@thesarahshay / thesarahshay.tumblr.com
Gentiles welcome as long as you know what matzo brei is and you've made it or had it made for you at home. Please reblog!
tbh I hope "other" dominates and I find out you absolute freaks are all putting peanut butter or cheez wiz or kimchi on your fried matzo.
a blessing for transitioning genders, rabbi elliot kukla
icon of the diaspora
gentiles on this website: “The Old Testament God is cruel and vengeful!” actual Jews in my synagogue yesterday: “My favorite part of the reading is when it says the Torah is not in heaven so it’s too far to reach, it’s not across the sea so we can’t get it, but that it’s in our hearts… the idea of having that be so close, of being so close to something divine, that thrills me.” “And here, where it says ‘the Lord will delight in you as he did in your fathers’, that’s such a beautiful thing. You know, God is this all-powering being, and God delights in us.”
gentiles on this website: “You can’t be an atheist and religious!” actual Jews in my synagogue yesterday: “I’m just not buying any of this. I was born during the Holocaust and I could never wrap my mind around this omnipotent all-seeing God, and usually I’m a little moved by this, I try to be hopeful, but when I look around the world now, I just don’t buy it! If I really believed there was a God, I would resent him.” [still wears a prayer shawl and attends synagogue regularly]
gentiles on this website: “Religious people never question what they’re told, they just followed blindly!” my actual rabbi: “Sometimes the Torah can be like an older relative whom we love dearly, and who has a lot of wisdom to give, but who also says things that cause us pain, that we find offensive or wrong. And I think the wrong instinct would be to pretend we don’t hear what they’re saying, or to cut them out entirely, or to be guided by them into thinking and behaving in offensive ways. What we need to do is engage the Torah. We need to wrestle with it, and try to understand it, to figure out where it’s coming from and learn how we can progress from it, because the Torah is not unchanging. It belongs in each of our hearts, and it changes for us as we study it, as each generation challenges its old assumptions.”
After a childhood of Evangelical Christianity, the Judaism my friends shared with me is quite literally what healed my soul enough that I reconsidered and eventually stopped saying the gentile statements listed above. I’m not Jewish, I don’t plan to convert, but I am forever grateful.
“… the Torah is not unchanging. It belongs in each of our hearts, and it changes for us as we study it, as each generation challenges its old assumptions.”
Also a lot of the time the idea of the Old Testament deity being vengeful was explicitly articulated in contrast to Jesus in the New Testament as a way to show how the Jews had an incomplete picture of God as well as proving that they were always being punished etc. because even pre-Jesus they were Bad People.
(This is apart from the fact that there’s plenty of anger and kindness in both parts of the canon.)
But the oversimplification to Old Testament = angry God vs. New Testament = loving God was a core theological tenet of Christian antisemitism.
This is fucking horrifying. Because yeah, we DO have all those meticulous records, and guess what? Millions of people still think either the Holocaust didn’t happen, or wasn’t as bad as reported. I can’t even imagine what it would be like with no records.
Some people: Kugel is a dessert Me: Y’all need Jesus
#ChanukahProject
On this second night of Chanukah, I continue the theme of publicizing the miracles of Chanukah.
The miracle of the oil was not simply that the jug of oil lasting eight days instead of one.
The Menorah in the Beit Hamikdash (Holy Temple) was supposed to be lit at all times. Every day the oil was changed so the lights would never go out. When the Jews returned to to the Beit Hamikdash, wanted to relight the Menorah immediately, but they found the holy site had been desecrated by the Seleucids. Every jug of pure olive oil was broken. They managed to find one jug that had just enough pure oil to last for one day. However, it takes eight days to make pure olive oil, as only the first drop of oil from each olive is considered pure enough for service in the Beit Hamikdash.
The miracle was that the oil that should have lasted one day lasted eight. If it would have taken five days or ten days to create new pure oil, that is how long the single jar would have lasted. And in that case we would celebrate five or ten days of Chanukah instead of eight.
On Chanukah, I try to notice the small miracles in life that are often hard to miss. Why did something happen to me in this exact manner? What is the miracle behind these seemingly small experiences in my life?
I wish you all a Happy Chanukah!
Pictures: Top - my Chanukia Bottom - last night’s dinner of Latkes.
If you’re not following @istodayajewishholiday, I highly recommend it. They are currently reblogging lots of peoples’ Hanukkah photos, and it’s lovely to see the incredible diversity of everyone’s hanukkiah: some are elaborate, some are simple; some are beautiful, some utilitarian. Non-Jews are welcome to follow.
tbh, goyim, you have really got to stop thinking of being jewish as only a religion. PSAs about antisemitism are a little more widespread nowadays but it’s still very obvious you only see us as a religion, or a “faith”, or whatever. yes, judaism is a religion, and yes, you can convert into it, but it’s difficult to convert in and you have to be the one to initiate it because we don’t proselytize.
the jewish people are an ethnicity as well as a religion. judaism is the religion of the jewish people. we are a people indigenous to the levant, exiled 1800 years ago, and forced to resettle in other countries where we were force-assimilated and many of us through those 1800 years lost our ethnic features while still retaining some—our noses, our dark curly hair, etc., which obviously aren’t on every jew but are common in families where the bloodline was kept strong.
it’s really tiring to see people saying “your religion” or “the jewish religion” or “freedom of religion” with reference to us because we are a people and a culture and an ethnicity. we’re far less persecuted for our religion than we are for our cultural dress and our ethnic features. a lot of us don’t even subscribe to the religion part but still celebrate the holidays bc they’re cultural holidays.
so please, like … remember this when you talk about our people or antisemitism. antisemitism is not a religion issue as much as it is an ethnicity issue and a particular brand of racism that has somewhat different rules because we’ve been exiled from israel for so long. like … just keep that in mind when you start discussion about our people pls lol
and yes goyim can reblog
re: Anons talking about religion - Should someone tell them that religion being primarily about belief is pretty much only true of Western Christianity and mainstream branches of Islam? Like, no one at a Hindu temple's gonna be like "But do you BELIEVE in Hanuman-ji?" You just do your puja and move on. Same for most Buddhists, Europagans, Zoroastrians, you name it. I just like how aggressive anti-religion atheists don't realize their worldview is still entirely shaped by Christianity.
They always—ALWAYS—look at things with a Christian lens, even when they are supposedly forsaking Christianity.
That’s part of why they feel a need to enlighten others: they need to win converts to their beliefs. Like Christians.
But…what deities don’t require belief? And if you didn’t believe in your religion’s god, why would you participate in that religion? Idk I’m confused by this.
JUDAISM.
There are literally atheist rabbis. There are literally two branches of Judaism that are actually centred around the idea that deistic belief is unimportant to being Jewish.
That’s what this whole post is about it. You “don’t get it” because you’re approaching the concept of what religion is from an entirely different viewpoint than how Jewish people approach Judaism.
It’s like, say you have an object weighs twelve pounds. But then an astronaut tells you, “Oh, we’re going to bring this to the moon and it’s only going to weigh two pounds.” And you’re like “Um, excuse me? The object is twelve pounds. I’ve lived on earth my whole life, and I know how much this weighs, and it’s twelve pounds. You can’t just change the weight of an object, that’s not how mass works.” EXCEPT! If you bring something from earth to the moon, the yeah, that’s exactly how mass works! Because gravity on the moon is totally different than it is on earth, and things on the moon are 1/6 of their weight on earth. It’s a totally different framework!
So like…right now, if Judaism is gravity on the moon, you’re approaching it like it’s gravity on earth. That’s why you’re confused. Your framework is totally wrong.
It’s more like … the word religion is being used to describe two exceedingly different paradigms, and if the only referent you have for the word is the paradigm you grew up with and that paradigm stresses belief as the primary point, you’re going to be super confused when someone says something like “religions don’t have to be about belief.”
It’s like you think you know what a “book” is and how it works because you majored in English literature, and now you’re trying to identify the protagonist of a cookbook or the primary narrative arc of a thesaurus.
You think you know what a “religion” is and how it works, and you don’t.
(For the record, Judaism is far from the only religion that is considered by many of its adherents to not require any sort of theistic belief.)
If you’re not familiar, Rosh Hashanah is the Jewish New Year. It’s one of the most important days of the Jewish calendar, and is supposed to be an indicator of how the rest of your year will be.
This would have been an affront to decency any day of the year; on Rosh Hashanah, it’s a slap in the face.
A.C. Strip has long understood the significance of the diary his older brother kept as they fled the Holocaust with their parents. He turned it into a self-published book that he gave to his brother as a 90th birthday gift.
But Strip never considered the diary to be an important historical document. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is making him rethink that.
Strip’s brother’s journal is one of more than 200 diaries written by Holocaust victims and survivors the museum hopes to digitize and make available to the public with the help of its first crowd-funding campaign. The museum is seeking $250,000 for the project and will begin soliciting donations through Kickstarter on Monday, the birthday of the most famous Holocaust diarist, Anne Frank.
Read More: Here
Donate here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/ushmm/save-their-stories-undiscovered-diaries-of-the-hol
If their goal is reached, their entire diary collection will be catalogued, translated, and published online for EVERYONE. They hope to stem holocaust denial by the power of so many readily-available firsthand accounts.
Please signal boost even if you can’t spare $5 to donate!
Signal boost
In case you were wondering what it's like to be Jewish in 2017: every time I see a photo and someone has their hand raised and their arm relatively straight and their fingers sort of together, even if they're actually just waving or raising their hand, I immediately assume it's a photo of someone doing a Nazi salute and my whole body tenses up.
do you guys wanna see literally one of the best craigslist postings i’ve ever seen
it was under “talent gigs”
Also what kind of seder starts at 7pm??? Boy this bubbe is going to show up STARVING by 7pm, and then not eat until nearly 8 or some shit? Those “details” better include either a really moving sob story or union scale.
I’ve been thinking a lot about compassion in Judaism, and being kind. In that light, I would like everyone to know that my current favorite Jewish supernatural headcanon is that, instead of driving vampires away with crosses or stakes through the heart, we say the Mourner’s Kaddish for them. I mean, that’s just so adorable. You see this threatening undead creature, and instead of yelling murder, you feel bad for them, and you mourn for them. Imagine being a vampire at the receiving end of that, having been chased away for years and years and told you’re a monster when you come across someone who sees you and your existence and accepts that you’re in a pretty bad place and offers help in the best way they can. I’m actually tearing up about this a little. If someone adds to this post I’ll love them forever.
It doesn’t work for zombies.
This is one of the hardest things she learns, in the business. Saying the Mourner’s Kaddish will slow a vampire, to stare at you with wide shocked eyes (and once, memorably, to weep blood-tinged tears), unable or unwilling to lift a hand against you. It will calm a dybbuk, enough to make it stop whatever destruction it’s begun, and almost always enough to start a conversation about why it clings so desperately to the world of the living, what it’s left undone, how it can be freed to move on. You have died, the Kaddish says, and we mourn you as we would mourn our own dead, because someone must.
But there is no soul and no mind left in a zombie, no vestige of the self it once was, nothing left for the Kaddish to speak to.
She says it anyway, with every head-shot, with every flung grenade.
Not because she still hopes one might hear her, but because they are dead, and the dead should be mourned.
Well, I love you forever now.
In addition to Shabbat, tody is Tu B’Shevat—The New Year for Trees!
Tu B’Shevat is four months after the New Year of the Hebrew calendar, as it takes this long for the soil to be nurtured by the seasonal rain. Observations include partaking in the fruit of the Holy Land, that is figs, dates, olives, pomegranates, and grapes.
Not that I need an excuse to eat olives, but I am definitely buying some today. Might get some dates as well.
if anyone, jewish or not (because I feel that non jewish people could also benefit from throwing out any lingering false associations between our core theology and christian core theology), is curious about learning more about how jewish thought / theology differs a lot from dominant christian narratives, specifically how “god” and “prayer” are very poorly executed english translations of our concepts of HaShem and tefilah/l’hitpalel, especially if you’re a jewish person struggling with the idea of religious judaism because you don’t feel compatible with what the dominant meaning and concept (heavily influenced by christianity) of the english words/concepts “god” and “prayer” are, please please watch some videos by Rabbi David Aaron specifically this one (x) and this one (x)
neither of them really come from a denominational perspective so don’t worry about if you’re heterodox or orthodox it’s just a really good look at authentic jewish theology. and some of the misunderstandings that he clarifies are, if left unclarified, big stumbling blocks for a lot of jews who are hung up on things like “do I believe in God” “do I have some ambiguous faith” “when I pray does God listen”, and those stumbling blocks could be avoided by having these conversations about what jewish theology really holds as true, especially since a lot of those phrasings we absorb from our non jewish surroundings that lead us to be confused and doubtful about our judaism are based in concepts that are… entirely unjewish.
like as a brief summary, “do I believe in God” is a question that is steeped in this christian dominant perspective that you sort of absorb in a lot of english speaking christian majority countries, where God = metaphysical dude far off in the sky that you have to profess blind faith towards, which… could not be further from what the concept of HaShem is in Judaism, aka HaShem is everywhere, HaShem cannot be depicted by any of our human conceptualizations of embodiment (like seriously depicting HaShem as a man in a flowing robe is a huge no no) and HaShem is more scattered divinity of Being than some humanoid ruler up in the sky (the video is a lot more eloquent than on this than me lmao). “do I have faith?” often references this idea that faith is blind and that “faith” is a state of mind not a set of actions. in Judaism there’s a lot more weight to actions than sitting around and thinking “yeah I have blind faith that there’s a God” (again that perspective draws on these weird ideas of HaShem as a distant and metaphysical being that are extremely unjewish) and “when I pray does God listen” comes from a non Jewish perspective of prayer as begging God to change his mind or something like that, which is again a very unjewish perspective and that second video link talks a lot about what the real meaning of l’hitpalel / tefilah is in Judaism and what are we doing when we daven, if not this english/christian centric concept of “to pray”
anyway I feel like those videos really solidified some things succinctly for me; I had the ideas cemented in my head theologically before but this was the first time I had heard them verbalized this simply so like check it out! the first video is very short, like under 10 minutes, and should be watched first imo, the second video is like 40 minutes, if you’re really interested but don’t think you’ll get to the second one on tefilah at least watch the first one on HaShem.
I had the first link wrong before! this version has the right link
@stepsonthejourney Not sure if any of this might be helpful to you, but thought I’d tag you in anyway!
hey there LGBTQ kids who are also Christian/Jewish! If you feel like you’re disobeying God, questioning your faith, or feel wrong and dirty for loving who you love, there’s this fantastic site I found today called hoperemains that accurately and thoroughly combs through scripture and its (many) mistranslations, validates your orientation, and basically let’s you know that you’re not pissing off God. It’s insanely thorough and after reading through every page on the entire site it’s super helpful. Go check it out!
No no no! Jewish LGBTQ kinderlach! Go to Keshet!
hoperemains is completely from a Christian perspective, and not pluralistic or interfaith at all.
If you reblogged the first post from me please reblog this amendment so the Jewish peeps can access this resource too!
Trans Jewish kids, you can go to TransTorah as well!
Reblogging this with a healthy side-eye for OP, who I’m sure was trying to be helpful but still earns a spot on my shit list for conflating Judaism with Christianity.
