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.)

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....

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 Extreme Elmo, which led logically to references to Elmo Martyr, The Passion of the Elmo, Zoe as Mary Magdalen, and someone doing a spot-on vocalization of "My God, my God, why have you forsaken Elmo?" All of this, I'm sure you'll agree, could happen to anyone.

But then my beloved husband said, "So would you cast Big Bird and Snuffleupagus as David and Jonathan?" I made a face. "Nah. Maybe Bert and Ernie, though." By the time I realized that Sesame Street actually has fewer significant female muppets than the Tanakh has significant female characters, it was too late -- my brain had already started casting -- and between my own childhood and that of assorted cousins, I have pretty decent Muppet recall. So here are the Chana family's casting decisions for Torah mi-Sesame Street, with commentary:

Adam: Aloysius "Snuffy" Snuffleupagus [This is not random: Snuffy does embarrassed better than anyone else in the cast, and he has a large enough body to be animated by two actors, lending credence to the primordial-hermaphrodite theory of Midrash. But please try not to think about whether this makes Big Bird God or Lilith.]
Eve: Alice Snuffleupagus [Yes, that's Snuffy's baby sister. And Eve was related to Adam how again?]
The Serpent: Slimey the Worm [Typecasting. Sorry.]
Noah: Forgetful Jones [Since Sesame Street lacks an openly alcoholic Muppet, we are going with a more subtle choice. This presumably makes Clementine Noah's long-suffering wife.]
Abraham: Cookie Monster [Again, we are leaning on midrash, but even the recorded instance of Abraham's hospitality to guests must've brought him into an awful lot of contact with food. Of course, all of this works better if you imagine Alistair Cookie in Bedouin garb.]
Sarah: Rosita, Monstrua de las Cuevas [OK, bad Machpelah joke.]
Lot: Oscar the Grouch [And wouldn't you be, too, stuck with that role? I bet Grouchetta wouldn't enjoy getting turned into a pillar of salt, either.]
Isaac: Telly Monster ["Perpetually nervous" seems like a good way to play ol' Yitz -- although for the later scenes, Google tells me that there was once a blind Muppet named Aristotle.]
Rebecca: Betty Lou [Manipulates her dolls.]
Esau: Herry Monster [Big, strong, dumb... yeah?]
Jacob: [Super-]Grover! [Alternatively, E. and J. could be played by the Two-Headed Monster, but there would be serious problems with the whole leaving-town plotline.]
Laban: Mr. Johnson [AKA The Fat Blue Customer In All The Skits Where Grover Is A Waiter. I trust this speaks for itself.]
Leah and Rachel: Pearl and Deena [Does anyone besides me remember Pearl and Deena? Depending on how you look at it, they were the female Bert and Ernie or the Muppet Thelma and Louise.]
Joseph: Guy Smiley [There aren't a ton of successful muppet politicians, are there?]
Pharoah: Count von Count ["... six, seven cows! Muahahahaha!"]
Moses: Bert
Aaron: Ernie [At least, we're told Aaron is the people-pleaser.]
Miriam: Prairie Dawn [Who used to write scripts for all the other Muppets to act out and in general function as an older sister. Also, please note that I categorically refuse to cast Abby Cadabby in anything not calling for Tinkerbell.]
Parah Adumah: Gladys the Cow [Also doubling as the Golden Calf with help from the makeup crew.]
Balaam: Mumford the Magician
Joshua: Elmo? [And suddenly it becomes clear why nobody listened to Joshua when the spies returned....]

Amendments, or suggestions for the characters we left out, are always welcome. Failing that, tune in next week when we seriously consider re-enacting Nevi'im using the characters from The Muppet Show! (And I was wrong -- I think Kermit and Fozzie get to be David and Jonathan.) This post has been brought to you by the letter bet, the number 5, and the blissful sensation of no more holidays for the foreseeable future.

* -- Why oh why do average-strength women persist in believing that they are not physically fit to carry an average-size Torah scroll? I'm maybe 5'5" in heels, I haven't worked out in close to a month, and while I may not be quite up for leaping in the air and spinning with the sefer Torah, I can certainly carry that sucker, circle with a bit of rhythm, and sing simultaneously for a hosafa or so!
** -- It was looking like rain, and we didn't want to repeat last year's fiasco when it stayed up for a week and a half extra and I finally had to take it down by myself because D. wasn't feeling well and there was a storm coming.

I usually do Yom Kippur posts, but this year I had a very odd YK for personal reasons, and the most cogent YK post I feel like making is a plea for new and inventive ideas in break-fast foods.* Instead, I want to talk about Sukkot, the holiday I often neglect to write about because I'm exhausted from the others, although last year I focused on Sukkot apocalypticism, of which there is plenty.

This year, by contrast, I want to talk about happy and decidedly non-apocalyptic memories of Sukkot. I've managed to surprise people before by talking about how much I'd enjoyed Sukkot as a child -- even though I didn't grow up in a Jewish enclave, even though I'm old enough to be behind the curve on the home Sukkot observance meme that's been spreading like crazy over the past 10-20 years. And it's not that Temple Hometown did much in the way of special Sukkot services (trust me, I was Bat Mitzvahed on Shabbat Hol Hamoed Sukkot), or that I ever saw a lulav and etrog outside a rabbi's hands, or even that we had special Sukkot foods to speak of.** But Temple Hometown had the standard semi-permanent synagogue sukkah, and in the early years of my intermittent Sunday School attendance I remember making paper chains to decorate it, standing under its newly cut branches, snagging cake squares from a table inside it, and feeling very simply happy to be outside in a succession of sunny green-and-yellow autumns. That is what Sukkot still feels like to me: sunshine-and-leaves-in-your-hair happy, the sort of happy you can start very young but you never get too old for.

I started young. At some point in my early childhood, probably influenced by a book (certainly, nobody in my family did this at the time), I decided that I wanted a sukkah at home too. So my (non-Jewish, remember) father and I came up with a solution which worked for some years: we took several old tobacco stakes (which usually held up tomato vines), drove two or three of them a little ways into the soft ground under a big crabapple tree's diagonally climbing trunks in the back yard, tied them all together and to the tree with twine, and cut appropriate greenery to drape over the crabapple trunks; one year I think we even managed to attach some cloth walls. The resultant lean-to, which a brisk wind could (and sometimes did) blow over, was just big enough to fit my child-sized picnic table underneath. And so, for as many days as it stood or until I tired of it, I ceremoniously carried some sort of snack out there and ate in my itty-bitty "sukkah."*** There, uh, may occasionally have been dolls involved (shut up). But it seemed obvious that a holiday where you got to build your own playhouse was a Good Idea. Eventually I outgrew the crabapple sukkah -- that tree came down in an ice storm several years back -- and I spent several decades wishing for a good replacement.

The next time I remember feeling happy at Sukkot, though, it was a different set of toys that drew me in. It was midway through grad school, and I was walking to the library with a friend when I noticed a truck parked on the adjacent street. This was the first Chabad "mitzvahmobile" I had seen in person -- I think they were just moving into the neighborhood then -- and the man and two young boys on the truck bed were sitting under a sukkah, holding lulavim, and scanning the crowd for likely-looking prospects. "Ooooh, a sukkah!" I said, loudly, half in surprise and half trying to get them to look at me. They didn't notice me -- perhaps they were looking for men first, perhaps I didn't seem very Jewish, or perhaps they'd overheard me discussing signification in De doctrina christiana a moment before, who knows? -- so I continued on to the library with my friend but doubled back on my own as soon as I'd finished my errand. A few seconds of concentrated staring right next to their vehicle (I was too shy to come out and ask) produced the desired questions: yes, I was Jewish, and yes, I'd like to bench (I would have said "play with") the lulav and etrog. I must have looked spectacularly clueless, since the Chabad guy prompted me to say "Baruch" then "Atah" -- I gave him a disgusted look and went through "vitzivanu" -- but he gamely supplied the final three words of the blessing, showed me the appropriate shaking sequence, and left me with a Chabad calendar and the fragrance of citron and myrtle clinging to my hands like a memory I'd just recovered. I sniffed my palms all the way back to my apartment.

It took several more years, and a move to Boondoggle, before I fell in with people who took sukkah-building and lulav-shaking for granted. Three years ago, telling myself that it was really a sensible purchase because I could show it to my Judaism survey classes and anyway it was the cheap one, I bought my first lulav and etrog set. Last year, a week after moving into our new house in a sukkah-friendly neighborhood and several years after realizing that tobacco stakes are difficult to come by in this part of the country, I finally gave in to common sense and bought a relatively affordable 8x12' steel-tubing sukkah kit from the Sukkah Project, complete with bamboo mats. As I said last year, I would certainly recommend the same kit to others (now that we know what we're doing, it takes less than an hour to put up).

This year, having acquired all the necessary paraphernalia, I am on a mission to get my husband to enjoy Sukkot (I have told him as much). You see, he did not grow up with a sukkah, however halachically dubious, and his feelings about building and eating in one boil down to the repeated statement that he Doesn't Do Camping.**** It was obvious last year that he was indulging me in the whole business of acquiring Sukkot accessories, and the part where he had to go out of town for business the first several days of the holiday didn't really help. Also, while we both love singing Hallel, the 6:30 am starting time for morning minyan during Chol Hamoed Sukkot is not precisely a selling point. But this year there were no business trips, and the first days of Sukkot conveniently fell on a weekend. My mother-in-law even helped out by sending us some appealingly goofy sukkah decorations. D. made it home from work just early enough on Friday (we got the sukkah up with a whole forty minutes to spare before candlelighting), and we actually had a dinner invitation with friends that night, so he got to hang out and eat brisket in someone else's sukkah. Then it was relatively easy to talk him into coming to services with me on Sunday as well as Saturday, and I thoughtfully shoved our lulav and etrog***** into his hands at every opportunity. After systematic guilting from the morning minyan crowd, we even made it to services yesterday******, where there were enough spare lulav-and-etrog sets that he got his own, and I think I saw him starting to smile during the hoshannot. Finally, last night, in search of reading material, he actually started flipping through our less-annoying translation of Mishnah Sukkah of his own free will. Muahahahaha.

Today I will be making pumpkin-pecan bread, and tonight we will have our usual study group celebrating a conveniently timed siyyum in our sukkah -- after I put back the mats that blew off in the storm last night, but that's OK, since it'll give me a chance to put the grape lights on properly. And maybe next year we'll have people over to the sukkah a few more times, and perhaps I can talk D. into eating dinner there by ourselves a little more regularly. One of these years I'd sort of like to cut branches for schach instead of the mats, too. Oh, and eventually we should acquire some small people to make us paper chains, because Sukkot is really all about the toys. And the happy. I don't think this is anything like the original reason we call Sukkot z'man simchateinu -- in Temple times, it probably had more to do with "thank God we got the harvest in OK" -- but it works for me.

Moadim l'simcha, everyone!

* -- Must be dairy/pareve, able to be made at least 24 hours in advance, good cold or at room temperature or after a very short microwave zap, and serve at least 6. Should probably harmonize with bagels & lox. I am basically running through my dairy potluck repertoire.
** -- Actually, Sukkot registers in my mind as the Last Plausible Time To Make Honey Cake, as well as the point at which you start making other honey-sweetened baked goods (pumpkin-pecan bread, yum) to use up any excess honey-cake supplies.
*** -- From a technical point of view, the major problem with this sukkah was that it was invalid because it was underneath overhanging tree branches -- also, most years it didn't have enough walls. Fortunately, these facts do not prevent me from wallowing in nostalgia or identifying it as the Best Sukkah Ever.
**** -- Well, neither do I. Sukkot is different -- that whole indoor plumbing thing, for one. It's like camping for five-year-olds, in the backyard under a sheet with snacks your mom packed in the kitchen.
***** -- If I purchase them using our joint accounts, they belong to both of us, or so I am assuming.
****** -- One or the other of us has been reading weekday Torah for the past four weeks, so we can only be guilted so far.