hello person checking my blog to see if i’m a zionist because i posted something about antisemitism that pissed you off, you can stop looking! i do indeed support jewish self determination in the jewish ancestral homeland — aka zionism. now you can block me and be on your way.
love how i can make a post like this explicitly defining zionism as a jewish equality and land back movement and people will still use this exact post as proof that i support baby killing. y’all will just lean into the brainrot if it makes you feel self righteous.
This has actually been my metric and counterargument.
The Nazis committing the Babi Yar massacre killed 33,771 Jews in under 48 hours, on Sept 29 and 30th, 1941.
That was done while:
Actively fighting the USSR, meaning any resources dedicated to killing were directly taking away from that conflict.
Rounding up the Jews in Kyiv, well outside of their territory.
The Jews of the city were only 20% of the populace.
With 1940s technology.
The conditions in Gaza are completely different... in a way that would make mass killing ludicriously easy.
Gaza is right next to Israel.
Iran, the Houthis, and Hezbollah are nowhere near comparable to the USSR.
Palestinian Arabs make up 100% of Gaza's population.
Israel has a fully modern military.
And yet, there has never been a Babi Yar-level death event in Gaza in nearly two years of intense fighting. Not even a fraction of such an event--the daily death toll, civilians and militants combined, has only rarely gone over 100.
If Israel was actively trying to kill all of the Palestinians, they could have done a Babi Yar-level massacre every hour back in October 2023.
The fact that they haven't shows that this isn't a genocide.
And if we started seeing those sorts of numbers, I would be the first to change my mind... but we haven't, and the desperation with which (supposed) "Pro-Palestine activists" are trying to invent additional death shows that they want more dead Palestinians, and are frustrated that Israel is not cooperating.
I'm like, do they want me to give a number? OK, I'll give a number.
Like, 1.5 million Gazans. We can call it a genocide when 1.5 million, AKA a majority of their population, much as it happened to us, is killed. When 1.5 million Gazans are dead then I will change my mind and call it genocide.
Of course this is ASSUMING we use this ridiculous definition of genocide which is "how many" people are killed and not the intention in killing them lmao but OK let's say genocide is how many people die. 1.5 million.
Maybe we can be even more permissive and say like 600,000 like their fake ass numbers now say 600,000 children were killed (there are not even 600,000 children in Gaza lmao).
I know, right? Back when this war started, I ran into one Hamasnik who claimed that Israel had killed "60 million Palestinians" on the "logic" that it was "ten times worse than the Holocaust". My rejoinder to that was to question how that's possible out of a population of 5 million.
And now we're seeing similar "logic" with claims like that one you just referenced.
Being a largely secular, free-form, mostly non practicing Jew is fine and all, other than the huge amount of guilt I get for feeling like I've betrayed by people and faith... The rising antisemitism makes me more guilty than ever before. It makes me want to go full Hasidic in spite and in support of my brothers and sisters. But I really don't believe in that. I love my practicing friends, however they practice, but I feel like I'm a traitor for not practicing with that same diction
Well, the good news is that there are ways to become extremely Jewish without bringing belief, in the religious sense, into it.
If there are any specific practices you're interested in, remember that they're cultural practices as much as religious ones. You don't have to believe in G-d to have a Seder, you can do it because that's what your ancestors did.
You can also take more secular paths: read literature and poetry written by Jews across history and the world. Learn about Jewish history. Hang out at the local JCC.
Sure, you could start dressing in a skirt to your ankles/suit and black hat out of spite, but you could also become the obnoxious Jew who has a historical fact for every occasion.
We're a broad community. There are many different ways to find a place.-🐞
I don't believe in hashem, although I still respect them (does that make sense ??)
But I go to all the holidays and I know some prayers and I own a tanach, right? I'm basically doing it for the love of the game (aka love of my people)
A few years ago, I was explaining to some non-Jewish friends why there are kosher rules specifically for milk. Not milk products, but just "milk".
"But it's just milk from a cow? Why would that be unkosher?" they asked.
"Well, it's simple but really disgusting. You see, the reason that kosher milk standards explicitly state that there needs to be a Jew present for every step of the process--from milking the cow to drinking the milk, ideally--is because of contamination fears."
"What kind of contamination fears?"
"The kind where Medieval Christians would milk pigs and try to sneak the sow's milk into cow's milk, just out of Jew-hating spite."
"..."
"Yeah. People would go to the trouble of milking a pig and wait for their chance to try to pour that milk into a bucket of cow's milk, just because they hated Jews so much that they wanted us to accidentally break kosher rules. So the kosher rules evolved because of that sort of environment of active spite."
In the last year, pretty much everyone who was involved in that conversation and who hasn't hopped onto the Jew-hating bandwagon themselves has admitted to me that at the time, they didn't believe it, not fully, and now they do.
Because, being blunt, that environment of active spite is in the process of returning after a seventy year absence.
So much of kashrut makes so much more load bearing sense when you consider a community having to survive but being unable to trust the authorities who process their food. If this didn't keep people alive over generations, it would've died out by now.
It's worth thinking about if we lose any of our safeguards over our food supply.
With the FDA being what it is now (going down the toilet), I believe that we'll see a resurgence of food borne illnesses. We've already seen botulism in baby food, ffs. And since Jews follow incredibly strict laws, we're less likely to be affected. Not totally free, because we're obviously going to be affected by things like E. coli or Salmonella on produce. But we won't be affected by tainted meat and dairy as much.
And I think, unfortunately, this will further antisemitism. "Why aren't the Jews sick? They must be contaminating our food!"
Alberta, Canada, has already tried to pass a law banning halal and kosher school lunches. (So they're putting pork into all school lunches? I don't understand how they thought this would work.) It won't be long until someone tries to do that in the US, too.
Why Evangelical Christians Keep Wanting To 'Celebrate' Jewish Holidays
This essay has been percolating in my head for a while, with writeups of various points having been done in explanations elsewhere, but now, with Channukah over and having seen still more examples of exactly this behavior, I'm putting them all in one place. This gets a little... okay, a lot long, so the bulk of it is under the cut.
However, if you need the summary/thesis statement/TL;DR, it's this:
The reason Evangelicals from the USA (and other places that they've influenced) are so keen on stealing Jewish rituals in order to "connect with Jesus" is simple: Their predecessors were a bunch of racists and bigots who had to keep throwing out pieces of Christian practice that conflicted with their racism and bigotry, until the end result is a form of Christianity that has practically nothing left of Christian practice. So they need to steal practices from somewhere else, in order to give their faith any sense of meaning. And the theft victims which make the most sense to them are the Jews.
First off, I want to make one point clear; this is a high-level overview. A full, detailed breakdown of this situation would be a book, and not a small one at that. So I know that I'm glossing over a great deal. I just don't want to write a whole dissertation on this.
With that said, let's get started.
So, in order to understand American Evangelical Christian culture, the fundamental concept is "Schismogenesis"--i.e. the way in which a schism in a culture or religion splinters off a new faction which then makes itself distinct from the old faction, and the ways in which that split tends to express itself.
In Christianity, Schismogenesis tends to be either lateral or reductive--i.e. "we're shifting our focus towards a topic that our old group found to be of less concern" or "we're jettisoning these aspects entirely." It is rarely additive--i.e. "we are adding new rituals and practices as part of the split". Not to say that it doesn't happen (a lot of fringe cults get their start from additive elements), but additive elements in the larger culture tend to come from stable practices and observances (see the Catholic Church in the medieval era for a great example of additive practices in a stable environment, while another example of an additive religious practice is the increased prominence and canonization of Christmas over the last 180 years in English-speaking countries and from there into more of Western Europe... but that was specifically because of A Christmas Carol giving a cultural template that grew popular enough to be endorsed and adopted, not a completely new holiday).
So, with that in mind, let's talk some history, as Blue would say.
Simplifying massively, the Medieval Catholic Church can basically be considered to be a loose theocratic empire over Western Europe, with tremendous power over the subordinate kings and able to bestow or remove legitimacy with a proclamation. As many social pendulums go, we had a period of extreme decentralization in the 1000s CE, followed by increasing centralization and control by the Vatican over the subsequent centuries. Pretty much every time a secular king or noble tried to go up against the Church, they lost. Not every time, and there are some *hysterical* periods and events where someone tried to appoint their own popes (called "antipopes").
Still, by the time the 1500s roll around, you have a powerful, corrupt, rich, and deeply centralized power, with the ability to call crusades, appoint and depose kings, and so forth. The only thing keeping it from becoming a hereditary imperial monarchy is that dang celibacy clause. and even then... well, we get the word "nepotism" from the word "Nepos", which means "nephew", because Popes would appoint their nephews to Cardinal positions, which is the rank below Pope, and the Pope is chosen from among the Cardinals.
Other corruptions included the sales of indulgences--literally being able to buy you way into heaven (which, not incidentally, is how the Church funded all of those gorgeously decorated churches and cathedrals). Now, over the previous centuries, there had been a few other attempts at reforming this incredibly corrupt structure.
Most of those attempts... didn't end well.
We're talking "priests order their parishioners to help hunt down the reformers and burn them at the stake along with their writings" level of "not ending well.”
One man translated the Bible into the local language, and there was literally house-to-house searches for copies, because we can't have the common man be able to read the Word Of God! What would the purpose of the priests be then? Still, the environment is so corrupt that people keep trying to speak out against it.
And in 1517, one German priest, Martin Luther, walks up to a church door and nails a paper on it with 95 points (he calls them theses) of problems he has with the Church's corruption to the door.
At first, Luther tries to be a reformer. He's not looking to break the church, but to fix it. But the Church reacts... poorly. And ends up banning his 95 points of problems and excommunicating him (i.e. throwing him out of the Church entirely unless he repents).
However, this time... there's something new, something that changes the effect from the previous attempts at reform.
The printing press.
Rather than copies having to be copied out one at a time by hand... they can be mass printed. And literacy rates are going up. So while the Church is trying to figure out what to do about this latest reformer--this took a few years--people are reading copies.
And when they get to banning it... well, the Streisand Effect happens. And people read more copies, and find themselves going, "hey, this guy has a point!" (not surprising; he was a professor of moral theology at the university as well; he knew his shit).
So a controversy was spawned. And when the church tried to clamp down on it, the genie was truly out of the bottle.
I won't get into more detail on the Protestant Reformation itself or the Counter-Reformation that followed--there are some good videos on the topic that I can recommend if you're interested--but essentially, we have a hundred or so years of on-again, off-again religious wars in Europe as that Catholic Empire I mentioned at the start of this essentially had a rebellion that wouldn't recognize its authority--an entire breakaway region, a civil war across multiple sub-polities.
The major part of relevance here for understanding American Evangelical Christianity is the Schismogenesis that spawned the Protestants.
Luther was a university professor and academic, and one of his most significant specific issues from those 95 points was with the financial corruption in the Church and how all of that beautiful art was funded with basically selling indulgences to get into heaven. The art itself wasn't the problem, but it was a symptom of the problem.
So as a result of the break, the Reformation, and the Counter-Reformation--generalizing here--Protestants were moving laterally, changing their focus to be specifically academic understanding of the Bible, and Catholics were doubling down on religious art.
This is not to say that there was not any academic understanding in Catholicism, or that there was no sacred art in Protestantism, but as a whole, the two sides moved laterally.
But then we have the colonization of the American continents; at first, it's by Catholic powers (mostly Spain and Portugal), but they're swiftly overtaken by Protestants (at least in North America), with the British, Holland, and elsewhere sending their religious fanatics to the New World.
And, well... If you're a highly trained university professor and Protestant priest, respected in your community, with a comfortable life and home...
How willing are you going to be to pack up your life and move to the American colonies to be the priest in a newly built, crude settlement?
Answer: not very.
So think about that for a moment; who are going to be the people most willing to make that jump?
The fanatics.
Not the settled, middle-of-the-road moderates, not the lazy “I’m just here to do a job” types, not the older members who have already gotten somewhere into their careers. No, the majority of the people who are going to be willing to pack up, leave home forever, never see their family or friends again, and move across the known world to a frontier colony that may or may not survive long-term... the people willing to make that leap are going to overwhelmingly be the zealots who burn with the need to preach; they’ll be the ones who jump at the chance.
As a result, you end up with what’s called a “founder effect” bias, where the majority of the Protestant priests of the new American colonies are the extremists, and are like that for the first few generations; it is well over a century until we see the first colleges founded in the Americas for them to train their own priests--this is where Harvard and the rest of the Ivy League comes from, in fact. But for over that century, the people running the churches in the colonies that would become the USA are the hardest of the hardcore Protestants, because they're the only ones willing to make that jump, and they put their stamp on the religious mold of the New World Protestant Christianity.
And during that time... American Protestantism is diverging from European Protestantism. Kind of hard not to, when there's a whole ocean in the way, and travel times are in the months.
Now, the European Protestants have already jettisoned the veneration of Saints; in their minds, it's too close to idol worship.
But now, with the lack of well-educated clergy and some other fanatics having outsized influence on the colonies... well, I'll put it this way: the Puritans that we so venerate in the US?
They were a bunch of religious fanatics. In the US, we say that they were being "persecuted" in Europe as their reason for leaving on the Mayflower, painting their leaving as a noble and morally superior flight to freedom where they could practice their religion without being persecuted and crushed. It’s a lovely story, but it doesn’t tell all of it.
Specifically, the story glosses over the fact that what they considered to be “persecution” was, "no, you are not allowed to impose your draconian interpretations of the Bible and religious law onto everyone else and create a strict theocratic state according to your extreme stance."
And these are the people who are mythologized and held up as venerable in the American consciousness.
The fact was that American colonies were small, isolated from the mainstream, and the primary people interested in being religious leaders during the early years were fire-and-brimestone firebreathing fanatics.
This occasionally led to some comedy.
Boston was founded by the first group of fanatics from the Mayflower. However, eventually, there's going to be disagreements on doctrine; that's just how it works. And Protestant Christians really have no other mechanism for solving these disputes other than by throwing the offenders out, as they have no central authority like the Catholics do to manage and handle such divisions. So, again simplifying a bit... Boston was founded by the first group of fanatics. They then throw out the people who disagree with them, who go on to found Connecticut. And then the Connecticut colony in turn ends up having internal disagreements, and the people who get thrown out of there end up founding Rhode Island. (And according to some stories, at least one priest and his wife end up excommunicating each other).
Meanwhile, other colonies are founded by economic interests--one was for making glass and shipping it back to England, but they also need religious leadership, and you get similar effects in those places, with the religious culture shifting away from the mainstream in Europe, which is itself also shifting dramatically.
And then...
Well, technically before, but what was coming really took hold over the ensuing generations, so the "and then" is still appropriate.
And then the first African slaves arrive in 1619.
Over the next two and a half centuries, the southern colonies develop into a full-fledged slave-based economy, while the northern colonies develop in other economic directions. And due to the economics of the southern colonies being based entirely on race-based slavery, the theology of the southern colonies starts to diverge to suit and match.
The divergence is not a rapid process, but in the end, over centuries... we have a full religious schism by the 1850s between the North and South, even to the point of being a formal schism in the American Baptist Church (which itself had schismed from the Church of England/Anglicans towards the end of the 1500s; simplifying significantly, they were/are a Protestant-influenced split away from the Anglicans similar to how Continental Protestants were a split away from Catholicism).
Here, as the Southern Churches had fully adapted their theology to legitimize and support a race-based slave state, the resulting schismogenesis made them jettison most of the remaining moral lessons and religious practices of Christianity... in favor of White Supremacy. Quite simply, you can't academically analyze the Bible and look at Exodus and then still go on to support black slavery.
So they jettisoned all of that. This was helped along by how they had so little trained clergy early on and the comparatively smaller congregation sizes.
Also, in an ironic mirror of what happened to pre-Protestant reformers in Europe, anyone who spoke out against slavery in the South was either killed or driven out.
So who is left at that point? The priests and ministers willing to preach from the pulpit that it is the natural state of Black people to be inferior and subservient to White men.
However, if Whiteness is the element of superiority... then it needs to be protected.
Now, Christianity always had a thing with sexual purity dating from its early days. Originally, it was a form of ascetic self-denial (please note the schismogenesis from the "sex between married people is a beautiful thing and a mitzvah" in Judaism) but in this extremely divergent strain of Protestantism, what we get is a focus on the sexual purity of white women as it became of paramount importance to keep the next generation of Whites "pure".
This was by no means limited to the American South, although it was the epicenter of it. Just because the Northerners didn't want to keep the blacks enslaved didn't mean that they wanted to intermarry, so the divergent faith made some inroads there, at least in terms of ideological influence. But it was still not to the same degree as in the South.
And when you had European immigrants come in, especially Protestant Europeans, they were offered a... ahem, devil's bargain.
They can assimilate into Whiteness--which is defined as an absence of Blackness and Catholicism, and shaving off your roots from your old country--and gain all of the benefits therein, or be lower down the ladder of social status in the US.
The Irish stayed Catholic, resisted that pressure to assimilate, and there was a period where Irish were seen nearly as "naturally inferior" as Blacks. But overall, most Protestant European immigrants ended up assimilating in with this pared-down and cut-down Christianity, where you worship Jesus as a totemic figure that you project your own values onto, because his values, as written down, have been pushed aside as inconvenient over the preceding generations, and the tradition of academic study has likewise been weakened into little more than “Bible study groups”, where conformity is pushed and questioning is punished.
Then we have the aftermath of WWII. Church attendance booms, and the pared down Christian cultural experience gets canonized by the childhoods of the Boomer generation; Christmas, Easter, and... not much else. There's also a cultural shift in the attitudes towards Judaism in the wake of the Holocaust--the previous institutional antisemitism gets pared down, basically out of guilt; the old antisemitic biases are still there, but it's seen as impolitic to voice them; it's mostly because it's hard to claim that your country is "the Savior of the Jews" when you're still abusing the Jews in your country, plus the association with the Nazis.
It takes a while to percolate through, but by the 1960s, Evangelicals are faced with an issue that they "solve" in an unconventional manner. Specifically, they are having extremely little luck with converting Jews, which is something that is required by their Dispensationalist theology (that's a whole other post, but in essence, they believe that Jews need to mass convert in order to bring back Jesus for the Second Coming). And they can’t continue with their previous aggressive efforts of explicit missionary activity, because that’s no longer completely legally or socially acceptable to the extent it was before WWII.
So they created what can only be described as a "fake religion"--what is a denomination of Christianity theologically, but one that (ab)uses the symbols and rituals of Judaism to make it look Jewish, culturally. Labeling their creation "Messianic Judaism", this new religious movement was essentially set up as bait--an institution that looked Jewish to the untrained eye to try to trick Jews into joining and ultimately converting to Christianity and the worship of Christ, with specific doctrines (“milk before meat”) to hide the truth until they had their victims ensnared. Ironically, it has had extremely little luck with converting Jews--enough to be tragic, but not enough to be an existential threat on the scale that they wish to be--but conversely, it has had an incredible degree of success in attracting American Christians looking for spiritual meaning and connection.
And the reason for that success is that mainstream American Christianity had been so trimmed down by schism after schism to have practically nothing left of emotional or spiritual substance to it. Consider: what is left of Christianity when it has been made into nothing more than Whiteness and unquestioning worship of Jesus--but not as a moral figure, but instead as a mirror which echoes back whatever you want that figure to say about society and culture? What is left when the dogma and doctrine have been pared down in order to "get butts in pews"? When the rituals are so flattened as to feel immaterial? When the psalms have been replaced by pop Christmas songs and praise bands? When the text of the Bible itself is ignored or demeaned as “Liberal nonsense” and the moral lessons within are actively sneered at?
Well, the answer is "Not much." In mainstream American Christianity, there are two (bare bones) holidays (Christmas and Easter) with extremely little ritual associated with them, and a single ritual outside of that--baptism. Everything else is just essentially the white supremacist culture completely divorced from the original religious teachings.
There are effectively no rituals, no ceremonies, nothing beyond pure faith in Jesus (whose teachings you're discouraged from reading and analyzing because they challenge the established order). And as a result, this becomes a self-reinforcing cycle of associating Whiteness and Americanness with this divergent Christianity. (This is also a part of why the whole “War on Christmas” nonsense has gotten as much traction as it has; not only is it asking an actively supremacist culture to have consideration for the needs and presence of people not like them, it is also asking them to tone down one of the few ritual elements associated with their religion as part of that consideration. It would be sad if it wasn’t coming from such a place of insecure entitlement and cruelty).
But there's also something bizarrely new in this cultural and ideological space--the Messianics. They're not really that successful at converting Jews, but they function as a permission structure and voice within the Christian community that vocalizes why Jewish traditions and rituals actually belong to the Christians. This is after 1700 years of it being formally against Christian doctrine to follow any Jewish rituals (decided upon at one of the early ecumenical councils where they also agreed upon the divinity of Christ... but due to the aforementioned lack of academic knowledge, this is not a hurdle to the people doing this). And while Messianics aren't formally part of the Evangelical movement, they're still funded by it (to the tune of almost a billion dollars a year) and there are a massive number of congregants moving between them, and there is a significant amount of ideological cross-pollination as a result. There is a degree of irony at work here, as the initial plans for “Messianic Judaism” back in the 1960s was to attempt to push Christian theology into being adopted into Judaism by means of using Jewish rituals to get the Wooden Horse past the gates of Troy, but instead, we are seeing Jewish rituals being adopted by Evangelical Christians instead. It would be hilarious if it wasn’t so offensive and cruel.
In the end, this is a large portion of why American Christians have spent the last generation getting increasingly grabby with Jewish traditions in order to "connect with Jesus". Simply put, it's very difficult for American Christians to add anything to their religious practices in terms of emotionally resonant ritual; individual congregations might be able to add small things, but they'll get pushback from the wider socio-religious space. In essence, any time someone might propose a new ritual, it would be viewed with intense suspicion, if not outright xenophobia born of the exclusionary biases against the other Christians on the other side of the schism and the focus on Whiteness. In a culture that sees the active hands of Jesus and Satan behind every happenstance and coincidence, how would they "know" that this new ritual is actually honoring Jesus, and isn't demonic in origin? Furthermore, they exist in a religious culture that puts tremendous emphasis on Faith Alone--Sola Fide--that actively disincentivizes rituals and ceremonies. This especially goes if the proposed ritual seems Catholic in any way, as there are centuries of literal demonization of Catholics, including calling Catholics agents of Satan or the Antichrist.
But they need ritual. They need something to do, not just believe. They need a ceremony or action which helps them anchor their sense of self. But they can't just create something that'll have wide appeal--their culture isn't stable enough, and isn't predicated on any identity beyond what they're Not. They're Not Black, Not Catholic, and that's just about it. Whiteness is a concept of exclusion, not inclusion, and their conception of Christianity is an extremely xenophobic and exclusionary one--one where typically only the faithful, and often only the faithful of their specific splinter movement, are given salvation.
So, in that environment, where yoga is seen as having potential demonic influences, but humans need rituals (we invent them, we canonize them, we feel better for having them), and they can't take anything "non-Christian", or anything Catholic, and DEFINITELY nothing Muslim... what's left for them to take to fulfill their need for ritual?
Judaism.
Via the permission structure and influence of Messianics, who help lay down the path, plus the basic supercessionism built into the structure of Christianity (i.e. the Jewish Torah is the Christian “Old Testament”, and anything that Jews create is seen as actually belonging to Christians), Evangelical Christians have solved the problem that's been giving them so much anxiety, their lack of ritual: take it from the Jews. And they believe that they're "correcting" these rituals, because they can add Jesus to them, with an almost hysterical degree of relief. “This is what Jesus would have done!”, they tell themselves, pretty much always incorrectly (with the remainder being “extremely incorrectly”).
The irony is that the same early Christian councils that canonized the divinity of Christ--which is pretty much the sole thing that these Evangelicals actually agree on!--are also the same councils that banned Christians from observing Jewish holidays on pain of excommunication. But they don’t care about that because, as noted previously, they’ve cut out the academic knowledge that would give them that awareness, and they would rationalize those councils as being “Papist” and thus not valid.
So that's where you get Christian seders and Christians celebrating Channukah and the rest... rather than going back to their cultural roots and bringing back saints' days. Because their predecessors have spent the last four hundred years chiseling their god and their religion down in order to fit into smaller and smaller boxes, motivated by racism, bigotry, and hatred of other Christians. And since they hate other Christians so much, they’ve shifted towards treating Jewish culture as something they’re entitled to, on top of Jewish scripture, in order to replace what they’ve lost over the generations so as to fill the gaping holes in their hearts and souls.
But they carved those vast caverns of irreverence themselves, and it does not mean that the Jews--a group whose ancestors preserved those rituals while being persecuted by the ancestors of these Christians--need to willingly give up their culture to them.
a lot of jewish tradition is just good life advice tbh. like praying daily or multiple times a day is a genuinely good way of remembering to stop and think for a little bit on a regular basis. going to shul regularly means you're getting out of the house and seeing people. keeping kosher in some way means, at the very least, you're being mindful of what and how you eat, not to mention that in a time before modern food safety, properly prepared kosher food would prevent cross-contamination and thus limit the spread of disease. shabbat is the foundation of the modern concept of the weekend, culturally instituting regular rest. there's a very balanced and regular rhythm to an observant jewish life that our ancestors took great pains to pass down to us so that when we, their descendants, are faced with times when we don't know what to do, we could turn to them. the entirety of jewish history rests on parents teaching children how to live and i am never more grateful for that than when i have absolutely no idea how to live.
When my cousin died and I was very very angry bc I blamed her mother for it (very long story and not the point), my rabbi said, "the best thing you can do is to do what our ancestors have done, observe the rituals of death, give your feelings time to exist, and then move on from them at the appointed time as best you can so you don't get stuck."
And... it wasn't perfect? Nothing about grief is? But it really fucking helped to do that.
Sukkot forces me to take a vacation and spend time outside with my family. Shabbat makes sure I don't work myself to death. Even just saying the Shema in the morning and at night reminds me I'm not alone. I'm connected to a people that were here before me and will be here after me.
1. Jews do not recognize Jesus as anything but a human man who probably existed in some capacity at some point
2. We do not celebrate his birthday. He is just some guy to us.
3. It is not a personal attack on you if we don’t celebrate your favorite holiday.
4. Chanukah is not the most important Jewish holiday, its just the only one you know by name because it happens roughly around Christmas time.
5. You can say or do whatever you want, we just think you’re annoying. At the end of the day, you’re still gonna get school or work off on Christmas and Easter while I have to chose between my religion and my schoolwork every year on Yom Kippur and Rosh Hashanah.
6. You are not the victim. However, unfortunately you are usually the main character.
I think goyim really truly just cannot comprehend the extent to which Jews think of each other as family. When I meet another Jew I don't think HELLO FELLOW CORELIGIONIST. I meet them as a second cousin I see at Thanksgiving.
In Talmud, there's -- for lack of a better word -- a scene where a gentile who wishes to convert is brought before the court, and the judges ask him why. Doesn't he know how hard it is to be a Jew in this world? They're persecuted and disliked and it's fucked up! Why would you want to take part in that if you don't have to?
And the rule is, if the gentile responds, "Yeah man, I know, it sucks, but I kinda do have to, and I know I haven't experienced what you have but I'm ready to face that, I'm ready to stand with you to be Jewish," they take him away and teach him the law so that he won't accidentally break Kosher, because from that moment he is considered a Jew.
The first Jewish person I told about considering converting said to me, "I love being Jewish and I can't be anything else, but I wouldn't wish it on anyone -- why would you CHOOSE this?" and I said, not knowing even what Talmud was, "I know, it's fucked up, but it calls my heart."
I'm not yet Jewish, but I draw closer year on year, and as I always say, Judaism has been here for millennia -- it'll be there when I get there. It's not the worst time in the world to be a Jew but it's fucking scary, the hardest time in my lifetime, and yet it still calls my heart.
And that first plate after the Yom Kippur fast is great.
So I hope it has been a meaningful fast for my Jewish family, and I wish you all a good year, and pray for your safety. Yom Tov! I hope you see my name in the book of life next year.
A whole bunch of trans people are commenting to say this is how they feel about gender so I'm here to tell you all that yeah it's exactly like that! You have to follow the call of your heart! Something in your soul knows that you gotta do it, and if it's hard then it's hard but your people are waiting for you on the other side. And they'll be there no matter how long it takes.
This. My sponsoring rabbi even had a half-joking word for it: "we call converts 'Jews by choice,' but from what I've seen in forty years of conversions, it's more like 'Jews by compulsion'." And he was NOT wrong.
Yup. I didn't decide to become Jewish, I decided to obey G-d hitting me upside the head with a metaphorical two-by-four (it was in fact literally a Torah and not quite upside the head but close) and saying "you're Jewish, dummy. Get with the program."
i was born and raised jewish, but i understand this urge so deeply. if I hadn't been born jewish i know i would have found it.
I don't exactly believe in the concept of the soul, but I don't not believe that there are people with a jewish soul. because how else do you explain the calling to be a part of judaism?
Vintage Israeli stamps depicting the Seven Species designed by Zvi Narkiss (צבי נרקיס, Israeli, 1921-2010), 1958.
The Seven Species (שבעת המינים, Shiv'at HaMinim) are two grains and five fruits mentioned in the Torah as special produce of the Land of Israel: wheat, barley, grape, fig, pomegranate, olive (oil), and date (honey). These staples were central to the diet of the Jewish people in the Land of Israel in biblical times and hold spiritual significance, as shown by the unique blessing recited after eating them to thank G-d for the land's abundance. Their first fruits were offered as bikkurim in the Temple in Jerusalem.
