#dead-litebulb

The most rewarding thing about writing it has been the fact that I got away with 2 seasons of specifically showing Steven controlling Earl with visual indications (glowing pupils) and only a few people caught on before the big reveal. 

I’m excited to keep that intrigue going and seeding all kinds of future plot points with foreshadowing and watching you guys try to pick up on it. 

Regarding your recent post expressing frustrations, what is your ideal vision for interaction with you regarding your posts about Judaism? Its obvious that people like something about either the way you write or you as a person that makes them want to ask you things, and i admit that seeing your original posts is a highlight of my day too. What would be the least stressful outcome?

(If its a straight "please dont", thats justified though.)

So I sat on this for a few days, because I wrote a few SUPER-salty answers in my drafts and the salt had 0% to do with you and everything to do with the situation, and I didn’t want to inflict that on you when you asked a good and fair question. My two main issues with the questions I get asked are two of the same issues I see a lot of Black Tumblrites complain about, and they’re related but not the same: 1) assuming Jews are a monolith and I can speak for all of them 2) Substituting me for research. So the first one: there are 16 million Jews in the world, and approximately 18.5 million Jewish opinions on any given subject. My roommate subscribes to Cook’s Country and when they had a challah recipe in it they literally talked about how impossible it was to get a consensus from their Jewish contributors on how challah “should” be made. And that’s just talking about a baked good, not complicated theological questions! I can only answer for myself, as a queer convert member of the Reform Jewish community. I can’t speak for the Orthodox, or the atheists, or the born Jews who had kids and now want to reconnect, or 60-year-old Israeli men who are studying kabbalah, or or or or or. Questions more complicated than, say . . . “what’s Purim?” are not questions I can answer, except in regard to how I personally feel or view them. The second one: the question that led to that post was someone who I’m actually pretty sure was lying to me. They claimed to be a “professional restorer” (of . . . . ?), and wanted to know about “the Jewish relationship to the material world and materialism.” I don’t even know what the fuck I just said, much less how to answer it. Nor do I know why a “professional restorer”--again, of . . . . ? Furniture? Metal items? Paintings? ‘Professional restorer’ doesn’t tell me shit--would be asking a random Tumblrite to answer what is almost certainly a complicated and multifaceted theological question that has a distinct whiff of “greedy Jew” about it.

Anyway--what it sounds like to me is a whole slew of research papers. That is a question you should be asking of multiple rabbis, and you should expect to do a lot of reading on it. I’ve gotten similar questions before--”what is the Jewish concept of the afterlife” pops up a lot.

So what I would like is, take your question and try to reword it as a “today I will talk about” statement. Today I will talk about the Jubilee. Today I will talk about the Jewish concept of material objects and materialism. If your statement sounds like the first draft of a college thesis, asking a random person on Tumblr is not the way to get an answer. (If it sounds more like something you might hear in an elementary or middle school presentation, go ahead and ask it.)

Now: what should you do if you get the “fuck, this sounds like a college thesis” kind of statement? This is going to sound very glib, but I’m actually very serious: either go to your local library and ask for the location of the religious section, or call a rabbi. Now I will warn you ahead of time that neither the rabbi nor the religious section will have a complete answer for you, because, well . . .

THIS IS A SINGLE BOOK OF COMMENTARY. That’s the Babylonian Talmud. Which contains approximately 400 years (out of 4000 years total) of some (not all) religious arguments by and between some (nowhere near all) learned sages and rabbis. People study this book for their entire lives. There are literally men in the ultra-orthodox community who are fed, clothed, and housed by the community and their entire job is to read and study this book and the Tanakh from dawn to dusk, for their entire lives. And even they are considered to have learned only a fraction of the truth.

. . . . you can see why I don’t like getting those questions.

i did mention i would be posting them to privatter but i kinda decided against that :0

instead, ill be posting them to my pillowfort ! i havent posted them there yet but thats cuz i wanna spruce up my page first yknow?