cast iron? yeah thats a pretty common spell to learn
you come onto my post and be funnier than me
skillet issue
Peter Solarz
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Misplaced Lens Cap
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
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let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
hello vonnie
Not today Justin
Today's Document
YOU ARE THE REASON
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@keshetchai
cast iron? yeah thats a pretty common spell to learn
you come onto my post and be funnier than me
skillet issue
The Cairo Geniza is a blessing
TIL one of the candidates running for Governor of Oregon in the Democratic primary is a woman calling herself Rabbi Fora. I was looking around on her webpage to find out where she got ordained, and I was confused to learn that her only listed education was a BFA from a private Catholic university.
And then I found screenshots the absolute wildest Twitter thread Iāve ever seen in my entire life:
āI didnāt wanna be a Rabbi despite the fact that Iām actively campaigning as a Rabbi and selling myself as a Rabbi. A random guy asked me to be his Rabbi, despite the fact that Iām not a Rabbiā how could I say no? I kept reaching out to real Rabbis, but ālefty Jewsā donāt get calls back from congregational, establishment Rabbis. They definitely ignored me because Iām āleftyā and not because Iām pretending to be a Rabbi.
So for Jewish people: Iām not a Rabbi.
For non-Jewish people: I am a Rabbi.
Hope that clears some things up šā
Follow upā Fora came in third in the primary with only a few thousand votes. Nobody expected a strong showing from her, and we didnāt get one, but Iām still shocked that a few thousand people voted for her.
A little over a week ago, I sent the āRabbiā a very polite email, specifying that I was a fellow lefty Jew and trans woman. I asked some basic clarification questions about her ordination and mentorship. Fascinatingly enough, I never heard back.
Weird. I guess lefty Jews donāt get emails back from non-congregational Rabbis.
the sartre quote vs the insatiaable jewish urge to make a good argument
Iām honestly so extremely over having to pretend that Reform, Conservative, etc are valid movements. They arenāt. It isnāt Judaism. There may be some Jews in the movements, but the movements arenāt Jewish and the āconvertsā arenāt Halachically Jewish. If you donāt want to keep Jewish law, donāt convert to the ākeeping Jewish lawā religion. If you want to pick and choose how you keep Jewish law, donāt convert to the ākeeping Jewish lawā religion. If you think Jewish law isnāt binding, donāt convert to the ākeeping Jewish lawā religion! Iām so over it. Orthodoxy (a term Conservative and Reform Jews have placed on us, by the way!) is simply the framework in which Jewish law eternally binding and unchangingā¦aka Judaism. Creating a whole new religion where Jewish law isnāt binding or is able to be changed as you please is not Judaism, itās a whole new religion masquerading as Jewish. Please stop acting like contracts can just be amended by one party without the consent of the other party.
This is going to piss a lot of people off but sorry I donāt know what to tell you. You went the route of essentially going to a non-accredited university and now youāre mad that your useless degree canāt get you into law school. š¤·āāļø
..
anon i assure you orthodoxy did not exist 200 years ago the way you think it did lmao
Per the Talmud, conversion necessitates only:
mikveh,
brit milah as applicable,
a sacrifice while the Temple stands (not currently) and
learning / motivation / beit din (bundling these because the beit din judges learning and motivation so theyāre kind of inextricable).
Therefore, halachically, converts who undergo these steps are fully Jewish.
Non-Orthodox converts do this.
They are fully, halachically Jewish.
End of.
Per Halacha at least.ļæ¼
Orthodoxy has added its own reinterpretations. And Iām not opposed to new interpretation in general, I believe that each generation adds to our knowledge, we learn more and improve, etc etc, but to pretend that Orthodoxy is More Authentic or somehow Unchanged is asinine.
Examples:
the Talmud specifically accepts conversion for the purposes of marriage (Yevamot 24b:6), whereas Orthodox Jewish groups today do not
the Talmud does not say you have to send your children to Jewish as opposed to public schools in order to be a valid convert but Orthodox Jewish groups today do
Charedi clothes are not ancient Israelite clothes. They were not wearing fur hats and black coats in ancient Judea.
the Talmud also indicates that many people had pretty limited Jewish knowledge immediately post conversion, indicating that the Orthodox practice of only converting people once they are up to community standards is novelļæ¼
And again, I donāt think itās wrong that Orthodoxy has its own interpretations of Halacha, just as Reform and Conservative do. We are one people but we are not automatons who always think and feel and need the same things. Someone needed to figure out how to navigate electricity, airplanes, IVF, chemotherapy, and other things that did not exist in Talmudic times.
Just generally, I think that every person on earth would benefit from sitting awhile with the concept of āwith very few exceptions, everyone always thinks theyāre right.ā Thatās just being a person. Most people donāt wake up in the morning and go āyou know what? Iām going to be a bad person.ā Or āIām going to do Judaism wrong.ā Definitely people do that. But we all think weāre right. Weāre all only human.
Anyway, Nonnie, if YOU want to cut YOURSELF off from us, I canāt stop you but⦠We all think weāre right. Youāre not special for that. 
I think a lot of people have a picture of pre-Haskalah Judaism as a culture in which everyone was scrupulous about keeping the mitzvos and that this golden age came to an end with the creation of Reform Judaism. But the reality is there have always been Jews at varying levels of observance within Jewish communities. There are complaints from rabbis and prophets going back to Moses about how the people are Doing Judaism Wrong and need to get back on the derech.
The reason the Torah reading for Yom Kippur is a list of sexual prohibitions is because a lot of Jews in that era only attended shul on Yom Kippur and the rabbis wanted to make sure they knew the rules regarding sexual immorality (since that's a lot more complex than the rules for murder and idolatry).
Now, that's obviously more about people born into Judaism than gerim, but my point is that what it means to be Jewish and observance of the mitzvos have always been closely related but not identical.
I also think a lot of Orthodox Jews would be surprised at the diversity of mitzvah observance among Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist Jews.
Brought to you by the All Theodicy compilation of SMBC, coming 2035.
Check out the bonus panel on the site.
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the monkeyās paw is really curling on the whole āthey only talk about mass shooters/attempted mass murderers this way if theyāre whiteā thing here
diversity win: the guy who tried to massacre more than a hundred Jewish children worked at a 4 star Lebanese restaurant with a mean shawarma
I return with the necessary Dara Horn excerpts:
āThe delayed clarity on what exactly happened in Jersey City [2019 shooting] muted some of the public empathy that instantly followed the previous attacks. So did the identities of the attackers, both of whom were Black, and their targets, who were Hasidic Jews who, it has progressively become clear, many otherwise enlightened Americans view as absolutely fair game for bigotry.
This was obvious from reporting within hours of the attack, which gave surprising emphasis to the murdered Jews as "gentrifying" a "minority" neighborhood. This was remarkable, given that the tiny Hasidic community in question, highly visible members of the world's most consistently persecuted minority, in fact came to Jersey City fleeing gentrification, after being priced out of long-established Hasidic communities in Brooklyn. More tellingly, as the journalist Armin Rosen has pointed out, the apparently murderous rage against gentrification has yet to result in anyone using automatic weapons to blow away white hipsters at the newest Blue Bottle Coffee franchise. What was most remarkable about this angle, however, was how it was presented in media reports as providing "context."
The "context" supplied by news outlets after this attack was breathtaking in its cruelty. As the Associated Press explained in a news report about the Jersey City murders that was picked up by NBC and many other outlets, "The slayings happened in a neighborhood where Hasidic families had recently been relocating, amid pushback from some local officials who complained about representatives of the community going door to door, offering to buy homes at Brooklyn prices."
ā¦New Jersey's state newspaper, the Star-Ledger, helpfully pointed out that "the attack that killed two Orthodox Jews, an Ecuadorian immigrant and a Jersey City police detective has highlighted racial tension that had been simmering ever since ultra-Orthodox Jews began moving to a lower-income community"āeven though the assailants never lived in Jersey City, and apparently chose their target simply through internet searches for Jewish institutions in the New York area. The Washington Post began its analysis of the murders by announcing that Jersey City "is grappling with whether the attack reflects underlying ethnic tensions locally and fears that it could spark new ones" even though the rest of the article described in detail how "longtime black residents and ultra-Orthodox implants alike say that they haven't experienced significant ethnic tensions here." Nonetheless, readers were informed, "the influx of Hasidic residents comes as many of the longtime black residents feel increasingly squeezed." This was all about gentrification, the public learned. The assailants, who wore socially acceptable clothing, were expressing an understandable communal sentiment. The newly dead Jews, on the other hand, were members of the unharassed majority, despite being the country's top hate-crime target according to the FBI. They were also rich, despite experiencing the same poverty rate as the rest of New York and New Jersey. On top of that, they wore unfashionable hats. So it kind of made sense that people wanted to murder their children with high impact explosives.
I was not able to find any similar "context" in media reports after the 2015 massacre at a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, or the 2016 massacre at an LGBTQ nightclub in Orlando, Florida, or the 2019 massacre at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas frequented by Latino shoppersāall hate-crime attacks that unambiguously targeted minority groups. In each of those cases, as was true in Jersey City, media coverage included sympathetic pieces about the victims, along with investigative pieces about the perpetrators, the latter focused on how perpetrators were drawn into violent irrational hatred⦠No one covered [the] "context," because doing that would be bonkers. It would be hateful victim-blaming, the equivalent of analyzing the flattering selfies of a rape victim in lurid detail in order to provide "context" for a sexual assault.ā
ā Pages 211-213
Someone is asking what the difference is between Judaism and Christianity on r/religion and I wish I could remember where I saw someone writing an answer that wasn't oriented around Christianity first. As in, instead of doing: "Christianity believes ___, but Judaism doesn't" it was instead "Judaism believes ____, but Christianity doesn't."
Queen Esther was a young Jewish woman hiding her identity inside an empire that wanted her people gone. And when the moment came where she could either protect herself or risk everything for her people, she chose her people. She fasted for three days, walked into the king's throne room uninvited (which could have gotten her killed), and changed the entire course of Jewish history.
Purim is really a story about how the people who seem all-powerful aren't always as secure as they look, and how one person's courage at the right moment can unravel an entire evil plot. Esther was probably was terrified, but she moved anyway because she understood that she was exactly where she needed to be for exactly this reason.
I love Mordechai's words to her, "Who knows whether you came to your position for just such a time as this?" Every generation has its "such a time as this" moment and somehow we're still here, every single time.
×× ×¤×ר×× ×©×× š
Copyright Ā© 2026 Ketubah Ring. No reproduction, printing, resale, or use without permission.
Imagine living so long that you become the only person left who actually remembers the truth.
Serach bat Asher is one of the coolest women and the ultimate old soul of Jewish history. She is the only person who appears in the Torah during the time of Jacob, and the time of Moses centuries later.
Legend says she was blessed with immortality after she played her harp for her grandfather Jacob to tell him gently that his son Joseph was still alive. Because of that song, she became the keeper of every secret the Jewish people have ever had.
She spent the next several centuries carrying the keys to every Jewish secret. She was the only one who knew the secret password to prove Moses was actually a prophet, and the only one who could find Josephās coffin hidden at the bottom of the Nile. Without her, we couldnāt have left Egypt.
When Moses showed up to free the Israelites, the elders didnāt believe him. They went to Serach (who was already hundreds of years old) and asked if he was a fraud. Serach asked, āWhat secret code did he use?ā They said he used the phrase āPakod Pakadetiā (I have surely remembered you). Serach said, āHe is the one. That is the secret password my father Asher told me on his deathbed.ā
I illustrated her with a massive set of keys from every era she witnessed, from ancient Egypt to the study halls of the Talmud, acting as the bridge between all our stories.
My favorite legend is when she heard the Sages debating what the walls of the Red Sea actually looked like when they split. They were coming up with all these complicated theories about dark stone or brick, and Serach stuck her head into the study hall and corrected them: āI was there. It didnāt look like that. It looked like windows of clear glass.ā
I love that energy, the woman who doesnāt need to theorize because she simply remembers.
Shabbat Shalom š¤
Copyright Ā© 2026 Ketubah Ring. No reproduction, printing, resale, or use without permission.
Judaism.jpg
Deeply funny to me this still gets regular notes
ā Jun Togawa as Lobster Princess in āUtopiaā 1985 ā
ashkenazi x sephardi sapphics <33
watercolor, colored pencil, ink, marker, gel pen
(hebrew text says the words for love in ladino, hebrew, and yiddish! - amor, ahava, libe)
Reading the tomes the anon left and holy projection, batman šš
I'm so tired lol
i am sorry for not being clear enough and also for letting my frustrations get in the way of explaining my point
usa jewish spaces is the first time where I saw that being halachic mattered and mattered a lot. and it's the first time that i felt rejected from a jewish community. not by you, (and I should have been more careful with "turning your back" because that was an abstract expression of my feelings to me, but badly worded, and I'm sorry). but by what seems to be (and i hope i misunderstand) a collective refusal to admit, that being halachic matters only on the inside. on the inside i am fully gentile, and i will be your shabbos goy and will have fun about it, on the outside i am fully jewish because i have the look. this outside includes members of my own family who are not jewish btw.
that's why i tried to reach out to you about the embryo. it was not a success, and i was not trying to dismiss your struggles of being a convert. it's just that that asshole is going to lose friends because of that egg.. and even then it seems that they wanted to be halachic?
and i am scared because i will not survive the rejection by the community. if my neighbors decide that it's a great time for a pogrom who will help me? you! so i'm scared that the biggest community of jews in the world cares so much about being halachic
also no, people who really care that i am not halachic now will not stop caring about my familial relations if i convert, unless they are literally a rabbi and this is a religious concern. if they are like that they are like that, and they are not accepting neither me, nor very likely you, and definitely not the embryo guy
Genuinely, earnestly: this conversation was never about your experiences and was not a roundabout way for me to say that I would disregard an antisemite attacking you for you having Jewish features.
It's also not a secret message that American Jews will leave other Jews to rot on the basis of halakhic standing. I literally have books on my shelf right now that were written in the late 60's and 70's and which discuss how to get involved with helping Soviet jewry escape the USSR.
I also, notably, do not care if orthodox Jews think I am not halakhically Jewish enough for them. I just don't! All they need to know is I studied with a sponsoring Rabbi, I went before a beit din, I accepted the mitzvot, said I would be a Jew, and I immersed in a mikvah with 3 rabbi witnesses, a slatted screen (as a woman, for tsnius) and one mikvah attendant. If they don't think that is good enough, that is a them problem, not a me problem. I don't feel the need to litigate this with anyone.
Good news: the majority of religiously active American Jews are not Orthodox! So their opinion is not representative of the majority of American Jews! And also: many American Jews are just not religiously active at all and would very much care about you and your well being on the basis of your Jewish heritage alone. Hell, my local Jewish family services runs refugee settlement programs for the entire state. So as a result, the community helps resettle like, Egyptian Coptic Christians and other non-jewish refugees like that all the time, and you can think we're going to ignore you, specifically and personally for not being a halakhic Jew?
It's like you're under the impression that HIAS doesn't exist or doesn't assist people who are not halakhically Jews.
Other good news: you have wildly speculated about this egg person and what will happen to them next and what they might look like. And we don't even know if they weren't literally just an antisemite trolling. We have no idea what they look like. We don't actually know if they'll lose friends (weird thing to say, like...they would have to go around announcing this whole scenario and also: who the hell wants to be friends with people who would object to your heritage?). And literally no one is stopping them from getting in touch with a Rabbi or joining a JCC or doing whatever the hell they want.
I even encouraged them to do so!
You are projecting here.
Right of the bat, I want to say that Iām not fighting with you Iām talking with you and I donāt mean to upset you. I am maybe a bit of a dick but not on purpose, and I think that you being a dick was also not done on purpose. I am just saying that from my perspective, culturally, your position seems to be very strange.
First of all, I was not talking about patrilineal! Sorry, I was reacting originally to this
āBut as a Jew who converted, I am so tired of basically anyone else claiming they are unambiguously Jewish and implying conversion is both unnecessary and beneath them, and then throwing a tantrum when everyone else says their local rabbis may still deem it necessary for them to convert in order to remove any ambiguityā.
And then
āYou still managed to act annoyed or upset that God forbid, you might have to convert as if it is beneath you somehowā
Sooooooo it kind of is definitely about me and people who are like me?
I donāt understand why you are jumping to conclusion that itās about patrilineal Jews. Itās not. (Im way worse than that!) Im sorry I didnāt reread the og post and mixed eggs with sperm. I have, I swear to god, forgotten about the ordeal with patrilineal Jews at the time. Literally Itās about you saying that there is only one way of being Jewish - religiously. And itās news to me because, yes, I am ambiguously Jewish, I know that, but if I convert that ambiguity will not go away. Iām not disputing that you are Jewish, but my complicated interfaith intercommunal fucked up family will not magically disappear. I already am a bit Jewish. Conversion FOR ME wonāt change that particular part. Iāll just become more religious. Two things can be true at once. You are Jewish through conversion, more Jewish than Iāll ever be, because I was born ambiguously Jewish. I canāt truly choose Judaism because like like you did, I am already. In my beautiful mind, I will not perceive myself less or more of a Jew if Iāll convert. I am already jewnough (sorry). And for Nazis too.
(Also English IS not my first language but I obviously can differentiate between the words āspermā and āeggsāā¦ā¦ā¦ā¦ I mean egg is kind of a 1st grade word and sperm is international. obviously there might have been another power at play, like me forgetting who done what. That hurts my feelings, that you thought that I donāt understand the word egg, and didnāt even suspect that Iāve mixed something up, is what Iām saying . Like itās part of what Iām talking about, you immediately thinking that Iām patrilineal or that I am either stupid (egg??) or malicious. I am neither).
Also re ethnicity, I of course know that it doesnāt include genetics. I also think that it is disingenuous to imply that ābloodā wasnāt important to humans, it so was. They were maybe less obsessed with ābloodā than we are obsessed with genes, but itās because we have soooo many shiny new toys like 23 and me and stuff. Everyone is obsessed with it now, itās strange to just. Ignore it. Of course the embryo would want to know more, why not? In modern world, genes are facts (however stupid it is). Their life has changed when they found out. Trust me, some of their friends will start treating them differently now.
Also please about Reddit being an international space,,,,,,,,,, come on.
But I do feel like a lot of USA Jews are turning their back on people like me. And I donāt understand why!!! Iām not stepping on your toes. There is lots of space, we are all dead anyways. Some Jewish people are Jewish regardless of what a rabbi said. I am ambiguously Jewish, but youāve basically said that my gruncle would had to convert to be considered Jewish and itās mind blowing to me that a fully Jewish person raised by a Jewish mother with a Jewish father dead in Holocaust would have to convert because his dad decided that he is a secular communist and refused to set fut in a synagogue when he was a teen and then he died, and they were from USSR? Culturally I am absolutely flabbergasted at that idea! Canāt say that Iām not judging, I am, but mostly I am curious that someone would have the audacity to tell that to my lovely gruncle who is buried in Israel and all that?? Like he didnāt go to synagogue at all, but being Jewish was so important for him. For all of us? Idk.
You highlighted only part of the important bit anon, and it excluded the part I was frustrated by.
"claiming they are unambiguously Jewish AND implying that conversion is both unnecessary and beneath them." My complaint is people acting like conversion is beneath them, and that conversion is something only lesser people need to do, and that as a process, it is something to be avoided at all costs. The idea that someone is going to throw a tantrum at the very notion that they need to speak to a Rabbi who might still suggest conversion is my problem ā because they're throwing a tantrum over the notion of being similar to, or seen as, a convert. I'm tired of people acting like it's a unique insult to convert.
Then you literally go on to say "I was born ambiguously Jewish."
Well then, you're not who I am talking about??? You're not claiming to be unambiguously halakhically Jewish???
You LITERALLY used the word I used?
"conversion wouldn't remove that ambiguity." I mean it quite literally does. That's the whole point of converting. Conversion removes ambiguity regarding halakhic status of Jew vs ???.
Conversion isn't a magic wand removing things like family baggage or interfaith relationships or cultural/historical trauma or anything else.
I was working with the information I had. Not trying to be mean, but genuinely unsure if you were actually fully confused:
1. You seemed to not understand the key point of the original person I was talking about re: egg donor
2. You told me you weren't from the US and didn't specify another anglophone country so I had to assume it was very possible that English isn't your first language and my wording was unclear or confusing to you somehow which is why you started discussing fathers and patrilineals.
I'm not saying that to be mean, I literally had to clarify a very important point about the original question being responded to, in order to make sure you weren't misunderstanding me.
Again: I turned my back on no one. You are projecting assumptions here based on only half of my statement that - by your own admission - doesn't even include you.
I mentioned that someone ELSE said they knew of people who converted after the shoah to deal with the loss of records in order to remove any ambiguity. I was not the person who made this statement, I was not the Rabbi(s) who suggested it, I didn't even say it was the correct decision. I merely quoted someone else saying they knew people who did this.
And, to be blunt, it's weird that you're continually acting like that is an American Jewish issue. A lot of these things happened in Israel. Your gruncle, if he committed Aliyah, probably had documentation that Israel accepted stating that he was a Jew.
From Easy Aliyah, for those claiming Jewish ancestry:
For those claiming Jewish ancestry:
Birth certificates establishing Jewish lineage
Must show clear connection to a Jewish parent or grandparent
May require apostille certification for international validity
Translation into Hebrew may be required
For the former Soviet Union, birth certificates (or marriage certificates) often listed "nationality" as Jewish
Soviet/Russian Internal Passport showing Jewish nationality
Extremely valuable for immigrants from former Soviet countries
The infamous "fifth line" (pyataya grafa) listing nationality as "Jewish"
So this isn't ...an invented American Jewish thing. It's also well known that Israel has different requirements for Aliyah than for being considered halakhically Jewish. They also have tracked those differences by numbers (see for example, the discussions on the 1990's post-soviet Aliyah Wikipedia page).
The fact of the matter is that Israel has been heavily involved in the push to get people to formalize their status via conversion, and Israel is the one constantly debating whether or not this is important and how quickly it should be done. Post-soviet emigration literally was a big factor in discussing how to potentially convince people to formalize their Jewish status under halalkha via conversion. It's arguably more of an issue in Israel because things like marriage are handled by the religious courts, and if you're not religiously and halakhically Jewish, you can't get married by a Rabbi in israel. You can qualify for Aliyah as a Jew, and still not be halakhically Jewish and that obviously impacted a lot of former Soviet immigrants.
This isn't a uniquely american thing. I want to stress I'm not even agreeing with how Israel or the Israeli rabbinate handles this issue! I'm just saying that the issue exists, and it's far more pressing outside of the United States and this is not some weirdly American attitude when it's far more of a huge deal in Israel.