#xianity

TIL there was a Jewish presence in the specific town my ancestors were from at some point (not just Moselle in general) -- which isn't a lot of information but does make me feel a little less like a mad man trying to figure out where some family customs came from.

for context i was raised Catholic, am Agnostic, considered converting to Judaism (i'd still like to but there are circumstances), but -- my grandmother, a devout Irish/Roman Catholic specifically, had a few practices that aren't traditionally Christian. they could be folk, but i dont know. there's a lot of possibilities and i dont know where to start.

the customs & how i learned about them

she took care to tell me when i was a little girl about how she would tie red strings to cribs to protect her babies from evil. and after she told me, she had me get me sister (who's 3 years younger) so she could tell her about it too. she wanted to make sure she heard.

also, after my great-grandmother died, we had a traditional Irish/Roman Catholic funeral process/wake (for anyone who doesn't know, this means a church service, memorial service, and burial (Roman), and a wake i.e celebration of life held at my great-grandmother's home with all of our family (Irish)).

then, this is where it gets nontraditional xianity-wise. we all went home and had scheduled times to visit. my family was the 2nd or 3rd day after the funeral/wake, and when i walked in the door to my grandmother's house, i went to look in my favorite mirror. except it was covered.

i went around the entire house and every mirror was covered. they had an entire bathroom with mirror walls and i honestly dont remember how they handled that but i do remember being totally bewildered. all the portraits were covered as well - but the landscape paintings weren't.

all the chairs were either put away or turned upside down, except for stools and my grandfather's recliner. my grandmother's recliner and all the larger seating (couches) were covered in tarps. i distinctly remember my grandmother going to get my mother a chair, but me, my sister, and my father weren't meant to sit down. i remember being in the kitchen and hoping up on the stool - it was really uncomfortable, but my grandma said it was a good thing because we're in mourning.

as i was wandering around the house, i ran into her in the dining room. i asked her why the house was like this, and she told me that it was because great-grandma (her mom) died and that everything would be back to how it was in about a week. i remember so clearly how she knelt down to me and gently spoke. she asked if that answered my question, and back then, it did.

but now, it doesn't. and i can't ask her any questions. she had alzheimers and cancer, and she died in 2020 during the start of COVID. i tried asking her siblings at her funeral, but they said they didn't know. they were both too young to meet our family from Europe before they died. her sister, Ruth, told me that it sounds like something they did "in the Old Days," but that's too vague & uncertain to really help.

though, one last thing: at my grandmother's funeral, after the traditional Catholic burial and prayers were done, my family started going around, picking up rocks, and setting them on her grave. some of them grabbed two because my father's baby sister is buried there as well. i looked up at my dad and he told me to grab a rock. so. me and my sister grabbed the prettiest rocks we could find and set them there.

i asked him later if that was something they did. he said that every time he and his parents visited his sister's grave, that his mother would set stones while his father would bring/plant flowers.

TL;DR: Catholic Irish/German/French grandmother tied red string to baby's cribs to ward off evil, did something very similar to Shiva after her mother died and had me participate in her home (but not my mother or her husband), and my dad's mom's side has a tradition of setting stones on graves, but my dad's father does flowers.

And I am trying to figure out how we got here.

Even if it takes me the rest of my life I am going to find the answer behind this because it's important to me, no matter what the answer is.

Utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer proposed a famous thought experiment: Imagine that a child is drowning in front of you. You see her flailing in a shallow pond, and you know you could easily wade into the waters and save her. Your clothes would get muddy, but your life wouldn’t be in any danger. Should you rescue her?

Yes, of course! Walking past the child would be incredibly callous. But according to Singer, we’re all basically walking past that child every day by neglecting to donate to people in poor countries. Since we live in a rich society and giving up a little bit of our wealth wouldn’t substantially harm our lives, we should give to save the lives of the millions of kids who die every year from preventable causes.

That argument has been very influential, both in the ivory tower and beyond. It helped inspire the effective altruism movement, which encourages people to donate as cost-effectively as possible — to give where their money can do the most good — instead of just donating to their local community or pet causes. It’s about doing good impartially rather than prioritizing your nearest and dearest.

But Singer’s argument has also stirred up a lot of debate and confusion, as people who try to optimize their giving for maximum cost-effectiveness sometimes end up feeling callous when they ignore those suffering right in front of them.

According to philosopher Bernard Williams — a staunch critic of utilitarianism — people are right to feel squeamish about ignoring those who are near and dear. In another famous passage related to drowning strangers, Williams said that if a man sees two people drowning, and one is his wife and the other is a stranger, and he pauses to consider whether rescuing his wife would maximize the overall good more than rescuing the stranger, he has had “one thought too many.”

Williams argued that moral agency does not sit in a contextless vacuum — it is always some specific person’s agency, and as specific people we have specific commitments. A mom has a commitment to ensuring her kid’s well-being, over and above her general wish for all kids everywhere to be well. Utilitarianism says she has to consider everyone’s well-being equally, with no special treatment for her own kid — but Williams says that’s an absurd demand. It alienates her from a core part of herself, ripping her into pieces, and wrecking her integrity as a moral agent.

By extension, there is something reasonable in Vance’s claim that it’s morally appropriate to give preferential treatment to citizens of your own country. America is a democracy, and the prime responsibility of a democratic government is to respond to the needs of its citizens.

But here’s the thing: It does not follow — at all — that America should gut foreign aid or keep out immigrants.