If baseball is America's civic religion, what event in the Hebrew Bible parallels the Red Sox victory in the World Series? Chronologically speaking, it closely approximates the restoration under Zerubabbel; in terms of reaction, however, I am more closely reminded of Elijah and his Iron Chef Ancient Israel shtick with the prophets of Baal. That's not quite right either, though. Suggestions?

Also, would it be terrible to use this as an extra-credit question on a test?

I've been meaning to blog about intermarriage* for awhile now. A few months ago, you see, I went to a Bar Mitzvah party for a wonderful young man -- I'm good friends with his parents -- and I wound up sitting with a few acquaintances from the Marvelous Monthly Minyan, where we had an exchange that has stuck in my mind ever since. One of them said something in passing about the "problem of intermarriage," and when I asked him what the problem was, he explained that "the children don't grow up Jewish." I went with the simple truth: "Well, I did." His eyebrows went up. "I hadn't realized you were... um." I like the man, so I took pity on him, made a joke about my shiksa name, and changed the subject. But, honestly: even if he doesn't judge by English names (a smart idea), he's heard me called up to the Torah by my Hebrew name dozens of times, and you can learn a great deal about people from listening closely to their Hebrew names.

For the benefit of any of you who've never heard me called to the Torah, my Hebrew name is Naomi Chana bat Sara Zisel. (This is where an unfamiliar gabbai will look at me for five seconds before deciding that, yes, I probably didn't go suddenly mute before I could supply my father's Hebrew name.) It means that my father is not Jewish and has no interest in converting; he was raised very actively Methodist but has mostly transmuted that into secular humanism allied with social activism (as near as I can make out, he read the Hebrew prophets one time too many). My mother is Jewish and was brought up Orthodox, something I regularly forget but which explains a lot (she doesn't feel obliged to go to shul, just to make sure I do). She moved south for grad school thirty-five years ago, got fixed up with a local boy, and never left. I am fairly certain my parents delayed marriage long enough to square it with my mother's side of the family: in the end Bubbie dug up the one Reform rabbi in Coast City who performed intermarriages back in 1972, cooked a giant kosher wedding buffet complete with tongue from Zadie's butcher shop, and invited the entire extended family plus Dad's side to watch her daughter marry her shaigetz.

My parents moved back to my father's hometown right before I showed up, and they joined the local synagogue, where I went to nursery school and religious school with plenty of kids who had equally non-Jewish names. Occasionally I went to church with my father's mother; more often, I went to temple with Mom. Dad gave me history books to read, and Bubbie sent me cassette tapes and books about Judaism, which she correctly guessed were a lot more interesting than what they taught us at temple. Eventually I got Bat Mitzvahed (Bubbie brought most of the Oneg down from Coast City), but I never grew out of the habit of Jewish learning: I haven't yet gotten around to being a rabbi the way I planned to at age ten, but I think I've learned a thing or two about Judaism, and I'm Jewishly active by almost any standard you can name. In fact, I may be a little off the charts just lately. But while my mother and I are in the minority, we're not exactly statistical anomalies according to the 2000-01 National Jewish Population Survey. My mother is among the 28% of Jews marrying in the '70s who married outside her faith, and the 31% of married Jews today who are in fact intermarried.

The thing is, if my mother isn't considered an anomaly as an intermarried Jew, then neither should I be as a Jewish child of intermarriage. The percentage of intermarried Jews (out of married ones) is actually lower than the percentage of children of intermarriage who are currently being raised Jewish: the latter is 33%, exactly one in three. What the NJPS doesn't seem to have bothered investigating is what my generation is up to now that it's "raised," or whether some of the children who weren't "raised" Jewish have decided to claim that identity anyway. "How the children of intermarriages will identify themselves when they grow up is unknown now," the report says. Um, hello? If over one-quarter of Jewish marriages were interfaith in the '70s, there were a lot of offspring from those marriages in their 20s even back in 2000, to say nothing of intermarriages which occurred before the '70s (yes, they did). I'm 29; I think I'm pretty well raised, and it's a little late for me to change my identity.

You may have guessed by now that the NJPS -- which I consulted in the noble spirit of Wanting To Prove Other People Wrong -- succeeded in ticking me off when it decided children of intermarriage weren't followable, and its next sentence just put the cherry on the sundae: "[I]t is noteworthy that children of intermarriages are being exposed to less intense forms of engagement with Jewish life through their parents than children of in-married Jews." Okay, I follow the stuff about intermarried families being less likely to keep kosher, light candles, and attend Seders (although I do all three -- well, two and a half, but dietary hypocrisy is a tradition on Mom's side of the family too). But... less intense? Less intense? You want me to show you intense? Because I can do that. Boy oh boy, can I ever. (Hi, I'm Naomi. If you've been reading this blog for about a week, you'll have noticed that I'm kind of intense, especially about Judaism.) I realize that anecdotal evidence only goes so far, but I'm mystified as to what else the NJCP is basing its editorializing on.

I know plenty of people born of two Jewish parents who had significantly less intense Jewish upbringings than I did; I know people born of two Jewish parents who had, as far as I can tell, no Jewish upbringing at all. In my work as an educator, I've seen many, many Jews born of two Jewish parents who got out of formal religious education knowing a hell of a lot less than I did at that age (that is, not counting my post-secondary training). But my post-secondary training did include the detail that surveys are always biased by the way they ask questions and the extent to which they leap from correlation to causality. According to the NJPS, for instance, Jewish intermarriage and Jews not raising Jewish children are both very strongly correlated with a lack of Jewish education, and yet a very specific direction of causality (intermarriage -> lack of education and intermarriage -> no Jewish kids) is assumed by the way those data are presented. We get statistics on the education of children of intermarried couples versus that of non-intermarried couples, but what I want to know -- and I can't find it in the NJPS report -- is the relationship between Jewish education and success in raising children Jewish, leaving intermarriage aside. You see, I can't help wondering what would happen if we cut out spectacularly unsuccessful attempts to "prevent intermarriage" and went for the equally ambitious but infinitely more manageable option of giving Jewish children and adults -- whatever their parentage and marital choices -- a comprehensive program of Jewish learning which includes the mitzvah of teaching the Torah diligently to their children.**

I also can't help wondering whether the assumption that intermarriage is the "problem" prevents us from finding other solutions to "losing" Jews. The other reason I'm writing this post now is that I chatted with an undergrad at Temple Boondoggle services the other night -- he was there for a class assignment, but mentioned that his grandmother would be delighted to hear he'd gone to shul, and I couldn't resist following up on the conversation. It turns out that his mother is (sort of) Jewish and his father is (sort of) Lutheran -- the mother, curiously enough, from an observant background which somehow or other influenced her against taking the lead in teaching her children Judaism.*** Anyway, this couple decided they didn't want to influence their children in any particular religious direction, so they set about behaving like misplaced philosophes testing for some sort of natural religion: they celebrated both sets of holidays but never introduced any deeper religious content or ideas about God. Their son had gone to Jewish services with his grandparents from time to time, he told me, and he'd actually started leading his family's Passover Seder (all the things the NJPS supports), but clearly not much had sunk in, as he hadn't encountered the major storylines in the Torah (we're talking Abraham and Moses, not the daughters of Zelophehad) until college religion classes required he read the Bible. Not surprisingly, he now treats both Jewish and Christian holidays as essentially secular and is in a state of religious and spiritual confusion. I felt bad for him, and I felt angry at his parents -- but not because they intermarried. The "problem" was that this couple couldn't be bothered to put together any sort of religious education (Jewish, Christian, shared heritage, strictly comparativist, whatever) for their children, and I'm not convinced they would've done any better had they both happened to be born Jewish. In fact, the born-Jewish mother seems to have been actively hampered by her Jewish education when it came to passing traditions and knowledge on to her son.

On the other hand, non-Jewish birth hardly prevents someone from either getting or passing on a good Jewish education. That Bar Mitzvah I was at? The parents wouldn't count as intermarried by NJPS standards because the mother converted before her marriage. The father, born Jewish, apparently had a wonderful Jewish education earlier in life. Now they're both possessed of an enviable range of ritual skills, active in several different congregational groups (they're among the founders of the Marvelous Monthly Minyan), and ardent fundraisers for both Jewish and non-Jewish charities in the spare time they somehow make from their jobs. To nobody's surprise, their kids are turning out a lot like them: all but the youngest child read Torah at the Bar Mitzvah I attended. And at the Bar Mitzvah I met this family's non-Jewish relatives, and Jewish relatives, and non-Jewish friends and associates, and Jewish friends and associates from all over the spectrum of American Judaism. That's how my extened family looks, too, which is probably why I've fallen so easily into friendship with these people. That's how a lot of my Jewish friends' families look. If the NJPS is correct, in fact, that's what American Judaism looks like -- and that's what we need to teach our children, not some instinctive fear of "intermarriage."

If I have children someday, as I hope to, I'll want to have them with a partner who shares my Jewish interests and who can deal with both sides of my family. (Good thing the statistics are running in my favor: most nice Jewish boys my age ought to have at least a non-Jewish cousin or three.) But our Torah isn't in a wedding ring or even in a ketubah: I have it on excellent authority that it's in our hearts and minds, that the only way we can pass it on is to teach it to our children, to talk about it in private and in public, morning and evening, every day of our lives. And, yeah, that winds up being kind of intense. So are my feelings about the issue. It's one of the very few subjects where I can't seem to help making it personal.

If I have a daughter, I'm naming her after Bubbie.

* -- The Jewish/other religion kind, not the Carolina/Duke kind, which is going to be more of an issue starting next month. My parents have a Carolina/Maryland intermarriage, which is actually easier to deal with, since everyone on both sides of the family agrees that the ACC should've stayed at eight schools.
** -- I'm not advocating a retreat from secular education, of course; I am saying that too much of the Jewish education in synagogues across the country is (a) only for the kids, (b) rudimentary or remedial rather than challenging, and (c) just plain boring. I guess that's a post for another day, though.
*** -- It sounds as though she got the notion that men do the Judaism -- she apparently couldn't cope with the introduction of female rabbis -- so when she married a non-Jew she had no clue how to transmit Judaism to anyone else. Obviously, this is another failure of Jewish education, because some of the most traditionally observant Jewish women I know are also some of the best teachers of Judaism.

[Fifth in a very occasional series on the Jewish liturgy. If you guessed this was also going to be the High Holy Days post, good call. :)]

Much as I love Tishri, the end of the month comes as a relief: I have been attending more holiday services every year, on top of an ever-increasing Shabbat schedule, and this year that worked out to four extended weekends in a row. Oy. Since I was brought up Reform (although significantly less Reform than, apparently, everyone in the Midwest), my approach to most two-day yom tovs is that I take at least one day off. Nevertheless, a month full of extra singing and layning and rehearsals and last-minute fill-ins for anything educational is... plenty, thanks. But now that the holidays are over, I have room to think about what I am doing by paying quite this much attention to the Jewish liturgy, and it boils down to being haunted by the quote from R. David Weiss Halivni that I blithely dismissed when Avraham brought it up awhile back -- the one about DWH's choosing to stick with the people he could daven with rather than the people he could talk with, because he could do without talking but not without davening.

I, you see, cannot do without either davening or talking (although I prefer to keep the two separate), but I do know that I'm having a heck of a time davening at Temple Boondoggle lately. TB is fine for happy holidays where I don't expect much by way of liturgical structure, but there aren't a lot of those in Tishri. Still, TB does a very nice first-day-of-Rosh-Hashanah, with honey cake in the evening and crazy klezmer music for the Torah procession in the morning. The second day of RH was OK but not spectacular -- since the choir doesn't sing, I took the easy way out and sat through the combined Reform/Renewal service with minimal eye-rolling at the guitar solos.* Then there was Shabbat Shuvah, aka Naomi Volunteers To Read Abso-Freaking-Lutely Everything On A Week's Notice Because She Is An Idiot, but at least everyone got the Torah and Haftarah portions in front of them -- I feel that being last-minute ba'alat koreh gives me leverage for benign extortion, and while doing handouts is unsatisfactory both theologically and ecologically, it sure beats being up there knowing that you could invoke Shub Niggurath without most of the congregation noticing.

I did not, for the record, summon any Elder Ones. Instead, despite practicing it dozens of times, I flubbed the beginning of the Haftarah -- "Shuva, Yisrael" -- something awful. (It's y'tiv-katon, and while I chanted something that probably sounded like Haftarah trupp, it wasn't a y'tiv.) I think I should have taken this as an omen for the holiday season, because I flubbed the whole teshuvah business of Yom Kippur even more thoroughly. Let's say you've got a kavvanah (prayer-concentration) scale running from 1 to 10, where 1 is someone whose mother just died and 10 is the Maggid of Mezerich on a really good day? This past Yom Kippur I registered about a -2. When I got home after breaking fast that evening (and Ne'ilah ended an hour before sundown, which meant that I was suicidally cranky by sundown), I typed up a quick summary of what had run through my head that day. It went on for about five pages. Here are some excerpts, which I hope will amuse some of you:

As you can see, either I was suffering from a rare form of liturgical allergy or I was flatly unable to worship at Temple Boondoggle on Yom Kippur. By the end of Ne'ilah, in fact, I had tears in my eyes -- not, unfortunately, from imploring God to pardon myself and my people, and not even from my blood sugar bottoming out, but because the Senior Rabbi had just informed us all that Spinoza had rescued Judaism from a medieval theology of fearing God and inaugurated an era in which we can see God in other people instead. Turns out you can draw blood biting your own tongue.**

After Yom Kippur, I figured I'd stay away from Temple Boondoggle until I calmed down, which would have been a better plan had I not committed to leading prayers for an Erev Sukkot dinner and Torah study for Chol Hamoed Sukkot. But since neither of those required me to attend actual services (TB doesn't have Erev Sukkot services, and I dashed out after Torah study), they were workable. For Sukkot and Simchat Torah I snuck off to Conservative Congregation Beth Boondoggle instead, and the services were great. (Okay, the cantor's vocal range and mine don't go together so well, but I can work around that.) I love getting to do special holiday additions. I love reading from every possible Torah scroll, and doing every verse of all the readings. I bought my own lulav and etrog this year, and it was a blast. I almost know all of "ya'aleh v'yavo" by now, and it just might be the Neatest Prayer Insertion Ever. In short, I appear to be liturgically Conservative. Oops.*** Now if I could just talk to the Conservative movement about the halakhic issues surrounding performance of intermarriages, acceptance of homosexual Jews within their community, and the practical difficulties inherent in a mara d'atra-centered approach to halakhic change... no? Well, probably not.

But that's a problem for another day -- maybe even another month. At the moment I'm focused on gratitude for living in a Jewish community where I do have multiple options for prayer, not to mention multiple welcoming congregations. And I am especially grateful because for once I took advantage of all the traditions that carry the season of teshuvah up through Hoshanah Rabbah. So I prayed for wind and rain, for deliverance and goodness, but most of all for a return to Torah and to the service of God. And on Simchat Torah I managed to forget all about the order of the service while I was dancing with a Torah scroll -- for at least a minute.

It was wonderful.

* -- Because of the solo, not because of the guitar.
** -- I am still not sure whether I should be more appalled on behalf of Spinoza, medieval Judaism, modern Judaism, or God. But a rant about reasoned discussion of rabbinic education is another post altogether.
*** -- As far as I can make out these days, I am intellectually drawn to premodern Judaisms, liturgically Conservative, politically Reform, halakhically variable (with a chance of showers), and practically incapable of being in more than one place at one time.

So -- people have been wondering what's happened to Baraita, and the simple answer is that I have been godawfully (and I hope god-awefully) busy. It is my third year on the tenure track at Boondoggle U., which means I have a review coming up next semester and that this is the absolute last moment to submit publications. I am finally starting to get more fully involved in our graduate program, I am dancing on the edge of affiliation with two synagogues and the Marvelous Monthly Minyan, and I sometimes even have a social life outside the Jewish community. I need to plant pansies, my house is getting a new roof sometime Real Soon Now, and there's a nice old oak mantel out in my garage waiting for me to strip and refinish it. I am learning how to ride a bike (I fall off a lot), and I'm even working on a solution to the cockroach problem.

The complicated answer... is complicated, and parts of it are private, but I feel I owe some of you a partial explanation, and perhaps you saw it coming before I did, or figured out what I likely meant by "third-life crisis." Some of you may also be wondering about my absence from other Internet forums, and this is a related subject. If you read my blog purely for nifty facts about Judaism and/or popular culture, you may want to skip the remainder of this post in favor of whatever I blog next -- coming, in fact, very soon, because I am not giving up Baraita. My blog absences tend to involve a single post backing up everything else behind it, and this is that post. Now I can go back to reading my blogroll without twinges of conscience and start clearing up the backlog of half-drafted posts on my laptop.

( I don't know whether MT's extended-entry functionality works with the full RSS feed, so I'm putting this bit in here to signal the beginning of the Strictly Optional Part. Also, I'll spare you the really bad extended analogies involving drain clogs and Liquid Plumber, but there's something to be said for thinking of what follows as a giant hairball. Still with me? Okay, then.)

You see, what I have been doing on this blog -- writing and teaching and arguing for the sake of heaven about Torah, about Jewish liturgy, about the histories of Judaism and Christianity and where they meet, about the movements in contemporary Judaism and why I do not fit into any of them -- is what I want to be doing with my life. I am passionate about it, I love it, and consequently I have been feeling guilty as hell and avoiding it just lately, because it is not precisely what I am supposed to be doing in my career right now. (The lines here are blurry; my academic and teaching interests aren't very far off the mark, but enough so that I can't simply transfer my work on Baraita into peer-reviewed journals. There are also huge issues of department politics and identity, but I'm not comfortable going into those publicly.)

I know what I should be doing, practically, for my career -- after all, I grew up playing the academic game, and there are plenty of people to remind me if I forget. I should cut back my commitments in the Jewish community, buckle down, get tenure writing and teaching precisely what I was hired to write and teach, and then move my academic specializations into line with my current interests by slow and painful increments and lots of grant-writing. I'd be about 35 by the time I got there, leaving aside the possibility of kids, and then I'd still have to address the elephant-in-the-corner also known as smicha*, but I'd be doing so from a nice safe position of academic strength. I'm just not always sure that's what I want to do. I loved grad school, but in some sense I went through it holding my breath -- no lasting ties, no new entanglements, no major choices that would have held me back from getting through as quickly as possible. And I can do that for another five years, but... it turns out I like to breathe. Deeply, even. You might say it's become a habit.

For the first time in my life, I sympathize with Abr(ah)am. He doesn't come across as especially sympathetic in the pshat of Torah, what with all the lying and fighting and general idiocy about family matters, but right now I think I know why every other chapter God had to show up with a new promise, even if half the time it was a repetition of the last one. Abram was frightened, you see. He lay awake night after night -- in Haran, in Canaan, in Egypt -- and wondered if he had truly heard God. If he had strained and even broken precious relationships with his father, with his nephew, even with his wife, on the say-so of a voice and a spark. If anyone else might have paid more attention to the things omitted from God's promises (descendants how? blessings of what?), or the barbed edge to his predictions (strangers in a land not their own, destruction of four cities full of living creatures). If this God of his had come to men and women before, back in Ur of Chaldea, and if they had said "no thank you" and gone on to live happily settled lives. If his God would ever stop demanding the sacrifice of everything that was important to him.

On the other hand, I envy Abraham, because at least he had a voice and a spark, and every other chapter he even had a God Who visited and advised and argued with him. I have a God, but I don't have a voice, or even a bat kol telling me what to do -- and I'm not sure I'd want one, but some nights it sounds like a really good idea. Meanwhile, I muddle on as best I can -- even if I'm not writing not quite as many articles as I perhaps should, because I refuse to give up things that make me joyful (life really is too short), and because I believe in a God who let both Ishmael and Isaac grow up into great nations, a teaching that is in my heart rather than across the sea or in the heavens, and a tradition of teachers who were not career priests (although they mostly didn't have to worry about bearing the kids, either). But I lie awake some nights, worrying that either I am semi-consciously sabotaging all my career options or that my God hasn't gotten over asking people to leave everything they're familiar with and everything they've accomplished. I'm not sure which possibility bothers me more.

I really hope that's the last post I'm going to make about this subject, although I have a nasty suspicion it isn't. But now I have to go off and get some work done on an article before tonight's shiur. And then I need to catch up on other responsibilities. And I have a few blog posts in mind for this week. If God is looking for someone to say "Here I am," I might try telling Her I'm really busy right now.

* -- Either that or a twelve-step program for people who fantasize about writing teshuvot.