I swear, I wanted to spend Elul blogging about teshuvah (at least a little bit), and instead I'm blogging about food. Oh well. I don't generally blog just to announce new things on my Bloglines aggregator (someday I will update the bloglist on my main page as well), but the other day BZ mentioned a new blog called Two Heads of Lettuce and devoted to the promulgation of really awesome kosher-dairy and/or vegetarian potluck recipes, along with a post here and there about basic potluck etiquette for independent minyanim and similar groups of co-eaters. I, personally, view this as an answer to prayer, because (a) I can always use more good potluck recipes, and (b) I would love to get everyone in my community clued in about the Halakhah Of Potlucks.

You see, the Marvelous Monthly Minyan here in Boondoggle* has featured a potluck dairy kiddush for the past 3+ years; in fact, I spent a year or more as the chief kiddush organizer, and I am now the chief Person Who Reminds The Chief Kiddush Organizer To Send Out Emails And Then Calls The Chief Kiddush Organizer On Friday Morning To See What Else I Need To Bring, which is a very slight improvement. I am also, effectively, one of two people/households who serve as the minyan's Potluck Completists, bringing everything that seems likely to fall by the wayside; I sometimes wonder what would happen if neither of us brought food one month, but since together we're also the central organizers of minyan activities, that seems unlikely. Last month I brought: whole-wheat challah (homemade), salmon/cream-cheese ball (homemade) with crackers, grape juice, orange juice, seltzer, a bowl of fresh cherries, and a tray of assorted desserts (not homemade, but left over from another minyan function). This is unusual only in that someone else usually brings the grape juice and I usually do a more utilitarian main dish than the salmon ball**.

Now, I come by this approach to potlucking honestly if idiosyncratically. My father's side of the family has organized its gatherings around potluck dinners since time immemorial, or at any rate before my birth. (My father is one of eight siblings, all of whom have kids and most of whom now have grandkids, so nobody can feed all of us single-handedly.) These family potlucks are run with tremendous efficiency, usually by a particular aunt of mine who knows what everyone else in the family tends to fix for these events and simply tells them that they are bringing the (applesauce, green salad, one of the turkey breasts, a potato dish, a couple of pies, that great chocolate cake of yours). But my father -- out of some complex sense of pride or possibly competitiveness -- has always insisted on exceeding his assignments, such that we typically arrive with enough delicious homemade items to feed a small Third-World country and with plenty of moral high ground from which to mutter about how tacky it is that Cousin So-and-So probably just bought that pie. It is only while writing this post that I realized I've carried my paternal family potluck minhag seamlessly into minyan potlucking. (Must call Dad tonight and inform him that it's all his fault.)

Our minyan potlucks have finally advanced to the point where they come out pretty well without too much shepherding, but that does presume that the (few) core people are going to show up with the (many) core ingredients.*** I actually kind of worry about our minyan's long-term viability, simply because right now we don't have anyone obvious to turn over leadership to when one of us gets burned out -- we just toss the various jobs back and forth like hot potatoes every year or so. Also, I wonder about advancing a two-table system (strictly-hekshered-kosher and lacto-ovo-pesco-vegetarian), mostly to help out the folks who worry that their non-kosher kitchen means they can only bring fruit and to allow me to confidently invite strictly-kosher guests to eat whatever.**** And every now and then I fantasize about a minyan weekend where all I do is read Torah, lead a service, give a d'var, and bring the cream cheese.

Still -- last month we had a visitor to our minyan, a nice young man who was in town over Shabbat (for a non-Jewish friend's wedding) and found us quite by accident. His hosts had arranged a kosher meal for him for Saturday night, but he didn't have any meal plans for lunch (other than eating the baba ghanoush he'd stashed in his hotel room), and I was thrilled that we were able to feed him, and feed him well. I love feeding people; I love cooking for that purpose; I love eating with friends; I love celebrating Shabbat with special food. And I love potlucks, because they make all of that easier and more frequent, plus they allow everyone to feel proud of the collective meal.*****

So, Two Heads of Lettuce folks -- I'm behind you all the way, holding my own serving implements. And if you want an all-purpose super-adaptable spinach kugel recipe, just let me know.

* -- Someday I will just stop with the cute nicknames already and give you a link to its website, but first I have to finish its website.
** -- I'd promised it to someone in exchange for his early attendance, since I was concerned about having a minyan in time for the Torah service (August is a tough month).
*** -- Wine and grape juice, challah, bagels, multiple cream cheeses, lox and veggie platter, some sort of dessert item, cold beverages, tea and coffee bags for the hot-water urn. Everything after that can be added on at will.
**** -- But what if you make, say, a pasta salad with all hekshered ingredients but non-hekshered feta cheese because you keep Conservative-standard kosher? More problematically, what about the folks who want their dried cranberries hekshered vs. the folks who see no reason to bother with hekshers? I don't care to alienate people either way, and I especially don't want to add amateur mashgiach to my list of minyan responsibilities.
***** -- My single biggest wedding-related concession was agreeing to have the reception catered instead of potluck, and that was largely because (a) all the venues I wanted had catering contracts attached and (b) my husband had already seen what happens to me when I have to organize potlucks. Oh well. Possibly we will have a potluck bris or baby-naming or something.

So. I know Judaism, especially in America, is shifting to the right like nobody's business. I know we're all susceptible to creeping historical nostalgia, whether it's for the mythical pre-modern Golden Age when everyone was observant to the point of OCD* or for the wild-and-woolly diversity of halakhic opinions in thirteenth-century Ashkenaz**. And I know that just about everyone is disgusted with some element or other of the contemporary political scene. However, I would like to float the argument that there has never been a better time to be Jewish than the year of our Lord 5767, and for a reason most of our Jewish communal organizations have failed to highlight in their brochures: it's so easy to keep a kosher kitchen with all the new products out there!

Now, possibly I have some readers who have never contemplated not keeping kosher. I would suggest that they continue through this post in the spirit of developing empathy. Ditto for lifelong committed vegetarians. For the rest of us -- those of us who don't keep kosher, those of us who used to keep kosher and now don't, those of us who've started keeping kosher after a period without it, and of course those of us who don't see why on earth they should keep kosher (a category including both Jews and non-Jews) -- anyway, for the rest of us, let's be honest here. There are really delicious non-kosher foods and food combinations out there. Possibly you have a thing for pan-fried scallops, or shrimp cocktail, or BLTs, or chicken cordon bleu. Perhaps you yearn for cheeseburgers, or turkey tetrazzini, or just some really creamy mashed potatoes next to your steak. Maybe you just wonder what it'd be like to open the fancy-shmancy food magazine you bought to read on a trip and start preparing all those "vegetable" dishes that call for chicken broth, cream, and a little prosciutto.***

Once upon a time, or so I am given to understand, Jews either didn't eat these items, or they ate them and felt more or less guilty depending on their personality and upbringing. They were always good at adapting to the culinary vernacular of the cultures they lived with, and invariably contributed dishes to non-Jewish tables (think carciofi alla giudia, or for that matter bagels). All the same, there were some foods that Just Didn't Work. Today, however, there are a lot fewer such foods.**** I think the trend must have started in the '60s, with the development of non-dairy creamer. Suddenly, a whole host of meat-based dishes involving milk products -- not to mention desserts to be served immediately after those meat meals -- could be adapted to kosher living. Then there was soy: when I was a child in the 80s, tofu and tempeh were exotic foods available only at health-food stores and in the utopian world of Laurel's Kitchen, but sometime around about the late 90s soy burgers and soymilk became part of the standard supermarket fare. Today we can get (with varying degrees of imitative success) soy-based fake chicken, soy-based cheese, soy-based steak strips, and of course soy-based chorizo. And now, just in this decade, kosher food has become trendy. All sorts of things have hekshers, including things that don't so much need them.

So now you have your choice of beef or soy bacon for that BLT, and if you crave seafood salad, there's lovely hekshered surimi (both fake crab and fake shrimp) out there. There are soy sausages, beef sausages, and (finally, in my local store!) poultry sausages. There are, in short, very few foodstuffs that anyone has to do without. Then there are the recipes that need rewriting. Now, my usual method of dealing with intractably non-kosher food combinations is to cut the Gordian knot in favor of dairy products: given a choice between fake meat and fake cheese, I will go with the fake meat (soy protein, beans, whatever) nine times out of ten. You will take away my cheese drawer when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers. But the other day, I came down with a serious craving for one of my favorite childhood foods -- I don't think my parents have made it in years -- beef stroganoff. Not, of course, the classic version with strips of steak and sour cream, but the all-American variant with ground beef, Campbell's cream of mushroom soup, and sour cream. Either way, not one of the great kosher foods of the world.

It would have been child's play to use soy-based "ground meat" or even appropriately seasoned TVP as the protein in this dish, but I was in the mood for honest-to-goodness animal flesh. And just the other day we had made the exciting discover that pareve Tofutti "sour cream" does not, in fact, suck. (It has a very faint soy aftertaste if you take a spoonful of it and swirl it around your mouth, but mixed into a dish with other flavors -- we were doing turkey chili -- it's excellent.) So I took my pound of kosher meat (buffalo, but that's another story), sauteed it with finely chopped onion, a ton of sliced mushrooms, and appropriate spices (mmmm, paprika), then tipped in half a box of Imagine "creamy portabella" soup (yes, it's soy-based) and let it reduce until I was ready to stir in half a container of pareve sour cream. We had it over whole-wheat egg noodles, and I swear it was better than my childhood memories.*****

I realize that there are people out there who don't want to take the Iron Balabusta approach to kosher cooking -- that's why we have all the prepackaged stuff from Manischewitz and Osem and Morningstar Farms, nu? -- but for those of us who think adapting dishes for kashrut is fun, this is a marvelous time to be Jewish. So far, I am dubious about nutritional yeast as a substitute for parmigiano-reggiano (really, I am dubious about anything as a substitute for parmigiano-reggiano , although I will agree that there are some nice domestic Parmesans), but soy "meat" goes perfectly in a variety of pasta-and-cheese casseroles, and I do enough baking that I routinely switch cakes and muffins from dairy to pareve on the fly while I'm also trying to cut down on fat and amp up some of the flavor. (I, er, have trouble following recipes.)

And the question arises -- mostly from friends who aren't into the whole kosher thing -- why am I faking it? Shouldn't I accept the idea that God just doesn't want me to have beef stroganoff or BLTs? Well, no, I shouldn't. There's something about serving with joy (God, not food, although the two are mentioned together) midway through the really depressing bits of Deuteronomy 28, and something about inquiring after God in quite a few places, including the seasonally appropriate Psalm 27, and there's that whole riff on tasting God's goodness at the beginning of Psalm 34, but what stands out for me is the simple and literal reading of the circumstances under which the laws of kashrut were given. No matter whose Torah chronology you follow, and no matter whether you're looking at Leviticus or Deuteronomy, everyone agrees that these laws (well, the basics at any rate) were given at some point during the Israelites' wandering in the wilderness. And as we all know, during that period of wandering, they ate -- no, not chicken soup with matzo balls -- they ate manna from heaven (plus occasional quails). The amazing thing about this manna stuff, apparently, was that it could taste like anything you wanted -- rather like today's soy products.****** And yet God shows up with a series of rules about what foods to eat, what not to eat, and in what combination they could be eaten -- why is this? Either we assume that God is a sadist (I refuse to go any further than theorizing that She enjoys practical jokes), or we assume that God wants us to experiment with the plethora of foods we have available, allowing us to imitate the food of heaven and (working within God's rules, however we define them) assemble whatever culinary masterpieces we're in the mood for.

I prefer the latter view, and not only because it produces better food -- it also produces better Judaism, a way of living with and for God's teachings that's not insulated from the world around it or reliant on nostalgia for a nonexistent past.******* But the food doesn't hurt either. And... y'know, I could really use a snack right about now.

* -- This works better if you define "everyone" very narrowly.
** -- That's probably just me, right?
*** -- I read once -- I think in Matzo Ball Gumbo -- about southern Jewish cooks simmering kosher salami ends with their greens to achieve the mandatory salt/meat flavor. (Personally, I prefer my greens stirred into a little olive oil and garlic, then lightly wilted.)
**** -- There is no proper substitute for pulled-pork barbecue. Chicken is OK; tempeh-and-seitan is, er, different. Neither quite work, though. Also, I am still searching for an effective substitute for scallops.
***** -- I'd like to say it was the spiritual fulfillment of maintaining kashrut, but I'm pretty sure it was that the Imagine soup tastes like mushrooms (there can never be too much mushroom flavor), while Campbell's cream of mushroom tastes like Campbell's cream of mushroom and has only a nodding acquaintance with actual fungus.
****** -- Except, according to some commentators, it couldn't taste like foods which were thought to be harmful to nursing mothers. (This is how they explain the Israelites' longing for "cucumbers, melons, onion, and garlic" in Numbers 11:5.) My personal suspicion is that manna didn't have the right crunch and it didn't brown up properly when you cooked it with the quail.
******* -- If the Jews of the mythical Eastern European shtetl could've gotten their hands on pareve sour cream, you know they totally would've eaten it. Probably swirled with schmaltz and topped with gribnes, on some nice pumpernickel bread.

So tomorrow morning we're reading Parshat Re'eh -- by "we" in this case I mean the Marvelous Monthly Minyan -- and the first aliyah, which I will be slogging through, includes the phrase איׂש כל הישר בעיניו -- translated literally as "every man what is right/proper in his [own] eyes," or less literally, "everyone as s/he pleases."

What this means in the context of Parshat Re'eh is somewhat trickier: is the state of איׂש כל הישר בעיניו positive or negative? The Torah portion is burbling along about the new rules which will fall into place when the Israelites enter their Promised Land, and at Deuteronomy 12:8, we get a clear summary statement "you shall not act/do as we are now acting/doing here" (that is, in the wilderness). The words immediately following, and ending the verse, are איׂש כל הישר בעיניו, with no obvious connector to the first half. Does "every man what is right in his own eyes" refer to the (chaotic) state of the wilderness? That's how JPS would translate it: "You shall not act at all as we now act here, every man as he pleases." But my Artscroll text argues the opposite: "You shall not do like everything that we do here today -- [rather,] every man what is proper in his eyes." That bracketed "rather" implies that "every man what is right in his own eyes" is in fact the appropriate state of affairs in the Land.

I lean towards the JPS reading, myself, and that's because there's another use of the same basic phrase with which I'm much more familiar. The words which conclude the final verse of the Book of Judges are איש הישר בעיניו יעשה -- "every man did what was right in his [own] eyes" -- and so this apparently describes a series of ever-more-horrific stories, climaxing with a deeply unedifying account of hospitality violation, gang-rape, murder, dismemberment, and intertribal warfare. I think we can all be reasonably certain that in this context איׂש כל הישר בעיניו is Not A Good Thing.

Is "every man what is right in his own eyes" ever a workable way of living, though? How much tolerance is necessary, and how much is deadly? I do wonder, sometimes -- not so much about the generations in the wilderness as about the Jewish world I blog in today. It's easier for me to assume the best about everyone when I know them in person; it's trickier online, when we're missing so many cues and connections and consequences. I do prefer to err on the side of assuming the best, though, and I've answered more than a few potentially-troll-like comments with the straightest response I could give, just in case they were serious.

That said, I draw the line somewhere significantly before the scenarios at the end of Judges. I never thought I'd need to post about this blog's comment policy, since it consists of passing everything through that isn't:

- an obvious mistake (double comment, code gone wrong, etc.);
- blatant advertising, spamming, or phishing;
- offensive/obscene language;
- or extensive slanderous remarks about other people, especially (but not exclusively) parties who are not participating in the comments.

That final item is the latest addition, and the one which prompted me to make this post. I can't imagine who would consider my blog's comments a halfway useful forum for publicizing their accusations against assorted members of the Jewish world whose names I barely recognize (maybe they're just trying to Googlebomb?), but that's not why I write this blog or make commenting available on it. Like most Jews, I can't claim to have read the Chofetz Chaim or other classic works on lashon hara in their entirety, but I have a fairly firm grasp on what I consider appropriate modes of speech about third parties, and I try (not always successfully) to police my own speech accordingly. Slightly unkind but basically well-meaning gossip about mutual acquaintances between friends should probably make me uneasy; more-than-slightly unkind gossip from anonymous commenters about people I don't know for God knows what purpose is clearly Right Out. And while blogs can certainly serve an important whistleblowing purpose, in or out of the Jewish community (see some thoughts on this here and here), that's not really what Baraita's about, either. Baraita tends to be -- and I try to encourage it to be -- a quintessentially civil commenting community.

This is partly for my own comfort, of course. I may be a wimp, but there are some otherwise excellent and thoughtful blogs out there -- and this applies across a number of religious and political spectrums -- whose comment sections make me distinctly uncomfortable because people are so nasty to each other and about each other. But I also believe that the great thing about civility is how it kicks in even when our moral sense fails: when I'm secretly dying to hear what So-and-So did, when I have temporarily forgotten the whole concept of lashon hara, I still have the sense that such behavior is Not Nice. Unfortunately, the problem with civility is that Not Nice isn't always enough, because people have very different interpretations of what is Nice, and my Nice may be your Downright Nasty. A couple of moral concepts (lashon hara, for instance) are also important to have around for when Nice won't cut it.

However, my inclination is to read איׂש כל הישר בעיניו as referring to a collective sense of etiquette or civility, not morals. The Israelites' idea of proper behavior by the end of Judges was obviously completely bankrupt -- the "heroes" of the final story collude in destroying a neutral city and arranging for girls to be seized as wives against their will -- so that "what is right in [their] eyes" is a devastating condemnation of their cultural norms. But in the wilderness, where everyone still shared a commitment to a central mission,* it could have worked as a standard. And maybe even in some corners of the wild, wild blogosphere... well, we can try.

What's the phrase? Oh, yes. Shabbat shalom!

* -- Possibly, in Deuteronomic retrospect, the mission of getting Moses to take a deep breath and allow the crowd a bathroom break.

[For anyone who just had two other posts pop up on their feed, I've been catching up with accumulated blogging from last week's conference. Things should be back on schedule about now.]

One of the advantages of attending lots of Jewishly oriented events, I am discovering, is that they tend to have Regularly Scheduled Worship Experiences described variously as "prayer," "davening" "shacharit" (or mincha or maariv), or of course "meditation/yoga." And with the possible exception of the yoga*, I will attend pretty much any egalitarian worship option** out of sheer curiosity. What prayerbook are they using? (OK, nine times out of 10 the answer is some variation on Sim Shalom, but I live in hope.) Which optional and semi-optional*** passages are being left out, and which ones absolutely have to stay in? Can I pick up any useful tricks for keeping the service running smoothly? And, best of all: what new tunes can I learn?

I have spent a good portion of my life singing in a choir; naturally, then, I enjoy learning new tunes on a fairly regular basis, although I am always a bit nervous about having them introduced in mid-prayer. In order for them to be workable in that context they have to be (a) properly taught, or at any rate repeated a few times so I can join in, as well as (b) blended into the rest of the service in terms of key, mode, mood, and overall complexity. (I love elaborate eight-part choral harmony as much as the next girl, but not in the middle of an otherwise-mumbled ten-minute afternoon service.) Finally, (c) they have to be significant -- or, to put it in words of one syllable (this will become important later), they have to mean something. Normally, this is not a problem: people introduce new tunes to elements of the prayer service which are already there (how many tunes to Mah Tovu do you know?), and so the words (be they in Hebrew or another language) have meaning both on their own and in the context of the service. The tune simply amplifies that meaning. I love to sing, I love to daven, what's the problem here?

Well, you see, there is one gigantic class of New Tunes which resoundingly fails requirement (c), and those are niggunim. In case you have stumbled onto this post from outside the world of Jewish Prayer Geeks, I should explain that a niggun is a (usually) repetitive tune made up of either hums or nonsense syllables (there are some exceptions) and originally associated with the Hasidic (that is, Eastern European mystical/pietist) movement within Judaism which began in the eighteenth century. The Hasids (and here I am generalizing about a vast and varied historical phenomenon) de-emphasized formal Jewish learning, which was only available to an elite class of men at that time, and urged average Jews (er, Jewish men) to focus on the devotional and affective elements of prayer. In keeping with this philosophy, niggunim and accompanying joyful singing and dancing were touted as an often more genuine method of pouring out one's heart to God than a repetitively mumbled mouthful of words crafted some centuries back. Somewhere around about the 1960s and '70s, for reasons significantly beyond the scope of this post****, Hasidic spirituality became the new black, and nowadays niggunim are very popular with services and service leaders across most of the Jewish denominational spectrum. Practically speaking, then, when you walk into a twenty-first-century Jewish prayer service and someone says "And now we're going to continue with a niggun," what they almost invariably sing is a minor-ish, catchy tune to the syllables "yi/li di di di di" (etc., all pronounced with long i) at pretty much any possible point in the service.

What I usually do on such occasions (once I finish rolling my eyes) is to join in -- really, what else can you do? -- and given a few reps, I generally start harmonizing. They're often lovely tunes, and my intermittent choral experience takes over in no time flat; after all, the only thing more fun than getting the hang of a new tune is making up new harmonies for it. The thing is, the niggun has absolutely nothing to do with prayer in my head. "Yi di di di di," I carol, trying to sort out whether or not I can get away with going up instead of down on the fourteenth "di," and the part where we're praying and I'm supposed to be preparing my mind to concentrate on the Amidah or Kaddish or Torah service or what-have-you is temporarily out the window. I am a Text Person; it is not that I am unmystical, but the mysticism I like is Text Mysticism (a phrase which covers most of pre-Lurianic Kabbalah, but that's another post). I would make a lousy Hasid. Trying to make myself get prayerful about singing nonsense syllables works about as well for me as getting prayerful about yoga does: both can give me a feeling of elevation and joy, even a sense of being close to God, but no more so than baking bread or smelling flowers or seeing a rainbow or any of the million little daily things for which the rabbinic Jewish tradition recommends -- wait for it -- saying a blessing. (I like to think of rabbinic Judaism as a support group for Text People.) In an ideal more-or-less traditional prayer service -- and God knows I am not always able to get myself into the proper frame of mind -- I am having myself a great time up in the Great Yeshiva in the Sky.***** In a non-ideal prayer service, I am more likely to flip to the back of the siddur and start scanning Pirke Avot or the weekday Torah readings. Either way, I am happily browsing through layers of text dating from as far back as the twelfth century B.C.E. and as recently as the twentieth century, an experience which -- I cannot stress this enough -- gives me a feeling of great spiritual and religious satisfaction. The last thing I need is someone trying to get me to sing "li di di."

And yet... I am puzzled, because the Entire Jewish Universe adores niggunim these days. The only exceptions seem to be my husband -- whose testimony is not precisely unbiased -- and people so far to the right of me Jewishly that they may, in fact, still be hashing out those eighteenth-century debates.****** And I don't actually want to stop people from praying in a way that's meaningful to them; I just wish it got on my nerves a little less. Who died and named me Grungetta the Grouch? Perhaps my reading of the mainstream rabbinic Jewish tradition is all wrong? Perhaps I suffer from a rare form of spiritual tone-deafness? Perhaps I have completely repressed some early childhood trauma involving the syllables "yi di di"?

Sigh. Sigh sigh sigh sigh sigh... excuse me, I think I need to go read something now.

* -- I would actually enjoy a morning yoga workout, but it does not ping me as a substitute for prayer. Your mileage may, of course, vary.
** -- And in the absence of an egalitarian option, I would probably attend a non-egalitarian option, but then we get into the difficulty of trying to sort out whether or not there actually is a mechitzah and whether or not I can sing out loud. (Someday I must remember to blog about how Orthodox shuls in major cities need a Female Tourist Welcome Rating, especially for weekday services.)
*** -- That is, the Prayers Everyone Knows You're Supposed To Do But You Might Get Away With Leaving Them Out. (See also Tachanun.)
**** -- Although we can certainly have a blamefest in the comments.
***** -- Possibly my favorite ever of the many Jewish afterlife alternatives, if not so much with the egalitarianism in the classic texts.
****** -- When everyone knows the thirteenth-century ones were a lot more interesting.

I have become accustomed to a particular round of Major Professional Conferences, but now that I am switching careers -- or splitting time between two careers -- or easing over into a closely related career -- or possibly just deeply confused about... wait, where was I? Oh, yes, conferences. I appear to have acquired a new one: the Coalition for the Advancement of Jewish Education conference, which seems to locate itself somewhere early in August. As I have been telling people, it's very much like an academic conference only with a lot more singalongs. And, of course, it features a lot more options for Jewish prayer spiritual enrichment -- egal minyan, non-egal minyan, nature walk, and yoga.

However, my enjoyment of the first option (it's more fun to hear how other people daven than to see how they bend) led to a decidedly non-academic dilemma. I would get up early, grab my ritual paraphernalia, and clip on a kippah just before the tallit and tefillin (entering a dorm room, unlike a synagogue, does not ping my headgear radar). After the service, I'd take off the tefillin and tallit, but my next date was breakfast, and it seemed a bit odd to whip off an item of headgear designed to show reverence for God just before blessing my carefully kosher-supervised breakfast -- or, um, sincerely intending to remember to bless my breakfast -- so I'd switch the spiffy tallit-matching kippah for the plain knit one I carry in my purse. Then, after breakfast, there were conference sessions -- some on education in a Jewish context, others on Judaic topics. Well, a kippah is supposed to be worn for Torah study as well as blessing, and while I tended toward the education topics (I was more familiar with most of the Judaic subjects), I did treat myself to a few text studies. So I started wearing my kippah all day -- except for the day-long grantwriting workshop -- and a funny thing happened.

If you wear a kippah enough -- even at an event packed with Jewish educators -- and you occasionally sound off about Torah and/or prayer and/or Jewish history (what, you want me to stop breathing?) -- people will frequently assume that you are a rabbi. I was asked this question easily a dozen times over the course of the conference. And it's not an unreasonable question, because most of the other people I saw wandering around being full-time kavod kippah turned out to be (a) obviously Orthodox men and/or (b) rabbis, as far as I could tell. There were a handful of exceptions, most of them working in educational positions where one could reasonably expect to find a rabbi instead, and there were one or two ordained cantors to throw off the calculations, but on balance it is a correct assumption that kippah = rabbi.

Now, I am not a rabbi, and do not wish to mislead anyone about my non-rabbinical status*, but this is not the first time I've wondered when I should wear my kippah. As a professor at a non-Jewish (but religiously affiliated) university, teaching both Judaism and other religious traditions, I was tempted to don a kippah when we studied my sacred texts, especially in classes devoted to the Jewish perspective on them -- but I worried that it would intimidate my (mostly non-Jewish) students, so I didn't. As a Jewish educator, I have my kippah on when I'm inside a non-Orthodox synagogue building regardless**, but when I teach at a Jewish community organization, I wear one because we are after all studying Torah. When I teach at a church, I wear one because it's a useful way of indicating "hi, I'm Jewish, I'm the guest speaker you're looking for, and I'm happy to answer questions about my religion." When I leave the synagogue, Jewish community organization, or church and go out for lunch or errands, I usually remember to take off the kippah, because I'm not sure whether I'm up for being question-answering-woman full-time, and I'm also not sure whether every moment of my day-to-day behavior makes me an appropriate public representative for Judaism.*** And if I am going out to a kosher restaurant, I definitely remember to take off the kippah (yeah, yeah, I know). If I am entering an Orthodox synagogue as a guest, the context will determine whether I wear a standard kippah, a girly kippah****, or a hat; if I am entering an Orthodox synagogue as an educator of some sort, I generally figure they can cope with whatever headcovering I have available.

Simple, huh? On sober reflection, it might be easier to just become a rabbi. Or shave my head and wear a wig, whichever. But I do sometimes wish we had a reasonable understanding of what the role of a Jewish Educator is -- because then I could decide what kind of hat to wear.

* -- Although the post in which I rant about Jewish use of the word "lay" is upcoming.
** -- We will not even get into my brief stint as the person stuck with writing up a kippah policy for Congregation Beth Boondoggle, except to say that I think adult Jewish women in an egalitarian setting should be required to cover their heads anytime adult Jewish men are required to do so, and I can back up my position with about five pages of written notes from assorted texts and teshuvot. A few meetings revealed that nobody else really cared about my notes, though, so I wrote up a reasonable description of their current custom (everyone has to cover heads on the bimah but only men elsewhere) with emphasis on how strongly we "encouraged" women to cover their heads.
*** -- Of course, sometimes I forget to remove the kippah, and so far nobody has demanded to know what business I as a Jew have trying on discount sandals or buying groceries or ordering soup.
**** -- At least, I keep meaning to own a girly kippah (you know, with lace and stuff) so that I have this as an option. I tend to assume that color-coordinating my kippah with my outfit gives a sufficiently harmless impression, though.

First, a disclaimer: I have never, in fact, uttered the phrase "Shalom, y'all." "Shalom" is a perfectly adequate greeting all by itself, and when I want to extend it with direct address, I'm more likely to tack on "chaverim" or "everyone," because "y'all" is an extremely casual way of addressing a group of people. For some reason however, "shalom, y'all" has beaten out "grits and gefilte fish" and "well, bless my neshama" as a phrase emblematic of Southern Judaism, so I suppose I will have to live with it, because after all I am a Southern Jew, and deeply-rooted on both counts.

Tonight at a Major Professional Conference I heard a talk from Eli Evans, author of The Provincials and several other very good books about Southern Judaism, and I was happy to be reminded that my experience was not necessarily unique. You see, in the Jewish world outside the South, many people consider this area (the cosmopolitan Research Triangle of North Carolina, known to certain locals to whom I might be related as Rhode Island South) as someplace about as Jewishly vibrant as China; they imagine a few, struggling Jewish communities who need to export all their bagels culture from the Great Jewish Lands to the north. They are, of course, dead (two syllables) wrong. At any rate, I am pleased (and slightly amazed) at the extent to which Evans' quick rundown of Southern Jewish identity coincides with my own experience, much more so than more recent formulations.* In brief, then, I want to summarize my own essentials of What It Means (Or At Any Rate Meant Fifteen Years Ago) To Be A Not-So-Deep Southern Jew:

- You grow up explaining Judaism to everyone around you. You have to; you're usually the only Jewish kid in class, and anything you do is therefore something Jews do.
- You also grow up explaining why you're not Christian, don't believe in Jesus, etc., etc. I spent a significant chunk of high-school lunches hashing out Isaiah with a Lutheran acquaintance. (We both thought it was fun.)
- However -- and this is really important -- you deal with relatively little anti-Semitism. (I grew up quite cheerfully telling people I was Jewish, remember, and the single nastiest thing anyone ever said to me was some girl at camp who informed me that it made sense I was Jewish because, after all, I had a kind of a big nose.) There have historically been exceptions, of course, but they are strikingly rare. I have encountered far more unpleasant anti-Semitic and anti-Jewish rhetoric in non-Southern states.
- The second and third of the above premises (and arguably the first) are bound together by the extent to which Southern Protestant Christians -- up through my generation at any rate -- were generally taught to respect Judaism as a Very Important Religion If Not Quite As Good As Ours.
- And in related news, everyone belongs to a church. Which church you belong to is a complicated matter of family loyalties, socioeconomics, convenience, personal preference, and maybe a smidge of genuine philosophical or theological conviction, most of which are immediately evident once you tell someone what church you belong to. And for these purposes, a synagogue is a perfectly acceptable church; what is not acceptable is not belonging to anything, an attitude which I understand is still very much in evidence. (I sometimes suspect that I have never very seriously considered secular Judaism because nobody I grew up around was secular anything.) In other words, you are extremely likely to be "affiliated" and fairly likely to be even a bit active in your synagogue.
- Intermarriage isn't especially weird (even some years back), perhaps because it's well-nigh impossible to sustain a community without it. Conversion is also a bit more common than it used to be; a significant percentage of your Sunday-school classmates probably have one or more parents who converted to Judaism. The ones who don't are the ones whose parents moved here from New York, of course.
- Your get-out-of-kashrut-free food may well be some sort of barbecue. (I firmly believe that every group of Jews has an equivalent food -- for instance, Mom's Baltimore-based family has a Thing about crabcakes. I don't know what New Yorkers cheat with, though.)
- Other Jews stare at you blankly when you answer the inevitable "where are you from?" question. (I have resorted to responding, "For purposes of Jewish geography, I'm from Baltimore.") Educating other Jews about the South is a sight more difficult than educating Christians about Jews.

I haven't lived full-time below the Mason-Dixon Line in fifteen years -- or maybe ten if I count that year in D.C. -- and I sometimes wonder how much has changed in Southern Jewish life. The widespread availability of the Internet and the consequent opening of communication with Jews all over the world must have had an impact, right? And the migration out of small towns and into the growing cities (including My Hometown), to say nothing of the migration of non-Southern Jews into the South for jobs in assorted industries. Plus migration out of the South, as mobility increases -- at least half of my Sunday-school class has moved to somewhere near New York (my mom gives me bulletins). And I miss Piedmont North Carolina something terrible -- I come by it honestly, since the non-Jewish side of my family is also the Hasn't Moved More Than Thirty Miles Since 1790 And Proud Of It side of the family -- but I'm not exactly living there either.

I wonder if there's a community out there -- and, yes, I know I should just check YahooGroups and LiveJournal -- for expatriate Southern Jews? We could stick a prayer into our silent Amidahs about returning us to Durham and Memphis and Savannah and Mobile; we could debate whether Charlotte and Atlanta even qualify as Southern any more; we could discuss the pros and cons of Chabad's move into a range of one-synagogue towns; we could offer each other support about intermarriage with non-Southern spouses (my husband thinks tomato sandwiches are best on pumpernickel, where did I go wrong?). After all, there's nothing more Jewish than diaspora, right?

Or we could occasionally get close enough to home -- at a conference, say -- that all the trees look right, and the weather feels right, and everything looks kind of familiar except the other Jews. Most of whom, not to belabor the point, probably flew in from New York. But some of them didn't (there are two of my former religious-school principals wandering around this conference, alive and sane), and those are the people I wish I could hang out with. Because I probably don't look Southern any more either, and my accent went out the window years ago, but I laughed at all Eli Evans's jokes, and I want someone else to trade stories with. Even if I have to force myself to utter phrases such as "shalom, y'all."

* -- Here I am mostly thinking of Matzo Ball Gumbo, which has an excellent recipe for oven-baked roux but is mostly focused on Jewish experience in the Deep South a full generation or two ago.

Perhaps it would have been a good idea to admit that this blog normally takes a summer vacation, huh? So, for the record, I'm still alive, and I'm still trying to find time for the Great Blog Redesign in between teaching and writing and traveling and doing way too much at my shul and, oh, yes, coping with our six-day-long power outage. (I have never been so unexcited about holding services outside -- and I have never spent so much time thinking about the synagogue's landscaping needs.)

Meanwhile, I have a not-terribly-urgent question for anyone still reading this: Did the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism really mean to send out a survey about membership-retention activities to congregational leaders... on Tisha b'Av? "Let's see, I haven't eaten in about 22 hours now, plus I had to get up for 6:45 shacharit, so I'd say my congregation SUCKS on EVERY SINGLE COUNT MENTIONED IN THIS SURVEY." (Maybe real congregational leaders don't get cranky when they have low blood sugar. I'm sure they got my email by mistake. Anyway, I'm waiting to fill it out until tomorrow.)

So, Tisha b'Av. My husband and I decided to learn Eicha trope this summer -- we figured we were on a roll with doing Regalim in the spring -- but between that and the unfortunate timing of our rabbi's vacation (ending July 31st) and our new cantor's arrival (beginning August 1st), I have spent most of the Three Weeks in anguish not about the destruction of the Temple but about whether or not anyone with the authority to do so had gotten around to assigning Eicha readings for last night. Now that we are finished with our assorted readings -- and can I note for the record that my husband is astonishingly good at switching back and forth between Eicha and Haftarah -- I am oddly unable to back into my usual historical frame of thought. Current events are a little too... current, and they make me quite unhappy enough without contemplating the past 2600 years. (But also see above re: my response to low blood sugar.)

I do hope anyone to whom it applies is having an easy fast. I am not particularly good at fasting* myself, but it could certainly be a lot worse today. I am in no real physical discomfort, and the work I am mostly failing to get done can be handled tomorrow with no serious repercussions. The thing is, I've have reached the point of synagogue involvement where I can be guilted into fasting till mincha because they need six fasters, and after mincha it just feels like giving up to eat. (Sadly, the later layers of the Talmud seem to preclude any useful commitment to a partial fast. Of course, the later layers of the Talmud** also include a claim that a Torah scholar shouldn't fast lest the cessation of learning diminish the work of heaven, which... wouldn't've applied either to me or to Tisha b'Av, but it's a nice thought, isn't it?)

There is a different problem with the fasts I don't so much buy into -- in fact, all the minor fasts annoy me in varying degrees which I lack the cogency to argue right now (someone remind me to post around about Tzom Gedaliah, OK?). But Tisha b'Av is actually a day I want to observe (I blogged about this awhile back), so in theory I should be as gung-ho about fasting as I am about chanting Eicha and reading kinnot and avoiding laundry for the Nine Days. In practice, unfortunately, my enthusiasm for fasting lasted until about 10 am. Now I am just trying to explain to myself why I have not gotten very much done today, and worrying over the part where I told my mother that I was kind of tired of attending synagogue services at the moment and she said "Good."*** I find myself wishing for a community where it went without saying that everyone fasted, simply because then I'd feel less ridiculous about wanting to last out the full 25 hours.

At this point, I think I'm going to make it OK -- there's a whole folder of appropriately depressing Jewish blogosphere feeds I haven't read yet -- but I can't help wanting there to be a better way. So far, the ideas I've come up with are (a) programming an all-afternoon Tisha b'Av study session followed by a break-fast for the shul, so that I have a community to fast with, or (b) arranging to be nursing a small infant by this time next year, so that I don't have to fast. I'm really not sure which of these options would ultimately be less trouble... but possibly I should put off any decision until after I eat.

* -- The exception, oddly, being Yom Kippur, which hardly ever really bothers me. This is probably because I spend the whole day doing fun things at shul, for certain values of "fun." On Tisha b'Av I spend the whole day wishing I could do something fun but feeling that getting up off the couch takes way the heck too much effort.
** -- And here I am thinking of somewhere in the first chapter of Ta'anit, but cannot muster up the energy to go all the way into my study and look up the reference.
*** -- Is this, like, a reverse double-axel guilt trip? I mean, if my mother thinks I'm going to too many services...?