flutiebear reblogged
Happy Hanukkah to all!
flutiebear reblogged
One time my rabbi told us, “imagine you had a box with a little bit of god in it. What would you do with the box?”
So we were like ?? “We’d protect it and keep it nice and clean and polished” and he was like “your body’s that box. Stop eating markers”
flutiebear reblogged
Menorah-ceratops
flutiebear reblogged
Our human lives aren’t like a Hollywood fairytale, no matter how much we try to make them so. Life is full of false starts, unresolved cliffhangers, incomplete closures, premature endings, repeat stories, and going back to the beginning. Life, like Torah, is a wandering journey in the wilderness, not a destination. Even the major developmental steps of a life – education, career choice, sexual identity, love relationship, family formation, geographic location, retirement – seldom come in exactly the right order at the right time. But there is a spiritual maturation in this seemingly endless cycle. As Jewish individuals, communities, and as a people, each time we return to the beginning, we do so with a bit more experience and wisdom. Though we didn’t reach the Promised Land, perhaps we learned a bit more in the last cycle of our journey. There is a richness and depth to revisiting important themes, both in Torah and in our lives. As we return to the beginning, we also get to look forward to a more complex future.
Rabbi Jane Rachel Litman (via yidquotes)
flutiebear reblogged
Jewish hope is different. Our hope, Jewish hope is much more difficult than hallmark hope. It is not a hope that guarantees happy endings. It is not a hope that makes everything better. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel taught: “Hope is a conviction, rooted in trust…an ability to soar above the darkness that overshadows the divine.” Our job then is to defy the darkness. When the moon is fully covered and when we can see no light, we continue to hope. This is no Walt Disney dreamland. It is not even a naive illusion. Jewish hope means that even when things are grim and even when it feels as though tomorrow will be worse than today, we continue to hang on. We continue to hope even when we have no promise of when the world will be whole again, or if we will ever achieve peace. Our Jewish tradition teaches that we can and we must overshadow the darkness. Regardless of how things turn out , we continue to hope, as we continue to work towards making the world more whole.
Rabbi Amanda Green (via yidquotes)
flutiebear reblogged
humanisticjew
flutiebear reblogged
You know what they say: “two Jews three opinions” and “if you want it done right you have to do it yourself”
sorry for not including beta israel holidays I didn’t really know enough about a lot of them besides sigd to accurately describe them
Pesach is the only holiday that gets bingo
and, thus, is the Ultimate Jewish Holiday
flutiebear reblogged
Matzah is the “bread of affliction” and at the same time, the “bread of freedom.” On the one hand, the matzah our ancestors ate when they left Egypt was literally their first taste of freedom. On the other hand, the Haggadah reminds us it is the “the bread of poverty.” How can it be both? The meaning lies not in the bread, but in the conditions under which it is eaten. Even the richest bread eaten when one is enslaved becomes the bread of poverty. But the poorest bread eaten under freedom represents redemption. The matzah tells us: bless what you eat but never forget that once, you were hungry. The contradiction between the bread of freedom and the bread of affliction is solved by our attitude.
And it is softened by time. Think about it: the only difference between chametz and matzah is time. Eighteen minutes of baking is all that is allowed to make matzah. Eighteen minutes is all that stands between kosher and not, between leavened and unleavened. The ingredients are exactly the same: flour and water. Only time stands between them.
Rabbi Elyse Goldstein
flutiebear reblogged
natashatroyka-deactivated201902
So there’s this famous phrase in Genesis, “לא טוב היות האדם לבדו" (“lo tov heyot ha'adam l'vado”), which means “it is not good for man to be alone.” I was thinking today that it might make a nice Jewish friendship bracelet or wedding ring inscription or something. Problem is, if you try to split it up it becomes
לא טוב היות האדם לבדו
“Existence is not good.” “Man is alone.”
All the other ways of splitting them up are similarly awful. And on the one hand, I think this is really kind of beautiful—how this phrase, which is about togetherness, is so beautiful as a whole but cannot be broken into parts without itself becoming splintered and distorted. The language mirrors the very nature of humanity that it describes.
But on the other hand it totally ruined my friendship bracelet idea so @G-d this is a callout post
flutiebear reblogged
Steven Greenberg, “Wrestling with God and Men” - Author’s conversation with Rabbi Eliashiv in Jerusalem
“Twice the power of love” is my new favorite description of bisexuality