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so much love to converts in progress and would-be converts who are stymied in their efforts by illness, disability, or inaccessibility. i see you. you deserve a conversion process that's accessible to you, financially and from a disability standpoint. no one should be kept from their people by access barriers. you deserve to come home and it's not okay that these obstacles are stopping you. we need to rethink how Judaism accepts converts, because sincere people are being kept out through no fault of their own.

#steps along the path

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dg68VCi9zoE

Like most good folktales, the story of Pesach doesn’t really have a beginning.  Wherever you jump into it, there’s always a bit of backstory to understand.  But one popular place to jump in is this:  Pharaoh has decreed that his Israelite slaves can only have daughters.  If they have sons, the sons will be killed.  Yocheved and her husband Amram have a baby, and it’s a boy.  Not wanting him to be killed, Yocheved places the boy in a basket and sets the basket floating on the Nile – she’d prefer to trust her baby to the whims of fate rather than to a certain death upon discovery.

We know that this baby will be found by Pharaoh’s daughter and will grow up to be Moses, star of the Pesach story.  But Yocheved doesn’t know that when she sets that basket in the water.  This song takes place in that strange, undefined time when a basket containing a child floats on the waves of the Nile.  The river itself seems to know that there’s a beloved child in that basket, and the waters cradle him, and do not swamp the basket.  The waves, in their restraint, are better than Pharaoh.  He would kill the baby.�� They rock him gently, away from people, alone in the care of the great River Nile.

#pesach #music

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I came across a pattern for mitts that I'd like to keep a mental pin for. It's free, hosted on the creator's Blogspot, and has a six-sided star incorporated into the design. (Though I think there's a section that presumes I know anything about crochet for the one step, so I'm not rushing into this immediately.)

I have no idea how it would end up looking, but I keep eyeing some Mothy & The Squid blue/white combinations, in part, because I ran into Ocean Storm on my dash around the same time as the mitts.

Archived link to pattern: Zimtstern Mitts.

Images of yarn below the read-more.

Ocean Storm. There's white, light gray, and enough blue that you can tell it's there, but it feels like a more subdued oceanic palette.

Since I was already on the site, I grabbed two more options.

Ice Blue Sea. The product description uses "icy blues" for a reason. It feels more eye-catching compared to Ocean Storm.

Choppy Seas. There's white, gray, several shades of blue including a dark blue, and according to the product description, some brown. It's similar to Ocean Storm (compared to Ice Blue Sea), but it's definitely got more blue and darker blues.

On Tumblr: mothyandthesquid.

#knitting

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How to Count the Omer:

The omer refers to the 49-day period between the second night of Passover (Pesach) and the holiday of Shavuot. This period marks the beginning of the barley harvest when, in ancient times, Jews would bring the first sheaves to the Temple as a means of thanking God for the harvest. The word omer literally means "sheaf" and refers to these early offerings. The Torah itself dictates the counting of the seven weeks following Passover: "You shall count from the eve of the second day of Pesach, when an omer of grain is to be brought as an offering, seven complete weeks. The day after the seventh week of your counting will make fifty days, and you shall present a new meal offering to God (Leviticus 23:15-16)." In its biblical context, this counting appears only to connect the first grain offering to the offering made at the peak of the harvest. As the holiday of Shavuot became associated with the giving of the Torah, and not only with a celebration of agricultural bounty, the omer period began to symbolize the thematic link between Passover and Shavuot. While Passover celebrates the initial liberation of the Jewish people from slavery in Egypt, Shavuot marks the culmination of the process of liberation, when the Jews became an autonomous community with their own laws and standards. Counting up to Shavuot reminds us of this process of moving from a slave mentality to a more liberated one. When to Count the Omer The counting of the omer begins on the second night of Passover. Jews in the Diaspora generally integrate this counting into the second seder. The omer is counted each evening after sundown. The counting of the omer is generally appended to the end of Ma'ariv (the evening service), as well. [Some call the evening service Arvit.]

The article also contains the blessing and formula for [day #, week #] when you get to that point. For those who would like to have the full list of [day #, week #] in Hebrew, Sefaria has a page: Easy as 1, 2, 3: How to Count the Omer.

Those who don't have a current need for Hebrew script (shortening the page/list): Reform's Counting of the Omer: Blessings for Each Day.

The Conservative/Masorti page has a printable calendar, a weekly email, a mixtape, and resources on the spiritual reflection side: Counting The Omer.

Chabad also has Omer Tools: a daily counter, a daily email reminder, a counter app, and a printable calendar.

#counting of the omer

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Leave it to Sephardic Jews to make even a pedestrian dish — the ubiquitous matzah brei, a mash-up of fried matzah and egg — into something sublime.

In his landmark book “The Sephardic Kitchen“ published in 1996, Rabbi Robert Sternberg introduced many of us to the flavors and pleasures of Sephardic Jewish cuisine. Masa Tiganitas is a Passover recipe of the Greek Jews — “tiganites” is the Greek word for pancakes and, according to Sephardic cook and author Jennifer Abadi, tiganitas is related to the word for “fried.” Masa Tiganitas is also a dish enjoyed by Italian Jews during Passover.

In Sternberg’s version, matzah squares are soaked in milk, dipped in a combination of egg and yogurt and then fried in oil. As opposed to matzah brei, or bumelos de masa, the matzah in Sternberg’s recipe is not crushed. They are left whole, dunked, fried and then sweetened with a drizzle of honey or arrope (a syrup made of grapes), and topped with a sprinkling of walnuts. Think fried matzah meets baklava. I am in love.

#recipes #pesach #sephardic

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max is allergic to nuts AND apples AND pears#SO#we adapted the Ugandan recipe#which has peanuts instead and bananas#we use peanut butter bc I have a mild peanut allergy and there’s this one PB I can have#the rest of the recipe is p much the same#raisins wine honey peanut (butter) and bananas#it’s AMAZING on the Hillel sandwich#it’s not normal Charoset so ppl get a little thrown off at first#but usually get into it later!! - @jewish-kulindadromeus

Ugandan recipe:

Ingredients 4 cups roasted peanuts 3 apples, chopped fine 2 bananas, chopped into small pieces 1/2 cup honey 1/2 cup sweet wine

Directions Grind the peanuts in a blender and place them in a medium-sized bowl. Mix with the chopped apples and bananas. Add the wine and stir. Add the honey and mix everything together. (If it isn’t thick enough, add more peanuts)

Please reblog for bigger sample size and Chag Sameach!!

#recipes #pesach

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Shoutout to those who can't get rid of chametz this year.

Those who can't clean as thoroughly as they'd like, either from sharing a living space with others or just not having the energy or ability to do so.

Those whose safe foods aren't kosher for passover.

This has been such a stressful year, and I know for me cleaning is exhausting when I'm at my best (and this year I Am Not)

So if you're stressed and anxious about cleaning, struggling with the idea of losing access to safe foods for a week, experiencing the anxiety inertia of "oh no why haven't I done anything yet and why can't I bring myself to", or just don't have the energy needed to clean, know that you're not alone 💛

#a mitzvah to eat #pesach

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Hi I wanted to ask a question about Pesach

So I know about the custom of selling chametz, but the question is who on Earth is out there buying it? Are there some agents of chaos out there offering to pay for stale baguettes and half-empty mayo jars?

Hi nonny,

This is so valid of a question! Typically it's someone who understands that this is literally a symbolic transaction and has chosen to be Jewish Ally of the Year.

Here's a great article about how it works in Israel:

#pesach

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as an autistic jew, passover is objectively the best holiday because it’s a dinner party with a script that everyone has to follow

#pesach

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My birthday will be on Passover this year, so I'm wondering if anyone on Jumblr knows of Passover-kosher 'cake' recipes that actually taste good, I'd really appreciate it if you responded to this post with a recipe (or a link to one)

Thanks!

#pesach #recipes

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Title: When Bad Things Happen To Good People

Author: Harold Kushner

Format / Cost: Ebook (free via Libby). The version I had access to was copyrighted in 1981. The introduction and Chapters 1 and 7 include the use of the r-word to refer to people with intellectual and developmental disabilities, and Chapters 4 and 6 use cripple/cripples to refer to physically disabled people (additional chapters may also use crippled instead of disabled). It's not a malicious use of these words, but for people who skip past the copyright info and are not already aware of when this book was published, it may be a bit jarring to suddenly see this choice of words.

Overall, I can see why a lot of to-read lists include this book. Some people may appreciate considering why there's suffering in the world generally, but this is very much coming from a perspective that's more theistic and ultimately thinks that God and/or religion can still be a source of comfort, especially if interacting with some sort of community. (Kushner's a rabbi. The God/religion/community thing shouldn't be too surprising, nor should the Jewish examples like sitting shiva.)

Basically, the idea put forward is that God is not all-powerful, which may be kinda scary to think about for some. There can be bad luck and randomness in the universe, natural laws of this world aren't going to be miraculously altered, bad things can happen because of humans having the moral free will to do so, and the conceptualization of God as a parent who will punish us in order to teach us a lesson can bring about more blame, guilt, shame, and alienation from whatever comfort God/religion/community could provide than ultimately do most people good. More or less. But I think 'God is all-loving but not all-powerful' sums it up.

(This has been tagged with #reviews for personal blog organization purposes and may not be considered a full or satisfying review for anyone else. Some quotes are below the read-more.)

Chapter 1: Why Do the Righteous Suffer?

To ask "Why do the righteous suffer?" or "Why do bad things happen to good people?" is not to limit our concern to the martyrdom of saints and sages, but to try to understand why ordinary people—ourselves and people around us—should have to bear extraordinary burdens of grief and pain.

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One of the ways in which people have tried to make sense of the world's suffering in every generation has been by assuming that we deserve what we get, that somehow our misfortunes comes as punishment for our sins [...] This is an attitude we will meet later in the book when we discuss the whole question of guilt. It is tempting at one level to believe that bad things happen to people (especially other people) because God is a righteous judge who gives them exactly what they deserve. By believing that, we keep the world orderly and understandable. We give people the best possible reason for being good and for avoiding sin. And by believing that, we can maintain an image of God as all-loving, all-powerful, and totally in control.

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Sometimes we try to make sense of life's trials by saying that people do in fact get what they deserve, but only over the course of time. At any given moment, life may seem unfair and innocent people may appear to be suffering. But if we wait long enough, we believe, we will see the righteousness of God's plan emerge.

I can't say I recognized Psalm 92 as an example of this coping mechanism, but it isn't just anecdotes about families in his congregation that are providing examples.

Often, victims of misfortune try to console themselves with the idea that God has His reasons for making this happen to them, reasons that they are in no position to judge.

See also: 'The Lord works in mysterious ways'.

Let us now consider another question: Can suffering be educational? Can it cure us of our faults and make us better people? Sometimes religious people who would like to believe that God has good reasons for making us suffer, try to imagine what those reasons might be. In the words of one of the great Orthodox Jewish thinkers of our time, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, "Suffering comes to ennoble man, to purge his thoughts of pride and superficiality, to expand his horizons. In sum, the purpose of suffering is to repair that which is faulty in a man's personality."

I think quite a few people nowadays would push back on the example of a parent spanking a child to teach them a lesson, but ultimately, the analogy of God in a parental role can still be parsed. Kushner pushes back on this educational idea by pointing out that a parent disciplining a child without making it clear what fault needs to be changed is more just randomly punishing the child, and it can be just as unhelpful to try to make the educational aspect be for the surrounding people.

If God is testing us, He must know by now that many of us fail the test. If He is only giving us burdens we can bear, I have seen Him miscalculate far too often.

In the last few years, I've run into a meme that's along the lines of: God sends [fill in the blank] to His strongest soldiers. I'm more used to it be used in a light-hearted manner, but I must admit that it feels less light-hearted to have a bit more background on where that was likely coming from [Abraham was being given a test in being asked to sacrifice his son Isaac].

When all else fails, some people try to explain suffering by believing that it comes to liberate us from a world of pain and lead us to a better place.

On the one hand, I'm reminded of earlier reading where there were explanations of how the World To Come even became a thought in Jewish thinking (and how it was a reaction to Roman persecution), so this can sometimes make sense for some people. On the other hand, yeah: "since we cannot know for sure, we would be well advised to take this world as seriously as we can, in case it turns out to be the only one we will ever have, and to look for meaning and justice here."

This chapter ends with the proposition that God may not actually be the source of suffering – "Could it be that 'How could God do this to me?' is really the wrong question for us to ask?" – and sets up the exploration of the Book of Job in the next chapter.

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Chapter 2: The Story of a Man Named Job

A long, long time ago, scholars believe, there must have been a well-known folk story, a kind of morality fable told to reinforce people's religious sentiments, about a pious man named Job. Job was so good, so perfect, that you realize at once that you are not reading about a real-life person. This is a "once-upon-a-time" story about a good man who suffered. [...] At the end, God appears, scolds the friends for their advice [to give up his piety], and rewards Job for his faithfulness. [...] [Our anonymous author] was so upset with this pious old fable that he took it, turned it inside out, and recast it as a philosophical poem in which the characters' positions are reversed. In the poem, Job does complain against God, and now it is the friends who uphold the conventional theology, the idea that "no ills befall the righteous."

I'm not going to give a play-by-play, but Job's friends don't want to have to give up on the idea that God is all-powerful, just, and fair, so they're willing to give up on the idea that Job is a good person. Job, with the firm self-knowledge that he's not any worse than others, is more willing to give up the idea that God is good. Instead, God is "above notions of fairness, being so powerful that no moral rules apply to Him" (and more similar to an insecure, ancient king in the fable who rewards people for their loyalty instead of their goodness).

Let me suggest that the author of the Book of Job takes the position which neither Job nor his friends take. He believes in God's goodness and in Job's goodness, and is prepared to give up his belief in proposition (A): that God is all-powerful.

This includes the part of God's speech about having trouble capturing a sea serpent in a net, which would not be unreasonably interpreted as a deity having trouble capturing disorder and chaos (with parallels or similarities to some other mythology of that time/place).

Our misfortunes are none of His doing, and so we can turn to Him for help. Our question will not be Job's question "God, why are You doing this to me?" but rather "God, see what is happening to me. Can you help me?" We will turn to God, not to be judged or forgiven, not to be rewarded or punished, but to be strengthened and comforted.

I didn't pull out the specific quote from Chapter 1, but one of the potential drawbacks of seeing God as the source of suffering is that some people [who would otherwise like to get comfort from God via prayer] don't feel like they can, or are allowed, to seek that type of help from God if God is trying to teach them a lesson, punish them, test them, etc.

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Chapter 3: Sometimes There Is No Reason

This is perhaps the philosophical idea which is the key to everything else I am suggesting in this book. Can you accept the idea that some things happen for no reason, that there is randomness in the universe? Some people cannot handle that idea. They look for connections, striving desperately to make sense of all that happens. They convince themselves that God is cruel, or that they are sinners, rather than accept randomness. Sometimes, when they have made sense of ninety percent of everything they know, they let themselves assume that the other ten percent makes sense also, but lies beyond the reach of their understanding. But why do we have to insist on everything being reasonable? Why must everything happen for a specific reason? Why can't we let the universe have a few rough edges?

There several examples (who lives during a mass shooting, which homes burn in a wildfire, etc.) but the refusal on Kushner's part to accept God having a reason for Martin Luther King Jr dying when he did has an evocative line: "Why can't we acknowledge that the assassination was an affront to God, even as it was to us, and a sidetracking of His purposes, rather than strain our imaginations to find evidence of God's fingerprints on the murder weapon?"

Rather than strain our imaginations to find evidence of God's fingerprints on the murder weapon. (That's the type of phrase you underline or circle in a book.)

Suppose that Creation, the process of replacing chaos with order, were still going on. What would that mean? In the biblical metaphor of the six days of Creation, we would find ourselves somewhere in the middle of Friday afternoon. Man was just created a few "hours" ago. The world is mostly an orderly, predictable place, showing ample evidence of God's thoroughness and handiwork, but pockets of chaos remain. Most of the time, the events of the universe follow firm natural laws. But every now and then, things happen not contrary to those laws of nature but outside them. Things happen which could just as easily have happened differently.

This isn't the sort of idea that's supposed to be a definite answer for everyone. It's more of a way to accept that randomness is a possibility, and Kushner uses an example of where hurricanes ultimately wind up making landfall. (He also pushes back on some purported beliefs that earthquakes are a punishment from God for the "alleged homosexual excesses of San Francisco" and such sinful judgments. Post-2005, I remember someone used to use the example of Hurricane Katrina being a punishment for America for progress on gay rights.)

Or it may be that God finished His work of creating eons ago, and left the rest to us. Residual chaos, chance and mischance, things happening for no reason, will continue to be with us, the kind of evil that Milton Steinberg has called "the still unremoved scaffolding of the edifice of God's creativity." In that case, we will simply have to learn to live with it, sustained and comforted by the knowledge that the earthquake and the accident, like the murder and the robbery, are not the will of God, but represent that aspect of reality which stands independent of His will, and which angers and saddens God even as it angers and saddens us.

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Chapter 4: No Exceptions for Nice People

Laws of nature treat everyone alike. They do not make exceptions for good people or for useful people. If a man enters a house where someone has a contagious disease, he runs the risk of catching that disease. It makes no difference why he is in the house. He may be a doctor or a burglar; disease germs cannot tell the difference. [...] Laws of nature do not make exceptions for nice people. A bullet has no conscience; neither does a malignant tumor or automobile gone out of control. That is why good people get sick and get hurt as much as anyone. No matter what stories we were taught about Daniel or Jonah in Sunday school, God does not reach down to interrupt the workings of laws of nature to protect the righteous from harm. [...] Would this be a better world, if certain people were immune to laws of nature because God favored them, while the rest of us had to fend for ourselves?

Kushner pushes back a bit on acts of nature being called 'acts of God' by insurance companies, and then he transitions from 'Why do good and bad people experience XYZ?' to 'Why do people in general have to feel pain, get sick, or die?' as a line of thinking. Pain is important for taking care of our bodies (to prevent worse injuries, say) even if we can't always imbue the pain with meaning and significance. Getting sick is more presented as cause-and-effect and us gradually learning more about how humans get sick, though it'd be nice to not have that fatphobic example. (Eugenics is also a bad idea even if certain illnesses have a genetic source.) Death is presented as a species benefit from looking at drawbacks of fictional immortality with a clear acknowledgment that this perspective doesn't provide comfort to individuals dealing with death or grief.

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Chapter 5: God Leaves Us Room to Be Human

There's this whole thing with how humans were created as part animal, part not-animal [in the image of God]. Eating from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil presents a differentiation from animals just living based on pure instinct. I can see how this is getting to Kushner's point that a certain amount of bad things happen because humans have moral freedom and the free will to choose to do bad things, but I also feel like I'm not entirely convinced by some of the specific examples being used to get to that point. (This is probably a difference in approaches to animal intelligence and social capabilities in 2024 versus 1981.)

In order to let us be free, in order to let us be human, God has to leave us free to choose to do right or to do wrong. If we are not free to choose evil, then we are not free to choose good either. Like the animals, we can only be convenient or inconvenient, obedient or disobedient. We can no longer be moral, which means we can no longer be human. [...] Our moral freedom means that, if we choose to be selfish or dishonest, we can be selfish and dishonest, and God will not stop us. If we want to take something that does not belong to us, God will not reach down and pull our hand away from the cookie jar. If we want to hurt someone, God will not intervene to keep us from doing that. All He will do is tell us that certain things are wrong, warn us that we will be sorry for having done them, and hope that, if we don't take His word for it, we will at least learn from experience.

There are small scale examples that support this idea, but Kushner does include the Holocaust as a bad thing that happened due to humanity's moral freedom instead of a specific plan on God's part.

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Chapter 6: God Helps Those Who Stop Hurting Themselves

One of the worst things that happens to a person who has been hurt by life is that he tends to compound the damage by hurting himself a second time. Not only is he the victim of rejection, bereavement, injury, or bad luck; he often feels the need to see himself as a bad person who had this coming to him, and because of that drive away people who try to come close to him and help him. Too often, in our pain and confusion, we instinctively do the wrong thing. We don't feel we deserve to be helped, so we let guilt, anger, jealousy, and self-imposed loneliness make a bad situation even worse.

There's a section that calls back to the chapter on Job, but it also broadly covers guilt and blame. We can accidentally affirm someone's feelings of guilt, we can carry baggage about deserving blame for bad things into a present situation, and sometimes we actually should feel guilty (the anecdote used was someone who had cheated on his wife with his secretary). There's also a section on talking about death with teenagers and children, including some care with 'stock phrases' that can accidentally affirm guilt or blame.

There's a sliding scale of truly understanding what death means for children – whole books are devoted to explaining death to youngsters, so this section won't handle everything – but one should definitely be mindful of young children blaming themselves or thinking a death was punishment for something that happened recently. Odds are that a teen trying to increase their independence from their parents will feel some amount of annoyance with them, want them to go away, or otherwise not be a perfect example of gratefulness or communication, and one should try not to imply that these relatively normal teenage things are to blame for a parent dying [the anecdote featured a teen whose mother died from cancer].

Anger isn't uncommon in the grieving process. Sometimes a situation will have a very clear cut person to be angry at, but other times, there's so much anger that it can get a bit misdirected. I'm not certain that I'm sold on the idea that depression is anger turned inwards, but I suppose it's sometimes that way, maybe moreso in specific grief and self-blame examples. Unsurprisingly, some people will be angry at God, but Kushner holds that it's better to be angry at the situation and leave room for some sort of religious comfort.

Actually, being angry at God won't hurt God, and neither will it provoke Him to take measures against us. If it makes us feel better to vent our anger at Him over a painful situation, we are free to do it.

I don't know if some psychologists actually do trace the origins of jealousy to sibling rivalry, but jealousy is also an unavoidable feeling when dealing with overcoming hard situations.

The afflicted person is not looking for an invitation to join the Suffering Olympics. But it would help if we remembered this: Anguish and heart-break may not be distributed evenly throughout the world, but they are distributed very widely. Everyone gets his share. If we knew the facts, we would very rarely find someone whose life was to be envied.

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Chapter 7: God Can't Do Everything, But He Can Do Some Important Things

If we believe in God, but we do not hold God responsible for life's tragedies, if we believe that God wants justice and fairness but cannot always arrange for them, what are we doing when we pray to God for a favorable outcome to a crisis in our life?

There are certain types of prayer that are considered ineffective, and one shouldn't expect God to be able to answer them: When an event has already happened and we don't know the outcome yet, we shouldn't ask God to "go back and rewrite the past" for us. God cannot change the laws of nature for our benefit. We shouldn't pray for harm for someone else, and we shouldn't pray for God to do something we have the resources to do and are capable of doing.

This doesn't mean that there's nothing to even bother praying for, but the point of prayer (and religion in general) is community. You sit shiva, eat the meal of replenishment (se'udat havra'ah) after returning from the cemetery, and attend services to recite the Mourners' Kaddish because it's a means of accessing community.

One goes to a religious service, one recites the traditional prayers, not in order to find God (there are plenty of other places where He can be found), but to find a congregation, to find people with whom you can share that which means the most to you. From that point of view, just being able to pray helps, whether your prayer changes the world outside you or not.

Kushner contrasts two prayers said by Jacob at two points in his life. When he first leaves his home as a young man, he does the typical 'whatever you want, I'll do it' sort of barter. After building a family and 20 years going by, when he is going to return to his childhood home, he acknowledges that he's afraid and does more of a 'can't do this alone' sort of prayer.

The God I believe in does not send us the problem; He gives us the strength to cope with the problem. [...] One of the things that constantly reassures me that God is real, and not just an idea that religious leaders made up, is the fact that people who pray for strength, hope, and courage so often find resources of strength, hope, and courage that they did not have before they prayed.

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Chapter 8: What Good, Then, Is Religion?

A book telling people how much I hurt would not do anyone any good. This had to be a book that would affirm life. It would have to say that no one ever promised us a life free from pain and disappointment. The most anyone promised us was that we would not be alone in our pain, and that we would be able to draw upon a source outside ourselves for the strength and courage we would need to survive life's tragedies and life's unfairness.

Posts about martyrdom and the Air Force member who killed himself have been circling back around on my dash, though it's no longer a recent news story, and it feels important that this book is trying to affirm life.

Let me suggest that the bad things that happen to us in our lives do not have a meaning when they happen to us. They do not happen for any good reason which would cause us to accept them willingly. But we can give them a meaning. We can redeem these tragedies from senselessness by imposing meaning on them. The question we should be asking is not, "Why did this happen to me? What did I do to deserve this?" That is really an unanswerable, pointless question. A better question would be "Now that this has happened to me, what am I going to do about it?"

It kind of reminds me of some radical acceptance posts I've seen – I think from a chronically ill person doing DBT – about figuring out how to live with chronic illness and disability post-diagnosis.

God, who neither causes nor prevents tragedies, helps by inspiring people to help. As a nineteenth-century Hasidic rabbi once put it, "human beings are God's language."

Examples touched upon are people who help in natural disasters, people who research diseases (like cancer), people who become doctors and nurses, and people who reach out to your family when living with a diagnosis (not in big, immediate ways, but in treating you and your family like fellow neighbors and friends in the small ways, even years on).

Is there an answer to the question of why bad things happen to good people? That depends on what we mean by "answer." If we mean "Is there an explanation which will make sense of it all?"—Why is there cancer in the world? Why did my father get cancer? Why did the plane crash? Why did my child die?—then there is probably no satisfying answer. We can offer learned explanations, but in the end, when we have covered all the squares on the game board and are feeling very proud of our cleverness, the pain and the anguish and the sense of unfairness will still be there. But the word "answer" can mean "response" as well as "explanation," and in that sense, there may well be a satisfying answer to the tragedies in our lives. The response would be Job's response in MacLeish's version of the biblical story—to forgive the world for not being perfect, to forgive God for not making a better world, to reach out to the people around us, and to go on living despite it all.

A previous section covered Archibald MacLeish's play J.B., which is a modern retelling of Job's story. J.B. loses his children and house in a nuclear event, the comforters have been modernized a bit (such as a Marxist saying that J.B. had the bad luck to be a capitalist during capitalism's decline), and J.B. ultimately begins a new life with his wife (the possibility to have future children replaces God restoring all that Job lost).

Are you capable of forgiving and loving God even when you have found out that He is not perfect, even when He has let you down and disappointed you by permitting bad luck and sickness and cruelty in His world, and permitting some of those things to happen to you? Can you learn to love and forgive Him despite His limitations, as Job does, and as you once learned to forgive and love your parents even though they were not as wise, as strong, or as perfect as you needed them to be?

This is from the ending where the question of why bad things happen is turned into questions of how we respond to the bad thing and go forward. I pulled this particular section out because it feels like an apt way to round out a chapter based on figuring out how to respond to religion in a broad sense in the wake of all these other chapters.

#books #reviews

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From the weekly pre-Shabbat email from my local-ish synagogue:

In addition to the regular preparations for Passover, the worries about what Kosher-for-Passover food will be available at which store, inviting guests, and all the other worries that accompany this time of year there is an additional question that is on our minds. How do we note the absence of the chatufim - those still held in captivity for more than six months? How do we include their presence at our Passover Seder?

Some of us will include a physical place for them at our table by having a chair that remains empty (similar to the set table that continues to be in the atrium of our synagogue). One suggestion I have heard that we will incorporate is to choose a food staple from your seder and simply not include it this year. Another idea was suggested this week by Rabbi Elie Kaunfer in an article on JTA. Rabbi Kaunfer offers the thought of having only two matzas on the table instead of the usual three. Those three matzas represent the priests, levites and Israelites from which comes the entirety of the Jewish people. Not having one of them would be a powerful way of noting that there are those who are missing from our table. In addition, it would be a difference that could not be missed since the afikomen is taken by breaking the middle matza and with only two matzas there would be no middle matza.

As a pre-Passover reflection about the four children, I would like to offer an additional chance to remember the chatufim at our Passover seder this year. We read about and discuss the wise child, wicked child, simple child, and the one who does not know how to ask. We debate if the wicked child is actually all that wicked, and whether or not the wise child's question displays any actual wisdom. Ultimately we come to a place where we understand that each of us is all of these children, sometimes wise, sometimes wicked, sometimes simple, and sometimes not knowing how to ask.

This Passover, I plan to include a fifth child, "והאיננה - v'ha'einenah" which means "the one who is not there." There is no question to go along with it because they are not given a voice to express the unspeakable pain and suffering they have been subjected to these past six months. As a response to that silence, we will take a moment to remind ourselves of the paramount nature of the mitzvah of pidyon sh'vuyim/redeeming captives and that the Torah instructs us: לֹ֥א תַעֲמֹ֖ד עַל־דַּ֣ם רֵעֶ֑ךָ / Do not stand idly by as the blood of your neighbor is spilled (Leviticus 19:16). Those who are not with us are the children of all of us and while I fear that they will not be physically present at any seder, they will absolutely be present at so many tables, including ours. I hope you will each choose a way to include their presence in your homes with the continued fervent prayer that they should be returned to the loving embrace of their families.

#sharing my path #pesach

[transition-with-the-torah]

My heart goes out to the people who are in the middle of their conversion journeys. In the past, long before October, I have joked "you know they're dedicated to convert at a helluva risky time"... But in all seriousness, it is fucking scary being a Jew right now, and I have so much love for my future Jews who see that, who don't have the supports around them of family, who have lost friends to rising Jew Hatred and are still on the path to being a part of our people.

I recognise how tough that is.

#steps along the path

[transition-with-the-torah]

I feel like that fandom post was a bit more about running out of room for forks.

An offline friend who I've been mutuals with since I got a Tumblr and who I've admitted to wanting to convert to [well before Oct 7th] reblogged an IOF post, and I was left wondering if the anti-Zionism would be worse if we ever met up offline again. At least her reblogs haven't called for the death of Zionists, but someone I thought was an online friend and mutual has been reblogging some 'death to Zionists' style posts lately (where Zionists is definitely standing in for Jews).

Maybe non-political blogs could help balance things out. Except the account with cute little shark doodles is stanning Hamas. The account behind solarpunk gardening tips reblogged a post celebrating the "liquidation of Zionists" and I'm having trouble trying to focus on gardening posts. The account that does cute dragon art has thoughts on Zionists. The stamp blog has thoughts on Zionists. (Having 'thoughts on Zionists' at the very least refers to concerns about Zionist cooties, but it can include accusations of genocide support, conflation with Nazis, etc.)

So, I've been browsing some blogs from Jewish posts and reblog chains. Someone's mocking their haters for supposedly having anxiety, someone's outright calling antisemites the R-slur for IDD folks, someone apologized for joking about gun violence in America, the amount of brain damage/injury based ableism, and someone hates American accents in Hebrew. Sure, no one's outright saying 'I think a group of people that includes you should die', but it still feels like forks.

(Horrible little forks that shouldn't bother me because it could always be worse. Forks that I logically know aren't even directed at me. Forks that feel so stupid for even getting stuck in my mind in the first place, but it's not easy to avoid forks. Some forks have explicit death wishes on them, and other forks have to be tossed into a mind volcano where the anxiety thought loops can't get to them.)

#the pain of shedding skin #antisemitism

[transition-with-the-torah]

Goals for Nisan 5784:

Continue using notes for a local-ish conversion class to inform reading choices (most often: "Living Judaism" by Wayne Dosick).

-- Some blogkeeping relating to weekly reading notes (mentioned in my Adar II notes).

-- At the very least, catch up on topics from Adar II.

Finish "When Bad Things Happen To Good People" by Harold Kushner.

#rosh chodesh #sharing my path

[transition-with-the-torah]

This is a relatively minor thing, and this is below the read-more so everyone can easily ignore it.

I don't really know where the fandom for [CBS show] Ghosts is, so I can't say that no one else possibly noticed something from the latest episode [S3E6: Hello, Brother]. My initial discomfort may very well be an overreaction. I dunno.

Trevor's still-living brother came to redeem rewards points for a weekend stay at Woodstone B&B. He specifically looked for a loophole in the rewards program, so he could use thousands of dummy email accounts to build up a million rewards points and insisted on using them for a year's long stay [with free food and lodging].

On the one hand, it's supposed to be a funny take on Jay and Samantha not setting up their rewards program correctly, so someone could have done this sooner. On the other hand... Did a Jewish character have to comb through the fine print for this loophole and find a way to seem super cheap and inconvenient?

We eventually figured out that the brother was afraid to accept his father's invitation to take over the family business, and he would end the weekend by doing so and leaving. Still, my gut reaction was that it actually wasn't that funny.

#fandom

[transition-with-the-torah]

16 March: I finished "Here All Along" and got my personal recap/review up.

18 March: I listened to the audiobook of "Jews Don't Count" by David Baddiel.

23 March: I read "We Need To Talk About Antisemitism" by Rabbi Diana Fersko.

8 April: I'm partway through reading "When Bad Things Happen To Good People" by Harold Kushner, and I'll need to finish that in Nissan.

I caught up on the local-ish conversion class notes for Adar I, but I got thrown off a bit by the readings being switched around for the topics listed in the last half of the schedule. It's a bit hard to tell when 'Chapter #' or a page range is all I have (for books I don't have access to), but it's not hard to guess that things might have gotten out of order when Night by Elie Wiesel and a chapter on The Holocaust are listed for the class on Purim instead of the class on the Holocaust. (So, I should go back and fix what I can in my posts for each topic/week.)

Goals for Adar II 5784:

Continue using notes for a local-ish conversion class to inform reading choices (most often: "Living Judaism" by Wayne Dosick).

-- At the very least, catch up on notes from Adar I. If possible, get totally caught up on Adar II notes and/or topics.

As alluded to in my Adar I notes, finish "Here All Along: Finding Meaning, Spirituality, and a Deeper Connection to Life--in Judaism (After Finally Choosing to Look There)" by Sarah Hurwitz.