1,2,3 ich nicht @morchelmeister - Tumblr Blog

love saying "ich krieg die krise" for i'm losing it / i'm freaking out / etc because it translates directly to "I'm getting the crisis". you know the one. THE crisis. the one and only baby. ye ol reliable

glowcowboy

does anyone wanna hold hands until we feel a little braver

its-your-mind

the reblog map is all of us holding hands btw

beautifulterriblequeen

We are each other's night sky. No one is alone here.

dear-ao3

night sky continues to get brighter. theres always people here for you

soft-raining

ryangoslingofficial-deactivated

prismatic-bell

I need answers. Are mermaids kosher? What did your rabbi say???

As per my rabbi, mermaids are NOT kosher, due to the following:

1) If mermaids are like Ariel from The Little Mermaid, then they have human intelligence and free will. This makes them human (whatever King Triton might have to say on the subject), and thus eating one is committing murder, which is against halacha. (She could convert to Judaism, though!)

2) If mermaids are like the original little mermaid, then they have intelligence (possibly of human levels), but no souls and thus no free will. This means they are not human, but they appear human, and thus eating one is in violation of lifnei iver, which means “before the blind” and comes from the verse “do not place a stumbling block before the blind.” In other words: someone seeing you eat the mermaid may assume the mermaid is human, and thus that eating human is okay, and thus they may commit murder to eat human, which is against halacha.

3) Mermaids that do not fit the “human top, fish bottom” tradition of mermaids may not possess fins and/or scales, thus marking them as not kosher.

Thus: Mermaids are not kosher.

jewishpangolin

Big Jewish Mood

flo-nelja

Wait, creatures with human intelligence but no souls are kosher?

prismatic-bell

Yes and no.

There are no known animal species that have human intelligence and meet the kosher requirements for their kind of animal. Dolphins and octopi don’t have fins and scales, rats aren’t kosher because they’re rodents, crows eat dead things and are predators. Pigs are being studied for the possibility of human intelligence, but pork is like...the one thing even gentiles know isn’t kosher. And monkeys and apes would fall under lifnei iver. I’m sure there’s another rule that applies, but off the top of my head I can already tell you they wouldn’t be kosher. (Koko the gorilla might even be a good starting point for an argument over whether gorillas have souls. She had human intelligence, memory retention, understood emotions, and acted of her own free will.)

With the understanding that I’m a believer in “G-d created science, so duh, of course His rules would match up scientifically, anyone who says science is the enemy of G-d doesn’t understand the actual text very well,” I’d say that running through these is a bit of proof to me that G-d is, indeed, watching over us. Or, since I’m a believer in “G-d is a computer programmer,” that we were programmed for it to be impossible to be 1) human-level intelligent and also 2) kosher.

quezycoatl

Elephants are the other near-human intelligence creatures. Are they kosher??? (I'm seriously just curious about this)

prismatic-bell

Nope. For a four-legged animal to be kosher, it must have hooves and chew cud. I’m not sure if elephants chew cud or not, but they don’t have hooves.

instructor144

As someone who’s read the OT twice (not from a devotional perspective, but as someone who finds the world’s various religious texts fascinating) the one thing that leapt out at me during my readings is how so many of the constraints in the Torah -- which a lot of people just write off as one people’s set of peculiar little taboos -- actually make sense from a hygienic/health perspective. From dietary practices to concepts of “purification” and “unclean,” the Jews had a lot of practices that, whatever their origin, kept them healthy. It’s a fact that for most of Europe’s history, when the surrounding gentile populations were dropping like flies, Europe’s various Jewish enclaves had a massively lower incidence of those various ills and plagues. To the point that it was not uncommon for the gentile population to blame the Jews for their ills: “We’re being smitten by this pestilence, and yet those Jews aren’t getting sick! They must be doing this to us!” It’s almost like whoever it was that conjured up the various constraints somehow knew that they would keep the people alive and healthy in a world where they were surrounded by populations who did not practice those sound hygienic measures.

prismatic-bell

YEP.

Even some of the ones that seem ridiculous by modern standards, like “anything a menstruating woman sits on is unclean.” There were no pads or tampons. You bet your ass it was unclean. Whatever rudimentary menstruation containment they’d come up with at that point, it likely leaked and/or easily disarranged itself. You know what you get in a desert climate, living in a tent, with the smell of fresh blood? Predators. like, forget the whole “blood carries disease” (and it did, blood parasites were so common at the time that the Egyptians considered bleeding from the anus normal), you can’t get to the Promised Land if you died of acute wolves. So how to make the items ritually clean and usable again? Fucking wash them. That’s it. They had to be washed.

Or like the “don’t mix fibers of two kinds.” I saw an incredible discussion here on Tumblr about that. Basically, the fibers that were available to the Israelites were linen (lightweight fabric, good for hot weather) and wool (heavy, good for cold weather and rain). Do you know what happens when you try to mix these? You get an unusable mess that will not contain the properties of either fabric. It’s a disaster--a waste of time, labor, and fiber. And if you try to full the fabric (which means a process by which you clean, thicken, and strengthen natural fabrics), the fibers won’t full the same. It’s just bad all around.

Or even, “every seventh year, let your land lie fallow and don’t grow anything.” You know what happens in that year? All the old stalks, leaves, etc. fucking rot. They, in modern lingo, compost. They refresh the soil. They keep you from stripping all the nutrients, so you can continue to grow things. And you can continue to drop as much cowshit as you want on that field to make it nice and fertilize-y during that year. You just can’t grow anything. By the time you come back to planting you’re going to have a nutrient-rich field that’s absolutely raring to provide you with high-quality produce.

This is one of my big beefs with the Orthodox. Ask an Orthodox person about halacha and they’ll say “it doesn’t matter if it lines up with science, G-d said it therefore we do it.” And I’m like . . . one, that’s completely contradictory to the teaching of Torah (which demands you question), and two, the point is, isn’t it fucking fascinating how G-d’s instruction book is scientifically sound. Like we were being, I don’t know, taken care of.

feitanswife

This, thematically, reminds me of the seawater in the concrete recipe thing.

It’s not that historical people didn’t know why things worked, a lot of the times they probably did.

It’s not that they honestly believed “every seven years we have to not farm this area cause that’s what this book says” they were most likely thinking “every seven years we have to not farm this land cause it helps the crops grow much better the rest of the time, which is why it was important enough to write down in the first place”

But they didn’t write that down cause why would anyone think there was another reason? Of course people aren’t going to think that we only do these things because this specific important book says to! That’s ridiculous!

Just like not specifying using seawater in your concrete recipe. Why would you use any other sort of water?

...or using chicken eggs as the standard egg in recipes. When was the last time you saw a recipe specify chicken eggs? It’s assumed, and having to specify seems ridiculous, in what world would we as a species forget that chicken eggs were the most commonly eaten eggs?

....In what world would we forget about how wool and linen work?