(Eighth in a very occasional series about Jewish prayer.)

This past week I read Torah at morning minyan, which -- in the normal order of things -- also means that between the second and third aliyot I read out a communal version of the healing prayer we call by its generic first words, "Misheberach" (there are misheberach prayers for all sorts of life-cycle events as well). Reciting the Misheberach for Congregation Beth Boondoggle includes reading out a two-to-three-page list of names (Hebrew, English, and quite a lot of Yiddish) of people whom congregants have requested be prayed for, and repeating names which people present at that service want to add to the list.*

Anyway, the last couple of weeks I've been adding a decidedly non-Hebrew name to the list when I recite it or am present for its recitation -- the eldest aunt on my father's side of the family. She had breast cancer a few years back, did radiation and so forth, and now she has some nodules of indeterminate status (we hope they're calcium deposits) which are being surgically removed this week. Each of Eldest Aunt's forwarded email updates on her situation has included requests that the recipients keep her in their prayers and/or put her on their "prayer lists." And while Eldest Aunt attends a church I've never been to, I remember that Grandmother's church had something very like our Misheberach list (only with fewer Yiddish names) printed in their monthly bulletin, so I figure the Misheberach is probably the way to go. It feels a little odd -- unlike some of my fellow congregants, I am not accustomed to adding names to the list -- but it also feels right.

This raises the perfectly reasonable question of why I don't pray for Eldest Aunt in the other, more frequent prayer for healing -- the eighth prayer of the weekday Amidah, complete with a nifty extra paragraph for individual petitions. Whenever I pray the weekday Amidah, I pray that the sick be healed, but I never insert names, any more than I would when I pray that the wicked be cursed or the righteous be blessed. (Come to think of it, I should be a lot more worried about the Birkat Ha-Minim, but that's another post.) You see, I have no trouble believing in God, and that God is in some sense a Healer. I can cautiously accept the abstract possibility that prayer has an effect; I have even met people who are holy enough that I can easily believe their prayers have an impact. But I have immense trouble believing in the real-world efficacy of my own prayers, especially for concrete ends. Wisdom, forgiveness, redemption -- those are all nice and vague and Obviously God's Sort Of Thing Anyway. Healing of body and soul? Not so much with the "vague." Part of it, I think, is that it feels kind of trivial to bring my own concerns to God when they're juxtaposed with the grand themes of The Prayer -- I mean, there's praying for peace, and then there's praying for my sinus headaches to go away.** But praying for someone else's serious medical condition is up there with peace on my radar screen -- and, as it happens, when I pray (or otherwise chat with God) outside a formal setting, or spontaneously, I do mention specifics -- the sinus headaches have featured pretty prominently of late.

The other part of it, I guess, is that I have tried praying for someone's healing -- for several people's healing, actually -- with as whole a heart, mind, and soul as I could imagine. As far as I could tell it did bupkis. Either my prayers don't work, I'm no good at praying, or I'm not measuring "work" the right way, and while I'd like to think it's the last of those three, but I don't even know where to start recalibrating. I guess the Amidah's prayer for healing is approximately where I hit the questions of belief that many people probably think about before they begin praying. I believe in God like I believe in gravity, but I am agnostic about the connection between my own prayer and God's intervention in the world. And yet the Amidah -- well, it Goes There. After healing we pray for good weather, functioning justice systems, rewards for the good, punishments for the wicked, the restoration of Jerusalem, and a pony.*** I may be a little worried about praying for trivialities, but the Amidah is cheerfully comprehensive, touching on the major areas of human endeavor (as of Awhile Back) one at a time, reminding us that the remote and awesome God of Our Ancestors, Who Revives The Dead, The Holy One, etc. etc. -- is also the one giving detailed clinical instructions for monitoring skin diseases in this week's Torah portion.

I suspect that one reason I feel better about the Misheberach is because it's a distinctively communal prayer; if you can recognize your fellow congregants by their Hebrew names and matronymics, it might even provide important information (is she out of the hospital? is he under the weather?), the same way Grandmother's church bulletin did, but if you can't, at least you have a lot of other people praying together with you. But that's not only true of the Misheberach. "To pray" (l'hitpallel) is grammatically reflexive in Hebrew, but "reflexive" doesn't have to mean "isolating." And so I try to remind myself that even the Amidah I offer outside a minyan, much less the one in a minyan, is a prayer from and about community. The beginning of the eighth Amidah prayer is borrowed from Jeremiah 17:14: "Heal me, O Lord, and I shall be healed; save me, and I shall be saved, for you are my praise." But what we say is just a little different: "Heal us, O Lord, and we shall be healed; save us, and we shall be saved, for you are the one we praise."**** I can do first-person plural, where my individual needs (however selfish or selfless) are part of my community, and where that community can be as small as the twelve people who showed up for minyan this morning or as large as "God's people Israel." Also, I can do praise. I can't do healing, but perhaps leaving it up to God is a workable division of labor. And I prayed, didn't I?

Also, God, just so we get this clear: Calcium. Deposits. Amen.

* -- On occasion, it also requires extremely quick revisions to the list when you realize that one of the people on it has just had his/her funeral announced. And then there are the truly frightening entries from a pronunciation standpoint -- That One Guy with four first names (was he an only grandchild on both sides or something?), and the names which may be Yiddish, may be written in Ashkenazic transliteration or may just be typos (D. and I occasionally threaten to name our third child Knaydl Dumpl in honor of this fine tradition).
** -- Blessed are You, Lord our God, Ruler of the Universe, who apparently had nothing better to do one Tuesday than to create pollen blesses the years.
*** -- You know, praying for a pony would actually make a lot more sense than praying for the Exilarchy dynasty of David to flourish. Just sayin'.
**** -- Leading to an exciting debate starting in Tosefta Megillah 3:21 and carried into -- I think -- both Talmuds about the advisability of altering Scripture. (If I look all of this up, the post will have to wait till after Shabbat.)

Today is the twelfth day of the Omer, making one week and five days.* It is also Yom Ha-Shoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day, and my husband remembered to light our little yellow memorial candle last night; on Sunday, I marched my Sunday-school students to an hour-long Yom Ha-Shoah talk in which an older student discussed his group trip to death camps in Poland (apparently, they saw nothing but death camps and synagogues) and encouraged others to participate in the same program. There are, I believe, all sorts of special community programs going on today. I'm not at all sure that that's enough, though.

Unlike Yom Ha-Shoah, you see, the Omer as a whole has customs. Slightly weird, difficult-to-parse, regionally variable customs suggesting quasi-mourning -- the most popular include no haircuts or shaving, no music, no weddings or other parties, and extra recitations of Av Harachamim -- but even a fairly heterogenous Jewish community may find itself paying attention to them, if only when your More Observant male friends start sporting the Don Johnson look this week. But why? Yom Ha-Shoah memorializes a fairly recent and colossal act of genocide. The Omer is, technically speaking, a measure of grain offered as a sacrifice on the second day of Pesach and beginning a seven-week countdown to Shavuot in a Temple- (or, rather, Tabernacle-) based religious system which no longer exists (cf. Lev. 23:15-16). Nothing against grain sacrifices, but if I created a poll here, I think we'd have pretty general agreement on which of those two events was more important in the General Scheme of Things.

But, of course, the Omer commemorates more than grain sacrifices. There are almost as many explanations for the Omer as there are weeks to count -- off the top of my head, they include Near Eastern agricultural anxieties over wheat harvest, plague deaths of improbably large numbers of Rabbi Akiba's students in the early second century C.E., borrowed Roman superstitions surrounding the Lemuralia, and the need for spiritual purification before the revelation at Sinai (which, you will remember, comes at the end of this period). But the explanation that interests me the most is the latest, historically speaking: the massacres of Europe's then-largest Jewish communities in and around the Rhineland at the beginning of the First Crusade mostly took place during the latter part of this period in 1096. Major centers of violence included Speyer (the 23rd day of the Omer), Worms (Day 38 and forward), Mainz (Day 45), and Cologne (Day 50, Shavuot), with smaller communities (Metz, Magdeburg, Prague) on either end. Estimates of the death toll from assorted Jewish accounts are fairly unreliable, but they add up easily to several thousand -- a significant chunk** of of the Jewish population of Europe at the time.

Possibly, you think, these historical details are only marginally more relevant than the grain sacrifices of the Jerusalem Temple. But I disagree, and disagree strongly. I try not to teach Jewish history as nothing but a succession of persecutions; I try to place as much emphasis on moments of interreligious learning and cooperation as I legitimately can. But the First Crusade massacres marked a turning point (and not a happy one) in the formation of Jewish communities within medieval Christendom. They also opened the door to innumerable nasty anti-Jewish and anti-Semitic practices which still remain alive today.*** They must be remembered. And how do we remember events which took place so long ago? There are no survivors, no descendants of survivors (except at such a remove as to lack any sense of connection), no photos, no artifacts to speak of. There are only a handful of eyewitness accounts (from both Jews and Christians) and an additional handful of accounts written after the fact (ditto), many of which are written in genres we no longer enjoy reading (when's the last time you sat down to a good martyrology?). But the Jews of medieval Ashkenaz were no fools -- even though, from nine hundred years later, we scream futilely back at them to get the hell out -- and they knew that some elements of memory are stronger than history. Customs, for one (consider the tenacity of Passover observance). Prayer, for another (why are all our holidays commemorative?). Historical specifics may get lost or modified; the important thing is that people remember what happened and why.

And so the First Crusade stories appear sometimes at Yizkor, sometimes on Yom Kippur afternoon, and sometimes among the kinnot for Tisha b'Av. But the memories appear much more frequently -- every time someone says Av Harachamim, for one. And during the Omer, some of us avoid listening to music; some of us avoid haircuts; I myself do neither of those things regularly, but I manufactured some very good (but not entirely true) explanations for scheduling my wedding just after Shavuot and not just before. The memories are there, tucked like forgotten receipts into our calendars, our prayerbooks, our day-to-day routines, our life cycles. I don't know what customs will evolve for Yom Ha-Shoah and for Holocaust remembrance more generally, but I hope they do, because in fifty or a hundred years I suspect that the community programs will run out of money, the small museums will vanish, and the big museums will either generalize their mission or find themselves dismissed as intriguing eccentricities. And what will remind the Jewish community then, or remind Jews to talk about it to non-Jews? The yellow candles are probably a step in the right direction, as is the scheduling of Yom Ha-Shoah for the Omer period in the first place; I myself think all the Holocaust educators in the country should lean on the editorial boards of the major siddur publishers (this is a lot easier now than in the twelfth century) and work together with liturgists to create special insertions not only for Yom Ha-Shoah but perhaps also for standard Shabbat services -- and something with a little more poetic grandeur to it and a closer fit into our existing liturgy than most of the all-too-clearly optional "prayers for the six million" I've seen.**** But most of all, I think we should figure out ways of teaching about the Holocaust not in splendid, reverent isolation, but in history -- in prayer -- in actions -- in niggly little prohibitions that your mother did so you feel attached to -- in everyday life.

Today is the twelfth day of the Omer. I know why I'm still counting.

* -- I forgot to count on Day Ten, though, so I can't say the blessing. What's really sad is that this is my all-time personal record for continuously remembering to count -- last year I forgot at Day Four. Possibly next year I should sign up for email reminders.
** -- I do not wish to be lynched by demographers, and the estimates of Jewish population in Europe at the end of the eleventh century are, to say the least, variable. They also have a tendency to be heavily based on the exact same chronicle sources which recount the First Crusade massacres. So I am being vague.
*** -- Although more heavily in the Muslim world. (I like to think that at least the Crusaders would have been horrified by the continued existence of a Muslim world, but this is small consolation.)
**** -- Zackary Sholem Berger mentions an interesting Masorti insertion for the Yom Ha-Shoah Amidah here.

I never seem to plan it when I go on blogging hiatus. In this case, if I remember correctly, my parents came to visit over winter break -- then we had a bunch of people over for New Year's -- then we flew down to visit D.'s parents -- then the semester started -- and somehow it's almost over. Nothing too world-shattering has happened to me personally in the interim, thank God; in fact, I feel that I've been in a bit of a holding pattern, waiting for all sorts of personal and professional things to Happen. But I have also been teaching classes (two undergraduate, one adult, and one Sunday-school); I have written a good bit of academic and quasi-academic prose; I have delivered a few good d'vars; I have read a lot of Torah, a reasonable amount of Haftarah, and a bit of Song of Songs (yay!); I have been married for ten months now and have fielded at least a dozen unsubtle inquiries about my reproductive schedule.* And I keep wanting to blog. So what on earth is stopping me?

Well -- and you must try to imagine this as less a whine and more a kvetch -- I'm busy. Back when I started this blog, I was spending a year writing my dissertation in a town where I knew practically nobody, and where I felt completely cut off from any sort of community, especially Jewish. Now I have a circle of friends, an overlapping set of communities in which I am extremely active, a house I fuss over, and a husband who came with a whole new set of long-distance family to keep up with, but I'm still a little vague on how most bloggers schedule their blogging alongside their (undoubtedly rather more interesting) lives. In a sense, I guess I don't need this blog any longer. But I've come to love what I do here, and I miss the Jewish blogging community as much as I miss any of the communities I temporarily lose touch with in Boondoggle.

The other problem with blogging here is that this blog was started under very different premises than I hold now. I'm not particularly fond of anonymity; if anything, I'd rather my ideas came attached to my professional name, and that people who disagreed with me had more reliable contact information. I'm still interested in academia, but I'm moving out of direct involvement in that world (in that special way where I still write articles and deliver conference papers), and I don't see myself blogging extensively about academic issues in the future. I'm increasingly interested in questions of Judaism and education, but I don't want to become impenetrably technical in either area. And I have almost four years of archives to fool with if I want to do anything! Sometime late last year, I went through and quietly deleted a lot of short posts from early on; judging from the complete lack of outcry, nobody will miss them.** I'd like to rearrange the archives by topic instead of date, but that will require a lot of re-tagging and some overdue technical changes.*** Right now the plan is to wait till the end of the semester, then take a day to revise everything about the blog (including the "About Me" page) and triumphantly re-launch it sometime in late May.

Meanwhile, however... I appear to be blogging. Actual content will follow shortly (more shortly than last time I said that). And while I will do my darnedest to catch up with the blogs I usually read, if you want to draw my attention to any posts, life events, or new blogs I should hear about -- please let me know in the comments.

Did I mention I missed you all?

* -- With absolutely no help from the Holy One Blessed Be She, who is clearly to blame for the part where I not only got scheduled to read Tazria/Metzora (that is, the Torah portion beginning with instructions for ritual purification after childbirth), but also got to read it yesterday at a baby naming.
** -- A brief synopsis, for archival purposes: "My office is cold, or possibly hot. My dissertation is annoying but fun. Here are some links to Lego art. If I leave my office, I will not have Internet access, and will likely be eaten by a grue. Oooh, new Buffy tonight!"
*** -- I need to move my MT installation over to MySQL database whatsising; I need to upgrade MT; I need to clean out the comments... it's rather like Pesach cleaning, only I can't delegate the vacuuming. Hmph.