For the last couple of decades, Jewish congregations of various non-Orthodox persuasions have been following a trend of making their ritual gender-neutral, at least in the vernacular version of their prayers. The most prominent example of this trend is the elimination of references to God as ‘the Lord,’ a designation that is seen as essentially masculine. In American congregations of the Conservative movement, such references are replaced by ‘Adonai.’ Moreover, ‘Adonai’ is repeated wherever the older versions include the pronoun ‘He’ or any inflected form of it.

Actually, the designation Adonai never occurs in the Hebrew Bible. In all the references that have been traditionally translated as ‘the Lord’ (going back to the Septuagint’s ό Κύριος), the Hebrew has the tetragrammaton יהוה (YHWH), interpreted as Yahweh, the name of the Hebrew God. It is the vowel marking applied to יְהֹוָה) יהוה) that indicates that the reading is to be Adonai (and that has also led to the misreading as Jehovah).

But in Hebrew Adonai means simply ‘my lord,’ or even more literally ‘my lords,’ except that the plural here is normal whenever the word Adon (‘lord’ or ‘master’) occurs in a form modified by a personal possessive suffix: ‘his master’ is literally ‘his masters’ (adonav אדוניו rather than adono אדונו), and so on.

The exception to this rule is the first person singular: in this case the form is Adoni (singular) rather than the plural Adonai. Actually Adoni is often used like a title (the equivalent of Mylord or Monsieur), even when plural speakers are quoted (as in Genesis 47:18, where some modern versions render it as ‘our lord’).

Since, however, the reading of יהוה as Adonai antedates the introduction of vowel marks by many centuries, it may well be that where the vowel-marked text has Adoni the original reading was Adonai (since the raw spelling is identical, אדוני), consistent with the other persons.

What, then, is the point of replacing ‘the Lord’ with ‘Adonai,’ which means essentially the same thing and is just as masculine? Is it the assumption that the exoticism of the Hebrew word somehow neuters it? This would seem to be contrary to the Conservative movement’s emphasis on the study of Hebrew. Since anyone with a smattering of Hebrew knows that Adonai means ‘my lord,’ the replacement doesn’t actually do anything in the cause of gender neutrality.

In fact, there is nothing inherently masculine in the word lord; it comes from loafward (Anglo-Saxon hlafweard), that is, ‘keeper of the loaf.’ True, it has traditionally been applied only to men, but so have many other designations of professions and offices that were open only to men, and some of these designations do in fact have – at least etymologically – a masculine flavor, for example doctor, which in Latin has the feminine form doctrix that in English would have become doctress (by analogy with actress). But in English (unlike French) the application of doctor to women has not presented a problem.

In the United Kingdom there a numerous official position that have Lord as a part of the title: Lord Chancellor, Lord Lieutenant, Lord Mayor, First Lord of the Admiralty and so on. Some of these positions have recently been occupied by women, but there has been no need to change the title to Lady Mayor and the like. The current Lord Lieutenant of Belfast is Lady Carswell, while Naomi Long is the Lord Mayor there. If the people of Ulster can handle a female Lord, then so, I am sure, can Conservative Jews in America.

I have just finished reading Exit Music, and not only was the last of Ian Rankin’s Inspector Rebus novels a pleasure to read, but it was especially enjoyable to read in the Eastern Scottish variant of British English that Rebus and most of his associates speak. When Rebus turns off his torch, closes the boot of his car, drives to his flat and talks on his mobile, I know that I am in Rebus’s Edinburgh.

When I began to read the series, about a year ago, I decided to do so in chronological order. It was a good decision, because each book is full of references to events in preceding ones, even when a summary explanation is given by the author.

The first few books that I found in the UC Berkeley library were the original British editions. Then the American editions began. At first they seemed to be simply reprintings, but eventually they began to be Americanized in the form of changes in spelling (colour/color) and punctuation (reversal of single and double quotation marks). That was still no problem.

But somewhere along the way the language itself began to be yankeefied, or “yanked” as I like to put it for short. Especially vocabulary: flat became apartment (though tenement did not become apartment house), torch became flashlight, and so on. By the time the antepenultimate novel was reached, even the title was changed from Fleshmarket Close to Fleshmarket Alley. But the ultimate in “yanking” was reached in the penultimate novel, The Naming of the Dead. Apparently the text was subjected to some sort of search-and-replace macro, and not only was every instance of mobile phone replaced by cell phone, but the word mobile itself, commonly used in Britain as an abbreviation for mobile phone, became simply cell. This is obviously a risky move for a novel dealing with police work, and in fact there is an episode in which Rebus is imprisoned and then released, but without his mobile phone. When the text reads “he left his cell” it is not at all clear if the reference is to getting out of the lockup or not taking the mobile phone.

I don’t know what led the publisher to abandon the “yanking” of Rankin in Exit Music, but I appreciate the gesture.

Setting aside the language issue, I had another reaction when reading The Naming of the Dead. The novel, whichwas published in 2006, deals with a murder investigation by a man-woman team of detectives, DI Rebus and DS Siobhan Clarke, over the background of the massive anti-globalization protests that took place in conjunction with the G8 Conference at Gleneagles, Scotland, in 2005. The book’s chapters are made up of alternating segments in which the protagonist is one or the other of the detectives.

By sheer coincidence, the novel that I had read just before it was Ça, c’est un baiser by Philippe Djian, a very popular French novelist whose books have, for some reason, not been translated into English, except for one, which served as the basis of the film Betty Blue and was translated under the same title. (The original title of both book and film is 37º2 le matin.)

Ça, c’est un baiser, which came out in 2002, deals with a murder investigation by a man-woman team of detectives (who, unlike Rebus and Clarke, have a sexual relationship) over the background of massive anti-globalization protests  in conjunction with a G8 Conference taking place in an unnamed large city in France. The book is made up  of alternating segments in which the protagonist (as well as the narrator) is one or the other of the detectives, Nathan and Marie-Jo.

Am I accusing Rankin of plagiarism? Of course not. The two novels are very different in plot and spirit. But Rankin, who lived in France for a number of years, may well have read Djian’s novel and been inspired by it. Is it a coincidence that the evil tycoon (a stock character in present-day socially conscious crime literature) is named Brennen in Djian’s book and Pennen in Rankin’s?

In reflecting on my post the other day (in which I waxed snide about French cooking) I realized that what I meant was “classic” French cuisine (whether haute or bourgeoise), and not necessarily the cuisine of France, which has evolved considerably in the half-century since I first experienced it and since Julia Child (and her French coauthors) first brought its gospel across the Atlantic.  Unfortunately most Americans still think of “French cooking” as what Julia Child, and such other apostles as Jacques Pépin, has taught them on television and in cookbooks.

I still remember hearing, from the French professor under whom I had done my postdoc at the Ecole Polytechnique, about his amazement at the salad bar that he had encountered when attending a symposium in Providence, RI, in 1962. Well, by now the buffet de salades is quite common in restaurants in France (though not in “French” restaurants elsewhere).  Under what foreign influence it got there, I don’t know.

What I do know is the influence on the cooking of France from her neighboring countries, whose cultures overlap into French territory. On its fringes, the population of France is, for the most part, not ethnically French. This is true in particular in the six corners of the hexagone: it’s Flemish in the north, German (Alsatian) in the northeast, Italian (Ligurian) in the southeast (Corsica is also ethnically Italian), Catalan in the south, Basque in the southwest and Breton in the northwest.  What’s more, the Camargue in the Rhone delta is populated by descendants of Andalusian Gitanos (it’s the homeland of The Gipsy Kings). The cooking of these regions reflects the influences. So, for example, all along the Mediterranean coast you can find, besides the overrated bouillabaisse, some wonderful Spanish and Italian food.

I still remember that, in the 1980s, the sidewalk restaurants of Port-Bou (on the Spanish side of the border on the Mediterranean) were overflowing with French gourmands gorging on tapas and paella. No more: you can now get great paella and tapas in France, at least in the south and southwest (and of course in Paris). Especially memorable is an exquisite assortment of tapas that I had as an entrée (i.e. appetizer, not entree in the US sense) at a restaurant in Montpellier in 2003. I have no recollection of the main dish.

And tapas are called, in French, tapas. Traditional French cuisine has no equivalent of the Spanish tapas, the Italian  spuntini, the Eastern Mediterranean meze, the Korean banchan or the Chinese dim sum/dianxin. In France, everything — cold cuts and other hors d’oeuvre, cheese, fruit, soup and fish and meat — somehow had to be crammed into the confines of a super-heavy meal.  I had only one such meal in my life, in 1961 at a restaurant in Dijon. It was tasty, but overwhelming. I could not eat for 36 hours, and it killed whatever enthusiasm I might have had for la cuisine française (originally kindled, before I had ever set foot in France, by the writings of Ludwig Bemelmans and Joseph Wechsberg). But la cuisine de France, de nos jours, c’est autre chose.

The film Julie & Julia is being released today, and once again the media abound with references to the late Julia Child as a chef (even Wikipedia calls her that). Of course Julia Child hosted a TV show called The French Chef, but she was no more a chef than she was French. As Tom Colicchio, a television host who really has been a chef, pointed out more than a year ago, “Julia Child was a great TV personality, but when you say the word ‘chef,’ it means ‘boss,’ and I don’t know what she was boss of, but it wasn’t the kitchen. Not to take anything away from Julia; she was brilliant. But she wasn’t a chef.”

The reviews of the film that I have read so far seem to focus on Meryl Streep’s uncanny “channeling” of Julia Child. Good for Meryl Streep; I don’t really care. I never particularly liked Julia Child’s shtick, which, as I understood it, was demystifying something that was never mystical to begin with, namely, the “art of French cooking.”

Her book Mastering the Art of French Cooking came out in 1961, just after I had spent a year as a postdoc in Paris. Back in New York, I reveled in the rich variety of non-French food that was available there, tired of the blandness of steack [sic] pommes frites and the heaviness of bœuf bourgugnon and cassoulet, not to mention the invariably overcooked vegetables. (When in 1969 the French discovered – probably by accident, as with the invention of champagne – that vegetables did not have to be overcooked, they promptly called the discovery nouvelle cuisine.)

The relative dullness of French cooking had already struck me during my first trip to Western Europe in 1958, when I traveled through France between Spain and Italy. In both of these countries I was amazed by the variety of the food, if only by the dozens of different kinds of tortillas in the one and of pastas in the other. In France I had to seek refuge from the monotony in North African and Vietnamese restaurants, and briefly thought that maybe colonialism wasn’t all that bad.

I believe that the mystification of French cuisine in the US is due to the very scant immigration of French people to this country, which meant that there was no need for real French restaurants, the kind that ordinary French people go to, to be established. This gave enterprising French cooks an excuse to serve (or to have served by intentionally surly waiters), at exorbitant prices, something that they called haute cuisine.

Julia Child’s aim, to make this kind of cooking accessible to everyone at home, may have been laudable. But it seems to have led to the sad spectacle of the Julie/Julia Project (the basis of the film), where a young woman spends a little over a year cooking every recipe in Child’s book, and ends up (in her words) “old, crazy, and worn-out.”

I am a socialist. I have never belonged to a socialist party, but I have considered myself a socialist since my teens, some 60 years now. Of the nonrevolutionary, social democrat persuasion, but a socialist nonetheless. And so, when I hear politicians and pundits of the American right wing refer to Barack Obama or his policies as “socialist,” I can only smile inwardly and say to myself, “I wish.”

Even when they call him a “radical,” the designation is pathetically absurd. To me, Obama is the most conservative American President in my memory, and probably since Herbert Hoover.

Don’t get me wrong. To the extent that, in American politics, “conservative” (in contrast to “liberal”) is a catchword (whether as an adjective or a noun)  for right-wing policies and their adherents, then Obama is a “liberal.” But in the common, nonpolitical sense of the word — meaning ‘cautious, averse to deviating from established norms’ — Obama is truly conservative. George W. Bush, by contrast, was quite radical.

In medicine, a conservative treatment is one that does not involve surgery or intervention.  And that describes rather precisely Obama’s attitude to curing the many societal ills that afflict his nation. Do nothing drastic; just keep Wall Street going by giving the banks money; keep gays in their military closets and don’t let them marry; keep healthcare in the hands of private insurers; keep the Bush wars going along with government secrecy and indefinite detention of suspects. To the extent that Bush policies — many of them radical departures from tradition — are merely cosmetic pimples, like allowing roadbuilding in the wilderness, then it’s okay to excise them. But deep incisions? No, at least not for now.

When it comes to dealing with other countries, including “enemies” like Iran or North Korea, I rather like Obama’s cautious approach, a welcome relief from the Bush-era swagger. But in matters of war and security, he shows undue deference to military professionals rather than listen to the wise old adage that war is too important to be left to the generals. In this respect he, a man with no military experience, resembles Lyndon Johnson, who despite his Silver Star saw virtually no action in World War II. (By contrast Harry Truman, a combat veteran of World War I, was not afraid to fire MacArthur when the situation called for it.)

Sometimes Obama sounds as if he wished that the situation he is in would allow him to pursue a bolder course. But he seems to have a visceral fear upsetting the applecart, even if it’s going the wrong way, lest his impeccably conservative attire be spattered by the applesauce made by the fallen fruit.

The other night I watched a TV movie titled Jesse Stone: Thin Ice, starring Tom Selleck, in which his love sex interest was played by Leslie Hope, a very attractive actress who seemed vaguely familiar to me, as did her name. I wondered if she might be a granddaughter of Bob Hope (whose original name was Leslie Townes Hope), but then I remembered: she played Terri Bauer in the first season of 24, when I watched the series and enjoyed it for a mistaken reason.

I noticed early on that most of the actors who played Non-Hispanic White (to use the official designation) Americans were Canadian: Kiefer Sutherland, Mia Kirschner, Elisha Cuthbert and the same Leslie Hope. As a result, I came to the naive belief that the series was a Canadian satire of American paranoia. It was something that I felt was desperately needed in the wake of 9/11.

It was only as the season ended that I realized that the series’ creators were serious. It was then that I lost hope. It was also when Leslie Hope’s character was killed.

An AP news story issued today begins like this:

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama issued a withering critique Thursday of Wall Street corporate behavior, calling it “the height of irresponsibility” for Wall Street employees to be paid more than $18 billion in bonuses last year while their financial sector was crumbling.

“It is shameful,” Obama said from the Oval Office. “And part of what we’re going to need is for the folks on Wall Street who are asking for help to show some restraint, and show some discipline, and show some sense of responsibility.”

I beg your pardon, Mr. President? These are Wall Street types you’re talking about, not software moguls or aircraft makers. I can readily see a computer-science nerd with a great love for his subject making it big in Silicon Valley, or a kid with a love of flying going into the aviation industry and somehow soaring to the top. But finance? What reason other than greed would anyone have for going to work for a Wall Street firm? Spiritual fulfillment? What responsibility should they have, other than for filling their own wallets? (I was going to write “their own and their friends’,” but then I thought of Bernie Madoff.)

No, Mr. President, asking “the folks on Wall Street… to show some restraint, and show some discipline, and show some sense of responsibility” is, as they say in Spanish, asking an elm for pears (pedirle peras al olmo).

OK, Tim Geithner has been confirmed.  So now we have a Treasury Secretary who doesn’t pay his taxes (until he’s caught) and a Chief Justice who doesn’t know the Constitution. What next?

The rumor that Andrew Cuomo is likely to become the next junior Senator from New York reminds me of the time, probably in 1991, when his father, Mario Cuomo, was considering a run for the Presidency. I remember someone saying that he had no chance — that Americans would not elect a President with more vowels than consonants in his name.

Of course, when Americans talk about vowels and consonants, they usually mean letters, not sounds. In fact, phonemically Cuomo is /kwomo/ and consequently has three consonants and two (identical) vowels (which are most often realized as diphthongs of some sort). But in common parlance “vowel” means one of the letters AEIOU and “consonant” means any other letter. And except for Monroe and Hoover, whose names have three of each (but in each case two of the vowel letters form a digraph), all other Presidents of the United States had surnames with more consonant letters than vowel letters.

At last, the pattern is broken. In Obama the vowels win, both phonemically and orthographically.

Update. The latest news is that the new Senator from New York will be Kirsten Gillibrand. The consonants win again!