelical Christianity than Judaism in this country.

In addition to the Temple Boondoggle Shabbat morning experience, I attend daily services at Congregation Beth Boondoggle every now and then, as I did for Bubbie's actual Yahrzeit (as opposed to nearest-Shabbat) this past summer. Not surprisingly, I am attracted to the traditional practice in which only mourners (who are not asked to explain themselves!) stand and say that Kaddish. There is healing in hearing others acknowledge my statement that God is beyond all comprehension; there is power in being the one who continually blesses God's name in response. But the ritual works because the congregants respect its boundaries; they don't stand anytime they feel vaguely mournful. Even if I wanted to -- and I do sometimes worry that there is nobody left to light a Yahrzeit candle for my great-grandmother, the Original Chana, although I have her challah board and sewing machine and several of my cousins have versions of her name -- anyway, I am wary of dragging distant relatives into Kaddish range. People at Temple Boondoggle can be distractingly creative about the sorts of individuals for whom they feel compelled to testify, and a friend and I have a bet on about how long before we hear someone tearfully announce that they are mourning the loss of their beloved household pet Fluffy.

In the past five or so years, I have sustained no pet-related trauma, but death has caught up with me all the same: now I am missing two of my three remaining grandparents, one or two distant friends, and several great-aunts and great-uncles I was close to. I have many little ways of remembering them, from recipes to furnishings to a certain way I mix fountain iced tea with lemonade, but I have lost no one in the degrees for which it is strictly expected to say Kaddish, and I have not thought to mark the anniversary of anyone's death in that way except Bubbie's, until this year. Someone who keeps particularly close track of Baraita posts might remember that Grandmother -- my father's mother, so the Methodist side -- died a year ago yesterday by the English calendar (the one she lived by, after all). She was buried on my birthday, which makes it impossible not to keep track. And I still miss her terribly, and it matters that it has been a year, but I am not sure what to do about it.

If I were home -- "home" in the sense of My Hometown -- this would be easy. I would go to Temple Hometown on Friday night -- no point leaving Dad alone on Saturday morning, but he has TV programs he likes on Friday night -- and I would stand with everyone to say Kaddish; I would attend Grandmother's church on Sunday morning, where I suspect her name will be read out in some form or other, and I would bring both flowers and stones to her and Grandpa's graves in the tiny cemetary next door. Unfortunately, I am not going home this weekend, and between the department picnic, singing in the choir for Selichot, and at least one person's determination to Do Something For My Birthday, I am likely to be deprived of what I consider a perfectly rational second choice, spending the weekend in bed with the covers over my head. Did I mention I'm turning 29, or that my birthday is Saturday? Emotionally and geopolitically, staying in bed makes a world of sense. But as ritual mourning practice goes, it leaves a great deal to be desired.

Grandmother herself would certainly tell me to get out of bed and eat a decent breakfast, and she'd likely approve of my going to some sort of services over the weekend, because that's What Decent People Do. What sort -- well, I asked my father last night, and he pointed out that he couldn't remember his mother ever saying a word against anyone's religion. She met her husband at the youth group of a church neither belonged to; they raised eight children whose current religious affiliations include at least four flavors of Protestant Christianity plus whatever the heck Dad is these days. My cousins and I are even more religiously diverse, but Grandmother cheerfully attended all our various baptisms and christenings and confirmations and Bat Mitzvahs (okay, that would just be me) and weddings. (It has just occurred to me that she will not be attending my wedding. Pardon me while I revisit the Staying In Bed option for this weekend. Okay, better now. Sort of.)

I have my choice of service options for Saturday morning: Reform, Conservative, Orthodox -- heck, I suppose I could drop in on the Reconstructionists if I really wanted to -- or skipping out after Torah study for a frivolous personal errand of choice. The department picnic will conflict with my usual plans for Mincha and Maariv (it's not worth trying to explain this to them, trust me), but odds are at least decent that Temple Boondoggle's Selichot service will include a Mourner's Kaddish, if I feel the need to get one in over Shabbat, which I'm not sure I do. Really, I'd rather go home this weekend, except that that's impossible. I'd rather cancel everything and stay in my house and plant old-fashioned flowers and bake something massively undietetic from Grandmother's recipes. I'd rather have my grandmother back.

May the One who makes peace in high places (bright shining as the sun) make peace (which passeth understanding) among us and among all Israel (they are not all Israel which are of Israel and vice versa). And let us say, amen.

It's Arrival Day again -- in fact, today is the 350th anniversary of the first Jewish settlement in what is now the United States of America. Last year I wrote about the accidental arrival of those first Jews. This year, Jonathan of Head Heeb suggested we all try to envision a "Jewish future," and various members of the Jewish blogosophere have responded with some very sensible predictions about how the great dangers currently besetting American and world Judaism might be resolved: the "wrong" priorities (definitions vary widely), the debate over assimilation, various problems in the Middle East, rising global anti-Semitism, and so on and so forth. I, on the other hand, thought about what sorts of Jewish texts normally predict the future -- and so naturally I headed straight for medieval apocalypse literature.

It's easy to think of the apocalypse as a literary/religious genre belonging mostly to Second Temple Judaism and then to early Christianity, but rabbinic and medieval Judaisms kept their fair share of the apocalyptic imagination. This page links to several useful etexts from the period. I have always been particularly fond of Sefer Zerubbabel, a pseudepigraphic piece originating in early seventh-century Byzantium, mostly because I enjoy pointing it out as a crystal-clear example of Theotokos Envy.* The first decades of the seventh century featured all-out war between the Byzantine and Persian Empires over the land of Israel, with possession of Jerusalem switching back and forth until the Muslims showed up in 638 and settled the question for the next 450 years. It is therefore fairly understandable why Sefer Zerubbabel gives so little attention to the future of Jews outside Israel.

In SZ, the angel Metatron/Michael explains to the biblical Zerubbabel (pseudepigraphy is awfully convenient if you want accurate prophecies) that following the destruction of the Second Temple "the holy nation will be scattered.... Many of them will fall because they observe the Torah, so they will abandon the Lord's Torah and worship idols." Only after 990 years will a Messiah-ben-Joseph figure suggestively named Nehemiah "gather all Israel as one." After forty years of peace, another round of turmoil, the smackdown of numerous foreign kings including the son of Satan, a second Messiah, mass resurrections, and the return of Elijah the Prophet -- in other words, eschatological business as usual -- the Jews will return to Jerusalem for the final time and proceed to worship at the Third Temple (recently descended from heaven), pal around with God (who has thoughtfully taken up residence on the Mount of Olives), and live happily ever after in the most literal sense of that phrase.

Sefer Zerubbabel is a fairly typical medieval Jewish apocalypse, and one which had considerable influence on the later tradition -- but it assumes, almost in passing, that Jews (much) outside the Holy Land will inevitably fall away from Judaism, whereas Jews returned to the Holy Land will achieve an ideal state of perfect unity. I think we are still carrying that assumption around with us today, and since Metatron has not seen fit to personally notify me of future events, I feel just fine about questioning the idea. "Judaism," qua concept (and as opposed to "Israelite religion" or some such unwieldly moniker), was in large part a creation of the Persian Empire and of figures like Ezra and Nehemiah who had grown up in "exile." Rabbinic Judaism is even more obviously a religion of exiles, the odd Hellenistic idea, and the occasional convert; it is a religion which elevated debate and disagreement (for the sake of heaven) into its canonical form of lawmaking. We have a great deal invested theologically in praying for return (literal as well as figurative teshuvah) and for unity of people as well as deity, but our default state is that of dispersion, both geographic and ideological. Until Lurianic Kabbalah came along to confuse things, being in exile was one of our better theodicies: notwithstanding ample evidence that life in Israel had been less than great for long stretches, all the evils and injustices of the world around us (to say nothing of our wackier co-religionists) could be put down to the fact that Jews were not living where they were supposed to be.

So what happens when we stay "in exile" on purpose? What happens when some of us do return to the land of Israel, but all our problems are not immediately solved and we do not all agree to be gathered in "as one"? The setting of Sefer Zerubbabel should make it obvious that these are not questions unique to the modern age. Jews could in fact live in Jerusalem under the later Byzantine emperors. But for those Jews, the authors and audience of SZ, and during each of the many centuries when return to the geographic land of Israel and the physical Jerusalem was possible, it was never quite sufficient. Jews have always continued to yearn for the fully rebuilt Temple, the return of God's presence to the land, the heavenly Jerusalem** in which all Jews would agree (arguably more of a miracle than a mere Temple descending from heaven). The Biblical Zerubbabel, whose name celebrates his birth in exile, presided over the first of these disappointing returns, and was himself hailed as God's anointed before dropping rather abruptly out of the picture, quite possibly thanks to factional disputes; the book bearing his name places its eschatological predictions a sensible four-ish centuries after its writing*** so that none of its advice has any immediate import for its contemporaries.

The funny thing is that, by most calculations, Jews have spent longer in exile than they have out of it. God knows we have spent more time disagreeing with one another than agreeing. All the same, the predictions of our death as a people have been, and continue to be, greatly exaggerated. Today Judaism is thriving in many different forms and in many different places outside the modern state of Israel; inside the modern state of Israel, most Jews will agree that evils, injustices, and disagreements over the Real Meaning of Judaism have not magically disappeared. American Jews in particular have more privileges, more power, and more opportunity to integrate into mainstream society than ever before, but at the same time we are returning to more traditional ways (where "traditional" means a whole lot of different things) in unprecedented numbers. I am not suggesting that Jews abandon thousands of years' worth of longing for the ideal Israel, or even that we cease to feel a tie to the contemporary Israel (we have always been fairly good about responding to other Jewish communities). In fact, our collective fixation on Israel has saved us from some of the more extreme formulations of America as Promised Land, which is all to the good. I am simply suggesting that we rethink the presumption -- not, I would argue, intrinsically part of our core Judaism**** -- that being in exile must always lead to degeneration, and that disagreement on some levels must always be a symptom of that degeneration.

I am not a prophet, nor the daughter of a prophet, and that's not going to change unless someone a few centuries hence is considerate enough to pen pseudepigrapha using my name. But I do see a lot to look forward to in American and in world Judaism, and I am happier the more I learn about it through the growing network of Jewish blogs (as well as more traditional means of learning). And so on the 350th anniversary of American Judaism, I can only observe that I don't write apocalypses; I just study them.

* -- The Messiah's mother, Hephzibah, kicks the butts of several foreign kings in battle, holds down the eastern gate of Jerusalem while everyone else is fleeing, and is frankly a much more interesting character than her son. The Antichrist-like king (and son of Satan) Armilos also has a mother, who happens to be an especially beautiful statue and whom he requires the deluded populace to worship. (Etexts aside, the best translation of Sefer Zerubbabel into English is Martha Himmelfarb's, in the Rabbinic Fantasies volume edited by Stern and Mirsky. That is the version from which I quote here.)
** -- A concept which John of Patmos most certainly did not invent.
*** -- Although numbers and measures of time (e.g. "years") are highly negotiable categories in the history of Jewish (not to mention Christian and Muslim) eschatological predictions.
**** -- I have already exceeded my citation quota for one post, so I won't launch into a full-blown defense of this just now, except to say that there's a reason Yohanan ben Zakkai is my hero. Every generation of rabbis since Yavneh (which is to say all of them) has continued to walk a very fine line between acknowledging the centrality of Israel and pointing out the flourishing of Jewish life in other parts of the world. I simply suggest that we continue walking that line.

Fourth in a very occasional series: see parts one, two, and three.

This past Shabbos I did something very unusual, at least as my life has gone in the past couple of years. I didn't go to services. I had thought it through, you see -- between 7:04 and 7:08, because my alarm clock has a four-minute snooze button -- and all my usual shul-hopping friends were out of town for the weekend, none of the minyans were meeting, both the places I could reasonably drop in for services were having ginormous Bar Mitzvahs, I was going to services later that evening for my congregational jollies, and Ki Tavo is rather low on my list of Torah Portions To Get Stuck Defending If I Attend Torah Study At Temple Boondoggle. ("But curses are fun! Also, God is clearly trying to pave the way for future generations of Jewish dermatologists. Er, all right, let's focus on the blessings again.") Anyway, I decided to sleep in and enjoy a relaxing Saturday morning brunch, the way I used to do in grad school. It worked fine through the cherry-tomato-picking and the omelet-making, right up until the part where I found myself ensconced on the sofa with my second glass of iced coffee, my tallit, a chumash, and -- by the end of the morning -- three prayerbooks.

I started out with one siddur, or a close approximation: Marcia Falk's Book of Blessings, which I like on aesthetic grounds, but which -- as with many attempts at wholesale liturgical revision -- seems to start with assumptions about the tradition which I simply do not share. (That's another post.) But I had been reading Falk the other night, and it was already on the sofa, so that's what I started with. I made it through the reading of the Shema, shamelessly resurrecting what Falk considers "dead metaphors" right and left, but just before the Amidah I decided that praying halfway from memory was sort of silly, so I switched to the Singer Centennial (in handy travel edition) that I'd left on the coffee table, and then after what was technically a spot of Torah study (aka Recreational Impromptu Layning) I wound up heading for the Liturgy Shelves and paging through Or Chadash, which is a really nifty commentary on the Siddur Sim Shalom, so I could sort out which parts of the Musaf service I wanted to bother with.* Now, I am well aware that the average Jew is capable of making her way through a service using only one prayerbook. What I want to know is why.

Or, rather, since the obvious answer to that is "convenience, and, unlike certain lunatics, we do happen to not have two shelves full of prayerbooks in our living rooms": why do so few people enjoy reflecting on or learning about the liturgy (tefillah, orders of prayer, whatever)? I know I am preaching to the, er, choir on this blog -- at least if you've read this far -- but I have spent quite some time chatting with Jewish educators and educatees about this topic, and have come to the semi-scientific conclusion that your average synagogue-goer will be interested in liturgy for two and only two reasons:

(1) To learn enough not to look stupid during services. Unfortunately, your average synagogue-goer only goes to a subset of synagogues where the services are pretty much the same -- that is, there are precious few of us whose normal worship life encompasses Reform, Conservative, and traditional/Orthodox prayer in the same weekend -- so your average synagogue-goer doesn't need to learn a whole heck of a lot, and only the practical bits ("here are the places you bow during the Amidah"), not the rationale behind them. Most guides to the Jewish liturgy are organized around this sort of learning.

(2) To compare Jewish services with Christian ones. For some reason, this fascinates otherwise unreflective people, at least at the liberal end of the Jewish spectrum. I suspect it of being related to Not Looking Stupid, only in this case it's Not Looking Stupid in front of non-Jewish co-workers and friends when they ask questions, invite you to their special events, and so forth. I'd also bet that it varies by community, both the insularity of the Jewish one in question and the particular denominations most visible in the larger community: Boondoggle has a fairly strong Catholic presence, and Catholic (or Anglican, Orthodox, or high-church Lutheran) services lend themselves particularly well to this sort of comparison, whereas the predominantly Methodist and Baptist services I grew up with don't.**

The very occasional person who does regularly attend services at both ends of the Jewish liturgical spectrum may be interested in the differences -- that's part of what got me started -- but there aren't that many of us. Most synagogue-goers grow up in a service style and stay put there, or find a synagogue that's convenient and accustom themselves to however they do the service. A very few people consciously look for a service style they like and make affiliation decisions based on that, but even then I know of comparatively few Jewish "laypeople" who can articulate liturgical preferences beyond the very general: egalitarian language/not, egalitarian participation/not, music on Shabbat/not, all Hebrew/some English, and length/complexity of rabbi's d'var/sermon. There is some excuse for this sort of ignorance in a place like My Home Town, where there is one synagogue; there is no excuse in Boondoggle, where there are thirty-odd of them. If we are not sending our religious-school classes around to different synagogues for prayer, we darn well should be.

There is also a lamentable lack of historical curiosity on the part of the average Jewish liturgical participant, although at that they're better off than the average American high-school student (I'll spare you all the usual survey results). At least we might have a vague collective idea about Unetaneh Tokef and some medieval guy dying, even if it never happened. Amputations aside, though, I find very few synagogue-goers (and remember, this is already an interested subset of the Jewish population) who want to know which parts of the service are rabbinic and which medieval, or which parts of the Aleinu got edited out when, or when and why we moved from "Praise God with psaltery and harp" to "no music ever" to "guitars and bongos are fine, but organs are just too classical-Reform."*** Now, rabbinic Judaism is really a very bad religious system to sign on for or grow up in if you dislike history, so I have trouble understanding this level of apathy; I can only put it down to really, really lousy Jewish education.

I wish I could use my own experience to come up with a solution. Unfortunately, I pretty much started out as the sort of person who thinks narrative history is up there with chocolate malts on the Cosmic Scale of Fun, and I have matured into the sort of person who uses three different prayerbooks to daven by herself, so I am purely useless as a source of insider understanding.*** I do know that this is not purely a Jewish phenomenon -- I've heard these same complaints from plenty of Christian theologians -- and it's also not purely a phenomenon of liberal Judaism, because while your average Orthodox Jew in my experience might have a fairly good grasp on the difference between Nusach Ashkenaz and Nusach Ari, he probably won't know a whole heck of a lot about, say, the Reform liturgy, or for that matter the precise set of sociocultural circumstances that enabled the creation of Nusach Ari.

Before anyone starts writing back, please remember that I'm assuming most of my readers are the exceptions to these vague generalizations. But I'm hoping some of you will also be able to answer for the Average Synagogue- (or, heck, Church-) Goer. Why aren't more people interested in the structure and history of their prayers? And what on earth can we do to get them interested? Back in the comments to one of my earlier posts, I joked that I always emphasize the Binah prayer in the weekday Amidah as a professional courtesy; it's a prayer for knowledge, and that's the business I'm in. But I can't forget that the prayers of the Amidah are spoken in the first person plural, and so we ask God to grace us with knowledge, wisdom, and insight. In other words, the acquisition of knowledge isn't supposed to be a solitary-genius kind of deal; it's supposed to work by communities.

Until I can find or create those communities, I'll be davening by myself occasionally -- but I only use two prayerbooks during the week.*****

* -- Musaf services are tricky when you're Reform (but still like Musaf services). If I were to write a meditative passage to accompany Musaf, it would go something like this: "Dear God: Not so much sorry about the loss of sacrifices, but incense recipes sound yummy. Please consider reorganizing future Temple along lines of highly successful personal-fragrance boutique with Torah-study sideline. As bonus, you may attract coveted Saturday-morning mallwalker demographic. Much love, Naomi."
** -- The most uncomfortable I have ever been during a church service was the time I wound up attending a Catholic Candlemas service sung in Latin by the whole congregation on a Friday night. It was just too close.
*** -- No, that is not my view. Don't get me started.
**** -- I did, however, have a lousy formal Jewish education, so I can easily see how someone with less independent reading habits would conclude that Jewish history and theology were boring. I simply concluded that religious school was boring.
***** -- The third one is for my extra soul. Only I think that actually gives me license to use four. Hmmmmmm.

[11 pm -- Edited and expanded from earlier this afternoon, because I hadn't intended to publish the first draft right away.]

You know, only in my department would they put the Jewish quasi-vegetarian in charge of a departmental hot dog roast. While our budget prohibits me from investing heavily in Hebrew National, I will be purchasing tofu dogs for the non-carnivores among us.

Speaking of which: does anyone have an idea where to dig up primary sources for the assertion, oft-repeated online, that both the early Church and the emperor Constantine banned sausages because they were employed -- in both obvious and more creative ways -- in the pagan celebration of Lupercalia? Thanks to my friendly local online Latin dictionary, I have discovered that Latin has an inordinate number of words for "sausage," which makes any direct database search rather challenging, although I did manage to turn up several botellum recipes ultimately derived from Apicius and a couple of more modern recreations of the Lucanian sausage. My quasi-vegetarianism is stronger than ever.

There is, however, something a little odd in my inability to track down either of at least two possible primary sources (imperial edict and... some sort of decree from "the Church") for the supposed sausage ban. I have several pieces of paper which tell me that I am a good researcher, and I am not entirely ignorant when it comes to early Christianity, but all I can find in half a dozen online encyclopedia articles is the same vague statements about Constantine and "the Church." There is no date given for the "Church" decision; for Constantine I found two conflicting dates (320 and 325 -- and I'm pretty sure there's nothing about sausages in the canons of Nicaea). There is no clear indication what sorts of documents I should be looking for, either, or from what immediate context they emerged, or what language they might have appeared in (smart money says Greek, but YNK). Furthermore, what "the Church" means in the (presumably) pre-Constantinian era is a perfectly valid question for Christian theologians but a nigh-unanswerable one for historians trying to track down documents. Am I looking for a treatise, a letter, a collection of didascalia? Some dime-a-dozen local synod dealie? A passing reference in a passio?

The business of the sausage ban reminds me why I am somewhat sympathetic to the recent warning not to use Wikipedia as an authoritative source. While my own response would be a fervent and eloquent "duh," several of my usual blogosphere reads have countered that Wikipedia is really self-healing -- which I doubt, given the amount of bizarrely slanted scholarship that seems to accumulate there -- or that it at least has limited usefulness for beginning research. Me, I have already complained about the situation in which a single inadequate or outdated piece of pseudo-scholarship gets spread all over the Web by eager encyclopedia compilers thanks to its status as public domain. But now I want to point out a new and purely factual problem: it's not that I doubt the veracity of the sausage ban (it sounds plausible enough), but the available online sources offer me absolutely nothing in the way of information I can use to check up on them or learn more about the event I'm interested in. My research is at a dead end. Even newsbloggers pride themselves on including links, but as far as I'm concerned -- and I'm approaching this as an educated person, not a professional educator -- the lack of avenues for further research makes online encyclopedias very close to useless.

But, hey, as long as I don't worry about checking up on things or reading about them in depth, I can sound plenty smart. I can tell you quite a bit about the medieval Byzantine ban on blood sausages as poisonous, not to mention the derivation of "botulism" from botulus, a synonym of botellum supra. And I did check one proprietary online database, with the happy result that I can tell you every reference to about half of the words for "sausage" in the Patrologia Latina (none of them, sadly, dealing with Lupercalian lasciviousness). I can also think of a few mildly laborious ways to locate at least one of the sausage references -- for starters, Constantine's imperial decrees must be edited somewhere, and we might have that edition, and with any luck it would include an index. On the other hand, that would require going to the library, which is a whole block away from my office, and paging through a lot of books with no particular assurance of reward, especially since it's the other reference ("the Church") that I'm really curious about.

And, after all, this is just a spot of unasked-for departmental service. It's not like they ought to be expecting much -- otherwise they'd've had the common sense to hire, I don't know, a caterer? Departmental service, like many other things that go into a department, is a bit like sausage: it's best if you don't watch it being made.