Tea

Baraita
A blend of academic, religious, and pop-cultural esoterica.

• Challah Day
  

  So Danya posted about learning to bake challah (why has it never occurred to me to take my bread dough out with me?), and then Simon posted his usual recipe. I think this is an excellent meme, because I love looking at everyone else's recipes, but it leaves me with one pressing question: how much bread does the average person eat over Shabbos? Does everyone Not Me routinely have a dozen guests over each week? Are people way the heck committed to producing enough dough to say the blessing for separating challah? Or is it just that I don't usually bake two loaves for Friday night, two for Saturday lunch, and one for the third meal? Because, seriously, I love bread at least as much as the next person, and freshly-baked challah enough to elbow the next person out of the way, but... wow, that's a lot of dough.

  I have made mass quantities of challah on on occasion, but my usual recipe makes two medium-to-small loaves (a little bigger than what's sold as "kiddush size," a little smaller than the average supermarket challah). This is much, much easier to work with than a larger amount of dough would be, and it provides ample bread for as many as 6-8 dinner guests (although D. and I can finish one loaf by ourselves when we're feeling gluttonous). If you double this recipe, you get two nice big loaves (also the right size if you want spiral loaves for Rosh Hashanah) or four smallish ones; the original recipe was actually three times the size, but I've monkeyed with a few proportions in slimming it down and now I prefer to triple this version.

  What follows is not the Quick Recipe Card version, but the version I would give if I were teaching someone how to make it in person, with all the little shortcuts I usually take. (I do assume that you probably know how to knead bread, but with a small amount of dough, it's pretty difficult to do it wrong.)

• On Crossing Lines
  

  A few weeks ago, I read something -- by accident -- that was not intended for me. I was sitting on the other side of my rabbi's desk in his office, waiting for him to finish a phone call on a program I was helping plan, and since listening to one-half of a phone conversation is only so enlightening, I found myself idly looking over various items on my side of the rabbi's desk while I waited for the call to conclude. Books, assorted ritual doohickeys, a few photocopied articles, and a handwritten letter on stationery, open and facing in my direction -- since I'd been reading the book titles and glancing over the articles, I'm afraid I got through the first paragraph of the letter before my brain caught up and said "wait, stop." Thankfully, it wasn't very personal; it was a letter from a congregational family I didn't know (the stationery had their name at the top) explaining that they were leaving Congregation Beth Boondoggle and joining the next shul to the right, which takes them outside the Conservative movement altogether. Now, the one thing I did know about this family was that they didn't care for our shul's increasingly public commitment to [gender] egalitarianism -- it had come up some time back when we were handing out honors -- so I wasn't immensely surprised to read that they were leaving. What puzzled me, though, was their statement that they were leaving because we had hired a female cantor. Women have been leading all the services at our shul regularly and prominently over the past couple of years, and have been participating in all services on the same level as men for the past four, so why leave now? Wouldn't it have made better sense to leave (a) years ago, (b) after waiting to actually meet the new cantor, or (c) never?

  Of course, my judgment is blissfully irrelevant to these folks, and I had no business beginning to read their letter anyway (hey, maybe there was a fuller explanation a few paragraphs down); the proper thing to do is to forget all about it. And I'm trying, but the universe is conspiring to present me with a handful of further examples of people who switch from an Egalitarian/Conservative to a Non-Egalitarian/Orthodox synagogue, or people who alternate easily between the two -- including a few good friends of mine -- and I am increasingly baffled. I simply do not understand what the heck is going on in these people's minds. While there is immense variation by congregation and a lot of grey area in between Conservative and Orthodox, and while the kiddush food and the social programming and the prayers and even the congregation's observance level may be very similar, it seems obvious to me the average Conservative shul (which is, these days, thoroughly egalitarian) and the average Orthodox shul offer radically different worship experiences. In the average Conservative shul, families sit together; in the average Orthodox shul, men and women sit separately, while children move back and forth but mostly wind up on the women's side. In the average Conservative shul, women are up on the bimah in the same ritual roles as men at virtually every service; in the average Orthodox shul, the bimah is a male-only preserve, and if women lead services at all they do so in all-female services. Perhaps a single man immersed in his prayers would find his experience in both synagogues similar, but a man with a family -- or a woman of any description -- would find things very different indeed. I know and respect people who prefer a Conservative service, and I know and respect people who prefer an Orthodox service -- I have attended wonderful services in both environments myself -- but I have no clue how on earth anyone can move from Conservative to Orthodox worship, or between both types of shuls, without a major paradigm shift.

  In particular, I'm confused by people like the family from my synagogue. Plenty of lists and blogs claim that the most observant Conservative Jews tend to wind up Orthodox, or at any rate their children do. (Whether this is said with triumph or despair depends on the ideological position of the poster.) This claim has always puzzled me, and while it's not really a trend in my synagogue or my community, I've run into enough individual examples to verify that it sometimes happens. I just don't understand why. Personally, I've encountered some very similar-feeling Orthodox and Conservative congregations (to say nothing of the Traditional folks and all the others in the middle), and I couldn't differentiate between my Conservative and my Orthodox cousins if I didn't happen to know where they daven, but I find attending Orthodox services to be categorically different from attending non-Orthodox services of whatever stripe -- and I don't think it's just that women's ritual participation is my personal bugaboo, because it's also become the effective boundary line between Conservative and Orthodox Judaism (which seems kind of depressing for Orthodoxy). Given the broad social, cultural, and even halakhic diversity of contemporary Jewish "Orthodoxy," honestly, I can't come up with a single additional factor uniting every form of Judaism to the right of the Conservative movement.* So is there a single well-defined attraction of Orthodoxy qua Orthodoxy, other than the lack of women's ritual participation, to which I happen to be tone-deaf? Or is it just that everyone is attracted to or away from a specific congregation, and there's no general rule to be derived anywhere?

  As longtime Baraita readers will have noticed, I don't much care for denominational labels, and at different times my actions have given people the impression that I'm almost everything across the Jewish spectrum.** My beliefs and convictions about Judaism can be phrased in ways that make sense across a good deal of that spectrum as well. So it's not that I can't understand being flexible about one's affiliation. It just seems to me that there's a huge barrier between "traditional" and "traditional/egalitarian" services -- that's certainly how I experience it -- and the folks who don't seem to notice it, or who discount it with relative ease... well, I don't understand them. I wish I did -- it seems to me that some insight would come in handy as I try to formulate halakhic explanations of my own egalitarian position -- but I don't. Any thoughts? Heck, any reading recommendations?***

  
  * -- Well, possibly agreement about the binding quality of the Shulchan Aruch as read through subculturally appropriate commentaries, for 99% of the relevant parties, and for maybe 95% of the relevant laws. But that isn't the sort of thing that people generally cite as the Number One Reason Why I Love My Shul, y'know?
  ** -- Nobody's ever mistaken me for, say, haredi. Can't imagine why not. *cough*
  *** -- I seem to be able to think of a few interesting and provocative but not offensive memoirs by people who went from Orthodox to non-Orthodox, but not the other way 'round. This has to be a deficit in my reading....

• Come And Play
  

  This entry is my husband's fault.

  You see, we were lying in bed the other night, relaxing after a tough morning of trying to gabbai Simchat Torah* and the World's Fastest Sukkah Dismantling in the evening**, when the conversation turned to the extreme creepiness of Tickle Me Extrem