jews on tumblr discussing parshiot and talmud

https://food52.com/blog/18520-why-sfenj-couldn-t-be-the-official-dessert-of-hanukkah  

https://food52.com/blog/15024-a-non-doughnut-fried-food-to-eat-during-hanukkah  

https://food52.com/blog/18605-your-hanukkah-latke-isn-t-as-old-school-as-you-think

I’m especially interested in  frittelle di riso (pine nut and raisin-studded rice fritters). (i’m Italian and into food history) also can you tell i’m getting very into your blog?

also from one of my favourite food bloggers, I imagine team applesauce will like https://smittenkitchen.com/2010/11/apple-latkes/ as well as all debs other Jewish recipes https://smittenkitchen.com/recipes/jewish/ because I’m making her brisket right now.

Now, this prayer is a kinnah, one of the poetic expressions of mourning we read. This specific kinnah is usually the last one that we read. One would expect that the tune of such a prayer would be, I don’t know, sad? For example, an inappropriate emotion to get after listening to a song whose refrain is “Wail, Zion and her cities, as a woman in her birthing pains, as a maiden donned in sackcloth for the husband of her youth,” would be “Wow, I really feel inspired to march out to war now,” right? Right? 

So then why does this kinnah sound more like a marching song than a mourning one? Why? Look, I would understand if this prayer was “עלה ציון,” or “alei tziyon,” rise up, Tzion, but it isn’t! It just isn’t! The title of the song is “אלי ציון”, “eli tziyon,” wail, Tzion, and no amount of singing this song as if it is a chant meant to inspire you for war will change that! 

And I’ll admit. As the grandchild of someone who sometimes angrily listens to “more mEANINGFUL versions” of Eli Tziyon, maybe I’m not one to talk. Maybe that’s just how congregations sing it, and there’s not much I can do, and I shouldn’t be getting this angry over one poem. But I am getting this angry. And so I decided to share it with all of you. You’re welcome. 

I researched this question for a long time, and every time I try to conceptualize how halacha-related time works in space, my brain kind of breaks. 

The key problem here, as far as I can tell, is that people don’t live on non-Earth planets, so we only have hypotheticals. One of the only practical examples comes from Ilan Ramon, an Israeli astronaut on Columbia, who asked a Chabad rabbi how he could observe Shabbat while in orbit. The rabbi ruled that he should keep Shabbat according to the timing at Cape Canaveral, the site of his launch, rather than observing it every 7 sunrise/sunset cycles, which would have worked out to every 10.5 hours for him. (Shabbat is a relevant analogy to Yom Kippur timing because in both cases there is the option of keeping your own count vs. keeping the count that’s on Earth). 

A traveler who is not sure where they are in respect to the date line (and thus doesn’t know whether they’ve jumped 24 hours in time or not), has no way of figuring out, and is not able to reach a Jewish community for Shabbat keeps Shabbat according to their own count - you can read a little about this on my Shabbat/repetition of days post. Ilan Ramon would be in a similar position - he isn’t establishing his own count, but rather using the count from before his launch. This introduces a wrinkle: in a place with a settled Jewish community, the ruling in Ramon’s case (and the extension, that you would keep 25 hours of Yom Kippur), may not apply. 

Ultimately, we have some hypothetical discussion, which you can find on sites like Mi Yodeya (judaism.stackexchange.com), but I am having a lot of trouble finding material that can stretch this far. There are too many complications that stretch far past what we have established. If you’d like my two cents, I think that you would use the analogous timing on the planet for Yom Kippur, but that’s just based on gut feeling. 

If the Temple was still standing in the time period you were living in, then yes, you’d be obligated in sacrifices just as anyone else would be. 

I think your rabbi might have been right in asking you questions about what you meant! Let me know if I’ve misunderstood and there’s a nuance I’m not seeing. 

Hey,

I’ve been thinking a bit about this blog and... okay, so I get a decent number of asks/messages, and they’re pretty split: many of them are “hey look at this cool supernatural thing! can we talk about it in Jewish/halachic terms!” or “hey I have this halachic question!” while others are “is this antisemitism?” or “are Jews white?” or “can I convert?” or “can I call myself part of x/y/z group?” 

In the past, I’ve answered both types of questions, albeit occasionally uncomfortably. I am not going to do this going forward. 

I will continue to happily answer all of the weird halacha and similar questions from a Jewish perspective as thoroughly as I have been doing so far (... and probably with the same time delays... I’m sorry...). But I do not have the mental or emotional energy, or the expertise, to answer the second group of questions. That is not what this blog is for. 

hi! so i’m a non-jew, but i lived in a jewish residential building last year that was home to jews and non-jews alike. we were supposed to keep kosher in the dining room, but other areas in the house were fair game (i say this as an indicator of how liberal/not the house was). as a vegetarian there wasn’t much for me to eat at meat dinners so i’d have bread and margarine, but now that i know about ma’arit ayin, i wonder if i shouldn’t have done so. certainly one of the cooks once asked me if the margarine was butter (so it wasn’t totally clear what i was eating). so basically, as a non-jew obligated to keep kosher because of the rules of the house, should i also have followed ma'arit ayin, or is that a separate thing that didn’t apply to me? (i’m not living there anymore, so this is a question borne of curiosity and not of necessity.) thanks for any consideration =)

That’s a really thoughtful question! The quick answer: because of the fact that margarine is commonplace, eating margarine during meat meals wouldn’t have been a problem of ma’arit ayin even if you were Jewish. 

Essentially, due to ma’arit ayin, some actions are prohibited despite not technically breaking halacha because they look like you’re breaking halacha - like, imagine you went to a Jewish community which had never seen soy burgers before and started eating one with cheese. They’d probably assume you were breaking kashrut, even if you weren’t, and so that wouldn’t be okay from a perspective of ma’arit ayin. 

In the modern day, margarine is well-known. People use it a lot, and even if it initially looks a little strange, we can reasonably assume that you weren’t eating butter. (The cook may have asked because you weren’t Jewish and they weren’t sure if you had, I dunno, forgotten about milk and meat, but given the respectful tone of the ask I’m going to assume you were reasonably well-trusted in this area.)