Let's say you've acquired a harmless little pasttime. You tried it briefly as a teenager, then some nifty-seeming friends reintroduced you to it at a time when you were feeling adrift in a new city. You got back into the swing of things -- you started purchasing paraphernalia -- and now you find yourself thinking about it first thing in the morning, blocking off time for it in the evening, getting irritable when your schedule requires you to go for weeks or months between major indulgences. Next thing you know, you'll be getting the shakes. But you can stop anytime, honest. This is your brain. This is your brain on trupp.*

Well, I'm semi-serious -- I opted to read Haftarah rather than Torah at the Marvelous Monthly Minyan last weekend,** and while I am pleased to report that I have finally beaten the last few nagging transition problems (aka Why Do I Keep Ending Kadma V'Azla In A Completely Different Key?) with the Haftarah cantillation, that decision plus the vagaries of other schedules means that I won't be reading anything for the next month and won't have read Torah in six weeks. Also, I now feel pretty thoroughly competent at both the varieties of trupp I've learned so far. This is... odd. Over the past forty-eight hours, I must've glanced at the Monster Tikkun*** on the coffee table half a dozen times before reminding myself that, no, there's nothing I really need to practice just now.

So what's a nice Jewish girl to do with her recreational studies? Well, I can think of several options, not counting the Directed Study of Halakhot Pertaining To Wedding Ceremonies I seem to be conducting in my spare time. For one thing, this would be a good time to start taking Daf Yomi seriously, since the next cycle starts at the beginning of March. Y'see, I've been following Daf Yomi in a half-hearted fashion for... um, since about the beginning of Bava Batra, or around about Pesach three years ago. With my poor language skills, I don't often get around to reading the daf proper (even though it's easy to access at E-Daf), but I get emailed outlines and "insights" from the nice people at Kollel Iyun Hadaf, some of which actually register with me. Then there are those nifty weekly "DAFootnotes" from Ohr Somayach. There are worse ways to become Talmudically semi-literate. But at this point there's nothing stopping me from investing in a few volumes of the Schottenstein Berachot and reading in English whatever I can't manage in Aramaic/Hebrew.

Then there's the next great hurdle in my efforts to overcome a particularly deep-seated phobia about Reading Hebrew Out Loud In Public. (Yes, I know, I layn Torah. That was step one.) I've thought this through -- with special reference to the issue of participating more fully in ritual life at Congregation Beth Boondoggle -- and it's clear that I need to start leading davening for non-Reform services, aka The Ones Where I Don't Have The Whole Thing Memorized From My Bat Mitzvah. This would be easier if I weren't also picky about nusach, but there you go. Operating on the familiar academic practice of creating one's own deadlines, I have promised People Other Than Myself that I will daven weekday maariv by the end of February (er, next weekend), Shabbat musaf by the end of March (this has the advantage of also being wedding planning, in that I want to do it at the aufruf), and -- well, April ends with Pesach, so I might give it a rest, but I'd sort of like to go ahead and tackle the few bits I don't know of Shabbat shacharit.

Then again, there's a whole world of trupp out there. D. and I are thinking of learning something together this summer, on the theory that we will go stark raving mad if we have nothing to focus on but Wedding Stuff. Right now Regalim is the front-runner, but there are also convincing arguments for Eicha.

There are also convincing arguments for me to remember that I have a slightly different paying job. *sigh* This is your brain. This is your brain on Judaism.

* -- Anyone unfamiliar with the cultural reference should check here for the background.
** -- I certainly would have been welcome to do both, but the only aliyah left unassigned was awfully long, and I had a rare moment of sanity in which I recognized that I should focus on the Haftarah. In April, I think, I might try for a double.
*** -- This is what we call the Artscroll Kestenbaum in our household. (Why on earth do they have stam for the Haftarah? I mean, where are the sizable Jewish populations who read Haftarah from a scroll? Seriously -- I have a vague sense that some Sephardic congregations somewhere do it, but I've never heard of or seen it in the U.S.)

Not long ago, my friend K. asked if I would be interested in attending Rachel Factor's one-woman show JAP. I followed the link she'd provided and read about the show: it depicts Factor's journey from a non-practicing Christian* actress struggling with estrangement from her Japanese-American identity to an observant Jewish performer (to female audiences only) living in Israel. It sounded pretty interesting, in fact, enough that I almost contemplated moving around previously made plans for that particular Sunday. But then I hit the sentences in the NYT article that made me pull a face: "Ms. Factor converted to Conservative Judaism, but after a prominent Orthodox rabbi performed the circumcision on their first son, Ariel Jun, in 2002, and introduced them to other Orthodox families, the Factors decided that Orthodoxy was most compatible with their spiritual goals. Ms. Factor decided to convert again, this time according to Orthodox precepts." Leaving the repeat-conversion issue aside -- that's a whole different kettle of gefilte fish, especially with aliyah issues and all -- anyway, leaving that aside, I concluded that Ms. Factor's show had a good chance of irritating me in the same way a number of Jewish acquaintances and media sources do, by pushing the tacit assumption that Orthodox Judaism is the only authentic or "real" Judaism.

Before I expand on that, let me explain something: it doesn't really bother me when a lifelong Orthodox Jew who clearly lives by the precepts s/he advocates -- someone like my weekday shiur teacher, aka The Reason We Definitely Need A Glatt Kosher Option At The Wedding -- indicates that, for him, Orthodoxy is real Judaism. Well, duh. It's part of him, of how he's lived all his life, of how he's chosen to live in the community he belongs to. More to the point, it hasn't for a moment stopped him from volunteering his time for Jewish education in minyanim and synagogues all over Boondoggle, and I respect that tremendously. He doesn't ignore my Judaism or the other Judaisms to the left of Orthodoxy, and he doesn't go around predicting their imminent demise; I imagine he finds them lacking in some ways and respects them in others, but I've seen his willingness to help fellow Jews again and again, and it extends far beyond the Orthodox community. Sure, every now and then I crave a little more historical perspective at that particular shiur, and I'm sorry I'll never be able to bake something for our group and have him eat it, but the priorities of his Judaism and my Judaism coincide often enough that I'm happy to accomodate him wherever possible.

I approach many of the Orthodox blogs I read regularly in much the same way: I know we don't always share the same assumptions about how halakhah works, but we agree on its importance in our lives, and I'm comfortable with the fact that we disagree on many other points. I do get uncomfortable, every once in awhile, when something happens to make me realize that there are sane and articulate people out there who consider my form of Judaism so illegitimate as not to be Jewish. On my Bloglines account, I've named the Judeo-relevant folder "Judaisms" in an attempt to dodge questions of definition,** but it's never seriously occurred to me to doubt that the variants of Orthodox Judaism I've encountered are in fact Jewish. And whenever I enter a Jewish community as a guest, in the blogosphere as in person, I try to follow the customs of that community as far as possible. I realize that the same ethic doesn't work for everyone -- that there are people who'd probably consider Temple Boondoggle's intermittent efforts at adopting Asian meditative practice outside the pale instead of just goofy and ill-considered, as I do; that there are also people who consider Congregation Beth Boondoggle, on the right wing of Conservative Judaism, to not be authentically Jewish; that there are people who find any number of things I may say in this blog to be offensive.***

I usually go to some effort not to offend needlessly -- it's never struck me as a good way to either interact or teach -- but just at the moment I want to know what's up with all the Conservative-, Reform- and unaffiliated Jews out there who buy into the idea that Orthodoxy Is The Real Judaism. Historically, that's tricky to sustain, although I think it'd be a very interesting debate -- if only it were debated more. For my part, I'd suggest (and a lot of scholarship would back me up) that many parts of the wildly diverse Jewish world 1000 or even 500 years ago would look significantly unlike any contemporary Judaism and would be animated in part by philosophies and practices generally associated with the more liberal end of the contemporary Jewish spectrum. I'd further point out that American Orthodoxy as a whole, and especially "modern Orthodoxy," has moved way the heck to the right in the past generation or so: my mother's parents, who considered themselves Orthodox and maintained the family habit of donating to Orthodox yeshivot, kept kosher at home and observed Jewish rituals with gusto but made no bones about driving on Shabbat or eating crabcakes at restaurants. Today they'd be, what, midrange Conservative? But even that easily verifiable fact, which many of us have experienced in our own lives, does kind of spoil the image of Jews as All Happily And Unchangingly Orthodox Until The Reform Movement Or Possibly The Haskalah Or Something Else Really Bad Happened And It All Went Kaplooey. No. I'm sorry, 'cause it's a great master narrative (see also Eden, Garden Of), but I don't agree with that version of Jewish history.

And even leaving aside the history -- yes, I can sort of do that -- I still don't get it. I mean, is it just me, or are there fundamental and fairly major differences between the self-understanding of Orthodoxy and that of more liberal Judaisms? I am downright baffled by the number of people whom I meet in contexts varying from transdenominational minyanim to Conservative shuls to Hillels who tell me that they're "tending towards Orthodox" or "attracted to Orthodoxy." Well, I'm tending towards considering myself obligated in the same mitzvot as my future husband (with a few biological exceptions) and attracted to a halakhic vision that occasionally disagrees with the Shulchan Aruch. And I've chosen those positions, and the movements which support them, consciously and with a great deal of thought, not because I couldn't be bothered to be Orthodox. See, I could be the frummest Jew in the world when it comes to clothing, food, davening practice, and so forth, but there is simply no way to reconcile those two positions (and they're fundamental to my Judaism) with what I take to be the core philosophies of contemporary Orthodoxy. This is fine; some of my readers are undoubtedly thinking at the moment that contemporary Orthodoxy wouldn't have me if I came with bonus airline miles and no annual fee. But these are important differences, unless of course you don't care about mitzvot or halakhah. (In that case, I must point out that all the nifty hats can be ordered online.)

Finally, and perhaps most telling of all, I hear from a lot of men that their experiences of Conservative and Orthodox Judaism are nearly interchangeable, even that the natural tendency of Jews brought up observant Conservative is a drift towards Orthodoxy. And I wonder -- because I am generally not in a position where I'm comfortable asking out loud: do these guys have wives, sisters, mothers, daughters? Then again, maybe they do: we have plenty of couples at my Conservative shul where the husband's there early but the wife only shows up halfway through the Torah service and chats the whole time; most of them are old enough to have been around when the congregation was still Orthodox, and the shift obviously hasn't made much difference for either of them. But yet another reason Why I Will Never Be Orthodox is my unavoidable fondness for participating in services. I love layning Torah and Haftarah, getting all the tricky little sequences just right; I love giving d'vars where I try to get people talking about the texts we're studying; I love leading prayers and trying to stick to the correct nusach. I also love being gabbai, taking an aliyah, opening the Ark or raising (you betcha) or dressing the Torah. And I love sitting in class learning about Talmud, or simply being among the first minyan on Shabbat morning every week, sitting near the front with my Favorite Shul Partner Ever and hearing our voices blend together in praise of God. Honestly, I could survive not sitting next to D. -- just barely -- but not sitting someplace where I could get a good view of the Torah reading? Not having the chance of participating in that Torah reading? Not being counted toward the minyan? No way in Gehenna. That's not the Judaism I grew up with, not the Judaism I've participated in my whole life, not the essence of the Judaism which attracts me.

You may conclude whatever you wish about my personal psychology, but I think there's no denying that the strictures on women's participation which seem very nearly constitutive of American Orthodoxy would represent a radical change in my, or any left-of-Orthodox woman's, experience of congregational worship. Does the Orthodox experience work for many committed, intelligent, Jewishly knowledgeable women? Of course -- I know a number of them -- but their world is definitely different from mine. There are many wonderful things about the Orthodox services I've attended, the communities who have had me as their guest, but I'm simply not willing to make that my norm, not willing to let my children grow up thinking that only men can be surrounding the Torah and that women's attendance is optional. I can't control what they choose once they grow up, and if they choose Orthodoxy that's fine, as long as they know what that choice entails. I'm not entirely sure that everyone who's attracted to Orthodoxy does realize that.

Of course, the Modern Orthodox wonder why everyone thinks Hasidic Judaism is more "authentic," and I imagine there are hierarchies among the various Hasidic groups which I know nothing about. Romanticizing the mysterious, exotic, yet non-threatening Other (and insisting the Other is mysterious and exotic in the teeth of evidence to the contrary) is a fairly well-established human tendency. But I continue to be puzzled by the people who can't see what all the fuss is about. And, you know, it's possible Rachel Factor's show doesn't touch on any of this; it sounds as though large parts of it would be pretty interesting even if it did. I didn't go, though; I figured I wouldn't be in the right mood.

Maybe I should've gone hat-shopping instead?

* -- I always feel bad for Christians when I use that phrase; "non-practicing Jew" is weird enough, but at least we have assorted ethnic identities. "Non-practicing Christian," as near as I can tell, just means you don't object to Christmas trees or Easter baskets. (By which standard, my parents' household is simultaneously non-practicing Christian and occasionally-practicing Jewish. Oy.)
** -- To pick a nice innocuous example, I'm fairly sure that the subjects covered in, say, Paleojudaica don't all represent a continuous heritage with my brand of Judaism. Let's face it, I'd make a lousy Essene.
*** -- If this is a persistent problem, of course, said people should probably find more congenial reading matter. God knows there are blogs -- and other manifestations of Jewish community -- which I don't regularly join because they drive me nuts.

This weekend was very, very special, because in celebration of my first Valentine's Day with an actual romantic partner in too many years to count, I... well, I led a Seudat Shlishit discussion of the beginning of Mishnah Sotah. The funniest thing about this -- besides the Tannaitic estimates of how long it takes to commit an adulterous act, which start at about five seconds* -- is that I have corrupted D. by the simple method of leaving lots of Mishnah commentaries strewn enticingly around his apartment. As he said the other day, looking up from my copy of The Fathers According to Rabbi Nathan, "I used to complain that there was no good science fiction any more."**

The discussion itself was a whole other event which I am filing for a future post on Exceedingly Gradual Culture Change At Congregation Beth Boondoggle, but my point tonight is that I have a lovely Jewish community in Boondoggle -- several of them, actually -- and yet I'm nowhere near tired of reading Jewish blogs or interacting with people in the Olam Ha-Blog.*** When I started Baraita back in 2001, it was supposed to be equal parts academia, pop-culture, and religion; the first two were easy enough to find examples for, but I actually looked around for blogs dealing with religion from a standpoint other than Christian confessionalism and came up with a very limited roster. Jewish blogs -- and by this I mean blogs dealing primarily with Judaism as a religion instead of Israel/politics -- were even rarer.

Now there are dozens of really wonderful blogs about Judaism, coming from all around the world and covering the spectrum of Jewish movements. I've learned a great deal from many of them, too many to name. I've even been a partial inspiration for a few new Judeoblogs, and I find myself ridiculously proud of that. The blogroll in my sidebar is woefully out of date, especially as regards Jewish blogs, and I keep finding new must-reads; I know that I should just stick my Bloglines roll in there, but I keep looking for the perfect fonts to imitate Rashi script. But over the past three-plus years, I've been impressed and delighted by the civility with which Judeobloggers discuss the issues which divide us, the force with which we affirm the faith which unites us, the ways we take turns learning and teaching. And after a pleasant few days browsing through classical rabbinic texts, I think I'm safe in saying that Our Sages would be even more ridiculously proud than I am.

Meanwhile, I wanted to let anyone who's been even more preoccupied than me know about the great reading list that is the 2004 Jewish/Israeli Blog Awards process. While I was thrilled (and slightly surprised) to find myself a finalist in one of the categories, I never got around to casting a vote -- it wasn't so much principled abstention as inability to decide between some wonderful choices -- and I wasn't entirely comfortable with the whole concept of blog "competition," so I never touted the awards here on Baraita. Now that the voting's over, though, I'm just impressed at the quantity and quality of what's out there. The finalist list -- as well as some of the earlier rounds of voting, if they're still available -- make for a really amazing tour through the world of Jewish blogs.

So, on the eve of the distinctly non-Jewish feast of St. Valentine, I figure I might as well express my appreciation for all the Jewish and Judaic bloggers out there. I did think about writing bad poetry for the occasion, but just because "blue" (as in "violets are") and "Jew" rhyme is no reason to subject y'all to that. I will simply wish you all the best, geekiest, Valentine's Day ever. If I could send you all chocolates (with assorted centers, so that we could argue over at what point one needs to bless ha-etz instead of just shehakol) I would. Since I can't, though, I vote we all do what we do best: go, learn, and (of course) comment.

I'll be over here with my study partner, a box of Godiva, and the Tosefta.

* -- There are parallel passages in the Bavli and in Sifre Numbers (I'd guess Yerushalmi as well, but I didn't check). That said, Tosefta Sotah is the rabbinic source with the most extensive discussion of exactly how long it takes to commit adultery once "closeted." And I'd like to point out that that was the first question my class asked after we'd read Sotah 1:2. It's always nice to have one's preparatory instincts affirmed.
** -- I don't think he meant it quite that way.
*** -- I didn't make that up -- I didn't make up "blogveldt," either -- but I can't remember precisely who did. Whoever you are, thank you. :)

Eventually, there will be real posts here, but in the meantime:

(1) I really wanted a snow day this morning. You know, a nice car-blanketing blizzard, the kind that makes it abundantly clear that nobody has to get out of bed all morning. I didn't get one. Wah.

(2) Yes, "Al Kol Eleh" is often performed to extremely cheesy accompaniment and has questionable subtext on several levels, but it still makes me sniffle. Even in bad English translation. D., on the other hand, has trouble restraining the urge to sing "Ukelele." Heathen.

(3) Speaking of which, it's probably a bad sign when someone mentions the wedding at Cana -- in John's Gospel, Jesus' first miracle, wherein his mother tells him the wine's run out and to Do Something, so of course he turns the water into even better wine -- anyway, someone mentions the wedding at Cana in the course of making a really interesting point about the role of women in Jesus' ministry, and your first thought is, "Hmmmm, I need to check my caterers' contract."

(4) Okay, who scheduled Shabbat T'Lamdeini for the same weekend as Major Professional Conference #3? Again, I say, wah.*

(5) And while we're at it, who scheduled the CBB Adult Ed Committee meeting for the evening of Valentine's Day? *sigh* Oh well. I'll just be putting off my infiltration plans there for another month.

(6) Finally, I know who scheduled both the current Jewish and Catholic/Gregorian calendars respectively, and while Ash Wednesday falling on Rosh Chodesh is slightly amusing, it doesn't even begin to compare to Purim falling on Good Friday. (Possibly I should avoid high-concept costuming my first year at CBB -- but if there ever was a time to go as a blood libel... no?)

(7) I am so very, very happy.

* -- I keep having an urge to get together all the semi-interested Jews at MPC#3 -- several years ago, a colleague invited many of us to a really delightful Shabbos dinner at his B&B, so I know there are a fair number -- and daven/learn/eat together. I am, however, not quite insane enough to take on something like that just now. Er, without help.