Stray thoughts @straythoughtsmostlyabouttorah - Tumblr Blog

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thespiralboundmastermind-deacti

nativepeopleproblems

Noooooooooooo

aconybell-deactivated20200917

I’m done

shiraglassman

SCREAMLAUGH

asfoisdhfoidjg-blog

Just FYI, the story of the Golde Calf is this week’s Torah Portion!

progressivejudaism

Not the parshat hashavua, but still funny!

straythoughtsmostlyabouttorah

Always funny.

straythoughtsmostlyabouttorah

It’s HHD time again.

So I decided I’d share my prayer/sacred poetry from last year.

The Blare of the Horn

August 17, 2020

The blare of the horn grew louder.

I felt it resonate in my bones, shaking loose all my insecurities.

I am not enough, but here I am.

The blare of the horn grew louder.

It woke up my heart, turning it from the stone of a selfish life

to the flesh of compassion and hope.

The blare of the horn grew louder.

It opened up my lips and I spoke.

I told you all that I am, all that we are. And you, God, answered in thunder.

The thunder grew louder, grew closer.

I was scared, but I stayed.

You, God, told me not to be afraid,

and that you would dwell with me forever.

The thunder grew louder, until only I could hear it. And I answered you, I am a holy nation. Speak to me and the blast of the horn will sound forever.

toastbutteregg

straythoughtsmostlyabouttorah

#AbrahamAndIsaac

liberalsarecool

Just think of a generation of women living with the misogyny and abuse at the hands of the men emboldened by Trump's vile rhetoric.

Think of all the innocent victims of Trump’s racism, homophobia, Islamophobia, and antisemitism.

Think of all the people who died from Covid because of Trump's lies and inaction.

So much damage to so many people.

grandenchanterfiona

I feel like the reason there aren’t any ‘Jewish hero fights the Fair Folk’ stories is because we’d easily get out of that situation.

Like, put Hershel of Ostropol in any situation involving the Fair Folk and bro would talk his way out.

shiraglassman

This is why I’m not really scared of paranormal beasties. But yes, I’d enjoy reading this happen.

chuuyaphobic

Names have power? Give them your secular name and not your Hebrew one.

If you eat their food you’re trapped? It’s not kosher anyways.

They speak in riddles? What, and you didn’t grow up answering a question with a question?

Confuse the Fair Folk with impossible halachic questions: if a man falls off a roof and onto a woman and as a result she becomes pregnant, is he obligated to marry her and is the child a mamzer? If meat is grown in a laboratory from a mix of various animal cells is it kosher, and is it even meat, and what bracha would you even say on it? Is a unicorn permitted to cleanse a poisoned stream on Shabbat using the innate purifying powers of its horn or does it count as work? Can it be justified as pikuach nefesh? Can necromancy be justified as pikuach nefesh, if one approaches necromancy with the understanding that it is just delayed medical assistance?

And if all else fails, you can always get out a fleischig pan, kick ass and take names, and don’t forget to say the blessing for fucking someone’s day up:

BARUCH ATA ADO-NOT TODAY ASSHOLE

shiraglassman

That ending line just killed me so hard omg 😂😂😂😂

thespiralboundmastermind-deacti

nativepeopleproblems

Noooooooooooo

aconybell-deactivated20200917

I’m done

shiraglassman

SCREAMLAUGH

asfoisdhfoidjg-blog

Just FYI, the story of the Golde Calf is this week’s Torah Portion!

progressivejudaism

Not the parshat hashavua, but still funny!

mostlysignssomeportents

Abortion Mobile Privacy Settings Quick Guide

https://digitaldefensefund.org/ddf-guides/abortion-privacy/

[Image ID:

How your phone documents your abortion experience and what to do about it! By: the Digital Defense Fund

Risk: receipt for payment for your abortion and/or travel in your inbox Alternative: Make an email account just for this purpose, then delete it after

Risk: period tracking app shares your data Alternative: Use a privacy-driven period tracker like Euki App

Risk: search history saved in your phone’s browser, and with your ISP (internet service provider) Alternatives: - Use a privacy-driven search engine, ex: DuckDuckGo - Install a paid VPN to hide websites you visit from your ISP - Browse with Tor or Firefox - Use a private browsing window, or delete your browser history

Risk: payment history for your abortion in a banking or payments app Alternative: use cash or pre-paid gift cards where possible

Risk: ad tracking & location tracking from apps, browser history, & social media activity Alternative: in your phone settings turn off location tracking & mobile ad ID

Risk: sensitive text messages about your abortion experience are kept forever Alternative: use an encrypted chat app, ex: Signal or Wire, with disappearing messages turned on (important!)

For detailed instructions for each of the above tips, visit: https://digitaldefensefund.org/abortion-privacy]

forcearama

Full offense, fuck every single one of you who:

"Protest voted" 🙄

Didn't vote at all for reasons unrelated to voter suppression tactics

Has been playing the "both sides" game for however many years because it makes you sound Cool and Very Educated

Has told people who were extremely upset in 2016 that they were being "hysterical" because obviously none of this was going to happen

surprisemoose

I’ve said it before, and I will say it again.

If you want Roe v Wade overturned, but don’t support:

Comprehensive sexual education in schools

Easy and affordable access to contraception

Access to adequate and affordable prenatal care

Paid parental leave

Subsidized childcare

CHIP (Children’s Health Insurance Program)

WIC,

Then you don’t actually care about reducing abortions or protecting children. You just want to punish women for having sex.

gendernihilistanarchocommunist

Incredibly fucking crucial information for Americans where period tracking digitally is concerned: DELETE YOUR DATA, DELETE YOUR ACCOUNT AND DELETE YOUR APPS

headspace-hotel

thinking about how in ancient times, at least people knew that the lives their children would lead would….vaguely resemble their own???

People have always fondly reminisced about The Good Old Days and complained about Kids These Days, of course. But—and I cannot stress this enough—when my mom was born the Internet did not exist.

headspace-hotel

like I’m thinking about how I am a college student and during the pandemic, work, education, and relationships have been almost totally dependent on a network of technology that literally did not exist when my parents were college students.

When my mom was in college, she just wouldn’t have been capable of predicting what college would be like for me. I took a full semester of college from 5 hours away because I can virtually attend class through a pocket sized device that projects my image and voice into a shared virtual classroom where I can interact with my professor and other students. I wrote research papers without physical access to a library because I could read my college library’s books on my computer.

If you’re a Mesopotamian farmer, hitching his oxen to a plow, like…idk, man. I can’t picture myself at 40. I feel like a Mesopotamian farmer, trying to imagine his sons riding John Deeres.

headspace-hotel

It’s so persistently portrayed as this eternal, cyclical thing: Get a job, buy a house, get married and have kids, save for their college, send them off to college. This is the cycle of life. 2.5 kids, buy a house, have a steady career. Just as your father before you did, and his father before him.

Except they didn’t. His father before him didn’t do this, and your son will not live like you. This is not enshrined in tradition. This is not life. This is not how things are, or have been, or how they ever been. Look at it. This beautiful, ageless world of saving for your kids’ college and paying off mortgages and nuclear families. There is no way of life to pass down to your children, no tradition, nothing your father gave you that you can give to your son! You were born into a world that is unintelligible and inaccessible to the children you wanted to inherit it, and you and your children will both die in a world that is as foreign to you both!

I don’t envy the Boomer generation, nor do I have some kind of conceited disdain for them for not being able to adapt to now. So, so much of what defines our lives happened for the first time in their lifetime, and the absence of those things cannot be explained to us. Do you remember what it was like before television? Well…what is “it?”

It’s like our generation’s dim memory of childhood before Internet, and the vast, panicky knowledge that our childhoods were mostly full of a quality best described as the absence of internet, and there is no way to transmit that idea to the kids of today or explain it. We remember it, so, so clearly. It was real. But it’s gone. Annihilated.

meirmakesstuff

There’s a midrash that before he died, Moses was worried about what would become of the Israelite people after he was gone. God brought him forward in time to the schoolhouse of Rabbi Akiva. Moses listened to the discussion but could not understand a thing, and nearly despaired, until he heard a student ask Akiva, “how did you arrive at this conclusion?” Akiva responded, “it follows from what Moses taught.” Reassured, Moses returned to his own time and died.

I taught this midrash last week to a class of about ten 3rd-8th graders whom I have been teaching since September and have never met in person. I asked them to continue the midrash: if Moses made a second stop in 2021, what would confuse him, and what would reassure him?

The youngest kids had a fantastic time imagining Moses trying to use an iPad, trying to understand that he was in a classroom, that we were doing remotely what he had seen Akiva do in person. The older kids wondered if he would be astonished at our level of literacy, or our coed learning.

When I asked what would reassure him they were momentarily stumped: it wasn’t the first time this group has struggled to identify positives about their lives and experiences, except in a guilty “some people have it worse” kind of way. I reminded them of what reassured Moses in the schoolhouse of Akiva: knowing that what he taught had evolved from rather than superseded the traditions of our ancestors. “Who are we learning about right this very minute?” I prompted.

One of them acted it out: Moses peering suspiciously at his iPad, then exclaiming, “They’re learning my Torah in there!” We are not unmoored, we are evolving. It is easier to see the changes than the things that remain constant, but I think there is value, whatever your cultural tradition, in asking “what would reassure my ancestors?”

lazaefair

“The children are using this vast, incomprehensible magical network to mock that damned Ea-Nasir and his terrible copper. Good.”

vrabia

i love to think about how my ipad holds vastly more knowledge than was available to sumerians in 2000 bce, but if one of them saw me scribble away on it with my stylus, they would know what it is! from 4000 years across history, they would recognize this object if they saw me use it! and maybe they’d say ‘you know, we use something like this where i’m from’. and i’d say ‘i know. in school we learn that you invented them.’ and in a weird, convoluted, wonderful and very comforting sense, they invented my ipad too.

Passover thought....

I'm supposed to remember that I, too, was a slave in Egypt. That I, too, was there at My. Sinai.

So you ever really think about what that means? How does it shape you? How should it?

I think I should work to fight systems of oppression. And also learn to relax, because I've worked for so hard, for so long. I saw the plagues, and the terrible things they did. And I saw the plagues of my own time, a reflection of them. I should be in awe of God and the things I've seen. And also I'll never see the Promised Land. I see great miracles performed for me. And I'll still cry when I'm hungry. I'll still struggle with faith. I'll come back again and again.

Am I supposed to learn from this? Do I ever get out of Egypt? The desert?