Halloween is a Celtic festival. It’s a great community event and a fun time. I love Halloween, its secular Purim!

I don’t celebrate Valentine’s day beyond eating chocolates I buy for myself. Not only does the Christian connection bother me, but I find the common practice of shoving all your romance for the year into a single day to be distasteful and shallow.

Although I don’t know anyone who actually celebrates it, there’s also Tu B'Av.

While I know this isn’t as common as I believed growing up, a lot of Jewish families (including mine) do frown upon celebrating the “fun secular parts” of Halloween and Valentine’s Day, because both of them were originally religious celebrations. @if-i-am-not-for-me is correct that Halloween originated as a Celtic festival and was only later made a Christian one, but the Celtic roots of the holiday are very much religious. I know pagans who currently celebrate it as one of the holiest days of the year.

In the spirit of neighborliness I will always keep candy on hand to give to trick-or-treaters if they come by my house on Halloween, same as my parents always did, but that’s the extent of what I do for either of those days.

(Unless you count going to buy half-price holiday chocolate the day after each, along with the day after Christmas and the day after Easter, those being the four days of what my friend @camwyn calls the Feast of St. Marked Down.)

so the tree of life shooter got sentenced to death and im rather glad about that (esp bc the defense attorney invoked the commandment to choose life in her defense, what chutzpah) but now im also very intrigued about how exactly the halakha says jews should feel about the death penalty. i know vaguely how it worked with the sanhedrin and the opinions of the time about the death penalty being enacted by them (that a sanhedrin who sentences a man to death even every 70 years is bloodthirsty) but what’s the consensus in the diaspora? especially for cases of antisemitic violence?

this isn’t me saying anything about how we should feel about the sentencing of the shooter or other infamous antisemites, im just genuinely interested in what the religious law has to say about this sort of situation.

I’m intrigued by the halacha as well. That said, I don’t know what good it does to kill him… if anything I worry it will make him into a martyr.

Typical of Judaism, we disagree about essentially everything. I wouldn’t say that capital punishment is against Judaism, but generally there are pretty high standards one must meet in order to qualify for a death sentence. The Talmud does mention four different types of acceptable execution methods, which leads us to believe that capital punishment is not completely out of the question. To look at modern times, the Jewish state has only carried out the capital punishment twice, one of which was for Adolf Eichmann.

Largely, looking at American Jews, the Reform and Conservative movements have generally supported abolition of the death penalty, while the Orthodox Union has stated that they conditionally support it, if it were to be reformed (chiefly, one of the reforms mentioned was racial bias in the judicial system).

So, halachically, it’s… sort of permissible? Rabbis have stated this issue still needs to be studied. The Torah permits, and even commands in certain cases, that we punish someone with death. In practice, however, the crime has to be egregious in order for the death penalty to even be considered. The Talmud lays out very specific conditions that must be met, such as several eye witnesses, of which no one contradicts their testimony, and a thorough examination of their testimony to identify any potential faults or questions. Which, in this case, I believe those conditions were met.

Interesting, thank you for this write up. Re: your tags:

Yeah, agreed, no dispute from me that he has done unforgivable things and I will not mourn him. I do, however, worry about how this will affect the Jewish community afterwards. Will this encourage more hate crimes? Will it make people see us as vengeful and violent, and therefore more acceptable as targets?

— Rabbi David Aaron

There is something so sacred about the velvety darkness that is so often deeply underappreciated.

Depicting holiness is often a very bright affair, with blinding lights, white marble, ethereal rays of sun filtering through the clouds, stark white robes that almost seem to glow from within, banks of cumulus clouds piled in a froth against a blazing blue sky, reminding us of the sapphire throne of God.

But how much more sacred is the holy dark?

If God is infinite, what better way to depict or understand that infinity than the endless dark of the universe? Earth, when properly understood in its place in the cosmos, is a bright speck in vast sea of unending black.

Have you ever felt folded up in the dark? Swaddled like an infant, wrapped in its all-encompassing embrace? Dark is restful, dark is peace. Dark is all things hidden and in the safety of that dark, released. Have you ever felt freer to express yourself than when sitting under the night sky with a loved one?

The liturgy speaks of "Tachat Kanfei ha-Shechinah," being brought under the wings of the Divine Presence. I like to imagine this as being held safe under the vast drape of the night sky. As I look up, I see just a fraction - an infinitesimal glimpse - of the Divine Presence in all Her glory, this small bit revealed to us, just like the revelation of Torah is a tiny taste of the infinite creation of the Infinite Creator.

My best prayers are whispered into the quietude of the dark, without the noise and visual distraction of the day. In the silence of the restful dark, one can almost hear the still, small voice speaking straight to your soul.

Even when davening Shacharit to the rising sun, I take a moment during the Amidah to cover my head beneath my tallis, a shadow falls across my siddur, and I imagine the soft underside of my tallit to be cover in the pinprick lights of a million tiny stars.

Remember, darkness came first.

"When G-d begain to create heaven and earth - the earth being unformed and void, with darkness over the surface of the deep and a wind from G-d sweeping over the water - G-d said 'Let there be light'; and there was light."

(Genesis 1: 1-3, Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures, the New JPS Translation, 1998.)

The "day" runs from sunset to sunset (or, if we're being strict, when three stars are visible from when three stars are visible).

Darkness is what comes first.

Darkness is holy, perhaps holier than light, as darkness is the base against which we act.

And yet somehow, the thought of a thousand points of light, a million points of light spilling out from under a tallit, slowly illuminating the darkness with the word of G-d, moves me.

Ma'ariv, being the first set of prayers spoken after sundown, demonstrate the primacy of the sacred darkness. Yes, we start our days with the darkness, with the poetry of this prayer, with rolling light away from darkness.

And here, in the dark, we are made new.

😈 You are not bound by the Hays code.

😈 You are allowed to have evil characters who are not punished by the narrative by the end of the story.

😈 You are allowed to have evil characters who win.

😈 You are allowed to have evil characters who make evil look fun and cool.

😈 You are allowed to make your fun, cool evil character the protagonist.

😈 You are allowed to glorify, romanticize and eroticize evil characters and villainous acts.

😈 You are not obligated to teach your audience a moral lesson.

Jewish option: I believe in HaSatan, the little mischief maker angel who is more like an annoying debate me bro and isn't an all-powerful king of Hell (there is no Hell)

every culturally christian New Atheist who assumes that jewish interpretation of jewish texts is the same as christian interpretation of the christian Old Testament now owes me a dissertation on the entire talmud

— Lemony Snicket

the thing folks living in Christian dominant cultures gotta realize is that even if you’re not Christian, your basic understanding of religion and spirituality and morality is still being filtered through a Christian lens. your very concept of what religion is and does is filtered through that lens.

This is what I call cultural Christianity, for those who are still confused

“But everyone celebrates christmas.” No. No we don’t.

“Religion is based on complete blind submission and not asking any questions ever”

No. That’s Christianity.

“Religion is totally focused on the afterlife and getting into heaven and avoiding hell”

Nope. Christianity again.

“Religion is about pushing your beliefs on others and trying to get them to convert”

Still Christianity.

Actually that’s even more specific - that’s Calvinism, which predominates in America. America isn’t just culturally Christian,it’s culturally Calvinist, which very specifically focuses on submission, the fear of damnation, and conversion. It’s also not just any old Calvinism, but a very rigidly puritanical variety thanks to our roots.

There are other culturally Christian countries, which are of other denominations and therefore have a slightly different bent. England is culturally Anglican, Germany is culturally Lutheran, Italy and Spain are culturally Catholic, Russia is culturally Orthodox, etc. However, even the cultural Catholicism of Italy is different from, say, the cultural Catholicism of Ireland.

So even here, we need to be careful not to filter other cultures’ Christianities through what is a very Americanized (via @queertilly) Christianity, and vice versa with other countries. Speaking as an American, even our concept of what Christianity is has been Americanised.

^^^ that

Question: what if you’re Jewish in America and don’t see religion through any of the lenses you’ve mentioned? Are there other false beliefs one can get through the dominant culture here?

Oh, definitely. I can’t think of any off the top of my head, though

Picture a wedding. Any wedding even in a fantasy context. Let me guess, you’re picturing a woman in a veil and a white gown, some guy in robes officiating, and it’s probably taking place in a church-like building, right? Christian culture is pervasive like that.

I once gave a lecture about “rituals”, and I asked the people who were attending how a marriage looks like in their culture. An adult woman answered “the bride always wears a white dress”. So I asked her which culture she was talking about. She kept insisting that that was the case in every culture, “even with atheists like me”, and that it wasn’t culturally Christian. Luckily there were several Muslims in the group that told her that that’s often not the case at Muslim weddings.

Other examples of “things we internalize” -I’m going to stick with religious ones: 

There’s a lot of stuff like this. In many cases, it’s about “what is the first mental image that comes to mind.”

Not originally worldbuilding, but this is a really good guide you can follow when building a religion to avoid making it just feel like a copy of the one you grew up surrounded by!

btw Jewish charity organizations in the USA don’t exist to convert you like Christian charity organizations, they are specifically Jewish because they were likely founded by Jews who were being turned away from other organizations. several Jewish hospitals exist in the US because many Jewish immigrants had degrees but were turned away from other hospitals for being Jewish. so we made our own, lmao. these days most of these organizations are no longer specifically Jewish because job and care discrimination is not as common for us as it used to be. i’m saying this just in case anybody is wary of accepting aid (many Jewish charities set up free food kitchens, for example) from a Jewish charity because of mistreatment by Christian ones, and i think it’s important to understand the difference

The bulk of the work HIAS does these days is in aiding non-Jews.

Your local Jewish Community Center? Anyone can join.

Jewish Family and Children’s Society? They’ll still help you if you reach out for their services and aren’t Jewish.

Ask the Hebrew Free Loan Association for a loan and have no connection to Judaism? Yup, they’ll work with you.

A Jewish food bank? Will feed you, no matter who you are.

And HIAS? My synagogue is working with the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society to support a refugee family that is new to our area (we furnished their house, do social stuff with them, and make the phone calls that are hard for ESL folks). The father in the family is literally a pastor.

no this is legitimately very sweet thank you

For those of you out there who have rejected Christianity as a religion and want to fully break with it, you have to understand that it's not just a religion, no matter how much it tries to say it is - there's a whole culture to it, too. Or, perhaps another way of understanding it is this: religion and culture used to be entirely inseparable and "faith" or "religion" were not coherent identities by themselves. Christianity changed that on a widespread level by pushing the idea of universal religion and evangelism.

Essentially, Christianity styled itself as the one singular truth that must be known and adopted by all peoples everywhere. By doing so, it necessarily severed any ties to one specific people, culture, land, or language, so that it could be practiced by all groups. Not only did this make it easier to sell to people because they didn't have to give up their whole identity, culture, language, and even certain belief systems, but it served the practical purpose of making it portable to every land and adaptable to become palatable to [almost] any demographic. [Jews are a little unique in this particular situation, because since Christianity appropriates from us so heavily, we already know how much of it doesn't work within its original framework.]

The problem is that this separation is, even in the case of Christianity, untrue. Having been raised in a Christian culture (especially if you were raised religiously Christian, but even if your connection to the religious tenets was minimal or non-existent) it creates a whole world view and value system that must be addressed in addition to faith in the religious tenets recognized internally by Christians.

If you view faith in the religious tenets of your assigned religion as being the only or even primary aspect of divorcing yourself from a particular religious outlook, then you are still using a Christian framework that is very obvious to those of us outside of it. There are a lot of things that cultural Christians might call "religious" that we view as simply being "cultural," and vice versa, because the separation is neither as sharp nor particularly important to us in the same way.

If you are truly looking to leave Christianity behind, you need to stop telling us your truth about faith is the only truth and start looking at the broader ways in which Christianity has filtered into your world view in order to root it out, if that is truly your goal.

(And if it's not? That's fine! You can be a cultural Christian who doesn't believe in the faith elements even if you take your culture and values from a Christian-based culture. But don't deny that's what you're doing because at that point you may have stopped evangelizing religious Christianity but you are still actively proselytizing for cultural Christianity by doing so.)

@ the Christians that keep asking me "what about after you die?"

I really don’t give a flying fuck. I have literally zero (0) control over what happens to my “immortal soul” after I die. I choose to believe that God exists and that God will decide what to do with me when I’m done. If I had my druthers, I’d rather have another go around, try to do better, and try to make a bigger impact. I’d personally prefer that over resting eternally in fluffy cloud heaven. But it’s not up to me, never was, never will be. So why bother wasting energy giving a shit about that when there’s shit to do here on earth?

— Rabbi Stuart Federow

quick question for the other jews out there, do you ever get irritated whenever you see the phrase "Old Testament God" used to describe something/someone as cruel, judgemental, severe, etc.? or is it just me?

constantly

Yeah but check this out:

Today my goyim friend said “I’d like to compare the Old Testament to the Torah” one day.

And out of habit I said “Wait what?” (I assumed she got confused and meant the New Testament or something. Thinking surely that she forgot that the Torah and Old Testament were the “same thing.”)

And she said, “Like the Christian Old Testament to the Torah”

And I said, “I’ve…never heard someone say that before.”

And she said, “Really? Like, I know they’re translated differently and I just thought it would be interesting to see the differences”

And I stared at her for a full minute and then said,

“Wow. I…nobody has ever used those terms correctly in front of me. Like…every non-Jewish person I’ve ever spoken to before this exact moment just said Old Testament to me when referring to the Torah. I…you’re literally the first person to use those terms respectfully to me.”

And she just went, “That’s really weird.” ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

So like…people are beautiful sometimes and unexpectedly.

Tell your friend that I love her.

Lmao will do!

Hey, @edenfenixblogs if your friend is still interested in that, I'm reading a book about this right now.

It's called "The Grammar of God" by Aviya Kushner. The author is jewish, grew up speaking hebrew at home, etc. The book is about things that surprised her when she read translations, and how it reflects Old Testament vs. Torah/Christian vs. Jewish interpretation of the text

I was able to get the Audiobook from my library, maybe she'd be able to borrow it too