During my blogging hiatus, as I dealt with the distressing realization that absolutely everybody in the world feels more strongly about wedding-related minutiae than I do,* I seem to have missed a blogveldt-wide tizzy about book-banning. Now, as a librarian's daughter, I feel that book-banning is fundamentally both A Bad Idea and Exceedingly Counter-Productive (look, how else do we explain why Lady Chatterley's Lover is supposed to be a "classic"?). But this is a particularly short-sighted book ban, as it comes from a group of ultra-Orthodox rabbis rejecting the work of a fellow rabbi who is working to reconcile the cosmological, anthropological, and zoological theories of the rabbinic tradition with the latest contemporary science on these matters.**

I have actually heard of R. Nosson Slifkin and read a few reviews of his books; I would point out that the whole book-banning business encourages me to invest in and read said books, were it not for the sad fact that my entire existence is probably anathema to the sort of Jew who considers a respectful attempt to reconcile Torah and science "heresy," and so my approbation isn't worth much. However, I do have three important points to make:

(1) When it comes to reconciling Torah (in the broad sense) with the latest in contemporary thought, I am the sort of wild-eyed lunatic who holds by.... well, my first thought was Rambam aka Maimonides, but several of the Geonim -- no, actually, the Talmud's pretty divided about what you do with "Greek wisdom" -- plus, moving forward, much of the reaction to the Haskalah seems to... oh, look, how about we all just study the wide-ranging and fascinating history of rabbinic Judaism's rich and fruitful interaction with its surrounding cultures and get back to this one? Anyone? Bueller? (Honestly, though, am I the only person who finds it offensive to suggest that the Torah is so pathetically out-of-date it can't be discussed alongside contemporary science?)

(2) Speaking of the Rambam, to say nothing of a crying need for historical perspective, that whole intra-Judaism book-banning thing didn't work out so well in the thirteenth century. But at least the Slifkin affair is making it easier for me to justify the relevance of medieval Judaism to anyone foolish enough to ask.

(3) I am an occasional -- though no doubt underqualified -- teacher of Judaism to non-Jews, and that means that I am also the lucky person who gets to mark dozens of papers with some variant on "NO -- Orthodox Jews do not 'take Torah literally' -- see rabbinic interpretation, Oral Law, KARAITES." This is because many intelligent Christians who are unfamiliar with the movements within contemporary U.S. Judaism will instinctively try to map Orthodoxy onto Christian fundamentalism, even after I have quite clearly explained that we tried textual fundamentalism starting in the eighth century and it mostly didn't stick (and oh, dear, I'm back to history again -- bad Naomi!). Anyway, the Slifkin affair will complicate this particular pedagogical task enormously -- unless, of course, it blows over really soon and I can in good conscience ignore it.

In summary... I'm going back to thinking about wedding plans, in which there is also a crying need for historical perspective, if by "historical" you mean "any." But at least this marriage business is going to be a whole lot more productive (to say nothing of fun) than attempts to ban books.

* -- No, really. At this point I completely expect that if I were to walk into the day-care down the block from my office and announce that I am planning a wedding, the children would solemnly begin to lecture me about the crucial importance of (a) good-quality tablecloths (b) tuxedos versus evening jackets and/or (c) where you want to place the floral arrangements. (These are all either situational or simple to answer -- I mean, plastic tablecloths are just icky. The sorts of minutiae which do interest me are questions such as (a) whether the readers of the Sheva Brachot need to have any qualifications (Jewishness, age, literacy, observance) whatsoever, because thanks to the Jewish blogosphere I already know I can ask anyone to read the ketubah (b) whether there is anything technically wrong with sticking a transliterated non-Jewish father's name into my ketubah and/or (c) just how I can tactfully make sure one set of dances is gender-segregated so that a particular couple of friends will actually be able to dance.)
** -- A good beginning post on the issue is here at Hirhurim, but see also various posts on Cross-Currents and the take on the affair here. Slifkin's own website, with an updated list of events and reactions, is here.

Right, so, the story.

As a self-confessed liturgy geek, an enthusiastic amateur singer, and a fan of excellent food, I was probably predestined to fall in love with the Birkat Ha-Mazon -- the "Grace After Meals," as they called it back in Sunday School. In its full traditional form, it takes at least five minutes of steady singing or chanting, involves a heck of a lot of Hebrew (and a chunk of Aramaic) from assorted historical periods, features numerous opportunities for counter-harmonizing, includes loads of fiddly little additions and subtractions depending on the time of week/month/year and/or the number and status of guests present, and -- possibly best of all -- does not interrupt the actual serving and consumption of the meal.* Naturally, I rank the Birkat high among the Reasons Why My Religion Is Cooler Than Anyone Else's Religion. Ever since I got addicted introduced to the full Birkat in college, I will bentsch -- heck, at this point, I'll lead bentsching -- at the drop of a napkin. And when I started attending Shabbat afternoon and evening services at Congregation Beth Boondoggle some time back, I was delighted to find a group of like-minded people who agreed that the full Birkat was really the only appropriate way to conclude a meal and Mishnah lesson.

And so our story begins at CBB sometime in Elul, right after the Birkat on Saturday night. We were making our way back to the chapel for evening services, I was walking alongside the Ritual Committee Chairwoman (who assigns all the non-Shabbat Torah reading at CBB), and I said something I had said many times before, namely, that studying Seder Nashim was doing nothing for my enthusiasm for marriage and that this might be just as well, since my various Jewish communal activities were failing miserably at bringing me into contact with single men between the ages of 30 and 50. The Ritual Committee Chairwoman gave this several seconds of thought before informing me that I was wrong, because did I remember the Torah reader for Pinchas last month? I did -- I had been gabbai sheni that afternoon, so I remembered a young man who read very quickly but very fluently in a pleasant baritone and had taken the second aliyah. I also remembered him asking the rabbi some interesting questions about Yamim Noraim trupp, which I shamelessly listened in on, and telling me that I sang the most coloratura version of the Birkat he'd ever heard.** The Ritual Committee Chairwoman triumphantly nodded and said that he was a year older than me, a regular reader in her morning Torah rotation (we ordinarily have a different reader at mincha), a colleague of her husband's at the Other University in Boondoggle, from someplace a good bit south of the Mason-Dixon Line, and single as far as she knew, so why didn't she invite both of us over for Shabbat dinner sometime?

I nodded, slightly dazed, because this was not how that sort of conversation usually went. It's not that people hadn't tried to set me up before -- and it's not that I objected to being set up in theory; I have always considered it infinitely preferable to whatever the heck it is one is supposed to do in singles bars -- but I had always been able to find some glaringly obvious flaw in the set-uppee that gave me room to graciously decline the invitation. ("Well, yes, we're both from the same species, but....") I had decided that the famous Jewish institution of shidduch was one of those things that worked better in theory than in practice. In this case, however, while it was theoretically possible that the poor man had a secret girlfriend (or boyfriend, or life of crime, or hitherto undisclosed fatal illness), I couldn't actually find a reason to object to having dinner in the same room as him. So, like any sensible modern woman, I Googled him, and discovered to my chagrin that he sounded pretty darn interesting. Then I went to mincha a few weeks later, found he had turned up again (to check me out, in fact), and unabashedly tackled him for a conversation about demonology in pop culture; he held his own, made several good points, and did not flinch when the Ritual Committee Chairwoman swooped down on us and made dinner arrangements for Shabbat Chol Hamoed Sukkot then and there. This, I decided, called for some serious paradigm shifting -- and perhaps an afternoon of equally serious clothes-shopping.

It was several months later before I found out what the Ritual Committee Chairwoman had told D., the Torah reader, about me (beyond the obvious statistics). It seems she had overheard, or had heard from someone else, my comment after a particularly poorly-led Birkat: I had asserted -- and I swear I was mostly kidding -- that I wasn't going to date anyone who couldn't do a decent job of leading bentsching. So this piqued D.'s interest, and after chatting with me about Good Omens versus The Exorcist, he went home and looked over the full Birkat. And after Shabbat dinner in her sukkah, the Ritual Committee Chairwoman asked D. to lead the Birkat, which he did (very well), and the only other thing that happened was that we had a great time. In fact, we couldn't stop talking; our hosts kicked us out and we kept talking in their front yard. As we started telling people some time later, we are complementarily geeky: our academic specialties have nothing in common but are fascinating to each other, while most of our hobbies coincide neatly, and we get almost all of each others' jokes. At any rate, the only flaw I could figure out at that first dinner was D.'s failure to make an explicit appointment for another date, which he promptly remedied Sunday morning at 2 am via email. I do appreciate a man who knows how to use email.

If it took us about twenty-four hours to set up our first independent date (dinner after Havdalah), it took the regulars at Saturday mincha about twenty-four seconds to figure out that we were dating; they were pronouncing us beshert on the second date (which also included mincha), telling us how happy they were for us on the third date (breakfast after Monday morning minyan), and offering to serve in the wedding party (I kid you not) by the time we had been dating a month and I came to Shabbat morning services at CBB to listen to D. daven Pesukei d'Zimra and read Haftarah. All this congregational interference should have been alarming, I suppose, except that we had been emailing back and forth in between dates -- which we had kind of stopped counting -- and it was at the point when D. came up with the perfect rhyme to cap off an Iron Chef-inspired parody of "Unetaneh Tokef" that I realized I wanted to spend the rest of my life going to services with him. And that might have been alarming, too, except that it turned out he felt the same way about me. The thing is, I am not much good at dating, and neither is D. -- I later heard the account of set-ups he'd wiggled out of, and I think I know which one of us the Ritual Committee Chairwoman was really worried about -- but we turned out to be extremely good at being together. Clearly, then, the only sensible thing to do was to stop dating. And we are really very sensible people, except about each other.

So we went to a lot more services, listened to each other read Torah almost every week, started deliberately counterharmonizing during the Aleinu as well as the Birkat***, spent a lot more time together in between services, and introduced our parents to each other at Thanksgiving (told you I was displacing anxiety about kashrut). Everyone was appropriately fond of each other -- happily, D.'s parents are wonderful people independent of their son -- so we proceeded with the next phase of our plan, which involved quite a bit of advance work. D. flew out to Coast City to join us at Aunt Miriam's a few days before New Year's, and on December 30th we made it up to Gotham to visit his grandparents. On New Year's Eve, my entire immediate-extended family had Shabbat dinner at Aunt Miriam's, and D. and I talked them into concluding with the full Birkat, which I led. Then -- before anyone could doff their headgear -- D. told everyone the story of how the Birkat had featured in our courtship, and he worked around to talking about his great-grandparents (who have nothing at all to do with the Birkat, but some of my relatives were starting to catch on at this point), and finally he gave me his great-grandmother's engagement ring.

I suppose that's the end of the story, except that we are still working out the details. On New Year's Day, we both read Torah at Aunt Miriam's shul by way of celebration (she organizes the Torah reading there, so it was easy to manage, although we didn't tell her at the time why we wanted to). In the afternoon, by careful prearrangement, we left a message on the Ritual Committee Chairwoman's answering machine (which she will listen to but not answer on Shabbat) so she could notify all the Saturday mincha regulars that we'd officially gotten engaged. And the next weekend we flew to D.'s hometown, where his parents threw us a party and lots of family friends told me what a very smart little boy he had been (well, obviously). We had already scheduled the wedding with the rabbi -- it's the Sunday after Shavuot**** -- and now we have a location and a caterer and a notebook with a lot of other details we need to deal with as quickly as possible before people drive us nuts asking about them. And most weeks one or the other of us is reading Torah, and we seem to be sharing not only my spiffy new Artscroll tikkun but also a cold (oh well), and curiously enough we are still expected to teach and otherwise do our respective jobs.

But I have come around to thinking that just possibly the whole shidduch thing works once in awhile, and perhaps one is predestined to fall in love with things other than the Birkat. And, really, it is just our little joke that we are getting married to make our friends spend more time bentsching. Er. Mostly. Although we are sticking around Boondoggle for a week or so after the wedding....

* -- It is also referred to as "ben[t][s]ching," which is Yiddish borrowing from Latin ("benedicere") through either Old French or Provençal. If you know this, the rest of the post makes a lot better sense.
** -- This is a fairly accurate description of, at least, how I start the Birkat. I'm an alto, but a lifetime of dealing with non-singers and/or people with incompatible vocal ranges has taught me to look for high harmonies.
*** -- Yes, we know it's disgustingly cute. We don't much care.
**** -- Since the Ritual Committee Chairwoman has put D. in charge of Shavuot planning, I will even get my all-night tikkun on Erev Shavuot. (With the congregation, I mean. Stop snickering.)

You know, it would be a lot easier to return from a mini-vacation if I didn't have to figure out a new way to combat comment and trackback spam every blessed time. Anyone who gets a lot of rebuilds on their RSS feed later this week -- sorry about that.

Speaking of blessed times, however, I do have a really impressive excuse for being too busy to blog (beyond the usual teaching, research, family shenanigans, synagogue shenanigans, and standard-issue laziness). In fact, this seems like an excellent time to announce it, since I am on my 500th post to Baraita and we are on the verge of a new year -- at least, for trees. It's not clear to me whether anyone consulted the trees about this -- around Boondoggle they're nowhere near thinking about waking up -- but we can celebrate in their absence, if by "celebrate" you mean "go around sharing TMI about Sabbateanism." In fact, if you, like me, prefer your Jewish holidays with a dash of history, I recommend Eli Segal's article on "Apples and Apocalypse". )

So, speaking of blessed times and for that matter of apocalypses* -- the announcement part is that I appear to be engaged. And I did contemplate going on about Tu Bi'Shevat some more, but at least a few of my readers know exactly where I live, and I don't think I want to be lynched, so -- story next post.

* -- In the non-technical pop-cultural sense, not as a genre of Second Temple-era literary production.