I suppose I shouldn't've been surprised that so many people had such strong opinions about my Thanksgiving kashrut dilemmas -- but I am. And since several of you wanted updates, I will simply make a few observations:

(1) As someone who is Not Particularly Fond Of Turkey, I would like to formally state that plain ol' roasted fresh kosher turkey (with a few vegetables and basic seasonings, but nothing fancy) is... pretty damn good. (I know, I know -- this is why people brine.) Alll the leftovers have already been used up, if by "used up" you mostly mean "made into a metric ton of soup and stashed in various freezers across the Boondoggle metro area."

(2) I have no clue how our ancestors kept kosher kitchens without lowfat soy products, cheap plastic leftover containers (the holiday-colored ones, indeed), inexpensive glassware, or disposable foil pans. Right now I could give U.S. consumer culture a big sloppy kiss.

(3) I should stop projecting my anxieties onto my parents. (They do a perfectly good job of creating their very own anxieties -- but serving a nonstop selection of exceedingly good mostly-family-recipe food is a time-honored method of garnering approval on both sides of the family. So there. I actually have no clue how people pull off this sort of thing without a fairly high degree of culinary competence, either.)

(4) And, yes, you were all right and pumpkin pie is perfectly good made with soy milk. (8th Continent Light Original, in this case. Must try vanilla next time.) What I keep forgetting is that pumpkin pie made by actual humans from real pumpkin is a bit like homemade bread, in that anything you do tastes so much better than the commercial stuff that there's no comparison.

(5) Thank God -- and I mean this in the full-on Hallel sense -- that Fleischmann's margarine is a national brand.

(6) I am convinced that the reason our family stuffing-which-is-really-dressing recipe has become the family recipe isn't because it tastes great; it's because shredding lots and lots of bread into small pieces by hand is extremely therapeutic.

(7) So, yes, dinner (and the whole extended-weekend's worth of meals) went very well indeed, and all the guests were appropriately appreciative. (None of them counted halakhically as guests, by the way, just in case I needed to invoke bateil b'shishim. That reminds me: am I the only person who thinks making kashrut decisions starts to feel like playing a card-based battle game after a certain point? Okay -- never mind).

(8) I'm not sure that all the dishes were washed in the proper configurations, but I couldn't bring myself to worry too much -- or to insist on doing all the dishes.

(9) Wow, Dresner & Siegel really is annoying -- although possibly I should avoid reading any articles ever about Why To Keep Kashrut. They remind me of articles about Why To Marry Jewish, in that I can't decide whether to laugh, cry, bemoan being anywhere near on the same side as the authors, or while away a rainy afternoon mocking gross historical fallacies.

(10) Also, it turns out Aunt Miriam and family are edging back into serious kashrut (the insidious influence of Jewish day school at work). So I'm, like, trendy. Excuse me while I snicker.

Rumor has it that I should get back to doing my actual job at some point this month. But I do have a few less food-centered Baraita posts in mind, honest. Meanwhile... would anyone like some soup?

T minus one week, and this whole Family Thanksgiving Dinner In My House business is starting to worry me. Not culinarily, because I'm entirely capable of putting together an elaborate meal for a small group (although I wish I had an extra freezer); not financially, because I can afford to remortgage the house once a year for a kosher turkey; not logistically -- much -- because I'm really good with the planning, the house is fairly straight right now, and I can have dinner on the table at noon and make it to minyan Thursday morning if I really want to. No, Thanksgiving is bothering me halakhically, because I can't quite figure out what I'm doing by way of kashrut.

Let me start by saying that while kashrut qua system is obviously a mitzvah, and while there is much to be said for learning opportunities and a tiny bit to be said for common sense, many minor details of implementation are both important and so thoroughly in dispute that I have trouble considering binding from Sinai any of the possible views on, say, whether or not Pyrex can be kashered. Unfortunately, I have the sort of brain, not to mention the sort of understanding of halakhah, that requires rules and a system under which one enacts changes or works through exceptions -- otherwise it's all just a giant game of Calvinball and I can go back to making a dynamite seafood alfredo. And so kashrut clearly has the potential to drive me nuts.

Nevertheless, over the past year, I've been doing a reasonably good job of keeping Kosher For Lazy People in my house, aka one set of dishes and no meat or chicken. For determining disputed points I've been alternating between three methods: Avoiding Potential Problems (which works great if you're never going to eat meat or use ceramics again), Listening To The Conservative Movement (which seems fairly sane on most points, but I'm not sure how one goes about holding by a "movement," and the copy of Klein on my shelf is out of date), and Listening To Aunt Miriam (which works out to something considerably stricter than Conservative but at least it's family minhag). None of these options satisfy me intellectually on their own, and none of them are perfect in terms of implementation either -- that is, nothing I'm willing to do will be kosher enough for, say, my Thursday night Talmud teacher to be comfortable eating over my house; nothing I'm willing to compromise on will make my father less convinced that I'm being silly. But I've gotten along OK this way on a day-to-day basis. Unfortunately, the whole business is unraveling with the advent of Thanksgiving.

You see, in my world there are rules for Family Thanksgiving the same way there are rules for Jewish living, and so even though I would rather have Tofurkey or at least a turkey breast, we are having a whole turkey. This means meat dishes: fortunately, I have a fancy china set that nobody's used for decades which will do nicely, and most of the serving bowls can stay pareve. Then there will be leftovers, which we will not (God forbid!) waste: rather, we will make turkey soup and salad and little packets of turkey for the freezer, which means I'm going to invest heavily in disposable plastic containers and decide what I think about rekashering various stockpots and metal bowls to switch them from meat back to milk. For dessert, there must be pumpkin pie, which means that even though my family minhag appears to involve pretending that we are from Amsterdam and/or possess Time Turners, I probably need glass dessert plates and perhaps coffee mugs rather than using the nice plates and cups that go with the fancy china set. I also need to accomplish all this dish-switching without freaking out my parents. It's at about this point in my calculations that I wonder how much Thanksgiving cooking I can do curled up in a fetal position, ideally in someone else's blankety-blank kitchen.

I was kvetching about all this to my friend D. when he pointed out a very obvious truth: I am trying to use kashrut to do precisely what the system is intended to prevent, namely, satisfy Jewish and non-Jewish guests and customs around the same table. (From certain perspectives, actually, I am what the system is trying to prevent, but it's about three millennia decades too late for that one.) Fortunately, in addition to having the sort of brain that needs rules, I have the sort of brain that adores a well-structured challenge, and that's exactly what I got out of D.'s comment. No narrow-minded Amoraic son-of-a-gun, whether or not he's qualified to raise the dead, is going to ruin my Southern Jewish Thanksgiving dinner (and you should feel free to imagine me saying that as I sharpen Zadie's gigantic meat cleaver). It's not simply that I'm working with a system to try and satisfy everyone (which is, by the way, impossible); it's that I'm working with a system to try and make it faithful to my understanding of contemporary Jewish life (which is a workable one-line definition of the halakhic process IMO). If I use the word "subvert" -- which isn't precisely what I think I'm doing, but may be close enough for jazz -- I think even Dad might understand.

But I still need someplace to start from, system-wise, preferably just a little short of reading my way through the entire Bar-Ilan responsa database before next Wednesday but with minority opinions and good footnotes in there. (So basically, the Kitzur Shulchan Aruch is Right Out.) The revised edition of Klein's Guide to Jewish Religious Practice is a possibility; so is Dresner and Siegel's Jewish Dietary Laws -- has anyone got a preference for one over the other, or are they best used in concert? I think the Artscroll volumes are likely to frustrate me, but I'm willing to take recommendations on those as well. And I guess I should see what's out there by way of glass dessert plates. At least the cooking part should be a cinch after this.

Let me confess something: I have always wanted to be a Cool Teacher. You know the Cool Teachers: they are descended from Indiana Jones out of Ms. Frizzle.* They ride motorcycles to class, get interviewed on the news, and wear fascinating tribal jewelry given them by their adopted Exotic Ethnicity family. Their classes transform their students' lives: forever after, you will remember the day the Cool Teacher breezed into class, unsnapping his bike helmet to reveal a casually elegant head of attractively silvered hair, and announced that he'd cancelled the test in favor of a field trip involving a charter jet, ancient ruins, and at least one mysterious ex-lover.

Of course, I am not a Cool Teacher. The most revolutionary my classes get is when we discuss current TV shows, my teaching clothes do not lend themselves to biking (I do cut loose with an orange chenille cardigan every so often), and I will neither confirm nor deny the existence of any mysterious ex-lovers. But I have always wanted to be a Cool Teacher, and so when I connected the dots between a much-hyped exhibition at the Big Art Museum and the topic of the grad seminar I'm teaching this semester, I thought I could take a teeny-weeny step toward Cool Teacherdom by arranging for one class session to meet at the museum. I even got us free exhibition passes -- my on-the-phone pleading skills are excellent, despite my lack of connections to any spy agency -- and I reached the museum early enough to get the free passes up to the front desk where they had not, in fact, been left for me.

The tour/class went well, despite one student's tardiness, the guards' overzealousness (they kept interrupting to tell a student that she couldn't take off her coat and carry it; she had to wear it or check it), and the sad fact that much-hyped museum exhibitions are typically set up to emphasize Pretty Pictures rather than Interesting Ideas. (There is one Pretty Picture in the exhibition with such an Interesting Idea that I may be coming back to purchase the catalog -- because none of my favorite images ever make it onto posters. Given the strong Catholic presence in Boondoggle, you might actually think that nifty imagery involving Christ's blood would be fairly popular, but I guess it doesn't play well on Christmas cards.) We ended that segment of the class with a five-minute mercantilism break (the exhibition had its own private gift shop, of course, and one can never have too many postcards featuring the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse). It was only then that I realized a small flaw in my plans.

I had intended to hold the second half of the seminar in the museum coffee shop, but that -- and everything else in the museum -- was closing at the unfriendly hour of 5 pm. (They would have held everything open for a Cool Teacher, but oh well.) After some consultation, we got in our cars and made our way to the nearest non-museum coffee shop, a nice little independent place most of us knew well. That took about ten minutes, thanks to traffic, but it went smoothly enough, and as I finished parking I realized all my students had gotten to the coffee shop before me and were clustered in front of it watching... a tree. With a cat in it. I had somehow thought this only happened in cartoons, but sure enough, there was a small leafless tree adorned with a large ginger-colored cat. The cat was clinging to several branches, and seemed both uncomfortable and disinclined to jump down; no friendly firemen were in sight (again, this always works in cartoons). My students looked up at the cat, looked over at me, and someone said: "So what do we do?"

Now, see, this is the sort of action-packed situation Cool Teachers thrive on. If I were a Cool Teacher, I would have known exactly what to do, and it would probably have involved either calling my mysterious ex-lover the fireman or rappelling up the tree myself using the mountain-climbing equipment I happen to keep in my car trunk. As it is, my car trunk contains various unhelpful items ranging from tefillin to jumper cables to sneakers to organic compost (in a bag, on the opposite side from the tefillin, I promise). I am also not very tall, which would have been useful under the circumstances. I am, however, fairly good at ordering people around, and my students are mostly sensible people. It only took us a few minutes to ascertain that the tallest student standing atop a coffee-shop table, with the rest of us and a single interested passer-by holding it steady, could just barely reach the cat. The people inside the coffee shop just gazed in fascination as my student gently disentangled the cat from its perch and brought it down to ground level, whereupon it gave us a look of I Didn't Need Your Help Anyway (i.e., a typical cat look) and stalked off into the night. "This is such a great class," one of my students enthused. "I've never gotten to rescue a cat during a seminar break before." A Cool Teacher would've conveyed the unspoken assertion that she routinely rescues orphans from rogue Nazis while everyone else is hitting the restrooms, but I just muttered, "Me neither."

As we finally filed into the coffee shop, I pondered the best way to reframe the discussion we had been having back at the museum. I am not certain that even the Coolest Teacher Ever could have come up with a seamless way to move from arboreal feline-fetching to -- among other things -- the evolution of the sacramental system within Latin Christendom, although there's probably room for a sly joke about lay participation somewhere in there. What I said, grasping at the last fading trails of Cool Teacherdom, was the best I could do under the circumstances: "Drinks are on me." Fortunately, we were at a coffee shop and not a bar (I think all these students are over 21, but I'm not positive). A Cool Teacher would no doubt have ordered a double espresso, but since I am not a Cool Teacher, I figured a mocha with skim milk would be fine. And the ensuing mini-lecture and discussion, while somewhat anticlimactic, turned out to be a lot more fun as long as we were all wired on caffeine and chocolate.

Next week I plan to give a nice boring lecture in our nice boring windowless seminar room. I can hardly wait.

* -- Ms. Frizzle is from the Magic School Bus. If you don't know who Indiana Jones is, I'm afraid this entire post will make no sense to you.

Nota bene: the intermarriage discussion is still going strong -- and there's a response at Out of Step Jew that's also well worth reading.

What I love about writing Baraita is the way it lets me communicate with Jews from across the spectrum of observance and involvement. What I don't so much love about it, sometimes, is the uneasy feeling that anything I say could be used as ammunition against the particular communities I am part of -- that some half-joking remark could be borrowed and used as Exhibit A for the reprehensible practices of Reform Jews or Jewish feminists or Jewish academics or what-have-you. Of course, it's the same responsibility I have as a professor (on tests, students always repeat back to you the things you muttered under your breath), and probably not so far off the responsibility a local rabbi would have, leaving aside the minor detail that I judge nobody but myself. Maybe it's not such a bad thing if I occasionally find myself editing my reactions in the interest of peace. After all, one of the few uber-traditional Jewish instincts I seem to possess is the ability to understand why minor issues are important, even if they're not as earth-shaking or appealing as the Big Questions.*

Still, there are some issues on which I have a heck of a time reaching out across the spectrum. Take Halloween, for instance. I have been enjoying Simcha's posts on the annual question of whether or not aiding and abetting trick-or-treaters constitutes avodah zarah, worship (or, in this case, assistance with activities which could be perceived as pertaining to the worship) of strange gods. I find this question academically interesting, I think I understand the concepts underlying each position, and I respect those Jews who choose not to participate in trick-or-treating after concluding that it does in fact constitute an inappropriate concession to an originally pagan ritual. None of this stopped me from carving a nice big pumpkin (this year it was a pirate, and I think the earring and eyepatch turned out remarkably well), stocking up on candy, and enjoying a pleasant evening at home with special Halloween programming** on the TV and many repetitions of the time-honored incantation: "And what are you dressed as?"***

But when I give the Halloween question the full weight of my candy-fueled consideration, it occurs to me that it's not really minor. Prohibitions against idolatry (along with any remotely associated people, places, and things) are a dime a dozen throughout the Pentateuch. Judging from the Prophets and Writings, of course, some of these prohibitions were honored in the breach -- but we've always had the prohibitions, front and center, complete with illustrative anecdotes. I haven't studied the Mishnah or Gemara of Avodah Zarah as carefully as I'd like, but I know that AZ includes not only some of my favorite aggadic episodes but also a lot of very practical advice about coping with the multi-religious Hellenistic world -- a world that looks a lot more like ours than that of ancient Israel. Leaving aside the much-vexed question of whether Christianity counts as avodah zarah (I'm sure you can all guess which opinions I prefer on that count), my world in Boondoggle does in fact include a handful of self-proclaimed pagans and at least one Jewish Hindu (no, I don't quite understand how that works either). And God knows there are people who seem to worship things or beings that do not deserve that level of honor, even if they themselves wouldn't recognize it as idolatry. So it's not like the whole business of avodah zarah is purely an antiquarian curiosity.

I just have trouble feeling it when it comes to Halloween, and I think it's because I draw a distinction between rituals of worship (in, again, the proper sense) and quasi-civic American ritualesque customs, which is how I class Halloween (and a goodly part of Christmas, but that's another post). I know my holy from my everyday, and I am quite certain that there's no hallowing involved in my Halloween. As a homeowner, I put out a jack-o-lantern and buy candy in the same idealistic spirit in which I dither over the correct sort of mounting device for an American flag for Memorial Day / July 4th / Veterans Day. Of course, I realize that Jews have been conspicuously Not Into Civic Religions throughout most of urban history, but the nice thing about the U.S.A. is that we are not a Hellenistic-style polis with a complete set of proprietary deities. (We are also not a Christian Nation. I study a period when there were Christian Nations with teeny-weeny Jewish minorities, and I can say with great certainty -- and more than a twinge of thankfulness -- that I do not live in one.) We have both posed and answered the Jewish Question, and our answer is one I happen to like very much. So I handed out candy last night and will head to my polling place tomorrow morning.

That said, I'm still trying to work out the theological point at which I diverge from the Orthodox world on this particular issue. Is it my openness to the possibility that a holiday with vague pagan historical overtones need not necessarily be considered pagan? (If so, I think we might be in trouble with Passover, and that's before Easter comes into the picture. Or if you want to pick a non-Torah holiday, the Hanukkah miracle's on some pretty thin historical ice, which in no way stops me from celebrating it with Yet Another Midwinter Light Festival. But surely anyone who confuses contemporary American Halloween with contemporary pagan Samhain is being either historically uninformed or deliberately obtuse?) Is it my interest in doing something to fit in with a neighborhood full of non-Jews? Is it my seeming inability to seriously contemplate how modern halakhah on the topic might apply to my cherished pumpkin-carving proclivities? (I don't think I ordinarily avoid these sorts of questions, but I'm not the best judge of my own behavior.) Suggestions are welcome. In the meantime... you know, I think my little baggie of leftover candy looks lonely. Snickers take shehakol, right?

* -- I have puzzled a number of my local friends by exhibiting curiosity -- if not exactly concern -- over the most appropriate blessings before my assorted meals. This would be a great deal simpler if I ate more bread, and almost anything would be preferable to my standard weekday morning breakfast, which involves a mixture of several different multigrain and high-bran cold cereals along with milk and variable fruit accompaniments. Whether to say shehakol or mezonot (or, under certain circumstances, ha-adamah and/or ha-etz) does not precisely keep me up nights, but I have the unfortunate habit of wanting to know exactly what the reasons would be behind each option before I make a decision, and... um, apparently I need more friends for whom this constitutes a valid topic of dinner conversation.
** -- Which would be Food Network Unwrapped -- the special candy-centric episodes -- alternating with Scooby Doo on the Cartoon Network. I am a wimp about actual horror movies, and I was busy enough that I didn't bother digging out the right Buffy tapes. (Naomi's Halloween Buffy recs: "Halloween," "Gingerbread," "Fear, Itself," and "Restless." Yes, I'm old-school. If you need more, I'd add "Welcome To The Hellmouth/The Harvest" in the beginning.)
*** -- We interrupt this post for a brief service announcement: parents, tell your children to make something up if they persist in trick-or-treating out of costume and are over the age where it's cute not to be able to explain yourself (i.e., about six). Also, using cars to trick-or-treat is cheating, even if it rains. Now, back to our post....