Animal Appetite

After graduation at the top of the puppy kindergarten class, he and Marsha entered a basic pet obedience class, then advanced pet obedience, and continued to shine. In the meantime, Marsha started teaching Nickie an impressive repertoire of tricks. All on their own, Marsha and Nickie worked out a wonderful little routine that tickled Professor and Dr. Goldbaum, and turned Nickie into the perfect, nuisance-free canine companion.
    The nuisance part emerged when Marsha hit the dog-book section of the Newton Free Library and learned of the existence of American Kennel Club trials, titles, and ribbons, and of the various other rituals and honors of what I pursue as the religion of my own ecstatic choice. So Marsha started plaguing her parents, who had no idea what she was chattering about, but eventually located someone who did. Consequently, in addition to classes with a religious scholar, she got lessons from me. With her other teacher, she read the Torah. With me, she studied Barbara Handler’s Successful Obedience Handling: The New Best Foot Forward. Barbara Handler? Truly, she is a real person, an obedience judge as well as what her name proclaims. Here in dogs, we take for granted these little signs of meaning and harmony in an otherwise random and dissonant universe. I told Marsha so. In a rather different fashion, perhaps her temple conveyed the same message.
    To become a bat mitzvah, Marsha had to wait for an arbitrary date, her thirteenth birthday. Nickie, however, earned his C.D.—-Companion Dog title—in three straight trials. Twice in the ribbons. Brag, brag. Although my principal contribution to Marsha’s success had been to drive her to and from the scenes of triumph while enjoying her company—she was a really cute, bright kid, and the dog was brilliant—she was irrationally grateful to me.
    So that’s why I got invited to Marsha’s bat mitzvah, which took place in a temple in Newton so Reform that its spacious interior was almost indistinguishable from a Congregational church, except, of course, for the absence of crosses and the presence of what to my New England WASP eye looked like an astonishingly large number of people for any day other than Christmas or Easter. But I’m no expert. I spent most of my childhood Sundays in the company of golden retrievers under the revival tents of dog shows, and except for switching to malamutes, I’ve stuck with the family faith.
    I’d attended only a couple of other bar and bat mitzvahs, so I’m unqualified to review Marsha’s and will limit myself to reporting that there was more English and less Hebrew read aloud at hers than at the others and that everyone, even the rabbi, refrained from referring to the deity by a gender-specific pronoun, but consistently talked about God and God’s whatever, instead of His, Hers, or (heaven forbid!) His or Hers, as if speaking about revered sets of monogrammed towels. The high point of the service arrived, I thought, when Marsha walked as confidently and briskly to the pulpit as I’d taught her to do in the ring and delivered the speech she’d written. Her topic was the gory story from the Book of Judges about Jael, the wife of Heber the Kenite, who slew her husband’s enemy, Sisera, by driving a nail through his head. Indeed, just like Hannah Duston! As far as I knew, Hannah, however, was a heroine, plain and simple, who’d killed her captors to survive, whereas, according to Marsha, the ethics of Jael’s deed merited deep debate. Only later did I realize that I’d missed the essence of Marsha’s interpretation and thus perhaps the quintessence of Judaism—that the ethics of absolutely everything were always subject to endless reexamination. Debate and reexamination were, in fact, Marsha’s specialties. As she’d patiently explained to me, a certain portion of the Old Testament had to be read on schedule everywhere in the world on a given Saturday. The yearly cycle began in the fall, and the portion about Jael would be read in January or February. Consequently, Marsha had had to concoct a complicated explanation to justify a bat mitzvah topic that didn’t really correspond to the allotted portion for this Saturday in November. As I’d told Marsha, I understood perfectly: The American Kennel Club, too, had a yearly cycle of dog show weeks, and I had been comparably inconvenienced when, for example, the schedule made the Ladies’ Dog Club show fall annoyingly close to Memorial Day weekends that I’d