L'Shanah Tovah

Happy New Year to all my Jewish friends and fellow-bloggers. This year I actually get to go to ticketed services, as my roommate has "and guest" written on her ticket. I went to the Erev Rosh Hashanah service, and was very moved by the cantor (cantress?), a young woman with a very sweet and nimble voice. I found that I was beginning to be able to follow along in the Hebrew sections of the prayer book -- I can pick out "Israel" wherever it occurs, and extrapolate to everything that begins "Baruch atta Adonai...". I can pick out a Hebrew "L" -- it's distinctive, looking rather like a camel craning its neck over the rest of the letters. The funny thing is, I think it is going to be green. My Roman "L" is a rather dingy yellow -- I didn't figure out until adulthood that it was one reason I didn't like my name almost from the start. At the age of three or four I changed my name temporarily to "Cisa" -- a survival maneuver, to avoid identifying myself with the person who got in trouble -- but "C" is only a marginally more tolerable yellow than "L" and I gave it up fairly quickly.

Was I digressing? I think I was. Oh, yes. Hebrew -- Jewish services. Last week I attended Selichot and the rabbi let me help to dress one of the Torah scrolls in New Year white. I felt rather shy about it, as I always do when included in liturgy that as a Gentile I have no claim to. On the other hand I am often too curious for my own good and once touched the paper of the Torah scroll when it was open, to feel the thick scrollpaper and the soft ink of the Hebrew words, and only a second later had visions of Uzziah.

The Torah scrolls, dressed in white embroidered with gold and silver, made a pretty sight nestled in the ark. It gave me the not-quite-a-feeling that liturgy often does -- a sense of jubilee, a satisfaction taken in a light, sure-footed dance. It is religious in the sense that I believe the pulses of heaven to move that way, but not religious in the sense that it is credal or required in some way. It's extra -- a grace-note that keyholes me into something new and half-remembered.

For the first time something sank in that I had been noticing in my peripheral vision for a while. The focal point of the Jewish sanctuary is the ark in which the Torah scrolls are kept: in which the Word is kept. I grew up among Protestant evangelicals, where casual references to "the Word" are common -- e.g. "I opened up the Word this morning" and, as one memorable joke, "Did you see that wasp in the Sunday School room? I was swatting at it with the Word to keep it off me!" Strangely, in all its forms and translations and hotly contested status in our society, the Bible still retains some of the redolence of the Word of God: the ultimate image of the power of language, of speech, of fiat. Though I wouldn't contemplate trying to swat a wasp with a Torah scroll. For one thing, considering how big and heavy those things are, I'd be much more likely to squash myself than the bug I was aiming at. Not to mention Uzziah.

In the ark of the tabernacle is the Word; and above the little house where the Word lives is a lamp. And it occurred to me that I have seen this arrangement elsewhere besides the temple sanctuary; I have seen it in my church. In every, in fact, liturgical church. In my church, to the side of the altar, is a tabernacle, over which a lit candle is always kept. When I asked what is inside the little cabinet, I was told it is for the reserved Sacrament -- whatever of the bread (usually wafers) blessed at the Eucharist that has not been eaten. In other words, in my church the Word Made Flesh lives in a little house with a lamp over the top, just as in the synagogue the Word lives in a little house with a lamp over the top.

I'm sure this isn't an accident: permit me my little thrill of ingenuous glee at the symmetry of the connection. In any case, it gave me a greater sense of the continuity between Christianity and Judaism -- not credally (and in any case, half the fun as far as I can tell of Judaism is the fact that it has not a creed but a situation of an open Torah and a ready-set-argue starting-gun), but practically. Liturgically. In the Anglican church, I am told, we say that "praying shapes believing." In turn, of course, what and how we believe shapes our behavior, including how we pray. This give-and-take of worship -- the performative infused with joy -- is not, as I have discovered afresh, foreign in a Jewish temple. It is like going to a house in a country where nobody speaks your language, being served a meal that you thought you knew but has a different spice in it that you can't identify -- and then realizing that the bowl you're eating it out of is exactly the same as the favorite one you had as a child. Your hosts don't exactly get what your excited gestures at the bowl are about, but they can tell you're smiling -- and eating -- and that seems to be enough.

I shook the rabbi's hand after the Rosh Hashanah service and said, my Hebrew tripping clumsily over the tongue, "L'shanah tovah." She gripped my hand warmly, with a broad fervent smile, and said, "L'shanah tovah to you."

A Grab Bag

So, the last few weeks have been eventful in that I finished "Shadow" -- which, if you've been following this blog a while, has been long in the writing. It's also just long -- I stopped counting pages after Chapter 23, and it was at 225, and there are 30 total now. Not to mention its snake-like sequelage. I've also updated my fanfiction page to reflect everything that's new. I think.

Also, I got to shake John Edwards's hand when he came to Springfield, which was an unexpected boon! I have some very poorly-taken pics of the rally, some of which you can see, along with commentary, here. I do wish I'd had my brother along; he takes very good photographs. I do wish he'd submit his ground-level photo of the family chickens running (a photo I call "Poultry in Motion") to Scholastic or some other contest. He'd have been a dab hand at photographing the color and swirl of the rally, whereas my photos tend to come out dark and foregroundless.

Speaking of visual artistry, I want to do something new with this blog. It needs to be cleaned up anyway to work with Blogger's new features; right now it looks rather neglected, which is probably one reason its readership has gone down (the other, of course, being the increasingly sporadic posts). But I'm beginning to feel that the task is beyond me technologically. Help?

I spent most of a week in late August at the Rivendell Motherhouse, doing some work on the farm and recovering from the effort it took to finish "Shadow". I remembered to bring my flute and piccolo up, and found that the acoustics of the house were really phenomenal; I managed to play impressively as well, so I think my musical instruments are invited back. There's something rather mythopoetic about playing the Veni Creator Spiritus on a piccolo in the open-air pavilion at dawn on a Sunday morning. I also did a little writing on the subject of hope, which I may post soon, though I don't recall it makes any use of what I learned from Elizabeth Goudge's The Little White Horse, which I read for the first time that weekend. Elizabeth Goudge, where have you been all my life?

My car is still dead. In fact, a mechanic friend has ascertained that both reverse and third gear (which are probably back-to-back with each other in the transmission, whatever that means) are gone -- which means in essence it would need a new or rebuilt transmission. Which would cost half of what my father paid for the car in the first place, and in any case I don't have it. So I got the title signed over to me so that I can dispose of it however I can and find a new car, though how I'll get a new car, strapped as I am, is still a murky proposition. Don't want to think about that frustration right now.

Meanwhile, am applying for another PT library position in addition to the one I have now; the two of them together should more or less equal FT work minus the benefits, which is what most people I know are working right now. I'm thinking about what Screwtape said about people not getting angry about misfortune unless they conceive it as injury, and that the devil's job is to make people think misfortunes are injuries and injuries are...also injuries, I guess, though if one considers an injury a misfortune I suppose it does prolong the suffering needlessly, as it forestalls an attempt at a redress of grievances. Which is in the First Amendment. Which increasingly does not exist anymore. Suffice it to say that I am beginning to conceive certain aspects of my misfortunes as injury, and I don't think Wormwood is responsible for the fact. I have an article on that, too, which I may nerve myself up to post soon, in tandem with the hope one.

Speaking of injuries, I had a linguistic breakthrough this morning in which I realized some history to the word bitch that I ought to have extrapolated before -- I think it must have been triggered by my roommate's fellow paid-staffer at the Kerry campaign, on being told facetiously in the other room that I must be the mooted Republican mole, cried, "That BITCH!" I hadn't had such a good laugh in a long time. Anyway, we've always had a theory that if you're getting called a bitch you must be doing something right, and should take it as a compliment; and no usage of the word in my personal lexicon has strayed far from the cluster of meanings including unpleasant, strident, uncooperative, criminally adversarial, rude. So a few years ago when I noticed in random reading at my job that Richard Ellmann and Ellsworth Mason agreed in translating Joyce's putanna madonna as "God's bitch of a mother," I thought they were rather off. I mean, putanna doesn't mean strident or uncooperative or adversarial, it means whore. (And really, anyone trying to call the Virgin Mary "uncooperative" probably doesn't have much of a grasp on the Gospel narrative.) Then I had my "Oh, DUH!" moment. "Whore" is what "bitch" used to mean, but the word's meaning has been diluted to include any woman whose behavior is unsatisfactory (much as "gentleman" has come to mean not a member of the landowning class but a man whose behavior has a certain dignity and praiseworthiness). You'd think this would be obvious, but I seem to have neglected to puzzle it out to the bitter end until now. So that now you can see people calling one another "bitch" playfully and even affectionately without in the least casting nasturtiums (the only Joyceism I love to employ) at their sexual morality. The word is now even being used to male persons in such contexts, and its former counterparts (such as whore and skank) are undergoing similar treatment (e.g., manho, a facetious term describing an unrepentantly promiscuous man), though certainly to a lesser degree. I believe slut remains precariously the only epithet that retains most of its pejorative power, though I could be forgetting one or two.

I suppose I hardly need to point out that this development arrived as a result of people's ascribing the worst possible shade in character (for a female) to a woman who is not uniformly acquiescent. In other words, if she opens her mouth, accuse her of opening her legs. The interesting thing is that such linguistic practices have been going on since the Iliad, but only within my generation (or perhaps beginning one or two before me) have I seen a widespread re-appropriation of the term itself, however much we can assume from such writers as Juvenal and Chaucer that the spirit of positive, vocal female nonacquiescence (apart from what it calls itself) has been alive and well. Who painted the lion, tell me who? Indeed.

I think that's all the news for today.