#jewishposting

[lioncircus]

I cant afford 44 candles so this is the hanukkah setup we're working with this year

[leastproblematic]

something I don’t think the vast majority of the pitt fandom understands is that Judaism isn’t just a religion but a culture. and in fact, for Robby and his positioning in time and geography and what he’s said, it is likely more a culture to him than a religion, though it is definitely both to him in some capacity. and this misconception is common, I’ve had to explain this to many of the people in my life, so it’s super understandable! because Judaism is a religion, very much, but I see a lot of people saying things akin to “oh, Robby doesn’t believe in god anymore, he’s lost his faith” and that seeming like an end point for his Judaism. and this makes sense, if your reference point for religion is christianity and you view the two as analogous.

but Judaism is an ethnoreligion, meaning that even if you are non-practicing, even if you have no faith or do not believe in god (like a surprisingly large number of Jews!), you are still Jewish because it is your culture, your heritage, your identity. when I first came out as non-binary as a teenager and felt that Judaism had too many gendered practices, I told my mom I wasn’t going to be Jewish anymore. and she said I could stop practicing, but I would always be Jewish, because I was born from a Jewish parent and I have Jewish ancestors. I’m always going to be Ashkenazi, which describes my relationship with place and ethnicity and origin, and it is a subculture within Judaism.

we have sub-cultural groups that developed based on where your Jewish ancestors lived, each with their own unique languages and foods and customs for prayer and gathering, often stemming from mixes of the local secular culture and ancient Jewish customs. many of the practices that we follow today have religious origins, and are certainly still observed for religious reasons, but so many Jews do them because they also have deep cultural meaning, because they connect us with our ancestors and diasporic Jews around the world. and some of our practices are just things other Jews before us did, that we do too now, without any sort of divine instruction, simply because it is cultural to us.

so Robby, as a reform Jew, raised by a presumably more observant grandmother (as older generations tend to be), who does not “talk much” to god and perhaps does not believe in god at all anymore, likely feels more connected with Judaism as culture and ancestry. but also, it’s hard to pull one from the other and differentiate. I don’t believe in god, I attend high holiday services, why? because I should, because I feel connected with every other Jew on earth that does or acknowledges the holiday in their own way, because it reminds me of family and where and who I come from. it’s all sort of intermixed, but just know, if a Jewish character loses their “faith” or “belief,” they are still irrevocably Jewish.

[aiidenssoup]

my first hanukkah 💙🤍💛

[risottofan7]

i would keep kosher but meat and cheese together is like my favorite combination ever. oops

[jouissanceangel]

illustration from a yiddish-esperanto primer, “esperanto far arbeter” (“esperanto for workers”), published in warsaw, 1931

[leastproblematic]

dr. robby's this place will break your heart. but it is also full of miracles in the speech he gives at the end of the day of the pittfest shooting and there is nothing so whole as a broken heart from hasidic rabbi menachem mendel of kotzk are so similar in meaning. that i wonder if robby internalized this piece of wisdom from hebrew school way back.

[leastproblematic]

I think about how robby says that he lived with his grandmother growing up, as if he instinctively anglicizes it, even though he likely has only ever called her bubbe to her face. it’s likely just a writing choice, to make the scene understandable or to reflect Noah’s own use of the word grandmother in his life or something of the sort. but I like to think about what this means for robby, the filtering of his use of language, how much Yiddish he likely spoke growing up, day to day, that he doesn’t anymore. because Yiddish speakers as a population are dying as our grandparents do. it is a language in decline. how much does he feel that decline in his own life? a language that he was maybe once fluent in or at least that littered his vocabulary with sayings and idioms that have fallen out of use since he doesn’t have people to speak it with anymore.

context/rant no one asked for: bubbe is the Yiddish word for grandmother. Yiddish is the language spoken by Ashkenazi Jews, of which Robby is, meaning a Jewish person of Eastern European origin. his family is potentially from what is modern-day Russia based on his last name. but it’s hard to pinpoint exactly, due to shifting borders and displacement from pogroms and then the Holocaust. my family is similar - we’re not sure where exactly the village our family is from would be on a modern map. groupings like ashkenazi and sephardic are just more useful categories for a diasporic people who share sub-cultural practices and foods and languages across national borders anyways. Jewish identity has always resisted nationhood in this way, in fact, as Jewish people have often been outsiders to the local culture (but not always! important to resist the idea that everyone is always defacto antisemitic!). but in that area, at the time, it was a popular idea that there were Russians and there were Jews, despite how these Jewish people were very much also Russian.

[leastproblematic]

who up writing a da pitt fanfiction where elijah the prophet visits the pitt as a patient while dr robby works passover, to check, as he may at any seder, any jewish household during pesach, if this world has reached a level of humanity that makes us ready for our promised, better future. where robby is confronted with the fact that he has stopped opening that metaphoric door to let in the hope for a better future, that he has stopped checking for elijah's presence at all. something about losing hope, losing faith ( in both meanings ), taking a step, even inadvertently, away from tradition and memory for all the ways it aches. but elijah still shows up at his door, seder or not.

anyway who will write this.