Simply Jewish Things @silly-jewish-joys - Tumblr Blog

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Hello Jumblr! I'm Silly Jewish Joys. I'm trying to collect nice little stuff about Judaism so we have a bright spot and collection of wins and joy at being Jewish. Things like images of old Synagogues or Jewish holidays. Or Jewish pride flags. Or even adorable pets.

Politics is not allowed. Israel exists and is a Jewish state. Its existence will be treated as a neutral nonpolitical fact.

Feel free to send ideas and submit posts. I will do my best to go through them though I am very slow. Love you all. Stay strong! Am Yisrael Chai! (The Nation of Israel/Jewish people Live)

#jumblr #jewblr #frumblr

greenandhazy

gentiles on this website: “The Old Testament God is cruel and vengeful!” actual Jews in my synagogue yesterday: “My favorite part of the reading is when it says the Torah is not in heaven so it’s too far to reach, it’s not across the sea so we can’t get it, but that it’s in our hearts… the idea of having that be so close, of being so close to something divine, that thrills me.” “And here, where it says ‘the Lord will delight in you as he did in your fathers’, that’s such a beautiful thing. You know, God is this all-powering being, and God delights in us.”

gentiles on this website: “You can’t be an atheist and religious!” actual Jews in my synagogue yesterday: “I’m just not buying any of this. I was born during the Holocaust and I could never wrap my mind around this omnipotent all-seeing God, and usually I’m a little moved by this, I try to be hopeful, but when I look around the world now, I just don’t buy it! If I really believed there was a God, I would resent him.” [still wears a prayer shawl and attends synagogue regularly]

gentiles on this website: “Religious people never question what they’re told, they just followed blindly!” my actual rabbi: “Sometimes the Torah can be like an older relative whom we love dearly, and who has a lot of wisdom to give, but who also says things that cause us pain, that we find offensive or wrong. And I think the wrong instinct would be to pretend we don’t hear what they’re saying, or to cut them out entirely, or to be guided by them into thinking and behaving in offensive ways. What we need to do is engage the Torah. We need to wrestle with it, and try to understand it, to figure out where it’s coming from and learn how we can progress from it, because the Torah is not unchanging. It belongs in each of our hearts, and it changes for us as we study it, as each generation challenges its old assumptions.”

yells-a-lot

My favorite thing about being Jewish is that I can question it. We have sooooo many books of people being like “this doesn’t make sense” “why do we do this” “what does this mean” we’re taught to ask questions.

In class when we’re learning Genisis I’m able to say the theory of all the stories being made up to teach morals. I can ask my teacher how he “knows” G-d is real.

There’s this story of a group of rabbis debating something, I think it was about an oven??? Rabbi A says one thing. Rabbis B, C, and D say another. Rabbi A tells a tree to move to prove his point and the tree does, the other rabbis say it’s not enough. He does the same by having a river flow backwards and walls cave in. The other rabbis say you cannot use those to prove a point. Eventually G-d’s voice appears and agrees with Rabbi A. Rabbi B stands and says that the Torah is not in heaven, and that it is now in the hands of people to make the decisions.

Judaism is so much more than a “religion that worships one god”

G-d has and always will be seen as our parent. They love us and want to guide us to what is right, but in the end it is in the hands of us, the children, to form our own paths and to grow up. To take our parent’s teachings and understand them in our own way. And through it all, we will know that our Parent will love us and be proud of us no matter what.

-signed a rabbis daughter who’s not sure what she believes, doesn’t fit into a Jewish sect, loves to argue, and is a proud proud Jew 💙✡️

themysteryofhistory

women at the western wall, around 1900-1920

source: library of congress

enki2

thegreenmeridian

Met a drunk Jewish American in the bar, he was slapping his kippah on his pals and I showed him mine. Got a free beer because “we’re in the triiiiiiibe bro! Mahhhzel fuckin taaaahv!”.

I love us. I do. I had dinner at chabad and bonded with my tribe, I went out for a beverage while waiting for my coke guy and bonded with my tribe, I’m going to bed in a hostel that also contains a girl from my tribe who I bonded with earlier when she clocked my Hebrew necklace.

This is what the goyim don’t get. All of us are family. All of us. Drunk randos, the chabad rebbetzin who I’m sure has figured I’m queer and trans and says not a word and sent me home with a challah, hostel girlie I gave my book to… family. All of them. People can get that the Irish side of my family would still be in Ireland if not for famine and the British. People can’t seem to get that the Jewish side would still be in Israel if not for millennia of Romans and Arabs and Christians and, and, and…

All of us are alive because some ancestor somewhere left at the right time or hid at the right moment or survived the unsurvivable. That’s a weight we’re born with, whether we’re raised Jewish or learn of it later or whatever other ways there are to be a Jew. Hell, even converts. So many stories of converts are people who were otherwise oppressed and found their homes with us. To be a Jew is to survive and to celebrate living in, as one of my favourite books* puts it, “a world that is heartbroken”. In a world that wants us dead, literally or metaphorically.

*(The book is Minyan by Eliezer Sobel, I got it in a second hand bookshop in Boston and nothing has impacted me as much since I read Catcher in the Rye as a mentally ill and deeply closeted teen. Fully recommend.)

undeadcrimson

Fuckkk Im so awesome Jewish women are so awesome can everyone cheer for Jewish women

vintageisrael

Holocaust survivors, Ida and Yishaya Yankovich, with their daughter, Tova. Haifa, 1955.

snissel613

I think one of my all time favorite takes is that sheidim used to exist, but then the Rambam paskened that they don’t, and well, he is the Rambam

jewish-microwave-laser

me when ive lit the shabbat candles and im about to say the bracha

lioryaakov

malte-laurids

I’m so sorry for this yall!

notaplaceofhonour

turns out it’s not shofar away after all

magical-girl-coral

Whenever I see an apocalypse setting with heavy Christian themes and the entire cast going crazy over this possibility being the end times/rapture/whatever, I'd like to imagine there is a nice area of Jews minding their own business watching smoke blow from the neighbours and deciding for once they can clean up their own mess.

edithsweetithh

can't just leave that in the tags op

fromchaostocosmos

@hachama too funny and true that I couldn't just let it stay in the tags

maimonideznuts

Guess who has officially survived for two years!!!

Isn't modern medicine the best!

Honestly has mostly sucked, the rise in Antisemitism means most of my friends are gone so my support network evaporated, and I am often too sick even to go to my medical appointments, and I can't do leisure outside of the house because crowds/respiratory infections=death.

The hopeful note is rapidly advancing CAR-T therapy and it's potential to cure my disease. Isn't modern medicine the best! Behatzlacha Rabah you funky scientists, and please hurry up. I am so fucking tired.

maimonideznuts

By far the best message I have received in response to this is "Happy Anniversary"

10/10, I am being 100% genuine that it has me grinning 😺

Thank you💖

indecisiveavocado

Hooray! You're still alive!

jewishtransdyke

ruthandestherlovechild

CONGRATS ON BEING ALIVE. 🫶🏼

maimonideznuts

Thank you, and...

Response to your tags, you can say it parasocially if you want, but I'm genuinely not a big deal.

#mazel tov!!#l'chaim!!!!#jewish joy

goose-onthe-loose

No I'm not frum anymore but I will NEVER shut up about the complete lack of orthodox representation in media. THERE. IS. NONE.

I've never seen an orthodox character in a movie, or book, or tv show, outside of the very niche genre produced BY us, FOR us.

"But what about Unorthodox--" No. That's about someone who used to be frum. That's a completely separate thing.

Do you have any idea how much that would have meant to as me a kid? To see or read about even ONE character in mainstream media who was like me? To know that someone even knew people like me existed?? And accepted it??? It would have meant the world.

And so, to the authors and screenwriters and character designers and podcasters and animators and EVERYONE working in the entertainment industry, I say:

Give me Chaya's and Perel's and Basya's and Devorah's. Baruch's and Chaim's and Avi's and Tzvi's.

Give me girls wearing long-sleeved shirts and skirts that go past the knees.

Give me boys with yarmulkes and tzitzit.

Give me characters saying "Do you wanna come over for shabbos/yuntif?"

Or, "hang on, I need to go daven shachris."

Or, "Is it Kosher?"

Give me bubbes and shuls and cholent and tehillim.

Give me explicitly orthodox representation.

And if you won't do it for me, then do it for all the others who feel invisible.

We're in the theaters and the bookstores and spread across all the internet, and we see you.

Why can't you see us, too?

animatedamerican

When I wrote stories as a kid, if they were set in the real world and not in some fantasy setting, the characters always, always had English names.

I grew up Orthodox. I went to private religious schools. The people I knew personally almost all had Hebrew names, including me and both of my siblings.

But the characters I wrote didn't, because nobody did in any of the books I read or the TV shows I watched or the movies I saw, and little me wanted to write like a real writer. And that meant English names.

Coming to understand this as an adult was painful. It still is. I don't know if I'll ever be over it.

(I am still grateful to @seananmcguire for naming a character after me in one of her horror novels, and making that character cover her hair. It matters, and she understands why it matters.)

koshercosplay

@animatedamerican you genuinely just blew my mind.

I also grew up Orthodox, going to all-girls Orthodox schools, in an entirely Orthodox community. Nearly everyone I interacted with on a day-to-day basis was an Orthodox Jew.

But I never, NEVER, wrote Orthodox characters, and I still haven't. I had that same mentality - I wanted to write something real. Writing an orthodox character like myself would have been weird and cringey, and I wanted to write something like the media I was consuming.

I never realized this was something I had to unlearn until this very moment. Even now, when I write Jewish characters, they're almost never orthodox, even though I myself am orthodox. I'll write secular jewish characters occasionally, because they just feel like they fit into the story better.

but that's probably only because I've never SEEN an orthodox character in a story like the ones I write. Of course it doesn't feel right. I have nothing to base it off of.

This is also probably why the book Spinning Silver felt like such a revelation, to the point where I'm still thinking about that story months later. It affected me so much because I had never read anything like that before. This mentality has been affecting me for my whole life, and I didn't even consciously realize it.

Representation matters so so much.