Irish Shabbat

All right, now that I've finally gotten all that overly metaphorical agonizing out of the way and opened up the blogging floodgates again, I have the space for some happier, or at least less weighty topics. So what else has been going on this last month (that I'm willing to share with el Interneto)? Well--thanks for asking--there's been plenty, good as well as bad. I'll fill in some of the previous weeks' events (and pent-up topics that have been building up behind that last whinge) in future entries, but for now I want to just do a quick entry brought on by what we did last night: having friends over for a combined Shabbat and St. Patrick's Day dinner.

Let me back up a second and explain. Ever since we joined the synagogue, we've been trying to find a way to fit in the concept of Shabbat and its "take a break" philosophy that makes sense for us in our busy juggling lives (oh the irony, yes I know--but if there's anyone who needs to learn to periodically slow down and take a break, it's us). So what we seem to have settled on at least for now is Friday night Shabbat dinners at home. We set the table with flowers and fancy tablecloth, placemats and napkins, we buy a challah and usually a pre-made roast chicken, and we say the blessings over the candles, wine and bread. After dinner we have no-TV family time (which for now mainly means we play games or do projects with Eli after the baby goes to bed). Maybe someday we'll work up to actually going to Temple for services, and maybe continuing the spirit (and observance) of Shabbat into Saturday, but for now this is at least a start. We've been doing it for a few months now, and it seems to have "stuck" as a family ritual. We've sometimes had other people over for these Shabbat dinners, and that's been fun too.

But last night's Shabbat dinner also happened to fall on St. Patrick's Day, which is something we've also traditionally celebrated ever since Josh and I have been together, in a mainly food-oriented way. In other words, Josh likes to use St. Patrick's Day as a good excuse to cook corned beef and cabbage. And since it's hard to eat a whole corned beef with just us (especially these days when I'm not eating beef anymore), we usually invite other people over to eat it with us. So we had Dri and Jim and the Coxes over last night, and since it was Shabbat, where we usually set a fancy table, it got to be a somewhat more formal event than the St. Patrick's Day dinner would usually be. It was a great dinner though--plenty of delicious food (including a fabulous home-made roast chicken Josh made just for me, green chocolate-chip cookies that Eli and I made earlier in the day and Marianne's ice cream that Dri and Jim brought).

What was really interesting to me about the whole night though was the way that both traditions combined into one big happy multicultural mashup event. Part of being an interfaith and inter-ethnic family (not to mention just living in the "salad bowl" country and historical era we do, with its proliferate appropriation and regurgitation of other cultures and eras) is this increasing need/ability to figure out how to do and how to be comfortable with mashups like this. (I've said before, if not very well, that I think that the mashup is the defining characteristic of our current historical era.) Gone are the days of "well we're XYZ so we do ABC because that's what we've always done and that's what we're supposed to do". Now we make our own hodgepodge traditions, cobbled together out of bits and pieces we remember from our own childhoods, beliefs (serious or not so serious) we've chosen for ourselves as adults, random whims, or any other things that appeal to us at the emotional/philosophical space we're in at any given moment. It's that globalized buffet/smorgasbord concept of culture--you take and consume what you want from the grand buffet, in whatever combination sounds tasty to you. And most of the time I think this is a great idea--the more, the merrier, the yummier the meal. But sometimes I worry that all this crazy combining serves only to dilute the original traditions, sending us crashing headlong into cultural relativism (if not moral relativism). Or is that just my own inherited Jewish guilt around assimilation showing through? Hard to say. I think I'll go ponder this some more over leftover chicken and cabbage.