Today's lesson -- not the one I taught, the one I learned -- today's lesson is that the absolute best way to make random Jewish people strike up a conversation with you (besides, y'know, breathing) is to cart around a sefer Torah. Even a little, dilapidated, non-kosher scroll. Even when you are walking in and out of a building devoted to Jewish community education, and therefore it is reasonably obvious that your motives for schlepping around the Torah scroll are likely pedagogical. People will stop you and tell you about their b'nai mitzvot, their lack of b'nai mitzvot, their experiences with Torah reading, their general views on the divine inspiration (or lack thereof) of the Torah... it's really pretty neat. But my right arm is tired, and it was a junior-size Torah.

Speaking of which, I know our rabbi has to be careful of letting any of the congregation's Torah scrolls out because they are hideously expensive (even this runty one, which I now have some strange urge to patch together and embroider a proper wrap for) -- anyway, I know he has to be careful, but his allowance that I could borrow that scroll as long as it was for "an appropriate use" made me snicker internally. What, pray tell, are the likely inappropriate uses for Torah scrolls? "Well, Rabbi, I know you assumed I was going to take this to one of my classes, but actually D. and I are planning to throw a housewarming party themed around burning Torah scrolls, and we thought this would make an awesome living-room decoration." "Well, Rabbi, one of my colleagues at the university wanted to know what the Jewish equivalent of a Black Mass was, so we're putting on a demonstration, and...." "Well, Rabbi, you won't mind if I grind part of this up and use it as a poultice on my sprained knee, right?"

In the crazy, mad whirligig of fun involved with moving, this afternoon I am hosting a cleaning service, an electrician, and a locksmith over at the new house. I will be passing the time by trying to learn the excessively long third aliyah of Nitzavim for Monday morning. (It's not that long for a Shabbat aliyah, but long for a weekday one -- and it's one of those repetitive diatribes against idolatry that make me yearn for a Deuteronomy Lite option. "Are you sure I can't just say "amen, don't worship idols, follow my Torah, Love, God?" I asked this morning. "You'd have to say it in Aramaic," my husband pointed out, "and someone would have to read the Hebrew anyway.")

However, in case anyone was wondering, my dread at teaching Sunday School again next weekend has almost completely eclipsed my dread over moving at the same time. Ah, the lesser-known benefits of Jewish education!

- This is my first significant chunk (> 30 minutes) of free time in a week, and that's only because nobody's shown up for my office hours so far.

- Boxes, boxes, everywhere. The horror, the horror. Naturally, we are not done packing, although we are close enough that I have almost stopped panicking. All the same, our possessions are currently spread between two houses and an apartment, and can I just say it's a really bad sign anytime your life starts to parallel the comic strip Cathy?

- After A/C problems at all three of the above-mentioned residences over the last several weeks, I am beginning to think that the best use of my time next summer would be as a student of A/C and furnace repair. I have already learned immeasurably more than I wanted to know about A/C coils, flue liners, and intake vents. At this point, I figure there's a soldering iron out there with my name on it.

- And speaking of best uses of my time, what on earth made me think I wanted to try teaching Sunday school? It's the worst of both worlds: I have no discernible authority over my students (such as, say, grading), and they don't want to be there. Also, half of them are making me remember why I despised boys all the way through middle school; the other half (which includes all the girls and some of the boys) seem reasonably behaved and perhaps even interested, which means I am failing them all the more miserably. High on the list of Things You Do Not Want To Hear Yourself Say At Any Point During The First Class Meeting has to be, "Look, why don't you all launch your paper airplanes at once and get it over with?" (No, paper airplanes were not part of the lesson plan. Neither were spitballs, if it comes to that. I am thinking of dyeing my hair, changing my glasses, and walking in next week claiming that I am an entirely new teacher.)

- When my husband is incredibly stressed, he freaks out and then takes a nap. When I am incredibly stressed, I freak out and then bake cookies -- more cookies than I can eat on my own. I cannot help but think that he is getting the better deal. (But, um, we needed to finish off the butter before we moved. Yeah, that's it.)

- I am terminally challenged when it comes to shofar-blowing, but I love listening to the sound and counting down to the New Year in my head. Some year I might make it to minyan a little more often during Elul. This is not that year. Still, I went this morning and it made me happy. Also, I have now gotten to the stage of rocking being quite comfortable with weekday Pesukei d'Zimra.

- I do have well-thought-out posts in mind. Somewhere.

In the annals of Best-Laid Plans, my proposed fall schedule of teaching two Boondoggle U. classes (one significantly reworked to include all the Stuff I've Always Wanted To Teach) and two community-adult-ed classes and Jewish History Boot Camp Sunday School... would really work a whole lot better if we were not also closing on our new house this coming Friday and moving in a little under two weeks. If you expected to hear from me recently, please feel free to assume that I fell asleep on my keyboard while trying to respond to your email. It's been one of those months.

I have plans for this weblog. Wonderful plans. Plans which require spare time and energy. I'm sure you all see the problem here. I did take Sunday off from both packing and class prep, but that was purely in order to test my long-held theory that any reasonably competent adult can produce an iced layer cake from scratch with only the most minimal guidance. As it turned out, I got precisely the birthday cake I wanted (basic 1-2-3-4 with a bit of extra vanilla and citrus, iced with strawberry buttercream), and my husband has been initiated into the ranks of People Who Bake. Incompatible baking beliefs can really tear a marriage apart, you know. (Yes, I'm smug, but it could be worse -- I could've posted pictures of the cake.)

Cake notwithstanding, I am postponing anything resembling a party till next month, when I can call it a housewarming and demand that people bring food. This brings us to the issue of house-related ritual, because D.'s grandmother has informed me, very seriously, that in addition to a mezuzah we need to bring bread, sugar, and salt into the new house when we first move in. It is not clear whether we can substitute honey, or for that matter whether we are intended to eat the bread, but for some reason, I feel that grabbing a bagel half out of the freezer would be cheating. So I'll bake something (probably challah) and take that over with honey and salt, and presumably eat some of those things with the relevant blessings, and -- oh, yes -- we are supposed to be careful to enter the house on our right feet.

So, dear readers: am I missing any other customs? And at what mythical age will I start needing less sleep?

Another disaster, another wave of toxic theology -- to borrow one overused metaphor from the newcasters, it's a veritable gumbo of painfully inadequate theodicy, silly soteriology, and back-door blasphemy. Also, it lacks okra. I refer, of course, to various explanations of the Hurricane Katrina-related devastation as demonstrative of God's position on issues ranging from gay marriage to the Gaza pullout.* Pointing out that God's aim would be a trifle inexact in any of these cases is so far beside the point as to be orbiting Pluto. And then there are the (much more sensible) people who point to this disaster as evidence that there is no God, or alternatively that God is an utter schmuck. While the creed of God-as-schmuck offers common ground between these factions, I myself find it rather lacking; plainly, some good old-fashioned dualism would actually fix these people's worlds a lot faster (it's all Ahriman's Satan's fault!).

Mocking aside, I have never been able to drum up a convincing crisis of belief to save my course grade, much less my soul, and disasters of this sort bring me no closer to one. If asked why a given hurricane strikes a given city, I would gently advise my questioner to go seek the ageless wisdom of the National Hurricane Center; my God is known to have spoken out of whirlwinds (as well as every other available and halfway showy natural phenonemon in the Ancient Near East), but clearly prefers to destroy cities using fire is not (to the best of my knowledge) heavily invested in any given weather pattern. And I, like most people, feel loss more directly the closer to home it gets; if I were able to seriously adopt a theology of God-as-schmuck, I would have done it last month, when two fatal traffic accidents in my community on sequential days killed, respectively, a healthy man on his way to morning minyan and a 24-week-old baby who only lived a few hours after his premature birth. I know those families; I went to one of the funerals and signed a card for the other. But the magnitude of the Katrina disaster, like the stampede deaths in Iraq, defies my imagination. I can only trust that the God I know is grieving, is working through as many people as are reachable, is manifesting in places ranging from fishing boats to websites -- but then, the God I know was doing that before the hurricane.

Possibly I grew up in a neighborhood with too many churches, or possibly I am tone-deaf when it comes to doubt, because I have never been able to get very far not believing in God. Who do you have to complain to, then? I can sympathize with curiosity or confusion or anger as responses to God; it's indifference that I don't quite understand. My very first webpage, created a little over a decade ago, featured a quote from St. Augustine of Hippo across the top: Deum et animam cupio scire, "I desire to know God and [the] soul" (Soliloquies I.7). Augustine, one of the best-known seekers of his day and ours, changed his mind several times about the number and nature of God, but his focus in that sentence -- and in the decent-sized chunk of his works I have read -- was on learning about God and the soul, not on discovering whether or not they exist. It's a breathtakingly presumptive sentence, even (perhaps especially) in an imaginary dialogue with Reason, and I still like it a decade later. The only one I can think of that tops it is "I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of Egypt" (Ex. 20:2).

You see, I come from a people who count this as the first of the Ten Big Ones.** I sometimes wonder how one could fail to observe this as a commandment -- say "are not either" in the general direction of Jerusalem three times daily, perhaps? Of course, there are assorted classical Jewish formulations -- Maimonides' thirteen ikkarim are the obvious example -- which take this commandment as requiring belief in God, or in God's unity; there are much stronger credal traditions in the Christian tradition which (by definition) do the same. But I have always felt that this is a bit of a stretch for the one verse. It is just dimly possible that we are supposed to believe that this particular God (the one identified by the name we veil under "Lord") is the one who did bring us out of Egypt, but I'm fairly certain that's covered elsewhere in the Torah. Like, every other speech. And even with all the rebellions toward the end of Numbers, nobody (Israelites, Moabites, Midianites, Emorites, random passersby, donkeys, et al.) actually seems to doubt that this particular God brought the Israelites out of Egypt, much less that this particular God is.*** We are not generally commanded to believe -- to do, to not do, to be, to remember, to observe, but not to believe.

Many of my friends are agnostic, and sensibly so, in the absence of convincing logical argument or empirical evidence either way; that sort of struggle also has a long history in Jewish tradition. So it's no particular virtue that I believe, nor is it the least bit rational; I have no convincing arguments to offer. I frequently accuse God of behaving like an S.O.B.**** or not playing fair or of only being knowable to people with several degrees less sanity than me; sometimes the Kaddish I am repeating sounds more obscene in my ears than a string of expletives. But I do not seem to be able to doubt that God is; I believe because it is absurd not to. The existence of God simply does not strike me as a reasonable object of doubt, in the same way that the presence of a coffee table in my living room is not a reasonable object of doubt. I can believe anything I want to about the table's existence, but leaving aside either Berkeleyan-strength idealism or thorough-going solipcism, the fact is that the table is present and will stub my toes if I persist in walking into it.

Likewise, God happens to be -- more precisely, God needs to be, which is the operative difference between God and the table. God cannot be replaced by that nifty leather ottoman I can't afford from Restoration Hardware. In my universe, God is necessary. A better metaphor might be a layperson's approach to gravity: it exists, and if you drop something from a height, the thing will fall, whether or not you happen to believe in gravity at that instant. The fact that things fall (under certain post-Newtonian restrictions) is a necessary corollary of living within earth's atmosphere. Similarly, God has always struck me as more of an inevitability than anything else. If I choose not to believe in God, that is my problem, not God's, and it does not materially affect God's existence.***** Imagining that there is no God is roughly as compelling to me as imagining that the Axis won the First World War: it's an intriguing thought experiment, it could be a fascinating novel, and it might be a helpful way to illuminate certain contemporary questions, but it's not what happened, so I can't very well base my life on it.

What floats my intellectual boat is in fact not the question of whether God exists, but whether God is knowable and/or describable by humanity in any (you should excuse the expression) sense. This is where I bog down before getting to the grand pronouncements about God's schmuckiness or lack thereof: granted that God exists (and it doesn't much matter what I believe about it), do I then think that anything (such as schmuckiness -- or goodness, truth, justice, compassion, etc.) can be usefully predicated about God? The handy thing about being Jewish is that you have a convenient and (in some way or other) authoritative record of people describing God; the unfortunate part is that this record frequently describes the sort of God you would cross the street to avoid, which leads you to hope that some of those descriptions were incomplete or just plain wrong. But that, mercifully, is a dilemma outside the scope of this post (it probably belongs to the post in which I do a lot of quoting from the Guide of the Perplexed) and not one I expect to solve anytime soon. Especially not on a day like today when, looking at the news, I suspect that what rescues the Kaddish from inanity is precisely its acceptance of God's utter fucking incomprehensibility.

So -- I am going to donate money, and pray, and contemplate the acquisition of moving boxes, and possibly treat myself to a little therapeutic baking (I have looked at one too many recipes for plum cake), and prepare for assorted classes, and wish I could do something to make it all better. Insofar as God is knowable, I'm betting God feels the same way.

* -- As a matter of principle, I prefer not to link to any of these explanations. I will note that anyone who clicks on www.godhatesneworleans.com will get a pleasant (and work-safe) surprise.
** -- The Christian traditions all consider this to be prologue to the Ten Commandments (although they differ as to other details of numbering; this page offers a nice little table for comparison).
*** -- They also never explicitly discount the existence of other gods, although there you get into shaky ground in Deuteronomy and certainly throughout the prophets -- OK, so the idols won't answer, but what does that mean on a metaphysical level? I myself think you have to go pretty far (like, late in Isaiah) to find anything that could be clearly defined as monotheism rather than monolatry, but I freely concede that it's a fuzzy line.
**** -- I realize that this is metaphysically meaningless unless you adopt some particularly cracked-out Gnostic creation myths, but it is satisfying nonetheless.
***** -- Sadly, this means that I cannot fully subscribe to the Pratchettian theology expounded so meaningfully in Small Gods, Hogfather, etc. Or, for that matter, the theology in ST:TOS "Who Mourns For Adonis?" -- although I think the problem there may have been Clarke's Law in reverse. This is, as usual, another post.