he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
untitled
Xuebing Du
Love Begins
Sade Olutola
h
roma★
Discoholic 🪩
One Nice Bug Per Day
oozey mess
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
if i look back, i am lost
RMH
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
Stranger Things
Cosmic Funnies
NASA
Andulka
Product Placement
wallacepolsom
seen from United States
seen from Kuwait
seen from Kuwait
seen from Uzbekistan
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from Germany
seen from Bangladesh
seen from Poland
seen from Bahrain
seen from United States
seen from United States
@dnathan-religion
Ugh
First run in with Orthodox insisting they are the only true conversion way.
Well, that's a debate and a half. But when the Nazis come for you, they won't check your paperwork for which rabbis were on the beit din. And if you're accepted by a massive segment of the tribe, then you're accepted. IMHO.
Wouldn't really be an issue if patrilineal descent was accepted as well as matrilineal, but, yeah.
Filtered the "aesthetic" tag.
It reminds me of the hyperreal notion; a simulation of a simulation.
That Pentacostal feeling.
As I chant the Amidah, my spirit rotates and I feel the ineffable in my spirit, even as I did in a Pentacostal worship circle.
I heard once, a Jew might not believe in God, but Judaism does. And I feel that tonight.
Shalom, ya'll.
essay on thinking
Talking with my wife a while back, she remarked that my following the Jewish path wasn't terribly out of character.
Over the last while - 10-20 years - I've formed the following habits:
I don't eat pork: I get nauseated.
Shellfish does a horrible number on my stomach.
Saturday has become my Day Of Rest.
Study of sacred text is a key personal value.
Disagreement in sacred matters is a key personal value.
they seduced you with learning she said.
Something I was persuaded to after studying serious strength training and other systems of delivering results was the power of ... habitual... work in life.
The systems of thought of successful and functional people started to have a certain resonance with how Judaism is built: the daily prayer, the cycles of festivals, etc.
How I was raised involved the monad diligently seeking the will of God, rather than the community. But, the older I got, the more the community made sense
More thoughts another time on this.
The Booksellers (D.W. Young, 2019)
I have hundreds on the Kindle. And hundreds on paper.
After a while, though, moving the library from apt to apt gets old.
Well, I was going to do a daf notes blog, but I'm not good at being disciplined, and sometimes it's just like... ancient medical practice - *yikes*. Or almost seems like pilpul over exact approaches irrelevant to today. I'm sure there's value but it's hard to see in my modern urban West day to day.
The siddur brings comfort. I think of it as a songbook for prayer. I also just talk to God. He is good, even though I grumble and debate at him. It boggles me that anyone can say the siddur and be an unbeliever. Guess that's the millennial drive in individual authenticity, so, yeah.
Peace out.
Siddur hunting.
I like the mishkan tfila. But it's big. And I question the translation slightly. Wish I knew Hebrew. I have a art scroll. I question the fundamentalism. I just got a Koren Sacks. I like it too. But it's even bigger than the others.
I like the Orthodox take that the Eternal is personal, real, and interacts with us. Not persuaded that He is frum though.
I love praying to Him though.
Say what?!
Daf 57a has a lot of relations. Mom? Sister? Goose? And poop in a dream? Boat floating high ... Or not. I think we can do better here. This is a clear variance in hermeneutic from Tanakh dream intepretations(Daniel, Joseph, etc). Would that the Rabbis had recognized that dreams interpretation belongs to G-d, and left it alone.
bless your heart^H^H^H^H^Hfood
Talked with a local rabbi about the conversion process. We talked about what would be a respectful way to start entering into the Jewish way of life, and I suggested prayers. He agreed and off I go...
As I'm doing dafyomi, in Berakhot, I determined to start working on blessing the Eternal for the food I eat and the drink I drink.
Ya'll.
That's hard. Moving from a casual snack to integrating the awareness of Divine by action into your life? The hallowing of the daily? I fail at it big time (and I've spent years being a rather devout Christian).
The Mishkan T'filah siddur will show up soon, and I'll be poking through some of the earlier Dafs for thoughts on the 3 services. I have a renewal siddur, but it feels very free in translation, I don't have comfort with that.
brakhot 19
idle thoughts on today's daf.
Mishnah
Originating Mishnah - on burial and prayers & the Shema
https://www.sefaria.org/Mishnah_Berakhot.3.1?lang=bi&with=all&lang2=en
Hermeneutics
Hermeneutical differences between talmudic and post-enlightenment times:
A single anecdote - Rav Pappa and falling stones - shouldn't be used as an argument.
ostracization
This seems to be somewhat ambivalent in how it's treated, heavily referring to the total Mishnah. I suppose that if I work through the Mishnah, I'll have some more context here.
Honi
Honi the Circle Drawer makes an appearence.
and if you were not Ĥoni, I would have decreed ostracism upon you, but what can I do? You nag God and He does your bidding, like a son who nags his father
The original account is Mishnah Taanit 3 - https://www.sefaria.org/Mishnah_Taanit.3.8?lang=bi&with=all&lang2=en
Echos of a teaching of Jesus regarding prayer. I wonder if Honi's story was known to the listeners of Jesus.
Boing boing boing for kings
Priests jumping over coffins for kings. This relates to human dignity. Not a common concern in 2020. Secular materialism as an ideology has rendered us into beasts with "spirituality". We need to have a higher regard for common dignity of all men. Although we should, perhaps, retain higher respect for scholars; yet we know all too well what respect for kings does for a society (yet, consider that in the Talmudic time, disrespecting a king had major consequences).
oy
I dug too deep.
I went too far.
When you dig into the Christian roots and analysis of the Bible, you find that some things are... not very well attested.
Trinitarianism. Divinity of Jesus was a big debate. Multi-Personness of God.
Hell. Pick your edition of Hell. Probably not adequately supported by scholarship for what was believed.
If Christianity is the penultimate cap on Judaism, then why did it abandon monotheism? Why did it drop the Jewishness ASAP?
Was did the church teach in the first 100 years after the last NT epistles, and how did it navigate the shift from "Jesus is coming back real soon" to "we have families, people are dying, being born, and life is.... just running along as normal". The doctrines of the NT don't address that.
Why did the church turn into this priest/eucharist thing after Paul left the scene? Why was the sermon on the mount ignored so thoroughly?
Why is Christianity so conducive to the violent rulership that it was adopted?
Why did Hitler get the support of Christians?
Why did chattel slavery get so theologically backed?
How can MLK be a preacher, and yet Christianity - Protestant Christianity - in the 20s support the racism of the US?
I dug too deep. This tension is too hard for me. Evangelicalism doesn't harmonize with the far reaches of the Christian message. Neither does Luther... or even Calvin.
I am certain there's truth in Christianity, and it's located around Jesus. Less so, Paul. But 2000 years of traditions and shifting cultural expectations has crusted all this over. You can't get what's going on in the NT without pulling open the scholar's books. Scottish Common Sense Realism (i.e., the idea you can learn the Bible without studying the background context), has played itself out, and it's been a real mess.
Fundamentally, a valid Christian faith should have been rooted, early on, in Judaism. Not just in the epistles, but in the later letters, until the final split. That split took a while, we know today. Not just by the end of Paul's life. A serious engagement with what their claims were regarding Jesus - the Jewish messiah.
I don't think they did. They dumped it. At least in the early church fathers letters I've read.
But the Divine has been found in Christianity, and in Judaism. And Islam, if you inquire a little bit.
Can you live within the Divine in Christianity? Yes. You have to walk out of much of the churches (at least in your own self), and start living in the Myth. The Great Story of how we, as people, encountered the Divine and wrote it down. But it's very broken in the Christian theological diaspora. The metasystem demands a Right Answer. And honestly, wandering off and following the Stylites or, perhaps, wandering into the UU or other systems with a very tenous connection with Jesus... that just seems empty.
So I'm looking extremely hard at Judaism. Because, frankly, it makes a lot more sense than Christianity. It addresses the major logical and historical concerns I'm seeing more and more.
