Ananeiah

by glass_museum on tiktok

Everbody wants third spaces until a homeless guy shows up. Now theres a lot of talk about third spaces for a reason. We need places to form community beyond just home and work, but that begs the question of who gets to be a part of our communities? You want more parks, more libraries but then you complain when these public infrastructures are, well public.

For the unhoused the importance of public spaces isn't just a matter of wanting somewhere to chill with friends it's a matter of existence and freedom. In his landmark essay "homelessness and the issue of freedom," Jeremy Waldron argues that the freedoms of the poor are dispraportionately restricted under the law since their material conditions coerce them into a state in which they must choose between survival and the violation of the law. He writes that freedom exists for the homeless "only to the extent that our society is communist."

Now before your redscare ass starts to hemmorage over the C-word let me explain, but first let's define our terms. Specifically let's distinguish between postive freedoms and negative freedoms. While postive freedom is the capacity to act according to ones free will, negative freedom is the capacity to act free from the coercion of others.

So things like loitering laws [and] public indecency violations though they apply to the rich and poor alike, they apply disproportionatly to those who posses no private property of their own and thus who exist solely in the collective space, and so while a homeless person may posses the positive freedom to, say, physically lay down in a park, they have their negative freedom restricted since they'll be forcebly removed for doing so, because of the regulations placed on public spaces that prohibit certain actions that are typically relegated to the private, like sleeping, pissing, showering.

All these actions are natural and necessary, and yet theyre prohibited in the public space. And this limitation is no problem for owners of private property, since the public is conceived of as being complementary to the private.

However, as Waldron notes, "This complementarity works only for those who have the benefit of both sorts of places" so if youre homeless you're stuck in a situation where you're forced to violate the law in order to survive, because in order to exist, one needs somewhere they can exist.

There's oftentimes a contradiction with how people consider the homeless if they even consider them at all, people don't want them pissing in the streets, but they also don't want them pissing in the Mcdonald's bathroom. People don't want encampments, but they also oppose the construction of affordable public housing.

There seems to be a desire for increased public life, but only a certain kind of public.

They take him home. They give him the Hebrew name Kal-El and the American name Clark so he will fit in. They know what it is to be different. There is no Hebrew school in Smallville so they teach him at home, and study Torah together. When he shows special abilities, they wonder to each other if he is the Moshiach. Not for the strength of his body, but for the strength of his kindness. He always seems to be helping others, delivering them from harm, as he was delivered to them. They never tell him this, but they teach him about the obligations without measure. He's a natural.

At school, he is side-eyed for being different. When he displays eccentricities, the villagers shrug and say "maybe it's a Jewish thing." The Kents make sure he values his education, and is always home for Shabbas dinner.

His is bar-mitzva'd at the nearest shul, a few towns over. They didn't know his birthday, so they chose one near Parshat Shemot. Now they worry that was too on-the-nose, but he gives a moving d'var about the obligation to speak truth to power.

As he comes into his own and tries to be a hero, he hides his identity from the public, not out of shame, but to keep his adopted parents safe. They've been persecuted enough.

When he moves to the big city for a job at a newspaper, Pa is so proud he cries. Clark uses his journalistic skills to expose corruption, give voice to the neglected and oppressed, and research his own origins. When he learns the truth about Krypton and his birth parents' desperate bid to send him to safety, Ma and Pa are not at all surprised that they were right.

When Clark brings Lois home, he assures his parents she is a nice Jewish girl, but they're just glad she's a mensch. They step on a glass to remember the destruction of Krypton, and stand under a chuppah quilted by Ma.

A white billionaire spews lies about him, trying to spread fear of the stranger in their midst. He comes out in public and says "There's nothing more American than being an immigrant."

When the government turns against immigrants, he stands on the side of the protestors and protects. Tear gass does nothing to him. He makes himself a shield. He writes article after article in the Daily Planet, making sure the public knows what their government is doing, that immigrants know their rights, that the powerful are put on notice. When they start rounding people up, he says "Never again."

They were! Superman was created in 1938 by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, two Jewish boys, sons of immigrants.

Depending on the size and amount of coral you eat, eating coral wouldn’t be bad for you. Are you swallowing large enough chunks to cause intestinal blockages? or grinding it up and using it as an additive? People use coral as a source of calcium in vitamins.

But yeah, it all goes back to "seems easier to just use regular ol' marble dust.

...related important question: are we sure that coral is considered alive, and an animal of any kind, like, halakhically speaking?

I mean:

Coral doesn't bleed (which is the important part about eating a still living animal)

They don't have lungs or gills

They generally don't move? (I guess corallimorphs can...kinda crawl? But otherwise no they don't move).

How is coral really different from like, fungi above water? Sure it can be a collective mass (mushrooms and their mycellium colonies!), but it's not capable of bleeding, and it doesn't have lungs or gills, and it doesn't really move. It just kinda...spreads.

No because fungi are bottom feeders of the ground and yet mushrooms are kosher.

The issue is whether or not these are creatures according to Torah. From Leviticus 11:

These you may eat of all that live in water: anything in water, whether in the seas or in the streams, that has fins and scales—these you may eat.

But anything in the seas or in the streams that has no fins and scales, among all the swarming things of the water and among all the other living creatures that are in the water—they are an abomination for you

and an abomination for you they shall remain: you shall not eat of their flesh and you shall abominate their carcasses.

Everything in water that has no fins and scales shall be an abomination for you.

Now, I am going to reference Bible hub here mostly because they have a nice Strong's Hebrew concordance feature that sefaria doesn't have that is easy to copy and paste from.

But basically I would argue that the important words we have to distinguish here are:

the teeming

שֶׁ֣רֶץ (še·reṣ)

Noun - masculine singular construct

Strong's 8318: A swarm, active mass of minute animals

life

הַחַיָּ֖ה (ha·ḥay·yāh)

Article | Adjective - feminine singular

Strong's 2416: Alive, raw, fresh, strong, life

and creatures

נֶ֥פֶשׁ (ne·p̄eš)

Noun - feminine singular

Strong's 5315: A soul, living being, life, self, person, desire, passion, appetite, emotion

So. Is coral an active (teeming) mass of minute animals? Well. It is a living colony in the same way that mushrooms are colonies of living things. But other things that swarm or teem are like... krill. shrimp. Locusts. Flies. Ants.

Y'know, stuff that moves. Swarms. Coral doesn't teem or swarm. It's static.

Which leaves us with living and creatures.

I would argue again that "living" implies regular movement — for example, you can have living waters. (Same root word for mayyim chayyim).

But also the other terms which appear beside the root word for life/living over and over again are basically:

Creeping, moving (Strong's 7430 רָמַשׂ ramas)

Flesh (Strong's 1320 בָּשָׂר basar)

Flying or soaring (5774 עוּף)

Having a soul (or literal breath) (5315, נֶפֶשׁ)

And nefesh is of course, also the last one in that list!

So is coral alive in the way Torah usually means things are living beings? Well, coral doesn't creep or move. It also doesn't have blood (which, arguably, means it can't have a carcass. It sort of has bones! But no carcass). It...MIGHT have flesh? I'm sort of unclear about this.

It can't fly or soar.

Which leaves us with:

Do corals have flesh? and,

do corals have souls? And if not metaphorically souls, do they have breath?

Well, coral do respirate. But so do plants. And neither of them have lungs. Also according to @montereybayaquarium's website coral get oxygen from algae? (Don't worry Monterey bay aquarium no one is actually going to eat the coral, this is all hypothetical)

Coral reefs get their bright colors from the algae — called zooxanthellae — living in their tissues. The zooanthellae provide the coral polyps with oxygen and nutrients produced from photosynthesis. In return, the coral polyps provide zooanthellae with carbon dioxide (a byproduct of the polyps’ “breathing” oxygen) and shelter.

Coral polyps can have mouths, but they don't really breathe with lungs. So I'm not sure they have that kind of nefesh (breath of life). And corals are like, a bunch of skeletal base material with living polyps on the top. But are they fleshy? But all their color comes from the algae living in them.

For this I go back to the presence of blood being a big factor, because again, mushrooms have flesh but don't have blood, and so halakhically...that fungi is a plant.

Also apparently Octocorals don't have those exoskeletons? So at that point how would we know something is an octocoral versus like...a seaweed?

I think either seaweed isn't meant to be kosher, or actually corals are kosher because seaweed is. Oysters have gills and hearts. Scallops have a gajillion eyes. Really easy to see those aren't plants.

Basically if you look at a coral does it have a breath and soul, does it fly or creep, does it bleed, does it have flesh, does it move around in general? Could it possibly be a plant, halakhically speaking? (Not by scientific taxonomy!) Would bronze age folks look at it and go "yeah, that's a plant."? Also important: what IS a plant? Halakhically?