For someone with a slightly unconventional Jewish upbringing, I have a very conventional Eastern European ideal of what makes up "Shabbos dinner" (or, as my dad's family likes to say, Friday night supper). Takeout, which is perfectly acceptable on any other night of the week, is inappropriate, as are doctored-up goodies from Trader Joe's,* and our usual ethnic melange of ingredients is frowned upon. Rather, the Sabbath meal (which we never call it) should involve a main dish of more or less European-styled chicken, something in the "starch" category (potatoes, rice, not terribly exotic pasta, maybe even couscous), and several hot and cold vegetable options served separately. There should be dessert some time afterwards (pareve for guests, dairy if it's family and nobody mentions it). There should be a tablecloth and nice dishes. Finally, I should feel guilty for not serving chicken soup or gefilte fish, although not guilty enough to actually make either unless it happens to be Pesach -- the last person in my direct line who put on the entire spread regularly was my great-grandmother, the Original Chana, and she had half a dozen daughters helping her out.** But whenever we visited the family in Coast City -- or every so often when I got a yen to do it myself at home -- someone would haul out the chicken recipes on Thursday afternoon and we'd start plotting.

These days, when I think about transmitting Judaism to another generation, I sometimes wonder if I shouldn't throw in the towel on Talmud Torah and just keep cooking. During most of my adult life, the abovementioned Shabbos ideal bore only a passing resemblance to what I actually cooked on Friday afternoons -- for one thing, I have been borderline vegetarian for much of that time -- but the funny thing was that I did cook, and more consciously than any other time in the week. Even during the years when I attended shul only for holidays, I wanted to Do Something on Friday night, and it was supposed to involve not only candles, wine, and something reasonably bread-like, but also a Real Meal. You see, the whole Erev Shabbos home ritual is mildly impractical for single people, especially if you go out once in awhile on Friday night (that's why I own tealights, a piece of aluminum foil, and a thoroughly inflammable stovetop*). I've had a post from My Urban Kvetch about the tribulations of lighting candles as a single womant in my clippings folder for awhile -- Esther even posted a recent response -- and I have to admit that I usually think of candles about halfway through setting up the meal, not the other way 'round. Candles give you wax to clean up and, yes, a slight case of missing your family; cooking a meal means leftovers. And there's nothing bad about leftovers.

Now that I am married to a man who understood when I bought him a tablecloth so I could cook him Friday night dinner (I hope small children are not reading this blog, but we have been cooking each other Friday evening meals for a good seven months already), entirely new vistas for Shabbos dinners have opened up to me. The first time I cooked him dinner, I did in fact prepare chicken, but we have branched out into fish, cheese- or soy-based casseroles, kosher pot roast once in a blue moon, and various preparations revolving around hearty stews or chili. One week we did chicken fajitas (homemade guacamole and refried black beans on the side, plus veggies). We have even managed to have guests over a time or two, although so far all our guests have been chicken types. Eventually, we will invite all the eco-kosher people over at once and do exciting things with legumes, but for now I am methodically running through family recipes and adding spices. There is a blog called Sabbath Meals with all these great vegetarian menus -- someday, I tell myself, I will branch out.

Here at the Chana household, there was talk of doing something wedding-related tonight, but apparently our friends have opted to concentrate their energies on tomorrow night, leaving us alone -- which is good, because we've been out the last two nights running and I sort of wanted to rest. By "rest," of course, I mean "putter in the kitchen." This evening we -- and by "we" I mean "especially the one of us who has not come down with a bad case of 4 pm meeting" -- at any rate, we are fixing garlic-lime baked chicken breasts, some sort of wild-and-brown-and-mushroom rice pilaf to be named later, green beans, mango salsa, salad and/or some other cooked vegetable, and strawberry pie. Baking gnomes also appear to have gotten into my kitchen and produced a small but rapidly rising lump of challah dough -- this sometimes happens when I am not paying close attention. (We are in fact having a guest, but I believe the baking gnomes were contemplating the whole first-official-married-Shabbos deal. Also, the challah rolls have been in the freezer way too long.)

The sad thing is that chicken qua chicken doesn't even excite me all that much. But Shabbos dinner, on some level, apparently does. And tonight we are getting our last (I think) installment of wedding Talmud volumes, so all's right with the world. Shabbat shalom!

* -- Their spinach-tofu eggrolls are seriously yummy, especially served with Soy Vey's Chinese Garlic marinade/sauce and perhaps a little Sriracha.
** -- I understand that a previous generation would have also felt guilty about not serving chopped liver, to say nothing of homemade noodles in the chicken soup. And Shabbos lunch is a separate post, because we didn't do that growing up, and cholent confuses me.
*** -- Further tips for singles and small families: unless you drink a great deal of wine during the week or can cope with veggie marinara and coq au vin every week, you might also consider keeping a bottle of kosher grape juice in the fridge (plus the juice boxes in the pantry for when I forget and run out) and only hauling out the real stuff for guests. Furthermore, that whole challah thing is neatly got around if you -- like me -- have a nearby kosher bakery which makes knot rolls (they look kinda like baby challot if you squint) out of challah dough. They freeze reasonably well, and it only takes twenty seconds in the microwave to defrost two -- unless it's a special occasion, in which case I will gladly seize the excuse to spend the morning playing with yeast. Or, of course, you could just adjust to having really awesome French toast on Sunday morning.

Now, some of you reading Baraita might be under the impression that I am a liberal feminist because I have, y'know, said so in the title of this post. Others might have deduced as much from my rare political animadversions, my commitment to egalitarian traditions of prayer and education within Judaism, or just that whole deal where I'm a mouthy overeducated bleeding-heart ivory-tower academic (at least last I checked). But the latest argument to hit certain sections of the Jewish blogosphere informs me that, no, actually I am a liberal feminist because I occasionally support my local Orthodox women's tefillah (prayer) group (hereinafter WTG) with liberal feminist actions such as layning, davening, offering d'varim Torah, and -- hold on to your seats, folks -- this one time I co-sponsored the kiddush.

If I understand correctly, it all started when Miriam of Bloghead posted about performing hagbah at a WTG gathering the Shabbat before her cousin's wedding.* Well, hagbah is fun -- not least because, as I've said in various other blog comments, an average-weight Torah somewhere in midcycle is perfectly liftable as long as you have halfway strong wrists -- but from the furor this disclosure sparked, you'd think Miriam had just confessed to incestuous cannibalistic orgies with married terrorists. Of course, Dov Bear picked up on it -- he loves a good controversy -- and the resultant comments were truly fascinating. Thanks to R. Gil, I'm tolerably familiar with what I consider legitimate halakhic arguments against WTGs from the right wing of Orthodoxy (check out the right sidebar of his blog for a list of all relevant posts). But I had hitherto been ignorant of how participating in groups of women praying and studying Torah together will cause said women to sprout facial hair, stop loving their children, produce Christian grandkids, do something unspecified but presumably nasty to True Judaism (tm), and start participating in incestuous cannibalistic orgies with married terrorists.**

Anyone who takes that last sentence seriously is probably not reading this blog, which is just as well; here on Baraita I shamelessly engage in mixed prayer! With, y'know, men!*** Still, it's interesting to me to discover that a practice I consider slightly staid -- the attendees are multigenerational, largely pillar-of-the-community types, at a safely Orthodox synagogue with a wide variety of headcovering and clothing choices -- is apparently the bleeding edge of Jewish radicalism to some. Fortunately, others have discussed the historical precedents, the argument from an Orthodox perspective, and even the larger (and in some ways more interesting) question of whether Torah honors are spiritual. Thus, I am free to boggle and/or make lame jokes about metaphysical electrolysis.

More to the point, though, I am free to be relieved that the Orthodox Jews I know -- the ones I'm related to, the ones I'm friends with, the ones who teach me, even the ones I interact with most of the time in the blogosphere -- are Not Like That. I keep thinking back to the big party we threw last weekend, and the way it was totally worth it to order in the kosher-style and the kosher food, to open the kosher champagne with my own dainty hands, to remember the one person I absolutely could not hug (I hugged his wife instead), to futz around with where everything was located so that people who wanted to walk on Shabbat could walk -- because everyone came, from Reform to right-wing Orthodox (I don't have any black-hat pals just yet) along with half a dozen denominations of Christians (none of them with Jewish grandparents to the best of my knowledge), and everyone did a bang-up job of rejoicing with us.

So I am probably still on some sort of goodwill-towards-humanity kick (only slightly marred by the presence of a cold undoubtedly transmitted by one of my wedding guests) when I say that this whole controversy has inspired me. This coming autumn, I will not only continue to attend our local WTG and do things like layn and teach. I will sponsor another kiddush. And when it comes to headcovering -- as a Married Woman, I should think about these things, right? -- I am seriously considering donning a "Do The Daf" baseball cap.

* -- By contrast, as an unregenerate Conservative-ish Jewish woman, I layned for my future husband's aliyah the Shabbat before our wedding, had him layn for mine, and had us daven two services apiece that day. But we are clearly beyond the pale. (Also, we have strange ideas of fun.)
** -- OK, guess which one of those I made up.
*** -- Most of whom are somewhere significantly below Jesse Helms and the late Mr. Rogers on the list of People I Am Likely To Have Inappropriate Erotic Thoughts About, but I realize that that is beside the point both halakhically and rhetorically.

For those of you waiting anxiously to hear all about it, I did more or less manage the appropriate tune for the Reader's Kaddish before Shabbat musaf last weekend, although I think I need another few go-rounds before I'm confident at it -- my first-time mincha rendition went better, largely because I'd become accustomed to an extremely simplified tune for it. And all Saturday's Torah reading (scheduled and unscheduled) was just fine.

(I also got married, a state which is mostly indistinguishable from not being married except that we are no longer spending most of our lives on wedding planning. Also, I will never again have to remember the appropriate codes for the accent in "fiancé." And I have some theologically dubious Jewish wedding books which are free to a good home if anyone needs them -- just as soon as I post scathing reviews on here.)

Across widely variant traditions, rabbinic Judaism emphasizes the superiority of congregational to individual prayer, especially for those prayers which are obligatory. Congregational prayer, we are told, is better, stronger, and more spiritual; it gets your whites whiter and your colors brighter; it goes straight to God with no standing in line at the Post Office. But the classical sources never quite get around to stating one of the best things about morning minyan: it's kind of like a family. A neurotic, overbearing, occasionally dysfunctional family -- which is to say exactly like every family I've ever been a part of -- and a bit short on women compared to both sides of my family, but definitely a family, and the kind you want to belong to. When you turn up in the morning, people will greet you by name; if you don't turn up when they expect you, they'll worry. If something's going on in your life, they want to hear about it, or maybe discuss it behind your back, but they'll congratulate or sympathize with you too. If you come regularly, you get your own seat by general acclamation, but if you sit in the wrong seat, someone will let you know about it (not, of course, the someone whose favorite seat you might be in, but the someone who takes it upon him- or herself to inform unwary bystanders of the Appropriate Seats). And last but not least, if you don't stay and eat afterwards, not to mention thanking the gentleman who buys the bagels, you're -- well, a little lacking in the finer social graces, but they'll put up with you, because you're family.

Even better, it's not an exclusive family: strangers are welcomed, although the Minyan Men are likely to be politely nosy about what you are doing there. If you've just dropped in for a yahrzeit or something, they'll offer you whatever role in the service you're willing to take, and I have seen them take great pains to explain the service to non-Jewish students visiting for class assignments. But if you start attending semi-regularly, well, then -- you're in the family, with all its attendant benefits and disadvantages. The afternoon minyan has more drop-ins, and a different set of social rules -- and the Shabbat services are a whole different ball game -- but the morning minyan is a commitment.

I had dropped in on the afternoon minyan (mincha/maariv services back-to-back) quite a bit over last summer, but my introduction to the Congregation Beth Boondoggle morning minyan was a trifle irregular, because it was right around the time that D. and I started dating that I got up the nerve to lay tefillin in public and hence to attend a standard morning minyan (I didn't like the idea of going without tefillin, but feared that someone would rush over to correct my inappropriate hand-winding technique). It turns out that the morning crowd is more my speed, that the morning davening is more participatory (possibly it's just that I know most of the people who participate), and that I am, as always, a sucker for Torah reading; the only difficulty was finding a reason to pry myself out of bed at such a hideous hour. So I got myself onto the morning Torah-reading rotation, and D. and I started turning up together to minyan on any day either of us had to read; the result was that the minyan folks promptly (and not incorrectly) identified me as That Nice Young Woman Who Comes With D. While I am used to playing many roles in religious life, the ingenue starring in Ben Stiller's next comedy hit, "Meet The Minyan," isn't generally one of them.

All the same, we seem to have managed OK, even if tefillin make it difficult to hold hands. Sometimes I fantasize that the Minyan Men go home to their wives (most of whom run other parts of shul life with terrifying efficiency) and say, "you know, honey, maybe you should come to minyan with me tomorrow morning." Then I get a grip. I am not a minyan regular, after all; during the school year I am at best a semi-regular, attending no more than four or five times in a typical month. And I am not a Minyan Man for obvious reasons, although there are a handful of other women who attend regularly or semi-regularly. It's been less than three years since Congregation Beth Boondoggle started counting women in the daily minyan, and I'm told several of the old guard walked out over the decision; rumor even has it that a few of the remaining Minyan Men fought full egalitarianism down to the last vote. Oddly, I don't know which ones, both because I am too sensible* to ask and because you can't actually tell -- the remaining regulars breathe a sigh of relief no matter what shape of person walks in the door tenth, and when I turned up for the first time, they promptly offered me the third aliyah. The worst I can say about them is that they're a tiny bit paternalistic toward me in a way they don't seem to have been to D., but once I demonstrate that I know how to do something well, they let me alone to do it and congratulate me afterwards.

It's not quite that simple, though. The key ritual distinctions between minyan attendees at CBB these days are tefillin-wearers versus non-tefillin-wearers and ritual-skilled versus non-ritual-skilled. You see, according to rules set forth by our Ritual Committee, only people wearing tallit and tefillin** should take any sort of primary role in the service (shaliach, gabbai, oleh), which relegates the non-tefillin-wearers to the secondary honors (Psalm reading, ark opening, etc.). These secondary honors clearly used to be the "women's jobs" in the non-egalitarian days, but since there are actually several male regulars who don't wear tefillin, a perverse kind of equality has now been introduced. Of course, such a distinction doesn't completely escape being gender-influenced: a random woman who decides to attend minyan on the yahrzeit of a parent's death, as many do, probably doesn't have (a) a pair of tefillin left over from her Bat Mitzvah and (b) the knowledge and confidence to put them on before davening. In fact, barring out-of-town visitors, there are exactly two other women at CBB whom I've ever seen lay tefillin -- one regularly, one occasionally.*** But without tefillin, one cannot perform a major role in the service.

Even fewer people have the necessary ritual skills to perform all the possible roles. Almost everyone who attends morning minyan can take an aliyah (a few have bad stage fright and tend to turn it down), and since not everyone who gabbais knows Torah trupp -- between ourselves, D. and I refer to this job as "ba'al(at) blanket" based on the ferocity with which certain of the regulars insist on whipping the gigantic Torah cover over the scroll at every instant when reading is not in fact taking place**** -- some (but not all) regulars will also take that role. When it comes to leading services, though, the regulars fall into four categories: Will Do If Present (four or five people, one female), Will Do If Nobody Else Is Available (another four or five men); Will Do Only In Case of Yahrzeit (about half of the remaining male regulars), and No Way In Heck (everyone else). It's a matter of acquired skills, not intrinsic bias, but all the same the balance is weighted against women leading -- last week, in fact, a couple in their mid-sixties (both former shul presidents and formidable individuals in their own right) came in for the wife's father's yahrzeit and announced that the husband had an obligation to lead services as a result. This was the same morning that another Minyan Man cheerfully told D. that as "the youngest guy here" he should daven Pesukei d'Zimra. Oy.

Nobody's ever asked me if I'd like to lead a weekday morning service, but then I've never volunteered, largely out of a healthy fear of what would happen if I didn't daven fast enough and the bagels got overtoasted. Still, I have most of the right knowledge set (doing the entire weekday Amidah fast enough in public still worries me, which is why I want to do Pesukei d'Zimra first) and at this point I've heard it enough that the tunes are no problem. In fact, CBB weekday morning Torah readers function as full-fledged ba'alei koreh, so that I already run through several pages of prayers before, during, and after the Torah reading proper. But my learning to lead weekday services is only so helpful, since (a) they already know I'm service-competent and (b) they'll all assume my husband taught me.***** What I'd really like to see is more women attending weekday minyan, laying tefillin, and leading services, but I have no clear idea of how to make this happen -- I suppose I could offer hands-on tefillin lessons to any women who might be interested, but I get nervous about teaching anything that isn't historical in a synagogue context, and anyway my likeliest candidate just went in for shoulder surgery.

Oh well -- I figure there are worse dreams, and perhaps the more important point is that I'd be happy to see more (especially younger) Jews (of whatever gender) checking out a daily minyan. Some mornings I enjoy the triumphant sense of learning new skills and making familiar the formerly strange line by line; some mornings I coast on the nusach, never quite waking up until the Aleinu; some mornings I just burrow into a few prayers and hang there, sounding out every word, while the hallelujahs and amens float in the air around me. There are spiritual dimensions that I haven't even tackled in this post. But the spiritual dimensions aren't always there -- and the family is.

And, look, it gets me blogging before 10 am!

* -- I would like to say that this is part of my principled devotion to the rules of lashon hara, but it's really just practicality: gossip is only helpful if it allows me to work better with people.
** -- On, obviously, mornings when it is appropriate to wear tefillin.
*** -- I don't lay tefillin every morning (although I feel I probably should); I do lay tefillin every appropriate morning I daven with a congregation.
**** -- I wonder whether there's anything approaching halakhah on this -- everyone seems to agree that we cover the Torah during the pause for mishaberachs between the second and third aliyot, but what about the quick paragraph of Hebrew before calling up the first aliyah? What about the Chatzi Kaddish between the third aliyah and calling up hagbah and gelilah? And why do we have a Torah cover the size of a small blanket, anyway?
***** -- Seriously, I got that comment about my Torah reading once when D. and I were still dating. (Because of course I couldn't've learned it back at my Bat Mitzvah, the same way he did?) Not that we don't sit around arguing discussing different ways of singing t'lisha gedolah, or tunes for the Musaf Chatzi Kaddish, but that's, y'know, different.