My Blog about Religion

Like. Israel is a concerningly flawed democracy at real risk of serious backsliding! It’s very bad! This law is very bad, the rhetoric coming out of the current majority coalition is very bad, the enduring popularity of people who built their political careers cheering on the Israeli equivalent of the JFK assassination is very bad.

But every time you try and talk about any of that, you have to contend with an avalanche of propaganda that posits that this means that Israel is somehow a more repressive regime than its neighbors, and like… I’m sorry, but that’s just completely detached from reality?

Like just as a point of comparison, Ukraine is only a 4.90 on the democracy index, and that’s not great. But only the most diehard self-parody tankies ever bring Ukrainian domestic policy and law up in the context of whether the war in Ukraine is justified, because given that Russia is a whooping 2.03 on the democracy index and has earned every bit of that rating, “some of the political purges in Ukraine are a bit concerning for long-term domestic governance” a fucking absurd thing to go after Ukraine for in the context of Russian hostility.

I really want to hammer this home, but don’t want to risk belaboring the point, so let’s just look at one example, very briefly:

Egypt is a dictatorship, and this is fairly unambiguous. After the Arab Spring, there was a brief moment of hope for Egyptian democracy... but less than a year after its first fair election, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi led a military coup that ousted the democratically elected leader, suspended the constitution, and launched a campaign against the Muslim Brotherhood and other opposition groups. Since then, Egypt has had “elections” which human rights groups generally describe as farcical, and Sisi has “won” those elections with 97% of the vote. https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/02/13/egypt-planned-presidential-vote-neither-free-nor-fair

The mere fact that there is a question as to whether or not Netanyahu will stay in power is enough to put Israeli in a markedly different category!

And then I found screenshots the absolute wildest Twitter thread I’ve ever seen in my entire life:

“I didn’t wanna be a Rabbi despite the fact that I’m actively campaigning as a Rabbi and selling myself as a Rabbi. A random guy asked me to be his Rabbi, despite the fact that I’m not a Rabbi— how could I say no? I kept reaching out to real Rabbis, but “lefty Jews” don’t get calls back from congregational, establishment Rabbis. They definitely ignored me because I’m “lefty” and not because I’m pretending to be a Rabbi.

So for Jewish people: I’m not a Rabbi.

For non-Jewish people: I am a Rabbi.

A little over a week ago, I sent the “Rabbi” a very polite email, specifying that I was a fellow lefty Jew and trans woman. I asked some basic clarification questions about her ordination and mentorship. Fascinatingly enough, I never heard back.

This is going to piss a lot of people off but sorry I don’t know what to tell you. You went the route of essentially going to a non-accredited university and now you’re mad that your useless degree can’t get you into law school. 🤷‍♀️

mikveh,

brit milah as applicable,

a sacrifice while the Temple stands (not currently) and

learning / motivation / beit din (bundling these because the beit din judges learning and motivation so they’re kind of inextricable).

Therefore, halachically, converts who undergo these steps are fully Jewish.

Non-Orthodox converts do this.

They are fully, halachically Jewish.

End of.

Per Halacha at least.

Orthodoxy has added its own reinterpretations. And I’m not opposed to new interpretation in general, I believe that each generation adds to our knowledge, we learn more and improve, etc etc, but to pretend that Orthodoxy is More Authentic or somehow Unchanged is asinine.

Examples:

the Talmud specifically accepts conversion for the purposes of marriage (Yevamot 24b:6), whereas Orthodox Jewish groups today do not

the Talmud does not say you have to send your children to Jewish as opposed to public schools in order to be a valid convert but Orthodox Jewish groups today do

Charedi clothes are not ancient Israelite clothes. They were not wearing fur hats and black coats in ancient Judea.

the Talmud also indicates that many people had pretty limited Jewish knowledge immediately post conversion, indicating that the Orthodox practice of only converting people once they are up to community standards is novel

And again, I don’t think it’s wrong that Orthodoxy has its own interpretations of Halacha, just as Reform and Conservative do. We are one people but we are not automatons who always think and feel and need the same things. Someone needed to figure out how to navigate electricity, airplanes, IVF, chemotherapy, and other things that did not exist in Talmudic times.

Just generally, I think that every person on earth would benefit from sitting awhile with the concept of “with very few exceptions, everyone always thinks they’re right.” That’s just being a person. Most people don’t wake up in the morning and go “you know what? I’m going to be a bad person.” Or “I’m going to do Judaism wrong.” Definitely people do that. But we all think we’re right. We’re all only human.

The reason the Torah reading for Yom Kippur is a list of sexual prohibitions is because a lot of Jews in that era only attended shul on Yom Kippur and the rabbis wanted to make sure they knew the rules regarding sexual immorality (since that's a lot more complex than the rules for murder and idolatry).

Now, that's obviously more about people born into Judaism than gerim, but my point is that what it means to be Jewish and observance of the mitzvos have always been closely related but not identical.

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“The delayed clarity on what exactly happened in Jersey City [2019 shooting] muted some of the public empathy that instantly followed the previous attacks. So did the identities of the attackers, both of whom were Black, and their targets, who were Hasidic Jews who, it has progressively become clear, many otherwise enlightened Americans view as absolutely fair game for bigotry.

This was obvious from reporting within hours of the attack, which gave surprising emphasis to the murdered Jews as "gentrifying" a "minority" neighborhood. This was remarkable, given that the tiny Hasidic community in question, highly visible members of the world's most consistently persecuted minority, in fact came to Jersey City fleeing gentrification, after being priced out of long-established Hasidic communities in Brooklyn. More tellingly, as the journalist Armin Rosen has pointed out, the apparently murderous rage against gentrification has yet to result in anyone using automatic weapons to blow away white hipsters at the newest Blue Bottle Coffee franchise. What was most remarkable about this angle, however, was how it was presented in media reports as providing "context."

The "context" supplied by news outlets after this attack was breathtaking in its cruelty. As the Associated Press explained in a news report about the Jersey City murders that was picked up by NBC and many other outlets, "The slayings happened in a neighborhood where Hasidic families had recently been relocating, amid pushback from some local officials who complained about representatives of the community going door to door, offering to buy homes at Brooklyn prices."

…New Jersey's state newspaper, the Star-Ledger, helpfully pointed out that "the attack that killed two Orthodox Jews, an Ecuadorian immigrant and a Jersey City police detective has highlighted racial tension that had been simmering ever since ultra-Orthodox Jews began moving to a lower-income community"—even though the assailants never lived in Jersey City, and apparently chose their target simply through internet searches for Jewish institutions in the New York area. The Washington Post began its analysis of the murders by announcing that Jersey City "is grappling with whether the attack reflects underlying ethnic tensions locally and fears that it could spark new ones" even though the rest of the article described in detail how "longtime black residents and ultra-Orthodox implants alike say that they haven't experienced significant ethnic tensions here." Nonetheless, readers were informed, "the influx of Hasidic residents comes as many of the longtime black residents feel increasingly squeezed." This was all about gentrification, the public learned. The assailants, who wore socially acceptable clothing, were expressing an understandable communal sentiment. The newly dead Jews, on the other hand, were members of the unharassed majority, despite being the country's top hate-crime target according to the FBI. They were also rich, despite experiencing the same poverty rate as the rest of New York and New Jersey. On top of that, they wore unfashionable hats. So it kind of made sense that people wanted to murder their children with high impact explosives.

I was not able to find any similar "context" in media reports after the 2015 massacre at a Black church in Charleston, South Carolina, or the 2016 massacre at an LGBTQ nightclub in Orlando, Florida, or the 2019 massacre at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas frequented by Latino shoppers—all hate-crime attacks that unambiguously targeted minority groups. In each of those cases, as was true in Jersey City, media coverage included sympathetic pieces about the victims, along with investigative pieces about the perpetrators, the latter focused on how perpetrators were drawn into violent irrational hatred… No one covered [the] "context," because doing that would be bonkers. It would be hateful victim-blaming, the equivalent of analyzing the flattering selfies of a rape victim in lurid detail in order to provide "context" for a sexual assault.”

Queen Esther was a young Jewish woman hiding her identity inside an empire that wanted her people gone. And when the moment came where she could either protect herself or risk everything for her people, she chose her people. She fasted for three days, walked into the king's throne room uninvited (which could have gotten her killed), and changed the entire course of Jewish history.

Purim is really a story about how the people who seem all-powerful aren't always as secure as they look, and how one person's courage at the right moment can unravel an entire evil plot. Esther was probably was terrified, but she moved anyway because she understood that she was exactly where she needed to be for exactly this reason.

I love Mordechai's words to her, "Who knows whether you came to your position for just such a time as this?" Every generation has its "such a time as this" moment and somehow we're still here, every single time.

חג פורים שמח 👑

Imagine living so long that you become the only person left who actually remembers the truth.

Serach bat Asher is one of the coolest women and the ultimate old soul of Jewish history. She is the only person who appears in the Torah during the time of Jacob, and the time of Moses centuries later.

Legend says she was blessed with immortality after she played her harp for her grandfather Jacob to tell him gently that his son Joseph was still alive. Because of that song, she became the keeper of every secret the Jewish people have ever had.

She spent the next several centuries carrying the keys to every Jewish secret. She was the only one who knew the secret password to prove Moses was actually a prophet, and the only one who could find Joseph’s coffin hidden at the bottom of the Nile. Without her, we couldn’t have left Egypt.

When Moses showed up to free the Israelites, the elders didn’t believe him. They went to Serach (who was already hundreds of years old) and asked if he was a fraud. Serach asked, “What secret code did he use?” They said he used the phrase “Pakod Pakadeti” (I have surely remembered you). Serach said, “He is the one. That is the secret password my father Asher told me on his deathbed.”

I illustrated her with a massive set of keys from every era she witnessed, from ancient Egypt to the study halls of the Talmud, acting as the bridge between all our stories.

My favorite legend is when she heard the Sages debating what the walls of the Red Sea actually looked like when they split. They were coming up with all these complicated theories about dark stone or brick, and Serach stuck her head into the study hall and corrected them: “I was there. It didn’t look like that. It looked like windows of clear glass.”

I love that energy, the woman who doesn’t need to theorize because she simply remembers.

Shabbat Shalom 🤍

ashkenazi x sephardi sapphics <33

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