Today will, I think, be the last day my family can eat exclusively from our Rosh Hashanah leftovers -- after dinner tonight we will merely have a bit of stuffed cabbage and some mock chopped liver in the fridge, and one of us will have to start cooking again. It does not feel like fasting season, to put it mildly, but we're in between the two closest fasts of the year for Jews -- and of course it's Ramadan now for Muslims, who undoubtedly think us six-day-a-year fasters* are wimps.**

Yesterday was Tzom (or "the Fast of") Gedaliah, one of the best-kept secrets of the Jewish calendar. This is, I suspect, almost completely a result of timing: it usually falls on the third day of Tishri, the day after many Jews have just spent the past two days in Rosh Hasnanah services, and a week before the much better-known fast of Yom Kippur, not to mention all the other holidays later in the month. If someone moved Tzom Gedaliah to, say, the subsequent and blissfully holiday-free month of Heshvan, I bet it would get much better PR: as minor fasts go, it's got by far the best independent story. The eponymous Gedaliah (ben Ahikam ben Shaphan, which connects his family with the reforming wing of the Judean nobility under Josiah) was appointed Babylonian governor over Judah after the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem and overthrew the last Davidic king in 586 BCE. His conciliatory rule was initially very popular, as it did not involve the near-constant rebellion and siege warfare of the previous three decades, but it was brought to an premature end when a conspiracy of disgruntled Davidic scions funded by the kingdom of Ammon assassinated him and many of his supporters (both Judean and Babylonian) on the above-mentioned inconvenient date, only two months after his appointment.

That is the story from Jeremiah and Kings, of course, and parts of it seem engineered precisely to bring about the fulfillment of Deuteronomic prophecy*** -- but Gedaliah may actually be attested in archaeological evidence and/or the Septuagint (see here for a quick summary), which gives him a better historical pedigree than ninety percent of the Hebrew Bible. What Jeremiah and Kings add to the likely facts is the perception that Gedaliah was the last best hope for Judean self-rule under the Babylonians, and that his assassination sealed the fate of the Judean exiles, at least for the next seventy years and perhaps (depending on your theology) for all non-messianic time.**** If history and/or Judean self-rule aren't your thing, though, Gedaliah's story still has obvious resonance for today. Which is the best reaction to occupation: violence (including quite a lot of collateral death) or cooperation? When does cooperation become collaboration? Who gets to decide what's best for the Jewish people -- or for any people? Does it always have to be the guy who's quickest on the trigger? I wish we could say that assassination is now an archaic method of regime change, but recent events have proven otherwise (pick a random cross-section of the Middle East, not forgetting Israel and Rabin).

So Tzom Gedaliah stands for a number of important concepts -- some theological, some historical, some political. It's still like pulling teeth to get people together (and at least some of them fasting) for the standard afternoon service for minor fasts; we didn't quite manage it this year at Congregation Beth Boondoggle, but I'm told this is the first year in ages we've even tried. (Next year, I feel certain, with a little more advance coordination and a weekend date, it should be doable.) I showed up for the service in question, but I am ambivalent about minor fasts in general, not only because some of the ones we have are difficult to relate to contemporary Judaism (as I hope I've indicated, this is not the case with Tzom Gedaliah) but also because our ritual procedure for all four very different fasts is identically uninspiring. I have no intrinsic objection to the standard "communal fast day" Torah and Haftarah readings -- they're pretty and all -- but they do bupkis for getting across what seems to be the very distinct messages of, well, three of the four minor fasts in question.***** When Jewish communities proclaim their own impromptu communal fasts (e.g., after the recent Monsey Meat Scandal), presumably everyone knows (and, ideally, feels) exactly why they're fasting from the get-go, but the same cannot (unfortunately) be said for Tzom Gedaliah and the other minor fasts of historical memory. And so we have people fasting for reasons they often don't even understand, when I can't help thinking that if it weren't for the weight of tradition I'd rather get them to attend a quick text-study on Gedaliah and Co. accompanied by bagels and lox.******

I'm not discounting the weight of tradition, though; I will always a little too halakhically lenient by someone's standards, but I have packrat archival instincts like you wouldn't believe, and if there's one thing I've realized about my reluctance to throw anything away because It Might Come In Handy Someday, it's that I am completely in harmony with the general trend of rabbinic Judaism.******* But I don't like keeping things around when they're broken unless I plan to fix them eventually, and it seems to me that Tzom Gedaliah is just a little bit broken. The problem is, I know how to sew a button onto that sweater I've been hanging onto for months, but nobody taught me how to do halakhic transformation, darnit. My all-purpose remedy for something is to throw education at it (which would make education either safety pins or duct tape, and I think it's time to drop this metaphor); sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. I feel like I should be able to do more, though. Because Tzom Gedaliah is actually my favorite of the minor fasts. And I'm getting tired of leftovers.

* -- Unless you get into the whole routine of fasting several days a week, adding onto Taanit Esther, before Rosh Chodesh, and so forth. I'm not so much into gratuitous fasting, but it's very well-attested in rabbinic tradition.
** -- I've picked up some great tips about surviving daytime fasts from reading Muslim blogs during Ramadan, though. I'm not aware of any Christian traditions which fast particularly at this season (well, some years the Elevation of the Cross probably fits in), but they'll get theirs in the spring, as well as possibly several other times per year, depending on what flavor of Christianity and what we mean by "fasting."
*** -- Specifically, the bits about the conspirators fleeing to Egypt, thus undoing the Exodus. On the other hand, if you were trying to make tracks out of Babylonian territory from Judah at that time, Egypt was certainly the logical direction to go....
**** -- Of course, it turned out not to be such a bad fate, as the tacked-on bit at the end of Kings about Jehoachin's cushy life in Babylon suggests. But still.
***** -- Anyone who'd like to clearly distinguish 10 Tevet and 17 Tammuz in terms of message (yes, I know the respective historical events) is welcome to do so, bearing in mind that 9 Av is also a separate fast.
****** -- Or mourning food (eggs, lentils, etc.). Or thematic food, although for an assassination that could get tricky -- maybe fresh pomegranates, so that everyone winds up with little crimson splotches all over their clothes?
******* -- Except, come to think of it, possibly the people who wrote the law codes.

Over at Jewschool, comments are still accumulating on a post asking about the role of rabbis in the independent minyan movement. (In brief: the poster wants there to be a role; many of the commenters, not so much.) Over at Hirhurim, on the other hand, there's a post addressing some of the complicated halakhic history of when and how it became acceptable to simply rule from the Shulchan Aruch (or any other of the law codes beginning in the twelfth-century Sephardic world) instead of going back to Talmudic and other sources.* I don't think there are a ton of crossover commenters between Jewschool and Hirhurim, and that's a pity -- the Hirhurim post is a valuable reminder of the long-running debate over the role of the rabbi vs. the non-rabbi in "rabbinic" Judaism, of which the independent-minyan question is merely the latest wrinkle.

What concerns me about the inclusion of both rabbis and cantors in the independent minyan movement is that all Jews -- ordained and that other L-word -- are not always clear on the fact that instinctive deference is not an appropriate choice. I have seen active, well-educated members of independent minyanim who feel obligated to invite a cantor or rabbi to speak or daven on the spot simply because s/he has chosen to join the minyan community for that service -- and while I can't speak for the rabbi/cantor (possibly s/he wanted a morning off from performing?), the sudden appearance of unwanted external "authority" certainly interfered with my davening experience. Of course, respect for the "crown of Torah" is and should continue to be a central value of rabbinic Judaism, and I recognize that the whole question becomes exponentially more complicated when you belong to a minyan (as I do) where most of the members also have synagogue affiliations and therefore a potential mara d'atra lurking in the wings.** But if I were to become a rabbi -- something I've contemplated and continue to contemplate, albeit with no immediate luck thanks to the small problem of geography -- I would do so because (a) it would more easily allow me to get paid to do the things I already do and love, plus (b) intensive halakhic training and the accompanying ability to pasken for others would be more fun than puppies or chocolate. Having people instinctively assume that I must be asked to lead every service I stumble into, on the other hand, would be about as much fun as puppies and chocolate together (emergency trip to vet, lots of puking).

I'm glad that the independent minyan movement is causing (some) Jews to re-open the question of the rabbi's role in Jewish community life. It remains to be seen whether anyone could (or wants to) return to an earlier view of rabbinic authority; I long for a Jewish community of fully functioning adult Jews, but I fear the creation of further divisions within the Jewish people. And, practically speaking, clocks cannot be turned back, nor history undone. (My to-do list for Rosh Hashanah is getting no shorter as I write this.) We stand here today, all of us, before the Lord our God,*** trying to figure out the best way to move on from where we have been, and where we are. And some of us are making this the second year running that we swear our independent minyan is going to have some High Holidays services next year, because the whole performance/circus/fashion-show of the "traditional" American HHD experience is more a hindrance than a help in making our prayers rise up to God. On the other hand, I know that there are many wonderful people at my "traditional" synagogue working their tails off to ensure that I and my family will have as good an experience as possible, so... yeah, it's complicated. More complicated, I think, than any law code can allow for. I hope some of you will help me unravel this one whenever you have a chance.

Finally: I have several other things I wanted to post about before the New Year, but my in-laws show up in 24 hours, and I really wouldn't bet on my having a lot of blogging time between now and then. Instead, let me close by asking pardon for any wrongs I have committed, any insults (intentional or not) I have delivered), and any emails I have left unanswered (is there any way we can reword Kol Nidre to address this pressing modern crisis?). I wish all who read this blog a happy and sweet New Year!

* -- When I joke that I am a pre-denominational Ashkenazic Jew and that I heart Rabbenu Tam liek woah -- or when I simply state that the Conservative Movement's method of halakhic decision-making has a great deal going for it historically -- this is what I mean. In historical retrospect, it seems to me that the move from case law to code law (something that happened gradually, between the twelfth and the eighteenth centuries, and much more slowly in Ashkenaz than in the Mediterranean world) impoverished halakhah and set us off on a path in which Talmudic learning became fetishized (after all, what is its practical purpose if the codes do almost everything?) and Jewish creativity was instead channeled through everything from kabbalah to, um, weblogs (neither of them bad things, but halakhah used to be a hell of a lot more creative).
** -- I have recently been toying with asking my rabbi an honest-to-Moses halakhic question on a confusing topic which is personally relevant to me and about to come up in the holiday season, but have so far rejected doing so on the grounds that I would not especially want to abide by his answer. (It's not that I don't ask my rabbi halakhic questions; it's that I only ask him puzzlers I've come up with, for fun, in casual conversation, and well away from any season or situation when they might be relevant. In other words, I treat him as a colleague with considerable expertise in fields other than mine. Also, he's awesome about lending books.) This is one of the reasons I occasionally suspect that I make a lousy Conservative Jew.
*** -- Yes, I know, that was last week's Torah portion. It's one of my favorites.

The thing is, I was supposed to be in Israel right now -- in fact, my husband and I were supposed to be there for nearly two weeks, including my birthday, for a long-planned trip covering several cities and conveniently situated before the holidays and before most of our semester-related responsibilities kicked in. I had started making tentative arrangements with people I knew in Jerusalem, and I was working up to emailing a few Israelis I knew only from blogging and asking if they wanted to get together for coffee or dinner (with the usual reassurances about my lack of psycho axe-murdering habits). Unfortunately, our travel plans were built around a professional conference D. had been invited to attend, and around about the second week of the Lebanon War the conference was suddenly moved to... January, just in time for everyone to get hit with massive fare-change fees from the airlines.* As D. pointed out, a major conference in his field will next be held in Israel some time after the Messiah offers to give the keynote from the Mount of Olives.**

In retrospect, it was probably for the best that I did not spend the past weekend being intermittently ill in a foreign country, and I got to read my favorite part of Deuteronomy instead, but my appointment calendar still looks awfully sparse this week, and I am not entirely over being deprived of a Proper Beach Vacation this summer. Naturally, I would like someone to blame. Candidates (in no particular order) include Hezbollah, the Lebanese government, the Israeli government, the conference organizers, the other conference invitees (I'm sure a significant portion of them were threatening to withdraw), and my husband (it was his stupid conference). Only one of these parties has provided me with a birthday dinner, presents, and compensatory snuggling, so that still leaves plenty of blame to go around.

In theory, then, we still have tickets for late January; in practice, I have no idea what commitments I may be unable to avoid by then, and the whole January business seems about as real as trips to Israel usually do to me. See, when I was young, Israel was a mysterious land of Incredibly Glamorous Jewish People, all of whom wrote fluently in Hebrew cursive, ate exotic foods like hummus and felafel, and never came anywhere near my Home State. Aunt Miriam had been to Israel for an extended visit -- had seriously considered making aliyah -- and this meant that Israel was just slightly realer than Middle-Earth, but she had also returned with a habit of correcting my Hebrew pronunciation, which only confirmed my suspicion that I would never be Jewish Enough to get anywhere near Israel.

As I grew up and started moving through institutions of higher education, I encountered more Jews who had been to Israel, usually as part of the great Jewish Summer Camp experience which I also missed.*** They were all intimidatingly willing to break into Hebrew at the drop of a hat, and a good portion of them were more-observant-than-thou (or at least than me). They also tended toward Israel-centered political activism, which -- like most campus-based "activism" -- struck me as both ineffective and (usually) rude. I became convinced that if I was going to go to Israel, it wouldn't be on anyone else's religious or political agenda. (I have never liked guided tours in any case.) And so I ignored the existence of Birthright Israel, and (much more regretfully) selected a course of graduate study which did not include ulpanim or study at the Hartman Institute. Some of that was sheer pragmatism -- I wanted to get through grad school as quickly as possible -- but looking back on it, I really, genuinely, spent my first 25 or so years convinced that I was not Jewish Enough to go to Israel.

Since I moved to Boondoggle four years ago, a lot has changed. For one thing, I have mostly gotten over my fear that I am not Jewish Enough for, well, anything. For another, I have met a lot more local folks who regularly go back and forth to Israel, or who have made/are about to make aliyah. I have also met a lot more Israelis (some permanently in the U.S., others visiting), and the blogosphere has let me into the lives of still others. It turns out that Israelis are not -- on the whole -- Special Glamorous People.**** Entire suburbs of Jerusalem sound suspiciously as though they might be inhabited by the same sorts of people -- and perhaps by relatives of the people -- who inhabit my neighborhood in Boondoggle (except that apparently Israelis have superior coffee shops). And everyone I have met assures me that the real language problem will be getting anyone to let me practice my Hebrew.

Now the problem is that I don't have enough time to visit Israel properly -- or, more precisely at the moment, that my husband doesn't have enough time and I am not especially thrilled about spending long periods away from him. I am also not exactly wealthy, so flitting across a few continents for brief visits is unlikely to be a regular event, and funding exists mostly for longer-term trips. And I am starting to resent the way people in the Jewish community react when it comes up in conversation that I've never been to Israel. Well, yeah, I'd love to go, and if someone gave me a free international vacation I'd be there in a flash, but it's not actually the number-one priority in my life. Call me weird, but I sort of thought it was more important to build a community where I was, to establish a Jewish life among family and friends, to continue my Jewish learning, to work on -- what're they called? -- oh, yeah, mitzvot. I am a Zionist in the sense that I support Israel as a functioning democracy in the Middle East, and even in the sense that I sniffle at "Hatikvah", but I'm pretty sure I'm not the permanent aliyah type -- the lure of one-day yom tov notwithstanding, I'm much happier as a Diaspora Jew than I think I'd be as an Israeli. And it's not -- it's really not -- that I don't want to visit Israel; it's just that I never seem to get there.

At least I am in excellent historical company. And, even if everyone else around me has been to Israel a zillion times, I still might get there ahead of the Messiah.

* -- The conference in question was/will be in Eilat. While my Israeli geography is pitiful, I am well aware that Eilat is at the opposite end of Israel from Lebanon. Just sayin'.
** -- And my husband's field has plenty of Israeli scholars, but no ties to religion of any sort.
*** -- I think I may be the only Jewishly active adult I know who has neither been to Israel nor attended a Jewish camp or day school. If there are any more of you out there, let me know!
**** -- Any Israelis reading this are, of course, entitled to still consider themselves Special Glamorous People. Especially since I am still fascinated by large parts of the Israeli foods aisle at my local international market. Apparently, Israelis have an obsession with layered wafer-and-cream cookies of which I heartily approve.

Finally, I am going to make an Elul-appropriate post. Elul, as we all know, is the month leading up to the New Year -- the month for thinking over the past year's successes and failures -- the month for engaging in some sort of spiritual accounting -- in short, the month for assigning High Holiday honors.

By "honors" our synagogue means pretty much what most synagogues mean: a variety of roles in the services in question, some of which require considerable technical skill (e.g., chanting Haftarah) but many of which do not (e.g., opening the Ark doors for a Special Holiday Prayer, of which there are approximately ten billion). A number of these honors revolve around the Torah services: if I am counting correctly, this year* the two days of Rosh Hashanah and one day of Yom Kippur will involve a total of twenty-four aliyot (including the four maftir aliyot for the Haftarah readers) and seven separate occasions on which a Torah scroll must be raised and re-dressed after it has been read from. In some places, or so I am told, all these honors are auctioned off (the presumption must be that anyone who bids on them is capable of performing them); in others, a select cabal of synagogue insiders determine the honors using complicated formulas blending past congregational service, future likelihood of major donations, and a Ouija board. No doubt there is even a synagogue somewhere -- probably in Chelm -- where the honors are assigned by lot so as not to admit the faintest whiff of favoritism.

At Congregation Beth Boondoggle, it is the job of the Ritual Committee to assign at least the major HH honors, a job which has traditionally fallen to the chairperson of said committee.** This year, however, in a display of masterful management skill as well as basic self-preservation, our chair decided to delegate the assigning. D. and I are wise in the ways of committees (we've spent a lot of years in academia), so we immediately volunteered to assign the easiest category of honors: hagbahah, the act of holding the Torah scroll up by its bottom rollers and displaying the just-read columns of letters to the congregation. Of course, the reason hagbahah is easy to assign is because (a) you only need seven people total, and (b) there are only a handful of possible candidates -- relatively few people in our congregation are comfortable raising the humongous scrolls we drag out for the High Holy Days, and especially for the RH morning portions from midway through Genesis.*** And when I say "people," I actually mean "men," because hagbahah is the only role in a traditional service where I will agree that men are, on the whole, better qualified by biology. So I've spent some time the last several evenings telephoning or leaving messages for nice men with broad shoulders whom I've seen perform this feat in the past, or whom someone else has identified as a "shtarker."

Meanwhile, I got called myself, probably thanks to someone emailing us to be sure and include committee chairs. I was asked to do an English reading from Eyleh ezkerah, which is my favorite part of the Yom Kippur services.**** Now, I tend to prefer doing service-y things with a little more technical skill -- and perhaps prestige -- attached, but I seem to have absorbed the ethic that declining an honor (without a good reason) is as rude as declining a dish your host is offering at a dinner party (again, without a good reason), only it's God's dinner party. Also, it's not like I can't receive other "honors" on, um, all those other days of the year when I come to services. Finally, I didn't want to make my fellow assigners' lives any more difficult than they had to be. So, after a microscopic hesitation, I said yes.

This would have been fine and dandy, except that I was working both sides, and so I was emailed a copy of the Honors Spreadsheet with everyone's contributions so far. We all look for our own names on lists, don't we? It was the work of several seconds to glance down the columns for the other English readers, as well as to note that I had been listed as a potential candidate only for English readings, which probably had more to do with the diligence of those assigners than anything else, but did not add to my joy. "Oh, shoot," I said, rather more loudly than necessary.***** "It's a Girly Honor. I HATE Girly Honors!" Let me explain: what I have dubbed a Girly Honor, at Congregation Beth Boondoggle, is a service role requiring relatively little technical skill or advance preparation (English-language readings as opposed to Hebrew ones, dressing the Torah as opposed to lifting or blessing it) and which is almost invariably performed by a woman (or in the case of Ark opening, a mixed couple) under regular (i.e., non-simcha) circumstances. Girly Honors are contextual, so that opening the Ark is not a Girly Honor at weekday morning minyan (rather, it is an honor reserved for That One Guy who expects to do it whenever he shows up), but it is for Shabbat and holidays. Despite these complications, it is very easy to identify a Girly Honor in my congregation: go up to a traditionally-minded male (pick anyone over 60 in a big tallit and you should be fine), ask him to do X, and see if he winces. Gelilah? Girly honor. Torah schlepping: not a girly honor, and overwhelmingly assigned to men, even though you'd have to be awfully frail to have a physical problem with it. Ark opening? Girly honor unless it's with your wife, and even then sort of. English-language readings? Girly honor. Aliyah? Never a girly honor.

Practically speaking, I'm pretty sure Girly Honors are a holdover from CBB's decades of not-quite-egalitarianism -- after all, there are still many older women in our congregation who are not comfortable taking aliyot but are willing to dress a Torah or do an English reading, which is fine for them. But me -- well, I hate Girly Honors with a completely irrational passion. It's not that I'm uncomfortable with my femininity, or external markers thereof. It may be, a little, that I'm proud of my service-related skills, enjoy showing them off, and resent the Girly Honor's implication that I can't do anything more challenging -- but most of the standard service honors are tasks we expect any ritually confident thirteen-year-old to be able to perform on a few minutes' notice,****** and I don't feel especially accomplished after an aliyah. Finally, honors qua honors are not a huge deal to me, simply because I do attend a lot of smaller services where everyone gets something to do by default. (If I ever really want a given honor, well, I also know all the people who assign them. I could ask.)

I think my objection to Girly Honors boils down to a well-established distaste for gendered (or, frankly, most any exclusive) ritual roles in public Judaism. In a private household setting, I don't much care if Mom usually lights the Shabbat candles and Dad makes Kiddush, or vice versa, or if they switch off every week; I do think it's important for their sons and daughters to be willing and able to perform both sets of functions (after all, they'll probably live alone at some point). But in a public setting -- say a synagogue which defines itself as egalitarian -- I think it's vitally important that kids not see certain functions as things they Don't Do, or even worse, things they Can't Do. Eventually, everyone is going to choose their own set of favorite synagogue activities -- I love reading Torah, which isn't technically an "honor" and which most people view as a chore -- but there's no reason to artificially limit those choices.

And having made those bold pronouncements, I will add that sometime during Elul (bli neder) I want to follow this up by explaining why I feel this way, and indeed why I would argue that all ethically and/or halakhically committed Jews ought to agree with me. (It's not like they will, but I figure I should aim high.) For now, though, it's still early in the month (i.e., I am not ready to start in on freezing the chicken soup for RH), and I'm trying to massage my soul into a configuration where I can stop feeling personally offended about the Girly Honors, because I'm pretty certain this isn't (or at any rate should not be) All About Me.

... I guess I could always start a weightlifting program and request hagbahah next year, couldn't I?

* -- Because the first day of Rosh Hashanah falls on Shabbat, we get two extra aliyot that day.
** -- With on-the-spot assignments and substitutions at the discretion of the assorted floor gabbaim -- but rather less of that this year. I believe we would all prefer not to repeat last year's contretemps, in which various people (not necessarily the assigned ones) got to read Haftarah on about ten minutes' notice.
*** -- Hagbahah is more difficult the more unbalanced the two halves of the scroll are, and there are three categories of difficulty among the High Holy Days readings, corresponding exactly to how far from the "middle" the reading falls: two from mid-Genesis, three from mid-Numbers, and two from mid-Leviticus. In any event, hoisting and keeping the Torah scroll in the air involves a certain amount of skill (here's a comment thread full of tips), but it also requires a good bit of upper-body, arm, and wrist strength. One doesn't have to be Superman -- given an average-to-light scroll somewhere not too far toward either end, I can do hagbahah just fine -- but I'm not touching those monsters we use for the holidays, and my view is shared by easily 98% of the congregation.
**** -- Although I am dubious about the English rendition in Machtzor Hadash, and by "dubious" I mean "frankly rather irritated that they cut most of the Ten Sages in favor of lots of Holocaust stuff." The thing interweaving the Kaddish with the names of death camps can stay -- that gets me every year -- but I want Yeshavav the Scribe and Chutzpit the Translator.
***** -- I may not have said "shoot," but do we really want to get off into a tangent about Jesus Christ and pogo sticks?
****** -- The exceptions are maftir/reading Haftarah, which normally requires at least some advance practice, and hagbahah, as discussed above.

[Dear random Googlers: Nope, sorry, this is almost definitely not what you're looking for.]

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single Jew in possession of a good education, must be in want of a past. In fact, Jews have wanted to return to an idyllic past state of perfect harmony with God and freedom from foreign influences since well before they became "Jews" -- the call to disentangle from the disastrous present and return to earlier perfection begins at the point when Moses encounters the "God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob" and only gets more strident as the later books of the Hebrew Bible unfold their tales of woe and call for return ("as in days of old") and renewal. Today, everyone across the self-confessedly Jewish spectrum (rabbinic, Karaite, Orthodox, Reform, whatever) has a specific -- and often idiosyncratic -- concept of what Ideal Judaism looked like and what has gone wrong to take us away from it. So I will tell you a little tiny piece of my own plan for tikkun olam: I would like to return to the idyllic time before American Judaism started using the adjective "lay".

I'm not sure how recently it become acceptable for Jews to refer to some of their coreligionists as "laypeople"; the term "lay" (or the noun form "laity") has an almost impeccably Hellenistic and Christian pedigree. According to the OED, its principle meaning "of persons: belonging to the ‘people’ as contradistinguished from the clergy; not in orders, non-clerical." It derived from Greek λαός, "people" or "folk," but very quickly came to mean "the people as opposed to those of us who are elite" -- so "civilian" or "common" -- in Hellenistic-era sources.* Translations of the Hebrew Bible into Greek by Jews and Jewish Christians (Aquila, Symmachus, Theodotion) employed λαϊκός in a couple of places as a synonym for "non-consecrated" or "non-holy" -- referring, I should stress, to things rather than people.** From there, it was a short leap for Christian sources to adopt λαϊκός and the Latinized laicus for "not in orders; non-clerical." On the other hand, early rabbinic Jewish sources borrowed a lot of Greek words, but not that one.***

Today, however, the habit is good and entrenched. The term "lay" is no longer exclusively Christian -- it can simply mean "non-professional" or "non-specialist," the way academics talk about writing for a "lay audience." But in a Jewish context, "lay" does not mean "non-professional," it means "non-ordained." A synagogue's executive director, for instance, is still a layperson; we can also have "lay cantors" who have not been through a formal ordination program. For that matter, I have been called a "lay educator," which is slightly bizarre given my training and experience as an academic. But I have also been referred to as a "lay worship leader," a "lay board member," and a "lay committee chair." All of these are accurate descriptions of things I do at my synagogue, and all of them make me want to, well, deliver a lay sermon on precisely this topic, or possibly just lay down and cry.****

Personally, I think it was a good thing that the Pharisees won out in the aftermath of the destruction of the Second Temple, and that Judaism's hereditary priesthood has relatively little to do as a result.***** Whatever you think of that development, however, the first generations of rabbis did not replace priests; if anything, they replaced assorted sages, judges, and teachers, some of whom were/are priests or Levites and some of whom were/are not. They did not, by and large, function as leaders of worship or as community leaders except by coincidence. And many Jews -- by which we mean "Jewish men," an element of the past I do not at all yearn for -- many Jews received semicha, may or may not be translated correctly as "rabbinic ordination," because they loved to study or teach or answer particularly complicated halakhic questions. Others did so due to family or community expectations. Some were accorded the title of "rabbi" out of respect for their apparent learning, as it had been used before Yochanan ben Zakkai introduced the whole concept of semicha (Jesus of Nazareth is a prominent example here); human nature being what it is, some probably adopted the title "rabbi" for purposes of self-inflation without any formal right. Or perhaps not -- after all, semicha was a lot easier to get before seminary study (another Christian idea) became its standard prerequisite. (It was even easier to become a chazzan -- professional cantors run all the way back to the eighteenth century, and the concept of cantorial ordination is even more recent.) It's not that rabbinic Judaism wasn't elitist in many ways, but throughout most of Jewish history, "rabbinic" Jews did not rely on rabbis, much less a rabbi, to conduct their day-to-day Jewish lives. They prayed, worked, cooked, and celebrated with only occasional resort to a rabbinic authority for judgment or advice. In many communities, there was nobody competent to give judgment or advice nearby in any case, and while one could dispatch a messenger to Sura or Mainz or Vilna for an opinion, the chickens would be eaten and the services finished long before an answer could return.

That's what I miss. I miss the idea that you could be fully Jewish as long as you had a minyan, a Torah scroll, and perhaps a shochet/mohel (now there's a vital Jewish community position!), with access to scribes and rabbis for special occasions. If your community got large enough, you could build a proper mikvah and a synagogue. If your community was especially large, or if there was a center of rabbinic scholarship nearby, you might be able to bring in one of the less promising students to give quicker answers about whether or not those chickens were kosher, and maybe to write divorce and marriage contracts on the side -- but you could get along just fine without him, too. I'm not sure exactly when it happened, and I'm pretty sure it was a gradual process, but the laicization of American Judaism is my hands-down least favorite element of contemporary Jewish life.****** One day a lot of us went to sleep Jews and woke up lay.

So what's a Jew to do? Well, there are obvious answers for individuals: go be a rabbi yourself if that's what you want (if we still had a system where I could study with the rabbis in my community, I'd be all over that), or maybe form a rabbi-and-cantor-free community (but are those sustainable? I note with interest that Kehilat Hadar now has a rabbinic "scholar-in-residence"). Neither of those responses do anything to address the larger problem, though. And it's not that I have anything against rabbis and cantors -- I have learned a great deal from many such people. I concede the usefulness of Jewish professionals in the contemporary "synagogue center," but I will resist to my dying breath the implication that therefore there are second-class Jews, or (more to the point) Jews who think of themselves as such. Last year our synagogue was searching for a cantor (or, as we have been instructed to say, chazzan), and in a valiant effort to avoid the (also very Christian) terminology of "clergy" and "ordination," reference was made to our need for additional klei kodesh, literally "holy vessels" or "instruments of holiness." This is nice and all, but I kind of thought -- in my demure little lay way -- that we were supposed to be a holy people. A, y'know, kingdom of priests. And that each one of us was supposed to be, oh, individually holy. Instead, we have a dumbed-down system in which holiness requires a proxy and in which we are scandalized when our unfortunate klei kodesh fail to live up to the standards of holiness we set for them (but not for ourselves). That's not just silly, that's pathetic. And also -- I hardly ever say this, so make a note of it -- un-Jewish.

So I don't know where to start, and it makes me miserable when every Jewish community I encounter seems to have a more or less severe degree of the same disease. There's got to be a tactful yet effective way to educate people about all this "lay" stuff, but I don't know what it is. Do you think it involves fewer puns?

* -- It's interesting to compare this development to an obvious Hebrew parallel, the word גוי, which came to mean "non-Jew."
** -- At least, in the case of Ezek. 48:15 (clearly translating חל). The other case the online LSJ lists is 1 Kgs 21:4/5, and I suspect some typesetting or scanning error, because there's simply no word anywhere near there that would so translate. My Greek lexicons are currently boxed, so unless anyone is just dying to know, I think I'll leave it at that for the moment.
*** -- Am ha-aretz is probably the closest synonym for "layperson," but I trust many of my readers will realize that it's still not very close. My personal suspicion is that Jews referring to other Jews as "lay" snuck in sometime in the nineteenth century, along with the German Reform movement's early (and largely abandoned) efforts to dub their rabbis "ministers" or "pastors." That early Reform movement was itself "lay," or rather, there were very few rabbis involved in its earliest phases, but it was drawing heavily on a German vocabulary and culture which had set aside the famous Lutheran (and, er, Biblical) emphasis on a priesthood of all believers in favor of retaining the vernacular laie and a pronounced respect for ordination in a religious context. That early Reform movement also contributed a number of ideas which -- a little under 200 years later -- have spread across virtually every part of the Jewish spectrum (for instance, regular sermons preached in the vernacular), so it is my hypothesis that the concept of Jewish "laity" spread in much the same way. That's just a guess, though, and I'd want to go back and see how everything from the Mishnaic am ha-aretz to the Hasidic notion of a rabbi-tzaddik could have contributed to the conceptual development of rabbi-as-clergy, too. (Note to self: find publisher first.)
**** -- I think the problem may be exacerbated in the field of Jewish education, a field where rabbis and cantors always get the benefit of their titles and I find myself in the awkward position of wanting to explain I'm rather specifically qualified but having been trained to commit seppuku before actually introducing myself as "Dr. Naomi Chana." However, I gave examples from synagogue life instead, because that's a more common experience.
***** -- I don't begrudge them the first aliyah or duchening -- both of which take place at my synagogue -- but I also don't feel that priestly privilege is a key element of rabbinic Judaism, any more than (equally well-attested) royal privilege. (This in no way stops me from being amused that I'm the only Israelite among my Jewish grandparents, parent, husband, and future children.)
****** -- The #2 and #3 spots are filled by, respectively, the Myth of Eternal Orthodoxy and niggunim. However, these are subject to change at whim.