On the road with You-Know-Who

Interesting Bit About Conversion

2009-08-03T21:46:00.004-04:00

Rabbi Marc Angel is a rabbi whose beliefs on conversion have no doubt been comforting in this time when many are increasingly confused and afraid after the continuing increase in strictness in the Orthodox world. A reply to an article of his on the subject is now in the current issue of Hakirah as is his reply to that.

I recommend them highly.

This quote in Rabbi Angel's reply is something that stuck out for me.

Rambam states (Issurei Biah 13:17): “A proselyte who was not examined [as to his motives] or who was not informed of the mitzvoth and their punishments, and he was circumcised and immersed in the presence of three laymen—is a proselyte. Even if it is known that he converted for some ulterior motive, once he has been circumcised and immersed he has left the status of being a non-Jew and we suspect him until his righteousness is clarified. Even if he recanted and worshipped idols, he is [considered] a Jewish apostate; if he betroths a Jewish woman according to halakha, they are betrothed; and an article he lost must be returned to him as to any other Jew. Having immersed, he is a Jew.” Rambam is quite clear that a conversion is valid even under very imperfect conditions: the convert wasn’t informed of the mitzvoth; had an ulterior motive; later recanted and worshipped idols. Even in such circumstances, the convert is deemed to be a Jew, as long as he was circumcised and immersed in the mikvah.

Yes, Rambam.

However, the important point that is danced around is this: it is a chilul HaShem to turn Judaism into a lottery win of birth ethnicity instead of faith in G-d by being blatantly openly hypocritical in turning a blind eye to the widespread purposeful defiance of mitzvot, the near deification by cult of personality of many rabbis over the centuries which tresspasses on idolatry, and the selective lowering of various halachot nearly to the status of minhagim and the converse, the raising of various minhagim to the level of halacha.

This is the 800 pound gorilla in the room that we are all pretending doesn't exist.

It's the thing that makes charedism seem clownish more than anything else.

It's the nagging stabbing pain in Modern Orthodoxy's back.

It's the silently ignored stain on the carpet in Conservative Judaism.

This "you're a Jew no matter how you act just because your mother was" attitude has allowed people who are less Jewish than a Catholic and believe in G-d less than an atheist be taken in the vast group photo of Judaism and thence to be taken as at least in part equally representative of it. That same attitude would deny gerim who love G-d, worry about His world, and seek to do right by Him a place in that photo.

G-d may forgive that, but collectively, deep down, man won't because man can't. If man is honest then man must acknowledge that discrepancy, that hypocrisy, and then to apologize and then to repair it or if the man is dishonest, only such dishonesty as the hypocrisy does not exist in his world, is so alien to it as for him to be an alien to the world, only that may allow otherwise.

A man who is so alien can be no Jew or anything else of value to the veneration of G-d's legacy for such a man cannot fathom G-d.

Yet just such men are held to more a Jew than people who've come on their knees begging to serve G-d, and turned away for not being able to promise one hundred percent observance of mitzvot.

They were in their admission more honest than the men who turned them away, were they not?

I'm sure Rambam would agree.

What am I doing online on Passover?

2009-04-09T15:01:00.002-04:00

Well as you know, for me keeping arrangements agreed to supersedes tradition. That is, if the agreement is not in violation or was made before you became obliged to the tradition, law, etc. I agreed to work any hours, any days, before conversion. So I keep my first obligation. It would be selfish to demand slack to be cut to me now as they didn't know at the time I'd be moving towards religiosity and neither did I.

Rest assured my next job will be availability of Sunday through Thursday except for religious days.

Of course, I don't view my job as work so much as torture and G-d never said you can get out of that for observances. If so, then the fiction of sale of chametz would have a matching sort of fiction with regard to marriage and you don't see anyone willing to take your wife please, which explains Henny Youngman's joke.

I wasn't paying attention and fasted on the Taanit Bechorot completely by accident. Then got dizzy and fell down and it became clear for the sake of continuing to draw breath I'd have to eat something.

And stop walking around.

So I drank some fluids, had something light, and tried to remember what we were doing for dinner. My wife suggested shrimp wrapped in bacon dipped in cheese sauce, her mother suggest an On-Cor frozen dinner of ribs. I gave them both an icy stare and did the shopping myself.

So now I'm munching on marshmallows and trying not to smack my head on the desk over the fact that our haggadah had coupons, coming free from the supermarket as it did.

No, I didn't mistakenly read the sales to my family.

Well, I better get back to the suffering. I hope all are doing well.

It's been an interesting day...

2009-02-26T21:37:00.002-05:00

Well, my day has been very different.

For starters, my car died last night. The garage looked at it this morning and it was hopeless without an engine rebuild. The block and head are fine. It's everything else that is more or less fubar.

My other car being off the road already due to its own set of fixable albeit very expensive problems, I am left without wheels.

The say you have to look at what you still have. I have my home. I have my wife. I have her mother. I have our dogs and cats. I have my health, what there is at my age. My job is only the next town over and I can walk the distance in under two hours easily.

Then you have to look on the bright side. The money I was prepared to spend had the engine not been a loss was far more than the couple hundred I spent on a really nice mountain bike which will get me to work in under one hour. I save money on gas for a few weeks to two months which is what I estimate it will be before we can arrange a trade-in for a cheap used vehicle.

I will lose some weight which was of growing importance to me recently as it happened anyhow.

All through this, G-d was at my side, behind me, right in front of me, you name it, wherever He needed to be, wherever I needed Him, before I needed Him, he was there. Every time I wanted to cry, G-d told me it was fine. Every time I wanted to scream, G-d made me laugh and shrug. Every time I felt like I didn't know where all this was going, G-d said go with it.

Somehow some way I know that G-d will be with me. I've been given another chance to get my house in order after falling asleep at the switch on a few things I took little notice of. I can't say that will never happen again, but I can say I hear His voice a little louder now, and it's not frightening. It's warm and wonderful in a way I cannot possibly do justice to.

I'm riding the fate train again, getting back on the rails, and taking the track He needs me on. For so long, I've missed that. It's good to be back.

The credit you do yourself

2009-01-19T16:16:00.001-05:00

It does one credit to wish the situation at hand were better.

It does one more credit to recognize the situation at hand as it actually is.

It does one the most credit to reconcile the two, accept the difference, and work cogently, rationally, logically, morally, and all other ways men find in their heart of hearts proper and best to make the latter move towards the former.

My apologies on lack of posting here...

2009-01-19T11:40:00.000-05:00

...as I've been having my best ideas as I turn in for bed and been somewhat preoccupied with politics of late. I hope to force myself to sit down and write something spiritual really soon. In the meantime if you're looking for generic morality in real world action check out Tr1v14l Pursuits.

Rabbi Shlomo Brady on head coverings for men...

2009-01-09T11:20:00.001-05:00

Ask the Rabbi: The way you wear your hat | Judaism | Jerusalem Post

For me, it's a silent visual method of identifying your affiliation, like Christians wearing crosses. Important more for cultural commonality than keeping G-d from seeing your scalp, and I think that's the reason G-d would say to do it. Strengthen the community with commonality in action.

Repeat after me...

2009-01-05T19:50:00.000-05:00

My life is not everything I dreamed of or wanted it to be, but it is mine.

Reconformadox?

2009-01-02T15:03:00.002-05:00

Googled it just in case.

Wow, eveything new is old.

An oddly reassuring blog story...

2008-10-21T10:17:00.001-04:00

Modesty Blasé takes a trip to the gym and asks rhetorically if Jews are obligated to exercise in the sukkah. For some reason, this post was very much just the thing I needed to start my day with.

A Reform Response to Chabad - New Voices

2008-10-16T16:43:00.001-04:00

Way too little, way too late, and wrongly polarizing... The problem is that the entirety of the FFB/BH world is tacitly accepted as the holiest of the holy, the archetype of what being a pious Jew means, even by those who oppose them whether ex-BT or never observant ostensibly Reform. That is the problem in this discussion, the source of the impasse. Those who oppose the charedi (and Chabad Lubavitch are a strain of charedi no matter what they and Satmar or Breslov say about each other) a priori concede the spiritual leadership to them.

It's not different from the Christian world where the Catholics are still regarded subconsciously from before the word go as the true protectors and carriers of whatever it means to be Christian. You will notice it isn't Presbyterian ministers in those apocalypse movies who stand up to evil, it's Catholic priests speaking in semi-old Latin, and badly I might add, and tossing holy water about.

Your average Lutheran never really deals with holy water. Catholics rub it on their forehead as they enter church every Sunday. Bet your butt that the Lutheran believes that should one ever come up against a vampire, head for the Catholic church across town.

Similarly, while this rabbi makes some good points, he is way too late and mostly alone. The bulk of Judaism already sees the BH community as the archetype of Jewish spirituality and if you concede the position to your opponent in advance, then your argument is predestined to fail. It's like playing a baseball game when you have every expectation of losing and in fact intend to because you've already decided the other team is better.

Unless and until a new Jewish spirituality, a neo-Chasidut maybe, grows up and splits from the pack and redefines what it is to be religious for Jews, that argument is pointless and Chabad is already acknowledged to be right before the first argument is constructed.

Not that I oppose Chabad. I like them and the Breslovers and so on a lot. Many things are an issue for me, but I don't see the Reform as offering a lot of spirituality that can be embraced. It's a lot of purposely non-judgmental wishy-washiness that leaves way too much fill in the blanks space for people that they ultimately aren't looking for in religion. They want assurance and Orthodoxy promises that. Their mistake is they promise way too specifically and promise way too much and in the name of G-d, making him look like a horse's ass when the mortal men who shill for him fail because let's face it, you sour on Ford altogether when a bad salesman sells you a lemon. Ford had nothing to do with it, but their rep is screwed.

Hence the numbers of disaffected Catholics and Orthodox. One shouldn't set G-d up to get a bad rap that way, but the reason we do is inherent to why we make religions.

Of late it may have been noticed...

2008-09-04T23:52:00.001-04:00

...that it my commentaries in other blogs' replies, I am much less reticent to be critical of some of the problems in Judaism today. Why? It occurred to me that joining a religion is a bit like getting married. You make a pledge to honor that which you've joined. To cherish that institution and the other party. In sickness and in health, for better or for worse.

In my marriage I've stuck to that more or less consistently and without fail in the end. It has been a rough marriage at time. Temptation was provided that was easy to go for and quite attractive given the troubles in our relationship. I didn't fall and when my wife tripped, I didn't walk away, didn't divorce her.

I am not telling you this to brag. I am not telling you this to say "look what a good person I am". I am telling you this to say that you can do this too. It is as simple as choosing something and standing by it. I had no proof things would ever go better in the future. I had every bit of evidence against that. That wasn't the point. I made a choice to make a pledge to G-d.

As we are made in G-d's image, so too then are we making a pledge to ourselves and all mankind in that moment. If we cannot even trust ourselves, who can we trust?

To give meaning to my choices, to give value and weight to them, I have to do it. I have to give that meaning. I have to give that value.

A marriage with difficulties is no different from finding disillusionment with G-d. You made a choice to believe He was and when that belief seemed challenged, you must realize that the only thing that can make it a meaningless choice, a worthless choice, a false choice, is if you abandon it.

Give worth to your choices, give worth to yourself, give yourself a chance. Though born of an eminently fallible species, you are potentially capable of so much and all any of it requires is simply making a choice. Simply pick something. It's as simple and easy as that.

I made my choice to become a Jew. That wasn't just for the food, the camaraderie, the fellowship, or just any good parts leaving the bad. It was for better or worse. If you choose to believe in something, choose to love something, choose to love people, it must be for a reason even if you are not sure what it was.

For G-d's sake, have faith in yourself that your choice had meaning and reason. Your choice to believe in G-d had reason. Your choice to practice Judaism had reason. Reason not given by others who can make mistakes and betray or disappoint you, but reason given by your own mind and heart. Reason you chose.

My reasoning is this. If something is worth doing, it is worth doing it well. If something is worth loving, it is worth standing by. If something is worth having, it is worth defending. I may see Judaism imperfect and as filled with imperfect people, but I see that religion as worth doing, I see those people as worth loving, I see that community as worth having. They are worth doing well by, worth standing by, worth defending.

What makes a Jew or anything else is choice and for a choice to have meaning, I have to give it that meaning. I must not be only a Jew when things go well and a timid gentile when other Jews discuss the problems they see. I have to discuss them too. To join in the ongoing perfection, to join in Tikkun Olam, to participate in Judaism not only when it is easy or fulfilling or uplifting but also when it is painful. Not to always agree and never disagree but express my own opinion and reason out of heartfelt love and caring for that which I prize.

So I won't be doing anything but saying the way I see it. I may not be right but to only speak when assured of being right is to not do right.

Some thoughts that came to mind while walking...

2008-08-26T17:22:00.001-04:00

Why is Judaism as a culture so much more obsessed with Jews by Birth than Jews by Choice? Why do people default to assuming "Jewishness" of those born to other Jews, even if they are practicing Buddhists, rather than those born to Christians, even though they practice faithfully in the style of Modern Orthodoxy or even Charedi Orthodoxy?

I think it is because of the fear of choice, and a lack of confidence in being Jewish in a variety of ways.

With regard to choice, choice is a variable. Humans don't like variables such as choice unless they are not so much a choice as a guarantee in their favor. They like to choose their own dinner. They don't like other people choosing their own dinner so much. They might choose something that makes them gassy and fart during the cocktails later. Indeterminacy, flexibility, openness to change, and a wide variety of other appellations are automatically open in the fearful and pessimistic human mind to going wrong. If it can go wrong, it will.

Jews by Choice can choose differently later on. They can join now, leave later. Of course, so can a spouse, but that doesn't stop us from getting married. We enact, if we have sense but for other reasons, strong discouragement of divorce, but it is still one of those might go wrong deals. So too are welcoming converts. They might proselytize for a heretical ideal. Ooh, scary.

The other reason is of course lack of confidence as in the response which various rabbis have remarked on which goes along the lines of "are you insane? Have you seen all six hundred and thirteen mitzvot? You'd actually choose this life on purpose?"

Well, I guess you might if you didn't see it as so much of a negative burden as they do (those who make those comments).

Jews by Birth on the other hand are born to it. You don't choose your parents, you don't choose your family's traditions, you pretty much get no choice. They chose to get it on, have kids that result from getting it on. Those who come before you got all the fun choices. You got stuck with a nearsighted dad who rants at you for bad report cards before he finally sees that it was actually a B and not an F and a mom who can't tear herself away from soap operas long enough to make cookies with you.

Also, you always have the old cudgel of the familial relationship to keep you in line. You might have the ability to choose later, but for right now, until you're an adult, you have what, eighteen years to have "being Jewish" reinforced as much as Christians have?

The choices of others and their possible decisions to reverse those choices to our detriment... I think that is what makes the birth rather than choice nature so much more concentrated on. Of course, there was the message firmly beaten in by Rome, Christianity and Islam to not proselytize, and the evolutionary move from faith in miracles and G-d towards rote ritual observance in its place, but I think that fear is the big reason for obsession with birth over choice and I think its not different when it comes to immigration.

However, to those we put through the hoops, we don't usually turn on them and suspect disloyalty just because let's say a naturalized Mexican puts a Mexican flag sticker on his car the way a fifth generation American of Swedish descent puts up a Swedish flag sticker on his car. Forget to observe faithfully, and in religion, it's not so well regarded or felt harmless. Which likely has to do with the rote ritual observance thing being what we place more importance on.

One of my favorite articles online...

2008-08-11T19:29:00.001-04:00

Not sure why...

Spring 1997 Michigan Today---The language of the desert

These conditions also may be why the religion of the Hebrews was so appealing. Mendenhall cites Judges 8: 22-3. When various tribes of Israel ask Gideon to accept traditional hereditary rule over them, Gideon replies, "I will not rule over you, neither shall my son rule over you: the Lord shall rule over you."

Yahwism emerged as a sort of peasants' revolt, in Mendenhall's view. "It prohibited graven images. But what were they? They were images of pharaohs and gods, and the purpose of the gods was to furnish authority to the kings as the embodiment of the gods." The ancient Israeli treaty, or covenant, made directly between one God and the people who accepted him, meant that the arrangements between God and the people were immune to kingly authority.

A point I've made regarding atheism versus religion. It's either a system open to challenge based on the dominant central focus, which in the case of atheism is man, which means consequently right and wrong are whatever those ambitious enough to take power and those strong enough to keep it say it is or a system closed to challenge as neither you nor I can proclaim and prove we alone have G-d's ear, despite the attempts of many holy men to claim it.

"Despite the persistence into our own time of an essentially 19th-century view that Biblical narrative is basically historically accurate and supported by the archaeological evidence," Mendenhall says, "there never was a Hebrew conquest of Palestine. But there was a religious conversion to a monotheistic faith of the existing population.

"Now I think that almost everybody has given up that 19th-century theory, but they don't have anything really to substitute for it, whereas I think I do," he continues. "That is, that Moses and a small band came out of Egypt with a new mission and a new concept of God and religious community, one bound together by a voluntary covenant rather than a monopoly of force. When political systems and empires were being destroyed all over the Near East, it really offered a very welcome alternative to populations who no longer had a community or whose communities had been destroyed."

I know that many will sneer at the idea, but what is better? The idea that G-d sent us to slaughter people the way the peoples we supplanted had done for countless centuries before? Or that G-d sent us out to deal with his great creation, free will, and win the day by overwhelming rightness of what we offered?

Interesting afterlife account, linked at Critical Judaism and Other Thoughts

2008-08-05T15:07:00.001-04:00

Critical Judaism and Other Thoughts: Heavenly court proceedings revealed - Finally

I thought the account was... interesting. There's no other word to use that fits as I am not one to judge others' view of the afterlife in near-death experiences. They all seem to vary which fits my view that reality and mentality are not as far apart as we like to think.

To clarify, watch Star Trek: Generations and consider the concept of The Nexus or read the Dungeons and Dragons treatment of the plane of Concordant Opposition. It basically appears much in line with the expectations conscious and unconscious of the viewer, thus denying a totally common and uniform answer to the question, where do we go from here?

That seems like G-d to me.

A word on faith...

2008-08-01T19:00:00.001-04:00

As Douglas Adams put it, and rather ironically as he was an atheist, G-d exists on faith and proof denies faith and therefore G-d cannot be proven. Man goes on to posit that the grandeur of the world proves He exists and therefore by His logic, He doesn't and goes poof.

It's a good point though. The search for proof is a search for knowing. That which you know, you have no need of faith in. I know my chair is under my ass. I have no particular faith in my chair. I have no knowledge whatsoever that my wife will find a job in her chosen field. I have faith that she will.

It isn't even that the analogue to proof is belief. It's not. It's suspension of disbelief. You can believe whatever you want. It's when you start to not believe in a specific thing that you head towards proof being needed to establish bonafide knowledge.

Let me give you the example of Star Trek. You don't know that it is real or not, but you have a lot of proof that it isn't. But you choose to suspend disbelief, the process of rejecting faith and instead requiring proof because the lack of knowledge discomfits you. In doing this, suspending disbelief by free will, you can in your mind accept that Captain Kirk is real in that assumption that he is, and get on from there to wishing you were snogging with the green Orion slave girl.

Why do we find it easier to suspend disbelief to "get into" the adventures of fictional people, and yet find it so hard to maintain faith in G-d?

Shabbat Shalom all.

Evidently Jews should not learn about the ancient temple because Muslims thinks it threatens their mosque...

2008-07-29T17:46:00.001-04:00

Chabad Temple seminar rankles Islamists | Jewish News | Jerusalem Post

The three-part seminar, which is being held this week and next week at some 200 Chabad Houses throughout the country, comes less than two weeks before Tisha Be'av, which marks the destruction of the Temple.

"We view this as a serious and drastic move toward the fruition of extremist organizations to establish a temple in place of al-Aksa Mosque," Zahi Nujidat said. "This represents a real danger to al-Aksa."

If Islam is threatened by others practicing their religion and embracing their heritage, it is doomed. Pure and simple. Why? Lack of faith. If G-d intends for something, nothing can stop it. If G-d does not intend something, only man can make it happen. If G-d actively opposes something, no one can make it happen.

It is the height of insecurity to believe that Chabadniks learning about the fabled temple necessarily means a plot to destroy al-Aksa. That it would have to happen for the temple to be built a third time on that site is a no-brainer. That the Israeli government populated by strident Jews hasn't lifted a finger to it is also beyond obvious and telling. Namely of the intelligence, wisdom, good nature and neighborliness of those they fear so much.

The temple's strongest foundation is not stone under al-Aksa, it is the heart of the good and decent. A third temple need not be built. As the survival in Diaspora proves, a nation need not have land under its feet. Sincere and pious Jews carry the roof of the temple over the heads of all.

There is no point in fearing G-d if you don't even trust yourself. None. Part Two.

2008-07-25T18:55:00.001-04:00

Are the rabbis less fallible than us? Evidently not if you follow the news. Doubly not if you listen to them bicker and make snide comments as to who is more right than another, or more to the point, as to who is less right and capable than another. The fact that they'd snipe each other in defiance of loshon hara tells you right off that they aren't less fallible than you.

And this leads to a terrible path for the rabbinate. On the one hand they are empower by all those who ask for a psak on which socks to wear on a given day, on the other hand, as Senator Palpatine said, all those who gain power are afraid to lose it. The following of people who rely on a rabbi constitutes a tremendously seductive temptation to make use of that power. It also constitutes an understandable force in their minds leading to disregard, disdain, disapproval, and even outright condescension for those who so blindly follow them. The phrase "useful idiots" wasn't invented for nothing.

Further, while those poor and uneducated Jews of the shtetl of prior centuries were definitely viewed with scant regard by the learned and this was noted by the Baal Shem Tov and his immediate circle with disgust and shame, today we have a system of learning for all. The material wealth of food, energy, and housing has led to the ability for just about any Jew to learn all day long. Many do.

No longer are they uneducated in Torah and Talmud, but can read the works and know them perhaps even better than their own rabbis who might in their age have forgotten something. What does this mean? It means that the human tendency to find mysteries and yearn to solve them comes into play. No longer is it that they don't know and must take the rabbi on his word, but when he says something out of bounds with reality as they've experienced it, they will feel that deviation, and think for themselves. As the explanations and reasoning for obvious contradictions become ever more convoluted, the desire to conform and pretend belief is ever more tested by what they know for themselves.

It isn't for nothing that the skeptidox blogging world is dominated by the formerly deeply religious of the Charedi and Chasidic worlds. The most formidable atheist and agnostic people usually hail from strong religious backgrounds whether early on or late such as for disillusioned Baalei Teshuva or Born Again Christians.

This entire focus on fear is setting us up for disaster. We're creating generations yet to be born who will be trained in the deepest writings of Jewish thought, law, and belief without having a shred of faith in any of it. We're making an army of atheists and agnostics who will walk away turning their back on G-d because those who were charged with keeping Him alive in the hearts of the people themselves feigned faith, and acted falsely, and some were out and out liars.

The very foundation of rabbinical Judaism is being set up for a fall but it is also the responsibility of the faithful to call bullshit when a rabbi errs. Were the average Jew who asks for rulings to only ask for rulings when he truly could not see past his inner doubt and conflict, when he truly could not decide for himself, and all other times have faith in G-d and rely on the conscience and heart He gave them, then he would take from that rabbi the corrupting power a good and decent rabbi has no need of and only give him the truest and most special power of truly being needed and not merely being a default device in the living of his followers' lives.

Why do we rely so heavily on them? Why do we not celebrate those our hears tell us are good but listen to whichever rabbi we do by default? We fear that we do not know enough. We fear that G-d is going to punish us for simple mistakes. We fear that G-d will judge with absolute severity anything less than a truly G-dly effort to avoid error in the first place. WHY?

Primarily, because we fear G-d. We don't love G-d, we fear G-d. We fear that the ultimate power in the universe, our Creator, can override our free will, render us irrelevant in our own lives, and take away from us the power to choose for ourselves, most likely the fun things. However, we judge G-d based on our own example. It is other humans who capriciously and whimsically impose on us and take the fun out of our lives and we go by that. Well, I am here to say G-d does NOT work that way. Your free will is the entire point.

As I read a phrase on the Internet once, "everything not forbidden is not compulsory". That is, just because you can do something doesn't mean you need to do it, or should do it. We fear that we will have G-d take away the very possibility of choosing something which in the end when we are good people, we would not do anyhow. You have free will to do anything you want. You also have a nature, a conscience, circumscribing that will. You can choose anything, but what you choose reflects on how you are. As you were made in His image, then so to as you do, so do you reflect on G-d.

If you live in fear of punishment and only do things or not do things for fear of reprisal, of G-d not liking you, and not because they are right or wrong in and of themselves, then you know nothing of right and wrong. You only know punishment and loss versus not being punished and not having something taken away.

When bad things happen, we always look up and ask, "why me". We assume that G-d who made the entire universe and perhaps an infinite number beyond is going to take time out of His schedule of doing whatever it is that He does, to smack you down for not covering your heard or wearing your tefillin right and that's why your car has a flat tire. He is punishing you for doing something wrong. All mankind assumes this. They assume their various deities, or that G-d, or that nature, or whatever is taking time to mess with them.

Humans take pain personally They then share that pain with others, and by the example they set, they judge G-d, and then it all snowballs from there.

We need to stop fearing G-d. Fear is for those who otherwise can't get into the feeling of love for G-d and would otherwise transgress, but not for those who truly feel His love. If you do, act in accordance with that love for G-d as you would someone in your everyday life. If you would not see a parent in disgrace for misdeeds, then would you see disgrace brought upon G-d by those who abuse kids and do not follow the laws and commit fraud? If they are also made in G-d's image, then that which they do reflects on G-d, and, concomitantly, reflects G-d back into them. If you love G-d, then you must also love the transgressor enough to not see them in disgrace but correct them and clean the stains of their disgrace by helping them to change, or if necessary despite all exhortations to teshuva, justice before the community at the earliest possible chance.

When we love G-d enough to trust G-d, we will only give such power to the rabbinate as those within it deserve, and only the deserving. Those who are not will eventually not be rabbis and in the future, no one will be a rabbi who does not deserve the trust of that position's responsibilities. We will be doing the entire rabbinate a favor in thinking for ourselves for no longer will we seem like ignorant frightened children, but worthy of more of the word of G-d, deeper thoughts and cogitations on the meanings and import, and worthy to bantered back and forth on the issues because we will raise no issues that we all know are nonsense, and only those we believe in our hearts are relevant and good to G-d, and His posterity and integrity and honor out of love.

In short, love G-d, do not fear. Think for yourself, and feel for yourself, and know He has undying compassion and forgiveness for you beyond all mankind, so that your errors are not sins worthy of condemnation when you learn from them and change what it is within you that made you commit them, and so do them no longer, or on the way, not so much. Do not unduly press on your rabbi's shoulders with expectations of guiding every juncture in your life. Offer them instead any service you can to lighten their load and help them with their awesome burdens. Care for your fellow man whether Jew or goy because G-d made them all and all are an aspect of Him and if you love Him then so should you love them. Care for their posterity and honor and do not countenance their own self-created disgrace to continue without intervention to change their path from darkness to light. Do not maintain a tight-lipped silence allowing misdeeds to go unaddressed for not a bit of good do you do by the misbehaving, but only let them heap more shame on themselves.

(Brought about because of a week of posts at Failed Messiah, The Kvetcher, and other places reporting more sad signs of fear-centric religious practice instead of love-centric worship. We worship best when we simply truly allow G-d into our lives. He wants to know us. We need desperately to let Him.)

There is no point in fearing G-d if you don't even trust yourself. None. Part One.

2008-07-25T18:35:00.001-04:00

As I read on in theology, especially Orthodox Jewish philosophy, I am struck by the constant theme of fear. Fear it is posited must be in the hearts and minds of everyone who would do G-d's will. I understand the viewpoint. It's laid out quickly and simply in the movie Dogma when Barnaby tells a boardroom of about-to-be-executed sinners basically that lacking fear, they feel free to do whatever. Only fear of ticking G-d off will make people behave.

This is a simplistic notion, really, and one that smacks of distrust of human potential for goodness, for love, for faith. It says that by default, without fear of punishment, people will choose the bad course and do the wrong thing.

Okay, then if that is so, how can the story of the Besht and Elijah where the Besht refuses to tell what he did on his Bar Mitzvah to Elijah have any weight whatsoever? Did he do it strictly in fear of G-d? No, he did whatever it was in service of G-d. We do not serve those we fear, we merely do what they tell us when they tell us, or do without being told because we fear reprisal, but we are not serving. Service requires some measure of affection. We do service for love of G-d. The Besht did a good deed out of love for G-d, and that was all he needed to know. It wasn't for reward or fear of punishment or fear of not being rewarded and he purposely didn't answer Elijah despite the prodding, knowing full well that he wasn't going to get the promised reward if he maintained his silence.

NOT out of fear did the Besht act, but out of love. Are we expected to believe we are inherently so much less worthy that we default to doing worse? The story of the Besht is that of a simple soul who had a choice and chose well. We each can do as well and the Besht himself taught that.

Yet do we teach it today?

Today we teach fear and distrust. We've given up on enlightened self-interest and embraced the fallback of ages, unenlightened self-interest. The first of course takes into account positive emotional concerns such as love and caring for others and that we will out of desire for those things do many other things to ensure them, some out of fear of loss, others merely as a constant way of maintaining them which feels natural to us.

The second revolves around fear and greed and while I am all in favor of using the fear and other negativity of others to counteract those same things, it must always be towards a goal of bringing about amplification of their positive affectations. We must not encourage selfish unenlightened self-interest for in that way there is no reliability. Those who do only for fear of punishment if they fail can be fairly guaranteed to not act of their own accord should they either not be ordered to, or should the act not present itself as obvious enough to make sense to avoid punishment. Further, other actions they might in their heads see in fear as needing doing to avoiding punishment might be done and they might be wrong. Act in haste, repent in leisure they say. It is as equally valid when you replace the word haste with fear.

We teach fear first of others, secondly of not having a rabbi to follow, and lastly ourselves. We internalize it, and then we make it our guiding force.

You may wonder why I put fear of not having a rabbi in there. Do I mean to badmouth the entire rabbinate? Heck no. I mean to badmouth our collective dependency on the position and those who hold it without any proper recognition of the great responsibility which goes with it on the part of everyone, both rabbi and congregant.

The responsibility that goes with being a rabbi is that of the spiritual guidance of those that ask for it in all trust. If G-d gives us Torah, and the rabbis then are the position of authority on its meaning and application, then the desire of G-d to educate and guide us is being handled by them. This is clearly an awesome responsibility. One must never try to be an intermediate between someone else and their Creator, but must be a scout and ranger to lead them through the wilderness of unbelief and ignorance to the Torah.

How can any rabbi do that in fear? In fear, do we not slow our progress on the trail? Do we not in fear poke bushes with our staff and timidly take only the safest and most boring way possible, missing out on all of the other places G-d put in the way for us? Of course we do. We take the path most traveled, not the path less traveled. A path where everything is the same, we are put to no challenges, our character decides nothing because all is rote, all is programmed response. Known boulder, walk left and follow path. Step over log one hundred feet on. Continue down hill to your right. Sidestep the gravel.

Is not much in Charedi Orthodoxy of today a clear expression of this fear? Dress the same, look the same, speak the same, do not expose yourself to anything which might require your decision, do not think for yourself, simply do and learn as told.

I think it is and I think the Besht thought it then of the Judaism of his time. I think all the fear first and foremost brought out a reaction of revulsion and sickness from this loving man and his response was to lead from love more than fear. Fear of disappointing someone you love outranks fear of being punished by someone you don't love. The latter takes the course of least resistance and effort, the former takes whatever course may come and often, all the effort in the world.

When I say sickness and revulsion, I do not mean to imply hate or dislike or even disregard for those who were steeped in it. One does not necessarily follow from the other. Sometimes, the feeling of sickness and pain is in the love of someone else, namely fearing that those you care for are in serious error that will harm them and damage their spirits. When a loved one is filled with hate and anger, do you not care that they are hurting their own hearts, and perhaps pray for them to see a better outlook and a calmer mind?

Another place we proceed in fear is fear of not being religious, or righteous, or good enough. Not for fear G-d will be dissatisfied but because we fear that WE will not be satisfied or more to the point that we will not have the satisfaction we yearn for. At what point will you be religious, righteous, or pious enough? People never ask that. They need to. What is the yardstick? The point of a goal is that it defines a journey. Even an endless journey to an unreachable ultimate destination still has the definition of that destination. What is the definition of righteousness? Ask an Ashkenazi and a Sephardi. Ask a Reform, a Conservative, and a Modern Orthodox. See how many definitions you get.

Without an idea of whether we're getting any closer, it's no different than a starship traveling in a void with no landmarks. We have no idea if we're better. When it comes to righteousness, absent a yardstick, we instinctively say, well, more must be better. More conservatism, more suppression, more oppression, more holding back.

Remember what I said about fear, timidity, and choosing the path more traveled. We are at two counts in favor of more stringency. Is it getting easier to see why we keep defaulting in religion to more and more suppression?

However, there is another path. The path of love. The path of effusive good feelings, of embracing openness and caring. The doing of right things because they are right, because your heart tells you that they are right, and not because G-d might smite you.

No, we experience fear. Fear that we do not know enough to make our decisions in religion for ourselves. Fear that we do not know enough to help make decisions in religion for ourselves with the rabbinate. Fear that we can do nothing. The only way to salvation is to follow the rabbis.

(to be continued shortly)

The Simpsons Talmud - By Noah Gradofsky

2008-07-21T15:21:00.001-04:00

If you need something amusing and light then this is probably what you're looking for. I thought it was a hoot. I only found it because I was searching Google for an idea of how often Talmudic content is someone saying something in someone else's name, which is often as well many know.

Sitting on a ledge...

2008-07-16T17:56:00.001-04:00

I sit on a ledge, looking out on the world.

I sit on a ledge, looking out on the world, and wondering if there's anyone still left out there.

I sit on a ledge, looking out on the world, and wondering if there's anyone still left out there, who is thinking and feeling and wondering still.

In my travels around the JBlog world, I've seen a lot of things that make me smile, and a lot of things that make me cringe.

I've seen promise and sorrow, genius and idiocy, and all the other dynamics of societies the world over that strain credulity for anyone who wants to believe it can all work out somehow.

Not stopping though.

My local synagogue has lost our rabbi to the needs of family and age. She's moving to be closer to loved ones. She and her husband are wished well by the congregation, but it leaves us sans rabbi for two months at least and indeed, we have not even Shabbat services for July and August. Since when do spiritual needs of the religious community go on summer hiatus?

Oh well, can't have my conversion overseen by multiple rabbis each inheriting unfinished business. Besides, I have a long way to go before I feel comfortable making it official there and I have work previously agreed to. The mark of us is how we stand up to our word, right?

Not stopping, no not now.

My Orthodoxy Nerd Test

2008-05-08T18:21:00.003-04:00

I swear I gave the most honest answers I could:

Left Wing Modern Orthodox: 57%
Right Wing Modern Orthodox: 88%
Left Wing Yeshivish/Chareidi: 43%
Right Wing Yeshivish/Chareidi: 14%

The Orthodoxy Test
says that I'm Modern Orthodox

The link is at the bottom of the right side column.

There is no nation in the world like the State of Israel' | Jerusalem Post

2008-05-07T19:23:00.001-04:00

I kept the article title for the blog post title because it says it all. Congratulations Israelis, Jews, and everyone else on not killing each other which given the last 27,000 years of history is a bonafide miracle of human will.

Though, this paragraph at the bottom was loltastic:

US President George W. Bush will attend a conference in Jerusalem next week marking the anniversary, along with Tony Blair, Henry Kissinger, Mikhail Gorbachev, Rupert Murdoch and the founders of Google and Facebook.

Emphasis mine of course.

Dov Bear must be apoplectic at Darth Foxius being there, the conservative outlet that it is.

Google and Facebook? Hello? Are they really snubbing bangitout.com?

Here's the article, go read it, and say a congratulations to another milestone.

High Rabbinic Court: Annul conversions | Jerusalem Post

2008-05-02T15:43:00.001-04:00

In an unprecedented decision, the High Rabbinical Court of Israel has called to invalidate all conversions performed since 1999 by Rabbi Haim Drukman, the head of the Conversion Authority.

The decision was made after the court rejected an appeal of a ruling by Ashdod's Regional Rabbinical Court rendering a woman's conversion invalid.

In a 50-page decision, a panel of three high court judges ruled that all conversions conducted since 1999 by Rabbi Drukman - who heads the Conversion Authority - and another rabbi, must be declared invalid.

They also ruled that it was permitted to retroactively cancel the conversion of someone who does not observe the Sabbath.

High Rabbinic Court: Annul conversions | Jerusalem Post

Emphasis mine.

Oh this was good too:

Out of extra caution, her husband was also added to the list of illegal marriages despite his being a Jew by birth.

Meanwhile, conversion rates AWAY from Judaism continue to climb unabated, observance continues to fall, Baalei Teshuva continue to drift away after a fitful start of observance, and conversion rates TO Judaism are... anyone?

Next up, born Jews will be excommunicated officially by the state of Israel for not being shomer shabbos.

Way to go rabbis! What a great decision!

A very important article, I think

2008-04-17T14:32:00.001-04:00

One on One: By virtue of her sex | Jerusalem Post

Please take the time to read it.

A really sensible article I agree with...

2008-04-15T15:37:00.001-04:00

The Sephardi Perspective: The Kitniyot debate: between tradition and unity |JPost.com | BlogCentral

...and so does my family. Other than my wife's room clearing joke*, we actually are somewhat more observing this. Beans and rice, absolutely.

*When I asked her what she is planning for Passover while in line at the grocery, she retorted without missing a beat, "a big ham like we do every year!" A Jewish woman nearby nearly choked and I quickly covered and said, "she gets Easter and Passover confused... Pay it no mind."

How do I feel?

2008-03-24T20:18:00.001-04:00

Ever watch City of Angels? Note the way the angels look at the world almost blankly with just a hint of some secret knowledge so secret even they don't know what it is, but there is nonetheless an air of having a clue or maybe just faith, in whatever it is they know or might know.

Note Seth's expression as he watches Maggie at first. Not so much interest in her as in what she does. How she does things. What is happening around her.

That's how I feel. Really separated from the world, but something I don't understand assures me that it is basically alright. I don't know what it is and as long as I just accept it then it is okay... for a time. If I don't accept it and question I just have more questions.

I feel it about my conversion as well. As I've said long before I ever get to the beit din I want to be cool with it in my heart honestly. I want the contradictions if any to be surmounted and shackled to my purposes. I want to suspend disbelief and as with not questioning and just accepting without accepting, stipulating to nothing, just let those things slide. I want to embrace the bigger picture and deeper message.

So I continue to sit on a high perch watching people, watching their ways, hopes, anger, questions... and sometimes taking part with few understanding exactly where I am coming from but all knowing there's something odd about me.

Some think the conversion odd given that my reasons for leaving Christianity as it is practiced behind to adopt the ways of Judaism. Even stranger still for such a secular person is that I want to sit in the middle of the Jewish theological road between the extremes of unaffiliation and Charedi ultra-Orthodoxy in Conservativeville.

It's not what it appears and not the same as the kvetching skeptidox.

All my life I was told about Jesus of Nazareth following a path that anyone could see was headed towards a lethal impasse. Either to his soul by recanting his mission and abandoning it, or to his body by continuing to stay honest to what he believed.

It was never about the schizophrenic view that the king of the Jews was somehow separate from them. You know, the internalized and overlooked contradiction that Catholicism and the rest skate past. I never saw it that way. It was a paradigm shifting without popping the clutch as Scott Adams' Dilbert strip might put it rather than the SEP or Someone Else's Problem as Douglas Adams would call it which the other Christians treated it as.

In other words I had a fair amount of cognitive dissonance even as those who I had been with seemed to be enjoying a measure of schadenfreude at it much as some snickering kannoim have towards skeptics and like them, because they have internalized the contradictions, swallowed them whole, and perhaps in some bizarre human way made them stop causing mental ulcers by surrounding them like an oyster makes a pearl.

I'd like to think in that dichotomy there was something so valuable as a pearl. I think XGH more than most is trying like all the apprentices of Hephasteus to hammer it hot and fast into something that makes sense and makes all of the anguish worthwhile. I'd also like to think that there's a certain lesson in simply acting as though there was a redeeming thing already found and get on with it.

Shock, anger, denial, and acceptance are supposed to be the four main psychological stages of of getting past the contradictions which in these skeptical religious introspections seem like Hegelian dialectic that keeps failing to reach a synthesis and thus the mediator never vanishes and we're left with the endless argument; and it would seem the counter-argument that we should have no argument for that matter.

So with respect to the issue from five and four paragraphs respectively, I always felt a drive to do honor by someone who'd never met me, but felt the moral path they were on was so important to the future which necessarily includes me that they went to a really horrible death but at the same time, I always felt constrained by the Catholic and Christian ideas about the new religion.

When you throw off the intellectual chains of a given system to the free fall space of making it up for yourself yet still encompassed by the spacesuit-like framework of your deepest beliefs and nature, you find yourself poking outward trying to find boundaries that you initially don't think should be there, and usually you smack into them when you think they aren't.

So what I came to was the realization that of all I felt, I felt most strongly that my fellow humans were idiots. Sometimes well meaning idiots, but still pretty dippy. Like a dog that runs headfirst into closed doors paying no heed to the fact that they aren't open. Internalized and insulated contradictions seem to be one of their fortes and I had little facility for it. It was a kind of comfort with their own imbecilic ignorance even when it was purposeful and chosen as such that I lacked. Excessive honesty with myself might have been one way of putting it. Guilty angst is another. My way of wrapping that annoying grit was to put it under the heading of Human Fallibility.

When I did that, immediately everything in religion from creation onward became merely a cute story, but something miraculously remained... that seeming downgrade from This is the Truth to Merely a Cute Story did not with it bring a similar downgrade in how seriously I took it. It merely changed why it was important.

Previously, whether it was factual or not determined whether I was right. Now it didn't matter and it was a matter instead of whether or not it said something to me and others that was of any importance to us.

You know, someone had to have the same or at least a similar idea by setting down the Mishna and Gemara. If nothing in the Torah was of any importance, then why explain it? If it was totally important, why not explain it? Can something be so important that you must not explain it? How then could anyone find the importance if someone who found it important did not share with them the reasons they found it important and the framework of reasoning by which they came to that feeling?

Granted, humans can be pretty thick. Read www.somethingawful.com or daily.rotten.com and you'll see what I mean. We're not talking natural born giants of philosophy. Nevertheless they have a weird way of internalizing various things they don't understand and therefore cannot argue in any way, much less formally by the Socratic method, the way those things have meaning and importance to them. I've begun to think some things have importance even their protectors and guardians don't understand. Sometimes, especially them.

In the case of Christianity, the importance that is generally missed without ever getting properly internalized and leading to the ongoing cognitive dissonance they have much as many others of other religions have a similar thing, is that Jesus was first and foremost a righteous Jew who never tried to start a new religion.

So why build a new religion then? It's sort of like going out to the home improvement store for putty to fix bathroom tile and instead going to the supermarket for bread and soup and after ten years of never getting to the putty, you wonder to yourself how long the wife will stand the crappy shower. We sat in church wondering when someone was going to say that it was all bullshit and we should try to understand the world through Jesus' eyes.

Isn't it strange that instead of getting the putty in the first place that people still have to engage in hermeneutics to figure out what belief system they belong in?

Like I said, humans have an amazing ability for duct taping over contradictory things and just doing things because that's how they have always been doing them.

I think the new religious system didn't work quite right. There are others who believe it did and really, I am cool with that and happy for them. Me personally? I'm drawn to the story of this person that thought something was going wrong between G-d and His children so strongly that he set on a course he knew would certainly lead to his own end in a most bloody painful manner. What was his view on the world framed by?

Maybe that explains my fascination with Hillel and Shammai. I don't know.

I do know that the new religious system isn't for me. It doesn't speak to me. I wish it did and I didn't have to leave. I wish there was something to keep me there. Sadly, there isn't.

I can't internalize this contradiction. I don't feel anything to counterbalance and make it palatable or at least tasteless.

The only honor I can do this man is to try to see the world from his point of view. For that you have to practice fundamentalism in its truest form: proceeding from fundamental premises.

The fundamental premise is that the man was a Jew and his ways were those of Jews from two thousand years ago. He knew the prayers commonly expected as a matter of dogma and doctrine in his day. He knew the reasons. He like others knew of the problems and promises of his people. The dichotomies and the contradictions. He knew what he thought to be right and what he thought to be wrong. These he learned from others of his people.

I cannot go back two thousand years, so what happened to his people?

That's why I dove into the sea of modern Jewish questioning and culture long before learning the dogma and doctrine. The people in a given system internalize and systematize the dogma and doctrine of that system. They then retransmit these things in their own way through the filter of their own experiences and natures. Just as Jesus learned from his people, I want to learn from them.

So I began to do so and my cognitive dissonance went away. These people I was learning from made more sense than those I'd come from as if I was always a 110VAC American hair dryer trying to be plugged into a 220VAC socket in Europe.

I don't think the skeptidox are going to find the same breath of fresh air experience in Christianity. I rather think that instead of the ability to pare away a later framework and reduce they will be forced to swallow Torah AND the New Testament. If the motor oil is the wrong weight, mixing it with more oil of a still wrong weight probably isn't going to help.

In that, I was lucky I had a more fundamental premise to go back to and a people who stuck with it even if they did so in an evolutionary manner which between the Ashkenazi and Sephardi shows a great difference from the period of the Second Temple.

Was I lucky? Or was it always supposed to have been, exemplified by the puzzle piece fit I found for myself? Can the eventual future have something to do with the past which preceded it?

Maybe. It's one of those internalized things which I'll never get a nice comfortable layer of pearl around, but at least that question doesn't frighten me and though I don't know why, I don't care why I don't know why either and I'll be thankful for that moment of peace in a world I watch with rapt attention like an angel who doesn't understand but knows something he doesn't understand which makes the first not understanding somehow okay.

Thank you CAIR for reaching across the aisle!

2008-03-12T20:27:00.001-04:00

“In a nation as religiously diverse as America, it is important that we all make the extra effort to accommodate the beliefs and practices of others,” said CAIR Communications Coordinator Amina Rubin. “Student athletes should not be forced to choose between their faith and participation in sports.”

CAIR: Muslims Urge Accommodation for Jewish B-Ball Team

As I've said elsewhere, it's not that Christians of whatever level of practice if any are anti-Jewish or anti-Muslim or pro-Christian as much as there's a common human tendency to see the world through one's own experiences and environment. Christians are in the majority and just like other humans, see the world through Christian filters, and other ways and practices aren't wrong, they simply DON'T EXIST. When something pops up demanding that they do, ignore it and be inflexible as if the other person is being irrational and wanting to take time off to hug trees or something.

If Jews or Muslims were the majority, they too would have to be prodded to remember that other ways of life exist just as much. The thing is, we don't give up and act like this blissful ignorance in others is okay, and if we are people of honor we will recognize this human fault, and counteract it in ourselves and leave an opening in our world for others.

Thank you Rabbi Jeremy Rosen for noting this CAIR posting.

G-d spoke again...

2008-03-04T15:20:00.001-05:00

I was half asleep as I started hearing Him. I had just woken from a dream which was about something that's been bothering me. Nothing odd. I just was somewhere I didn't want to be, in the presence of someone I can't speak with because she won't speak to me. Several years now.

In the dream I said, "well, it's been nice. My time is up now though." Then I fell to the floor, and stopped breathing. I remember voices and then darkness. I felt really peaceful. I was ready to die.

When I woke from this I heard that voice inside saying, "please, stop. Don't go. It's not time."

I answered, "I know, you love me. You don't want me to let go. And I'm sorry, I don't want to let you down. I just don't know how much longer I have. I'm failing fast and there's a part of me ready to move on now, even though You don't want me to. I'm sorry for that."

"It's okay... don't go. Please. I can't say I have anything special for you to do, but everyone has a part to play somehow in the world and you've been trying so hard. Don't let go. I can't stop you from going, but I can ask."

"I'm sorry. I'll keep trying."

"I know what's bothering you."

"And I know you can't make people feel something they don't choose to. Just... I don't know. Let her stop hating me some day before either of us lets go. If there's a way..."

So something inside is warning me. G-d, conscience, whatever you want to believe. Warning me to not let go. Which tells me that you can simply will yourself to die. That you can let go of this life and die without actually doing anything to kill yourself. No matter how depressed I've gotten, no matter how suicidal I was in younger years, I never heard this one before.

Something inside me doesn't want me to let go, and some part of me wants to. Why does the sunny warm day, the blooming flower, the smile of my wife bring me no comfort? What is the darkness now at the edge of my world threatening to come on like a storm? Financially, we're doing great, we're making progress on the house renovations, getting ourselves together after years of scraping by. We're a closer family than we've been ever before. I'm happy with my path to conversion. My wife has a new job. I don't want to die, that I know. I'm not remotely suicidal.

So why is there a part of me that wants to let go, even if it's to quiet darkness? Is it frustration at running in place and the gulf between where I am and where I am going and the speed of progress? What exactly is bothering me? So my mother isn't speaking to me. I wasn't the one who wronged her, she turned her back on me and cut me out of her life mere months before my grandfather's death. I didn't do that.

So she's a BAC. I don't think it is any of her business if I convert. I'm pushing forty and that's my business.

If she gave a damn, she'd call. In two plus years, she hasn't. For all the years before that I called her. If she wants to say something, she knows where I am and what my numbers are. Conscious and waking, I don't really care either way any more.

Maybe the dream was just a convenient framework to hang my doubts on. Maybe it meant nothing. The voice telling me not to let go and move on meant something. I think I need to be a little more skeptical of myself and just suspend judgment. Sit back, give it time, be patient. This I rationally know, but inside, a part of me is tired of waiting... for what I don't know.

Masthead change...

2008-02-29T15:38:00.002-05:00

Previously, I wanted to express how I seem to a lot of people. Functional, but out of place.

Now, I want to express an idea forming in my mind and namely a similarity between quantum mechanics and human realism when it comes to religion. You can't know if something is true or not until you check, and wait! Do you really want to look? If you do and the result isn't what you wanted, will you be honest enough to admit it? Will you perceive it correctly or incorrectly to begin with? Are you a depressive cynical sort or an optimistic bouncy sort?

As Douglas Adams pointed out, faith is often beliefs that not only can't be proven, but might well be disproven by any attempt at proving them.

In line with the fanatic BAC/BAJ stereotype problem, what do you do when the appearance is that you were wrong? Redouble your efforts anyhow? Turn away? Chart a third course?

Therefore I ask a question soon to be my next masthead...

What Is The Third Choice?

Why do I hang around Orthodox Jewish blogs?

2008-02-28T22:04:00.001-05:00

Because most Ba'al Teshuva, Born Again Christians, Ger Tzedek, etc. want to jump right in with their eyes closed. I want to be honest and jump right in with my eyes open.

If you were to study all the angles regarding Chabad-Lubavitch, you'd probably not go frum and all BT.

If you were to study all the angles regarding Evangelical Christianity, you'd probably not go all Jayzus and pumping grace.

I don't want to be those things. Not that many CL people or ECs aren't good, they definitely are. I know a lot of them. I just don't want to be one of those outreach besotted people who goes all... well, Born Again Jewish. All wishful thinking with blinders on and no idea of what they're really doing or getting into.

With that, you either have to become ever more detached from reality to keep from facing up to the shortfall from reality or you have to eventually hit that shortfall dead on and make a decision. That can lead to being an AO (Agnostic Orthodox) which a lot of bloggers seem to be. I've done the agnostic thing, and more against myself as in, I wasn't really sure I existed or was important. Trying to believe in G-d when you don't believe in yourself is a fruitless hollow exercise.

So I want to take in the breadth and depth of Jewish religious misery, all the self-conscious soul-searching dubiousness. I wanted to stare the dark side of my new home in the face and then when I say to G-d that I am truly made up in mind, that I'd rather die a Jew than live as whatever the heck it was that I used to be, I can say in all honesty it was a choice freely made with totally fair disclosure. G-d didn't stop them from showing themselves to be the wonderfully imperfect people they are with all their nuances, and I saw it and joined anyhow.

I've seen the complaints and kvetching. It hasn't changed my mind that I've come to a fairly cool people with a great history and wonderful rapport with the human idea of G-d.

After all, if people were perfect, would would not want to join the perfect people? The trueness of a choice is in the imperfections and seeing beyond them to what can still easily be.

Sort of like getting married, really.

Wolfish Musings: The Gedolim And How They Relate To The Common Person

2008-02-26T18:08:00.001-05:00

Go read this at the link below. Excellent set of premises and very well put together. Highly recommended blog in general by the way.

Wolfish Musings: The Gedolim And How They Relate To The Common Person

On the heels of the last part, some article addressing...

2008-02-20T17:15:00.001-05:00

Let the Vatican pray for my soul - The Jewish Chronicle

A few decades ago, if you wanted to play music, you would have bought a record player. Then came cassettes, then CDs. By the turn of the millennium, lots of people had all three formats happily sharing shelf space.

But today, you go for Third Generation (3G) technology, the iPod. Why is it Third Generation? Because it does not sit alongside what came before, but rather replaces it. The whole point about an iPod is that you load on all your music, hold your entire collection in the palm of your hand, and never need your records, cassettes or CDs again.

But the first to come up with the 3G concept was not Apple, but early Christians. As the Preaching of Peter puts it, “The ways of the Greeks and Jews are old, but we are they that worship Him in a new way, in a third generation.”

I am jumping ahead to this bit because I cannot overstate my general instinctive disgust with relating religion to digital audio technology. I don't want anyone anywhere ever again to use "3G" and anything religious in the same article. Not ever. I mean that.

Okay, that stone in my sandal dealt with, I'll back up to:

The fact is that the desire to convert the Jews is basic to Christianity, and it is only the Church’s efforts to reach out to the Jews in recent years to make up for centuries of persecution that has somehow convinced us otherwise. That, and that fact the Jews, en masse, have come to accept in recent decades to a fiction called the “shared Judeo-Christian heritage”.

I am not sure where to start with this. Did the writer even talk to a Catholic, or any Christian at all? If they had, they might know that no, the Christians aren't looking to convert anyone. They simple treat the world as if everyone already was a Christian and any time reality deviates... ignore it and forge ahead. This is why I can wear a kippah at work and have a translated Torah on my desk and STILL people treat me no differently than them. Other ways of thinking simply don't exist and they don't care.

We Jews do (caveat: as a specific group consciousness thing and the Catholic Church hierarchy does as well), and it shows. We get steamed whenever things like this papal idiocy crops up, we often think that if no one will react to our dressing and doing things differently, well, we have to find a new way to make non-Jews react. Won't work the way you want. Not ever. The Christians dominate because of this detachment from reality, much like British royalty's, where the world is always assumed to be whatever they assume it is, and reality not be damned, but doesn't exist. Reality simply is what they believe it to be. No one and nothing can change that. They live it 24x7.

I know, I'm a former Christian and former Catholic to boot. The church cares. The ones who wrangle the official released theology. The rank and file? No. Not at all. Look out upon the masses of reform and other Jews, largely irreligious. They don't care. We care in official religious capacities. In our ordinary life, the world is what we decide it is.

For instance, I notice kosher symbols on food as I go shopping. To me, the world is cognizant of Jews and their dietary requirements. There is kosher food everywhere. To a Christian, they see the exact same supermarket and the exact same food packages, but those kosher symbols just do not register. They don't occur to them because they are not part of their world.

I treat the world as if everyone was a Jew. I am friendly, outgoing (to a point, I am a nerd and introvert), and polite. I'm down home, familiar, like a piece of the scenery that people expect there like a convenient bench to sit on. They perceive me as just another might-be-Christian. I don't wear a big star of David, and if I did wear a tallit katan and tzitzit out and flapping, they'd notice nothing of it and think nothing of it, and out in public I wear a baseball cap or bandana or winter hat depending on time of year and they don't know why my head is more often than not covered. It never occurs to them to ask, I never ask them why their dress choices.

That secular side is something important. It spackles over things like that no one goes through the father but through Jesus nonsense. It pares away the extraneous and superfluous. What do you get down to? Well, for most Christians not concerned with official stamped and registered with theology, Christ becomes a man by the side of the road pointing the way to G-d.

And you know what? THAT IS EXACTLY THE PICTURE GIVEN TO ME BY THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN SUNDAY SCHOOL!

Yeah, surprise surprise, the Catholic Church spends more time on G-d the creator than it does Jesus of Nazareth. The Jesus obsessed are largely Protestant johnny-come-lately types. Especially the Christian equivalent of a Baal Teshuva, the Born Again Christian. BACs are big on Jesus because as with most of the new testament they can spin it any way they want.

The historical picture of Jesus is that of a good and loyal Jew who wanted an end to corruption, wanted an end to the Roman domination, and wanted people to heed the sages, to follow the ways he followed all his life but to do it with love and honesty. Without hypocrisy and deception and double-talk. If anything, I see that very same mindset on the part of Skeptidox bloggers constantly.

Of course, Paul never met Jesus during his life and his conversion was after the fact. He had issues to be sure. And he and his fellows were trying to sell the word they had to Romans. ROMANS EXECUTED JESUS. Does any sane rational person think that the Romans would say "mea culpa" and bow before the memory of he who they nailed to a cross? Of course not.

So Bar-Abba became Barabbas, and that entire story got concocted. The Romans were made to seem the tools of a far more corrupt than they ever were Sanhedrin. Pontious Pilate is made to look like a reluctant bad guy, and to show a glimmer of future Roman redemption but without the Romans ever acknowledging any wrongdoing. The inference at the center becomes that Jews killed Jesus.

Rome is made to look like they were always and forever faithful to this newly concocted religion that Jesus himself never tried to create, never tried to build, but realistically had no way to combat before his death. The believers who listen to your message never really do. They hear what they want to hear and they fill in the blanks themselves. Unless you're a control freak psycho like Jim Jones, that kind of thing can never be better than a sorry side-effect of getting people to supposedly agree with you. There's the part they agree to, then there's the loads of baggage they toss on after it and no amount of setting them straight can change it.

Look at the dead-end quandry that Chabad finds themselves in. Do you really think that Schneerson didn't know how he was adored? Or that he wanted people to think him moshiach? Everything I've ever read on Schneerson tells me he wasn't stupid enough to think himself even a piece of G-d, nor stupid enough to not know what was going on with the adulation and raising up of his name all the time. I think like anyone else in that position he came up against the no-escape briar patch of knowing that no matter what he said, the adoring followers cared more about reading into him and his work what they wanted, than about any Torah teaching he gave.

Today though is not the heady time of the Second Temple Period as it is called. Today is a cynical mass market time where even Mennonites from Pennsylvania eventually have to go to WalMart. Everyone is banging up against everyone else. And everyone is like normal, making up their own personal theology for themselves.

I tell you this honestly and truly... do not look for trouble where there is none, or you will lose friends and make enemies and G-d does not want that. Many many Christians don't think about Jesus as much as they think about G-d. They heard the bible part about "no other other gods before Me". They heard the iffy insubstantial and colliding and contradicting later books about Jesus. When you pare away in Christianity the parts that contradict, you can come to no other picture than that the Romans killed a man who seemed to be a threat to their nice and relatively peaceful stability of rule which was nothing new, he was a good and righteous Jew, and the father, the one uncreated creator G-d was the one we should all revere, and it all got rewritten and revamped and retconned mercilessly on the altar of marketing and reselling it to people.

THAT was the image presented to me, by nuns, in Catholic school.

You can stop worrying what the new pope cares about. It's not about what the alleged leaders say, it's about the what the rank and file believes. Politicians know that. Why don't religious people notice? Probably because like with everyone else, we assume the world to be what we assume it to be. The Vatican, your local rabbi, that ayatollah on TV, everyone... Everyone sees the world the way they want to. Time to see what's really there and make use of those openings to bridge gaps. Whether or not moshiach has come, will come, etc. matters not. What matters is, who do we all believe is ultimately in charge? Who alone needs to accept us? Who alone judges us?

That is our shared heritage. The retcon by Paul and his successors and most especially the Roman Empire notwithstanding, G-d is above all else, and that is what we all believe when you pare everything else away, we are naked and in the mud, the Torah or bible not there, when it is down to that last breath and we're headed for learning what no living person can know, that we have in common.

Let's start working from that.

Vatican steps back a few centuries, RA does two-step in place

2008-02-20T14:51:00.001-05:00

Let the Vatican pray for my soul - The Jewish Chronicle

Quoted loltasticness:

The Rabbinical Assembly, the international association of Conservative rabbis, went as far as threatening a motion declaring itself dismayed and deeply disturbed.

They "threatened" a motion that would state they were "dismayed"? What are they waiting for? For the Charedi world to okay the MO world to okay us Conservatives to be dismayed and deeply disturbed? I ask it that way because that's basically how Conservativeville works if you hadn't noticed.

Next thing you know, they'll go ahead on their own and declare themselves considering a declaration of discomfort.

Purim Katan

2008-02-19T21:37:00.001-05:00

Read about it here: Purim Katan

Keep hope alive...

Hitler IS fodder for comedy, and here's why...

2008-02-19T19:45:00.001-05:00

Quote:

Maybe it's just me, but I find using Hitler for humor extremely distasteful. The man was the epitome of evil in the last century and the murderer of most of our people.

Yehudi Hilchati: Hitler and comedy

Some might think as a ger tzedek (I know they shouldn't but people are people, yadda yadda) I should not merit a say on this subject but I must disagree.

From before I entered school, from as early as three, my grandfather spoke of his World War II experience. I heard about the blood, guts, and whole bodies floating in the water at Normandy, days after the invasion. He arrived two days on and they were still cleaning up the mess. The waves were still foaming red he said.

He spoke of the sight of bodies run over by tanks as they advanced, the effect on internal organs as they exploded under the pressure.

But... most of all... he spoke as he motioned at my uncle's house three acres distant, of the bodies at the camps. Impossibly thin, gaunt, skeletal. They stunk of rot. The whole camp stunk of burning human flesh. It stunk of sewage and human body odor. He pointed at my uncle's house and said that they were stacked farther than that, as far as he could see, like cordwood.

He'd trail off then with a distant look on his face as if he no longer wanted to live, for just a moment. That look of horror that says you have just become disconnected, please call back later.

I also grew up with Jewish comedians like Mel Brooks making fun of Nazis. At first I didn't understand, but then it made sense. The minute you fear these creeps, is the minute you grant them the first bit of false legitimacy on which every other piece of their evil is hung. Not knocked from the table, they will nail it down, here, there, everywhere. Soon they are entrenched, established, and we fight with them.

For there to be an argument, there have to be at least two sides. Nazis don't have a side. None. Zip. Zero. EVER.

They were given that first piece of legitimacy during the beer hall putsch maybe. Maybe before that. Instead of being patted on the head and herded into mental facilities with comfortable pajamas and heavy medication, they were taken seriously. People actually argued with them as if they had any point to make, any side to argue. Their side was so monumentally insanely indefensible it amounted to not being a side. More like the kind of Internet Performance Art done by trolls, and with the same idea that argument was just amusement and distraction and never the real point of any of it. In the case of Nazis though as with all such political loons, it was about getting some of the power over their fellow man that being in government offers. And from there... Same as all other political movements and people. More power.

Unlike Nazis however, most political people today aren't jonesing to put people in camps and systematically wipe them out. Which is what separates them. Their ultimate idea of what to do with all that power eliminated any rational sane claim that they had a side. That they had any rational sane claim. To anything.

The Nazis must remain for all time locked beyond the veil of legitimacy and relegated to cartoon characters. The cranks who spew their bullshit to the streets, who wear white hoods, who publish how-to guides on domestic terror, and so forth... they must NEVER be seen as anything more than the unfortunate mildew on society's edge that they are. Not for fear of them, because they are not anything to fear, but for fear of what WE cause to happen by putting our prodigious powers of the mob of society behind a broken steering wheel of intellectual worthlessness like them.

Have faith... life will out

2008-02-12T17:00:00.001-05:00

Where did that central Asian haplotype come from? Most Jews are vaguely aware of the Khazars; their king plays the role of interlocutor in Yehuda Halevi's 12th-century defense of Jewish doctrine, The Kuzari. The Khazars, however, were not a mere literary device. They were a real people with a major kingdom north of the Caspian Sea, and in the eighth or ninth century the Khazar leaders and some of the people converted to Judaism. After the 10th century, they disappear from history. The common ancestor of the Ashkenazi Levi'im who carry this particular haplotype lived less than 2,000 years ago. A good guess is that at roughly the time the Khazar kingdom disappeared, a very small number of closely related individuals with the tradition of being Levi'im, or perhaps only a single male, came from the general region of the Khazar kingdom to join the then-small Ashkenazi community in Europe. If this is so, it may indicate that the Khazar Jews had created a native class of Levi'im.

Genetics and the Jewish identity | Jerusalem Post

This post runs three pages and for those who are quick to judge and argue, it DOES bring up the difference between legal, ethnicity, halacha, etc. What this article is about is proving that despite our common misconceptions, historical inaccuracies, personal biases, and other pitfalls, common threads of the whole scene keep running through physical reality leaving telltale bits behind to find.

Chief Atheist Christopher Hitchens: Not So Harmless or Principled

2008-02-05T14:06:00.001-05:00

Christopher Hitchens and the racist Jewish court | Jerusalem Post

Go ahead, read it. I dare you.

E-Kvetcher comes through again...

2008-02-01T15:49:00.001-05:00

Search for Emes: Ecce Homo

Read this article he's thrown together from a few books and Wikipedia on Barabbas and Jesus. If ever the name Barabbas bothered you and you were wondering what was going on there, well, this might make light bulbs go off in your head.

A really good article at BreslovWorld.com

2008-01-31T20:05:00.001-05:00

Excerpt of note...

Hashem wants to lavish His magnificent illumination on each of us, as a loving father desires to give to his beloved child. Yet, our misdeeds cause concealment. When a person falls into the darkness of concealment, Hashem is deeply sorry and prays for that person. The Gemara in tractate Berachot, page 7a, teaches us that Hashem Himself prays, for Hashem says: "'I shall bring them to My holy mountain and I shall gladden them in My house of prayer' My house of prayer not their house of prayer, to teach that Hashem prays. And what does Hashem pray? Mar Zutra bar Tuvia says in the name of Rav: May it be My will that My mercy overcomes My wrath, and may mercy permeate all of My traits, and may I act with My children with the measure of mercy, and may I judge them with lenience.

BreslovWorld.com - Spiritual Growth: No Reason for Despair

Now aside from the usual skeptic criticism that this ignores basic and well known biochemistry regarding moods, this article does have one really notable thing which in all my studies has not been brought up by anyone else... G-d is said in the Talmud to have feelings and pray. Just like me.

Believe me, no one in all of Christendom that I've ever read has ever broached this. I have, but then I'm considered a chinstrap on a yarmulke. Functional in some way in certain exigent circumstances but generally odd and unsettling.

THANK YOU BRESLOVWORLD, THANK YOU RABBIS ARUSH AND BRODY. A THOUSAND TIMES THANK YOU.

A word from G-d...

2008-01-30T17:22:00.001-05:00

"You're not supposed to be perfect so stop hating yourself when you fall short of some goal that for all you know, I never had any design on you for."

This idea keeps flitting through my conscience when I am hard on myself. I feel His hand on my shoulder and I want to cry. I want a hug. I know that's human emotionality, but it is what it is. I wonder if I'm going to get to ask Him what it means or if He's right and why and in what context. He tells me, but my doubt gets in the way of holding the belief. Yet still I tread on, numb, and headed where he sends me.

I tried to walk away before, and was tortured near to insanity by the reminders He'd leave in my path. All of it boils down to that simple statement from Buckaroo Banzai... "Wherever you go, there you are."

He made me, and in His image. I can no more run from Him than I can escape myself. I know he doesn't expect perfection but I want so much to make Him proud somehow. Just one redeeming thing before I go. I fear I'll never get to do it. He says not to worry, but why do I want so much to prove myself? If I am in His image, does He want to prove something to someone, and if so, to who? Where does G-d hang His head when he wants to cry or needs a hug?

Maybe there's a reason I feel so alone. Maybe in that... I'm not.

orthomom returns with an excellent post...

2008-01-25T17:41:00.001-05:00

orthomom: Freakonomics on Shemita and the Law of Unintended Consequences

After you read that, I have some questions and ideas. Ruminations and vague thoughts.

The Torah is nowhere near as strict as the corpus of Jewish law afterwards collectively known as halacha when it comes to chametz. Back when the original negative mitzvah was handed down, everyone pretty much made their own bread. Later on, not so much. Why such interest in making it more strict to include things that no sane Jew would ever try to eat? To keep the same sense of importance and urgency as in millennia past?

Maybe only the actually sane edible chametz could be destroyed and the inedible chametz containing products could be escrowed with righteous Gentiles instead during Pesach and bought back afterwards for a nominal fee? Maybe someone could find self-storage operators who were fitting and acceptable, and get them to have a Pesach Escrow Service. Just an idea.

AM gives this comment:

heter mechira was instituted in the late 1800s because it was considered pikuach nefesh. The farmers would starve without it, and that's why R Yitzchok ELchanan Spektor (the godol hador at the time) agreed to it as a necesarry measure. I think the original stipulation was that the fields would be sold and worked by non-jews.
The main objection to heter mechira was related to "Lo Tachenem" a prohibition in the Torah against selling land in Eretz Yisrael to non-jews. Those opposed felt that by selling you would violate a Torah prohibition to remedy a rabbinic prohibition. (Most poskim hold that shmitta today is d'rabannan)
With regard to chutz la'aretz, it was never pikuach nefesh, so perhaps the heter would not apply.
I heard R' Herschel Schachter say that Rav Soloveitchik instrutced Rabbi Genack and the OU not to rely on heter mechira for this reason.
I think most Kashrus agencies follow the smae reasoning.

I agree with this largely, but am I agreeing because I wish for a more lenient outcome, because I believe G-d to be generally lenient and not intending for us to create perverse incentives and unintended consequences despite free will to do so? I wonder to myself.

Perhaps the more important rule of not selling Israeli land to non-Jews would then imply that Israel needs a nearby but trustworthy and low-cost source of imports. Perhaps hydroponics on converted cargo freighters, registered to somewhere other than Israel by non-Jews and docked in Israeli waters? So they would be within Israeli security and control, but not actually Israeli land and thus not running afoul of the injunction.

Hmmmm...

My reply to: Rabbi without a cause: Poland's Jewish Cultural Festival

2008-01-21T15:31:00.001-05:00

Rabbi without a cause: Poland's Jewish Cultural Festival

People do horrible things under the pressure of fear of dying, under the fear of displacement, fear fear fear... Even the seeming most evil people do things on automatic pilot without much thought like fleeing death at their heels through a hotel, hall to hall to stair to hall to room to room. Slaloming this way and that hurtling forward through events knocking others this way and that in a cascade failure.

No one pebble thinks it is the avalanche and no one drop of rain thinks it makes the flood. It just happens that way.

There's a lot of people dead now, gone and there's a lot of living people who didn't do those things of decades past. People who were just children when the Nazis were removed from the world. I don't hold the sons or daughters of those who wrong me to account for the sins of their parents and won't now.

I get the feeling there's plenty of Poles today whose ancestry two or three generations back, maybe more, was Jewish and under the fear of ostracism from the greater whole of Polish society or pogroms and death , whatever drives people to throw away their religion, and maybe we should leave the door open to people healing, some returning.

If we don't have the capacity to forgive, we don't have the capacity to heal. We don't heal, then the evil wins. And we take up the mantle of those who wronged us, and we wrong ourselves and generations undreamt of.

I see sheepish half-hearted attempts at making pain go away, pain people don't know what to do with. The sons and daughters of those who wrong me aren't their parents and I won't hold to blaming them for what someone else did. Nor will I keep on the argument that wasn't and the fight that didn't. It was never the point, not for the parents, not for the grandchildren, not for anyone.

Evil is more in the absence of us and between us in the empty places we define by where we're not for our fears and anger. I won't let that be.

That ain't stopped others though the the war that isn't keeps on going. It's time to steal the thunder from the darkness and let it lay. Let those who didn't cause it and would gladly die to make the past different cry out their sorrows on our shoulders and clap hands to their backs and get ourselves back together with our neighbors. It's long past time to close the gap where evil lives and give it no place at all.

I've wronged others myself and in the moment didn't know what I was doing and for the lack of sense of it after when I finally knew, I've hurt. Hurt as bad as any I've hurt. That's the price of doing wrong by others. When your conscience is awake and you know, you will hurt. The Germans, the Poles, they're hurting. Many many many of them are hurting over a pain they didn't inflict on people who aren't alive to scream out and can't make it get out of their heads.

We feel free to represent and speak for the dead every other time and issue, but when it comes to forgiving, never.

That needs to change. People not born, not responsible partaking adults when the crimes happened need to be forgiven by we who weren't born, not responsible partaking adults either. We need to stop hurting. All of us. We're holding people responsible who weren't for the deaths of those they never met, knew or could have.

Shabbat or Vote? A couple thoughts...

2008-01-18T14:45:00.001-05:00

Caucus deals Shabbat blow to Vegas rabbi | Jerusalem Post

The Nevada caucuses to determine the presidential nominee for Democrats and Republicans had been scheduled for January 19, this Saturday.

I have a couple thoughts about this...

If it is an important contribution to be made to the community, family, continued subsistence... then you have to decide if for you it rises to the level of being important enough to set Shabbat aside. For instance, I converted AFTER having accepted a job wherein I agreed at the outset to work any hours given. That means Friday and Saturday are on the menu. The essence of Judaism for me is to recognize ethics and morals as actually existing and mattering and to attempt to live in accord with that recognition. I gave my word. I will work as I agreed until I can create a new agreement which is freely accepted by all parties.
Las Vegas is a "twenty-four seven" city like New York and more than New York is predicated on an irreligious secular basis where the calendar is nothing more than a way of arranging our events ongoing. The only reason Sunday isn't chosen is because the majority of the nation are ostensibly one variety of Christian or another. Had the history of Christianity been a little different, it might have been Judaism that was in the majority but that's not what happened. We work around that and maintain our faith that sets us apart as well as the ties that bind us to our fellow countrymen.

Besides all that, major league football is played on Sunday and the betting businesses in Las Vegas thrive on that at this time of year. Football knows no observance of anything but football.

This quote is exactly correct:

"In Las Vegas, every day is a workday. Every day is also going to have some significance. So Saturday was the day when the least number of people went to work, so we could encourage participation," said party spokesman Jamal Simmons.

Remember:

Steve Wark, the communications director for the Nevada Republican caucus, also expressed regret that certain voters would be excluded from the process, pointing out that Seventh-Day Adventists and residents who couldn't be in town - including overseas servicemen - would also not be able to participate.

The realities of the world are that we must always face some sort of hardship in observing spiritual matters versus secular physical matters. While over thousands of years Jews have gotten very good at working the outer world into the inner world, sometimes things don't go the way we want. We then have to do away with the CNC Spirituality and use our hearts and minds to weigh various ideas and options ourselves. Then again, G-d must have made us able to do so for a reason. Maybe so important a thing is why.

Ethnic, religious, national...

2008-01-15T19:46:00.001-05:00

Palestinians Who Prefer Israel - article by Daniel Pipes

I am of various ethnic backgrounds. Italian, Irish, Polish, and many others.

I was born to Christianity and am now a Jew by choice.

I am an American.

Maybe there are more Palestinians who are cognizant of the differences between those things than the press likes to tell us. Palestinian by ethnicity, Muslim (or Christian or Druse or other) by religion, Israeli by nationality?

Like I said, on a purely secular, realistic, and functional basis, I favor a one state solution. Not a religious state like Saudi Arabia has become, not a Jewish state, but a state that is inherently safe and sound for Jews. Better a single state where no matter what the religion of the citizens, they are as one under that nationality much as we Americans are when the chips truly fall, where Jews can know their neighbors rise and fall with them and have that inherent interdependent relationship.

Please oh please G-d let this sanity be infectious. We're getting down to a dangerous time on this planet and a glorious future sits perched on a sharp precipice of our own making.

Does it matter if Barack Obama was a Muslim, practicing or not?

2008-01-15T15:35:00.001-05:00

Daniel Pipes seems to think so...

All this matters, for if Obama once was a Muslim, he is now what Islamic law calls a murtadd (apostate), an ex-Muslim converted to another religion who must be executed. Were he elected president of the United States, this status, clearly, would have large potential implications for his relationship with the Muslim world.

...but I don't.

In fact, I cannot see this as an issue other than as perhaps the radicals like Al Queda might see him as an even more legitimate target than they already see our president, and perhaps that Saudi Arabia and Iran might be put in a tight theological spot in being forced to deal with an elected leader who under their (allegedly) literalist interpretation is a heretic.

However, that very thing would probably work in our favor by forcing the point into sharp relief, that extremist orthodoxy in religion does not mix with intra- and inter- national governance.

Personally, I am not voting for Obama, but it is strictly because of his politics and the party he is representing that is trying to put a new and more conservative face on an infrastructure that remains unchanged from the previously revealed hyperdelusional leftism we saw with the Dean campaign. It's like putting a new paint job on a wreck and thinking that is enough. It's a pretty wreck, but the Democratic Party is still a wreck nonetheless.

Not sure what is going on when a Ghandi writes things like this...

2008-01-10T21:58:00.001-05:00

Gandhi's grandson blasts Israel, Jews | Jerusalem Post

Nutshell:

"Apparently, in the modern world, so determined to live by the bomb, this is an alien concept," he wrote, concluding: "You don't befriend anyone, you dominate them. We have created a culture of violence (Israel and the Jews are the biggest players) and that culture of violence is eventually going to destroy humanity."

Later on this clarification/retraction/ass covering...

"I am writing to correct some regrettable misimpressions I have given in my comments on my blog this week. While I stand behind my criticisms of the use of violence by recent Israeli governments - and I have criticized the governments of the US, India and China in much the same way - I want to correct statements that I made with insufficient care, and that have inflicted unnecessary hurt and caused anger," he wrote.

I think part of the problem is that Ghandi and company don't understand the situation which goes back well over a thousand years. How can they? Modern Israelis and Jews at large have precious little understanding themselves, but they're closer to the problem and more in a position to feel their way through. It's sort of like my own town. We haven't got a clue how to fix our town, but we still have more relevance than the state much less federal government.

One parallel however is that the modern state of Israel has whether they like it or not become as occupational a government as the apartheid government of South Africa was, even though they were all native to that land as much as those who were oppressed. It matters not at all that the Israeli people have a long-standing claim to the land predating the Arab peoples there now, but you could also say that the Italians via their Roman predecessors have a claim as well. They were also occupiers too even if they were there long enough for citizens of the empire to be born, raised, and serve there. It didn't matter. The fact is, you have a government making a claim to rightful dominion and a very large number of governed people in opposition.

Some might wonder what my view are of the whole place and the solutions. I'll tell you.

First, I am for a one state solution with a constitution protecting the freedom of religious practices of all who live there within reason of doing no harm. Human sacrifice for instance would be right out. I am inherently against religious states be they Islamic, Christian, Jewish, etc. It is not a matter of the dominant religious affiliation of the citizenry. Anyone can by simple choice separate their religious beliefs from their secular beliefs. I see people do it without even trying every single day in the USA. We're not some strange mutant variety of people here. If we can do it, any humans can.

Second, while I believe on a religious basis in the right of Israel to exist, I am more concerned with the rights of collectives^* in most cases needing to be earned. Otherwise they are privileges at best, and onerous burdens to the rest of the planet's population at worst. Does Israel deserve another chance at existing? I believe that the answer is most surely yes. No one else who has governed the area has done very much with it if anything, treating it as an afterthought on a day to day basis while holding on to it for dear life at the cost of much bloodshed in the name of religion. Vatican City for instance is ornate and well taken care of. Jerusalem under it's emissaries never was. Mecca is well maintained by Muslims. Jerusalem under them never was.

Who has bothered to install proper water, sewer, gas, and electrical infrastructure? Who has bothered to put in multilingual schools? Who has bothered to build an economic system with international ties of long term and deep substance? You know that answer and it wasn't Great Britain, Turkey, Egypt, etc.

I therefore would leave the current Israeli system largely intact, but with a reformed constitution and system to absorb and embrace the Muslims, Christians, and others. Some will say that Jews exclusively by prophecy have a right to the land, but G-d has put to us that charity, piety, love, and compassion are important to Him. How can we deny anyone their home, which they under various rulers have lived in for centuries, and say we cannot be denied a home? G-d so loved us that He gave us a whole world to our selves with no other intelligent creatures on it. He spoiled us by not making us right up front learn sharing with an entirely other intelligent race. Perhaps He believed we'd sooner or later learn to share amongst ourselves, but sadly we seem ill able to figure it out. Our ability to relate to others and have empathy for them seems running out and all of us taking inflexible positions.

Do I expect the Palestinians to go along with it? No. I only wish they'd see that as much as the returning Jews coming back from centuries in other places, everyone there has a right to live in peace. Nor do I expect Israel in reflexive defensive position to embrace the Palestinians either. Yet... If they do not all learn to get along soon, the rest of the world may involve itself to death.

*As opposed to the rights of individuals which I feel are far more important to us as religiously, I feel that G-d's first relation to us is personal and individual, not collective, when He allots for us to be in His universe

WordPress MultiUser test verdict: Fail

2008-01-09T19:45:00.001-05:00

I've been tossing around in my head an idea for a Jewish blogger site that gathered multiple blogs together in a better community format.

My first attempt at studying the structures and software out there was to install XAMPP from Apache Friends on my machine and try WordPress MU on it. The bugs and problems were many but thanks to relatively good Google-Fu, I managed to fight my way to what I found to be a common problem of such things: blind spot in smtp linkage.

No plugin I could find would allow external SMTP server usage for it, all were apparently written for regular WP.

Also, it creates subdomain blogs as in user.domain.topdomain and has no system to properly tie them together that doesn't involve immense geekery and I spend enough time entering things of the sort, ip route 192.168.10.0 255.255.255.0 10.10.2.1, all day long. I don't want to have to master PHP programming on top of everything else I do to make something as simple as WP on Apache work.

So, fail. Big time fail, WP. On to phpBB version whatever.

My brain just exploded...

2008-01-08T18:37:00.001-05:00

Frum Satire - The Rantings of A Frum Yid With A Warped Perspective

underground world of Hasidic pubic hair customs.

Ow ow ow ow ow ow ow ow...

Must people say phrases like that?!

A little of what The Prophecy trilogy means to me

2008-01-07T18:21:00.001-05:00

I like to imagine how a movie story can be explained, rationalized, etc. as a creative exercise of my own. So The Prophecy trilogy for me was a good one to work on.

How can G-d let an angel of all things go loose messing up His creation like that? Assumption: even angels have free will without which the whole fallen angel legend falls apart. They can disobey. They know right from wrong deep down, and do something in accordance or against it.

How can G-d let an angel who's done that come back? Assumption: G-d is endlessly forgiving and we all assume or hope for that in fear of what if he isn't. All that is needed is the true repentance that comes with knowing the truth, and then accepting it. It's a horribly short and insufficient way of putting it but I think you get what I'm saying.

Okay, so Gabriel does all that killing, and then comes back at the end to grace. In between is the lesson of how. He becomes arrogant as Lucifer says, and that's evil, and that's the devil's. He is punished in the usual way but is spat out because well, you've got two devils and that's one too many in Hell.

I learn from this that punishment does not bring the recognition of the truth, merely a desire to avoid punishment. Your actions may not violate, but your spirit does. If your spirit be right, then you need fear nothing for nothing would you do deserving of punishment.

His lesson is learned amongst humans after Michael takes away Gabriel's mark of G-d and this tells me symbolically that G-d can indeed remove your elevated status whatever you've achieved. Even an angel can be humbled. You too can, and it isn't actually that G-d does it, YOU do it to yourself by virtue of your actions having (somewhat predictable) outcomes.

(G-d's world is not perfect nor can it be for it to have meaning. There must be the simple adversity of unpredictability. In other words, bad shit happens to good people. However, if you knock over a vase onto the floor, it will probably hit the floor and break. Insult someone, and they will most likely be upset with you. Some things are deterministic. However, the interplay of deterministic events on a suitable scale is beyond computation and amounts to probabilistic chaos at best and this is where you have to try to follow the simple rules, pay attention to the little things, and feel your way through. If you need to hear this from me, you really didn't pay attention to Star Trek. It does point up though the saying in Hagakure that things of large importance should be taken lightly and things of small importance taken seriously.)

Among humans, he sees how they live and sees the desperation and hope they still manage to have despite that desperation. Like a child being taught to swim and being dared by an adult to strike out into the water and trust they won't be allowed to drown, G-d talks to us and we hear Him somewhere deep inside us across what seems like a vast gulf, and we strike out from the material everyday world of what we can hold on to and fearfully reach for G-d... who seems just out of reach. It's frightening. As Lucifer says, it's so hard to have faith...

Yet... we do. In some small way it is an act of hope to fill your car's gas tank because it implies you think you will be going somewhere. Not that you might, but that your estimation is that you are so likely to go somewhere as makes no difference between that and definitely going somewhere.

People rarely consider these things.

When I can get it together right, I will do a take on The Matrix trilogy.

del.icio.us Tags: The Prophecy,Hagakure,Star Trek,faith,meaning,Gabriel

Prayer is not a team sport or...

2008-01-07T17:48:00.001-05:00

...why minyans and full synagogues are as irrelevant as born-again revival tent gatherings if you don't actually believe.

No, that's not a link because the article is right here. I'm writing it here and now.

Since starting down the road to conversion I've mixed in online amongst other Jews, both born and by choice, and witnessed a wide variety of ideas, concepts, beliefs, and temperaments and personalities. From the outside any group seems very insular and homogenous for two reasons.

Firstly, if there's anything about a grouping of people to differentiate them into that group and not that group, it must have been long enough for someone to notice and that gives the appearance of it being insular to some degree. Insularity also results from the following behavior of the group.

Secondly, if you're not part of that group then it is likely you don't spend significant time within that group and hence have as much familiarity with it as you do the sights outside your car as you are driving. You might drive past the same places every day, but you drive. You don't walk and stumble over them. You see a coarse-grained picture repeatedly enough to get the coarse points down. You make inferences based on sane logic as to some of the finer points between. For instance, you see a fence between two houses and it registers that it is a picket fence and your mind can fill in the structural details most likely to be involved.

Having dove into Judaism and looked it over from a wide variety of angles I have a better understanding. Re-read that sentence. First, I said I have "a" understanding. Most emphatically I do not claim to have "the" understanding. That's G-d's own realm and He cannot tell me that which I cannot reasonably already know. Unless He has some weird purpose He doesn't act like a spiritual source does for clairvoyants. Second, I said "better". As in preferable to some previous state in time. Since it wasn't "best" it infers if only weakly that even better than that is possible. Put them together and you see that I have more ahead of me. Do I need to explain this? Well, in a world where people worry that using the word "ladies" in an Orthodox organization's output is sexist or otherwise demeaning, yes I damn well do have to explain it.

What have I learned? I have learned that Jews are much like Catholics and Protestants of today in that they are similarly torn between centralized hierarchical orthodoxy and their own personal interpretations with a great stress of lack of relevance whether real or imagined, most likely imagined, sitting on that span between.

I've never been one for formal shows of faith. When they don't come from the heart, even when they seem to be on the part of the participants to be great efforts for that purpose of G-d's, whatever it is conceived to be at the time, they are inevitably for some other reason. It may be a good one. It just isn't the one we want it to be. On the other hand, when you realize exactly the reason truthfully you're doing it and that reason is a good one, it can be a powerful thing.

Bad reason: because others expect it and you've gotten some idea that maybe it will make you a better person. You need help psychologically and by this I don't mean professional help but a deep self-analysis of your ideas and world views and paring away of your inherent bullshit. This takes honesty to you which is tantamount to honesty before G-d since when you die like when you are born, you're alone but for G-d. He knows when you're full of it and you need to get down to that with him. Trust me, he's not a sadistic bastard. He'll laugh about it and hug you spiritually. You need to stop fearing damnation and punishment.

Good reason: because others expect it and you know now that you are a better person and want to share it with other people. What makes you a better person is that you have faith in what is right and want to help others out of despair towards shining true faith of their own, but have the recognition that you cannot create it for them, only cut back any bullshit from your quarter that might obfuscate it for them. Enable faith in other words by not disabling it first.

I've seen revivals and whatnot. If you do it for the idea that somehow you need saving, well no one else will do it. I guarantee you if you want to see moshiach you need only go look in the mirror, and then accept it. G-d works through us for our betterment, and just as when you ache for someone fucked up on drugs, even He can't help you if you won't let Him.

This is the furthering of the bad in the bad reason. If you hold on to the bad idea like a talisman, it provides a security blanket against the cold hard reality that you need to be honest with you about you. After a while, you have ever harder a time trying to see outside that blanket and when the snap comes, the worse it is.

So my advice is don't worry about minyan so much as your own faith. If you are truly faithful and believe, then worry about minyan, but more for the help you provide others just by praying with them than what you get out of it. If you aren't, work on finding out why.

Me? I spent years being so afraid G-d didn't like me that I spent those years not liking me for Him. I'm still shy and embarrassed and do not wish to soil the experience of others with my self-doubts and possible insincerity. When I speak the words, I want to have their meaning to others but more importantly to me down pat, accepted, part of me.

I need time. Of course with my current job hours, I have that.

Another important quote...

2008-01-04T21:45:00.001-05:00

Gabriel: In the end, there's still the word. Everywhere. In heaven with angels, the Earth and stars; even the darkest part of the human soul. It was there the word burned brightest, and for a moment... I was blinded.

Taken from www.imdb.com at their quotes section for The Prophecy 3: The Ascent.

Gentile Lubavitcher refused conversion | Jerusalem Post

2008-01-03T14:47:00.001-05:00

If you believe that a dead man is the messiah, does that disqualify you from converting to Judaism?

This raises an important set of questions.

Do those who are "born Jewish" who believe Schneerson was/is the messiah merit Jewish excommunication, known essentially as cherem?
My POV: No. There are born Orthodox Jews who I've heard utter that Jesus may have been the messiah. The idea that the messiah may have come already and been passed by in error is a common fear much like thinking your soulmate might have been someone you got off on the wrong foot with and passed by years ago. What others view as an error in composition of theology in you is not something that makes relations between you and the community impossible. That is my standard for cherem by the way.
If so, why are they not?
My POV: They are not because the Chabad Lubavitch movement is very large, very wealthy, extremely effective at getting donations for various good causes, and very attractive to baalei teshuva in a way many Charedi groups only wish they were. In other words, supposed integrity in defense of Jewish orthodoxy is readily thrown aside for the usual reason: scraps off the table of wealth and influence.
If not, why is this man who follows their ways in every respect considered unfit?
My POV: Quite simply, it is a stunning lack of foresight as to the exposure of the above two points conflicting with simplistic reasoning and misplaced concern masquerading as integrity and defense of the faith and probably a little bit of the old suspicion toward the ger.
Is this like the "don't ask don't tell" of the US Army regarding homosexuality?
My POV: This is the embodiment of agreeing that there is such a thing as a "noble lie", the idea that small children have that if they hide under a blanket and can't see you then you can't see them, and tacitly agreeing to disagree all in one. It's both a subtle and obvious admission of fatigue with the argument, and a willingness to let things go between us lest we argue and fight further. However, in the end, it's only because when it is told that we feel socially bound to fight not necessarily because we actually have to or should.

I think that it is highly unlikely his fellow Lubavitchers did not advise him to be careful what he said, and perhaps may even have gone past inference to pointedly telling him to deny it if they, the beit din, asked. The Lubavitch community is not unaware of how the rest of the Charedi and Chasidic worlds regard them on this subject especially. I would not blame them in the slightest for counseling this man to lie. He, the ger tzedek, answered honestly anyhow.

That honesty, of taking the rap to the spiritual knuckles shows an honesty that is sadly lacking in many religious quarters. Whether or not I agree that Schneerson, or Jesus, or whoever was the messiah is not the point. It's that what we each believe is ultimately squeezed out of our public lives, hidden under our clothes like a forbidden book, in favor of things we may not believe which unfortunately have become orthodoxy.

It is also an honesty lacking in the "don't ask don't tell" approach. We lie and pretend something isn't so until it is told and then we think we have to. We invent for ourselves the peer pressure. We think, "oh great, now I have to stand up against this because otherwise people will think less of me". THAT is why when it is openly told that you're gay or you believe Schneerson is the messiah that you get open resistance and oppression. It is because the other person fears for what society will think of them, not for what impact you will have.

I am of course not getting into a discussion of the righteousness or horrible anathema of messianic or sexual leanings. That's not for now. I just wanted to point out why this man was rejected: the beit din worried more what people would think than over what the actual damage to the Jewish community would be. They were worried that accepting his conversion would be seen as opening the gates to more messianic believers, not just those harking to Chabad Lubavitch's rebbe, but perhaps Jews for Jesus.

All of this also points out that it is almost impossible at this point for there to ever be the coming of moshiach as G-d's own choice of representative on Earth would be circumscribed by the judgment of a mortal human beit din. G-d is not constrained by us but if we don't heed Him, what does it matter? The outcome is the same. In the name of Him, we marginalize Him.

This is one more reason for my philosophy of uniting the opposites and floating in nothingness. Whatever will be will be...

del.icio.us Tags: Chabad Lubavitch,conversion,ger tzedek,moshiach

Over on JPost.com, this Hot Potato was thrown...

2008-01-02T17:56:00.001-05:00

Israel should turn to France now. Times have changed. The US is becoming weak' | Jerusalem Post

Turn to France. America thinks big and talks big, but when it is time for action, they retreat. They are the ones who are cowards now. Israel should turn to France now. The French President is pro-Israel and he has a drop of Jewish blood. Times have changed. The United States of America is becoming weak and the Arabs are aware of this.

By this rationale, it is better to let your beloved shade tree die during a drought because it proves the tree weak and scrub is encroaching. Sheer idiocy. You carry water to the tree and nurse it through the bad times. You enjoy the shade during the good times. If it grows a way you dislike, you place stakes and wires to hold it upright. You trim the grass about it and make sure it is treated specially so you have it for the summer.

Whoever posted that silliness seems tragically unaware of recent French history vis-à-vis World War II and France's capitulation, nevermind France's "screw the world" attitude when it comes to international concerns over their spreading of nuclear materials and technologies such as to Saddam Hussein's Iraq because as we all know it was the evil superhuman mastermind George W. Bush who utilized time travel to make ties with Saddam during the Iraq-Iran War and no one else ever was involved with propping that regime up... No, no one at all...

If Israel hitches their wagon to France, they might as well slap England across the face pimp-style on top of it, and whiz on America's leg to top it off. Of course to effectively do that, they'd have to ally with Al Queda and give them assistance with the insurgency in Iraq and wouldn't that be amusing.

Not.

del.icio.us Tags: Iraq,Iran,Jerusalem Post,France,nuclear,idiocy,alliegances,alliances,allies

Another good quote

2008-01-02T15:39:00.001-05:00

Taken from the Internet Movie Database at www.imdb.com, from the quotes section of their entry for Kevin Smith's excellent movie, Dogma.

Serendipity: I have issues with anyone who treats faith as a burden instead of a blessing. You people don't celebrate your faith; you mourn it.

While this was directed at an erstwhile and lost Catholic, it applies to others, ahem, as well. You know who you are. The difference between the blessing and the burden is the difference between freedom and slavery. G-d didn't make you to be a slave to anyone, not even and in fact especially not Him. He didn't make us aware of Him to bring us down and make us heavy. Neither need you tighten your chumras and redefine terms to make pain into pleasure like a flagellating masochist.

As the song goes, "don't worry... be happy. Be happy now..."

del.icio.us Tags: Dogma,Kevin Smith,chumras,faith

So where is Suitepotato now on the conversion path?

2007-12-31T22:07:00.001-05:00

Right where I was at the beginning and will be years after the beit din of the local Conservative synagogue see me: still and always learning.

I work late hours and have crushing bills. I have no choice but to work the hours as I did agree to work any hours they gave me. I was desperate for this job when I took it and now... not so much, but still in dire financial need (though no tip jar shall go here, I don't need donations, I need ideas) and one of my ikkarim is that we are no better than our actions and among those specifically of greatest importance are those undertaken to fulfill our word.

Thus it is that going to the local synagogue for classes anytime soon is right out. I can't keep the roof over my head AND take classes.

However, this is not a big deal for me. I didn't join for acceptance and fitting in. I joined for having a spiritual home and that acceptance was G-d's alone. All my life I have looked everywhere for it but that little voice in the heart of my soul just shook it's head as it were. I could hear a depressed sigh from it and a very low and hard to hear "no, not there..."

It wasn't until I turned towards Judaism that the voice said, "yes... that looks like home".

I used to cry myself to sleep wondering if I'd ever find a wife when I was alone. I would cry myself to sleep wondering if I'd ever belong anywhere. I would cry myself to sleep wondering if I'd ever be like any other people and fit in.

Well, G-d worked through a relative who after everyone else had watched me be alone for years and think nothing of it, or at least not enough to speak about it, suggested the personals. I met my current and please G-d oh please let her be the only one ever and permanent and let me get old with her and die with her. Thank you for her.

I looked towards the lands I'd been, the lands others offered, and found a land that was no different and yet felt more at home than anywhere else. A place I felt I could put down my potted plant on the window sill, a place where I could sit on the porch, a place where I had neighbors who I didn't feel uncomfortable around.

That land was Judaism.

As I said, I didn't join for the fitting in and being accepted, it was the home and home is where the heart is and my heart was lost. Nowhere to be, nowhere to sit, nowhere to rest. G-d it seemed to me would not allow me to have a place. Like playing a game where the other person can only say yes or no, or more like maybe or not, I looked until I found the one that got the "maybe" response.

Acceptance and fitting in come with it, but it wasn't the acceptance by others, it was partly mine, and partly G-d's. I fit in within my heart.

Now will the congregation accept me? I think so. They're a bit politically left of me as far as I can tell and more than I'd like involved in city doings, but pretty average folks. Just Jewish average folks. They observe what they can fit in their lives to various degrees and I expect that though a ger tzedek has much more of a bar to chin up to, I should do well there. After all, I've had the time to let the shock hit me.

What shock you incredulously ask?

Well the shock of Jewish reality. Just read Jewish blogs. You have Charedi Orthodox (if that's not redundant and I think it is) men admitting they watch rented video tapes on Shabbat, sometimes drive on Shabbat, and some display a knowledge of adult subjects far beyond what a single guy who ostensibly davens and leins to the tune of their conservative community should.

Then of course there's the dark side. Stories of Chasidim acting like petty children, acting like Mitnagdim, acting like anything but people who even have the slightest clue what "chesed" means.

Then on to the even darker side. Ostracism, sexism, spousal abuse, sexual abuse, turning a cold shoulder to ger tzedek, financial abuses, mistreatment of baal teshuva, etc., etc., etc.

I am not going away. I am not afraid. I am not embarrassed. No one said you're perfect. If you were, what would be the value of you? To me the value of G-d is not that He knows everything, but that He DOESN'T. He created us to ask questions of and to Himself. He cares enough to think about these things. You were made in His image. What else should you do but have and ask questions?

It is not imperfection to have questions, it is imperfection to never bother asking them, among other things. G-d still is perfect in His way. Me and you, not so much, but we can do what we should and that's to ask. We should ask the big questions.

So are people asking the big questions? YES. Most assuredly yes. Beyond any Sanhedrin that could ever be again, the sages within us are crying out to wrangle and argue virtues and vices, sins and merits, and to figure out what should be what. They're doing it on the same blogs that bring stories of Jewish grief.

Don't be afraid. I'm not.

Well, not much. ; )

del.icio.us Tags: conversion,convert,ger tzedek,Conservative Judaism,Judaism,G-d

My literary recommendation of the moment: Marcus Aurelius' Meditations

2007-12-31T16:48:00.001-05:00

Meditations (Penguin Classics)
by Marcus Aurelius

Read more about this book...

Read an online version here, but I recommend buying a book copy to own.

Read the Wikipedia entries on stoicism, Marcus Aurelius, and Meditations.

This is one of the works that I got into and still haven't gotten out of yet, before I made the choice to convert. It is without a doubt for me one of the top five most important philosophical works ever. It sets forth and embodies ideas that I cannot properly express through any short words of my own, which I try to use to govern my trek into the world of religion and faith.

This and Hagakure as I earlier referenced would be the top two I want to propose be read by Orthodox and other Jewish religious seekers. There's a serene calmness possible in all human endeavors, even those of warriors and emperors. Perhaps you can find some for yourself to master your worries in these.

del.icio.us Tags: Marcus Aurelius,Meditations,Hagakure,philosophy,stoicism

The Jewish Outreach Institute

2007-12-28T21:46:00.001-05:00

“Big Tent Judaism” Words of Torah

And not with you alone will I make this covenant and this oath. But with the one who stands here with us this day before the Lrd our Gd, and also with the one who is not here with us this day. (Deut. 29:9-14)

That struck me between the eyes. Thank you JOI for that. I needed a shot in the arm today.

del.icio.us Tags: Torah,conversion,Judaism,covenant,Deuteronomy

How you know when your conscience is on the right track...

2007-12-27T19:10:00.001-05:00

...or, how do you know G-d speaks through your conscience?

Consider this. You want to feed your dog a little later figuring that the bowl was half full this morning before you went to work and he's already eaten his fill during the day, so he can wait till before you go to bed. You're tired and want to sit down.

Your conscience should stop you. G-d doesn't agree with us all the time. Sometimes yes. Like when you feel you should intervene and stop a mugging. Sometimes not. Like when you try to rationalize having the last piece of desert in the refrigerator. You know you should let someone else have a go at it. It's better to be selfless than self-centered. You know G-d is talking when you hear your own voice somewhere deep inside say, "but your wife might like that after lunch tomorrow. Let her have it. It'll put a smile on her face and you'll feel better about yourself having done a good thing for her."

So, you say back, "yes, I should see to his food and water now while I am up and not later. It's not fair to him. He can't get his own dinner. I'm responsible for him."

In general, G-d will agree when you're doing the right thing, but not necessarily without criticism. He'll point out little points that might help for the future. Or simply a little later. He'll console you when you're being too hard on yourself, and nag you when you're not being hard enough, when you know that you can do better and the easier it would have been, the more He nags.

However, G-d doesn't ever get nasty. He loves you and is always trying to improve you. The best you that you can be is in His interests for the world, this we know and take on faith. He doesn't set silly standards though and understands you need help along the road.

It's in your conscience where you know. The kind of knowing that doesn't need proof, it just is. The knowing that has an honest balanced and fair view of you. Neither sanctimoniously flagellating nor overly excusing egomaniacal. You know. So don't be afraid to accept it. That fear is what costs us. What holds us down.

I've been there. Where faith is so hard to have. Where your only option seems to be that which the cold uncaring part of the world says is exclusive: give up. I didn't give up. I don't say this to crow. I say this to let you the reader know that the darkness in my life at that time passed, and my marriage is here, my wife is here, my life is here. It would not be had I given up. The bad times don't last forever and you know that.

So stop running from what you know.

Making a Martyr of Bhutto - Yahoo! News

2007-12-27T14:43:00.001-05:00

Bhutto is dead. Why why why..?

Haqqani, now a professor at Boston University, isn't sure what the latest bloodshed means for his country. "Will the Pakistani military realize that this is going to tear the fabric of the nation apart, and so really get serious about securing the country and about getting serious in dealing with the extremist jihadis?" he wondered. But he made clear he feels the best chance for such a policy has just evaporated. "She did show courage, and she was the only person who spoke out against terrorism," he said.

"She was let down by those in Washington who think that sucking up to bad governments around the world is their best policy option.

(Emphasis is mine.)

Amen Haqqani. Amen.

How was Christmas at my house?

2007-12-26T15:24:00.001-05:00

My house as you know is Jewish, or supposed to be in theory. We light candles every Hanukah and that's about it. My wife considers herself to be converting to Christianity and my mother-in-law observes not much of anything. I think it's been over a year since I last heard her utter anything about fasting. Me, I'm the Christian convert to Judaism who tries to eat kosher marked food, pray, and slowly learn whatever he can without losing heart or mind.

The reasons for all this coming about are many. Most goes back to my wife's late father who was the torch-bearer of faith in their house and much like countless Catholic fathers, made his family attend without much reason behind it other than, that's just how he grew up. Without a connection to G-d on a regular basis beyond the canned form of prayers and psalms, there wasn't any connection to Judaism for my wife.

Besides, she blames herself for her dad's death. It wasn't anyone's fault, his heart attack. Bad things happen to good people. Not everything in the universe has a cause and effect relationship that involves G-d punishing or rewarding you. That's as silly as crystal spheres carrying the planets.

So then his wife's lack of observance is... my guess a combination of pain from associating it with him, and the owing of thousands of dollars in dues to the synagogue, and her way of dealing with the depression of our crushing financial woes. She simply sinks into her easy chair in the living room every night and falls asleep in front of the television.

So my wife insisted on a tree and I love my wife dearly and want to make her happy. I am not happy with her wanting to convert, no. However, she accepted me when I wasn't Jewish as did her mother, and I prefer to leave religious choices to each person on their own. All I can do is show my happiness with coming over to Judaism and remind her that Christianity is most definitely NOT what Jesus of Nazareth had in mind. He was a loyal G-d fearing and loving Jew who wanted to call back his people when it seemed they were lost or getting lost fast. It was the legacy of Paul's taking the message on the road to the gentile world almost exclusively as well as a seeming grudge against the rules of the day (leading to elimination of halacha for instance) which gave us what we see today.

As an aside it makes me cringe to think what Judaism might have obtained had it only gone back to proselytizing instead of eschewing it. The rapid adoption of Christianity and later Islam was proof the people of the world nearby were open to the word of G-d. However, the pesky Romans would have none of that and so spreading Judaism's message would have invited more horrors and... History is never pretty, especially where religion is concerned. The ninja of Japan owe their existence to religious persecution for instance.

She got her tree. It was put in the corner inside one of those portable metal dog enclosures to keep our mutts from tearing it down. Under it were a few presents, all of them for her since I insisted on receiving none and neither of us had money for presents for her mother. It was only a couple years ago when there was money for much more. How the days seem so much drearier now...

I treated it as a remembrance of an important religious Jewish personage's birthday and abstained from as much as I could which I felt wrong on such a day and crocheted my wife a hat in about an hour, since I'd not had time to finish a sweater and a scarf for her.

To her mother I gave another hat which I did finish on time.

Our finances are in shambles, the outlook bleak, the end of the year come and the season of white death about us. Yet I am not giving up and instead trying to maintain some hope. G-d has been with me through foreclosure and gotten me through and out of it. He's been there telling me that the bad times will not last forever and that I can make things different. The future I see for myself is not necessarily what must be. Merely what I see through my own depression.

So I continue on.

I read the blogs of other Jewish men and women, read their takes on G-d and what should or should not be, and feel that thanks to the Internet (and thus thanks to G-d for the ingenuity of man who made it and was made by Him) I am living in a sort of second temple period again. No Sanhedrin today, no. Just a lot of people who care enough to even ask what G-d wants and why He made us and how, and all that. A contentious time when in the name of Him, people marginalize Him. A time when people are confused, upset, angry, and losing hope. We have no Roman legions to contend with, only the empty phantoms of our own worries and the nefarious evils we create, allow, nurture.

We're living in heady times again and I suspect more are to come. We never see them at the time as we see them in hindsight, nor do we understand them so well until even later than that when the passion is not so bright and our honesty easier because the wounds of our guilty consciences hurt a little less or we've scarred over and become a little crustier.

One thing I do know is that none of us should be afraid to give of and be themselves. No matter what those who live in fear say, no matter what those who can't see outside their shtetl ensconced world-views say, no matter what we each say when afraid, we cannot live in fear of being whatever we are.

So I offer this prayer before all to G-d on our behalf. Dear G-d... I beg you, please, do not send us a messiah. I truly believe the time has past for us to be playing innocent children in need of someone you appoint to save us. I believe the time has come for us to grow to the next level and save ourselves. So instead, grant us each just a little insight, just a little hope, just a little courage. Help us to see that our salvation is not from an external evil, but from that which results when we good people do nothing. Help us see we need to save ourselves from ourselves. Help us all see that it isn't about us versus them or me versus someone else, that it is all of us versus all of us, and in our fear and anger we're making it worse.

Please G-d, help our passions to calm and our anger to abate. Please help us make our world better in 2008. Just a little bit. We'll work in it. Just help us to see that we can and always could instead of waiting for you to do it for us. We know you said the stewardship of this world was in our hands. We sometimes forget what goes with that: responsibility for its outcome, to be handled with love and conscience.

Thank you for this year's life. We appreciate it.

Random Quotes

2007-12-23T23:52:00.000-05:00

"Character is what you are in the dark."
Lord John Worfin, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension

CD-ROM shatters stereotype of haredi Holocaust silence | Jerusalem Post

2007-12-18T16:55:00.001-05:00

A fine article that should be read

Avigdor also recounted the long discussions that took place in a rabbinic court in Drovitz, a town located in modern-day Ukraine, over whether it was permitted to pose as a Christian to save one's life. The rabbis debated whether Christianity was a form of idol worship, and therefore posing as a Christian was forbidden, even at the price of giving up one's life. The court ruled that not only was it permitted to pose as a Christian, it was also an act of bravery since the reason for doing so was to preserve the Jewish people.

Some will call it stupid but this is faith of heart in action. To sit there delaying escape asking seriously, which is the moral course without which living is bothersome and ridden with guilt?

In feudal Japan, this same sort of question would have been along the lines, "shall we dress as the samurai of our lord's enemies to survive to regroup and attack again and bring victory out of our defeat, or is the deception dishonorable and tainting any victory we might achieve after?"

For me, it's related to the morass of today's world. One blogger whose post I can't find at this moment but will post if I can said something along the lines that there are mitzvot due to G-d and mitzvot due to our fellow man and the latter are not as eye-catching and attention-getting. All the usual frum yardsticks are mitzvot to G-d. People see the length of your tzitzit, know you wear tallit katan underneath, they see the quality of your kippah, etc. No one sees what you put in the tzedakah tin. That's a mitzvah aimed by G-d at your fellow man. Not a showy one. Neither would the fifteenth mitzvah or the twenty-first be showy. Break them and you can see it. Maybe. Hold to them and no one notices.

Like working where I do and doing a good job. It's to wear dark pants and wet yourself. A warm feeling is had, but no one else notices and in the end you feel stupid.

These men weren't worried about Olam HaBa, they were worried about the morality and dignity of their lives if they did something that might be so seriously wrong. Could they hold their heads high later if they did the wrong thing? Would death be preferable?

Not everything in our ways makes a lot of sense or on deep reflection can ever be sensible, but neither did the samurai ways. On the other hand, much made sense.

So if you want something to help you with your faith and exemplification thereof, I suggest getting a copy of Hagakure by Yamamoto Tsunetomo. It's an excellent read and I find many parallels between two cultures who were each at their times very violent and warrior driven, yet more of it was in their minds than in their hands. Ancient Israel and feudal Japan... both born of tribal combat, but did far more war in the heart and mind than ever they did on any number of battlefields.

Hagakure: The Book of the Samurai
by Yamamoto Tsunetomo

Read more about this book...

Perhaps someday we will properly embrace what we find in this CD-ROM release and see the nobility in their survival.

(For me, you owe no honor to those who with all dishonor seek your death and destruction. Therefore, lying and pretending to be something else is not a bad thing for you lie to a liar and deceive a deceiver for the sake of outlasting them to a time when there will be no more need for either.)

Reform leader embraces Shabbat as antidote to 'microwave culture' | Jerusalem Post

2007-12-17T17:23:00.001-05:00

Missed it by that much! (As the famous Maxwell Smart quote goes...)

Other issues addressed included the need to build an "unconditional, non-negotiable" connection to Israel, Jewish-Muslim dialogue and the need for universal health care.

First, what does that have to do with any movement of Judaism? As long as you insist on sticking political planks into theological propositions and positions, you're shooting yourself in the foot.

Second, if you even tried to follow a little of that culinary tznius called kashrut, you might notice it to be a lot healthier in the first place. It's not for nothing the majority of items in the health food section have kosher symbols on them.

Oh wait, universal health care... Okay, sell kosher eating to the masses then. I'm sure you can find a nice telegenic Reform man or woman for a Food Network show. Of course it will be done for other than religious reasons, but the health of us, physical and moral, is the reason for kashrut. So... half is better than nothing. It's a start.

Go for that. In the meantime, please stay out of the political arena and especially this nonsensical universal health care thing. It has nothing to do with making people healthy or caring for their health. It has everything to do with rationing care, and treating the glass as less than half empty, all for the sake of entrenching some people in power over others, shackling the masses to the choices of others. We need more government involved with our health like we need another Antiochus Epiphanes in our lives.

One on One: Debunking dastardly debate | Jerusalem Post

2007-12-17T15:31:00.001-05:00

This is a very important article...

Here's a really good quote:

How do you explain what appear to be more and more cars with exhaust pipes emitting the kind of pollution your book deals with? And why is it being spread among the educated, self-proclaimed freethinking classes?

We live under the fallacy that educated people - or specialists in a certain field - have better judgment than the man in the street. One of the myths about the Nazis is that they were primitive - that the party had no intellectuals. I've even heard that said by the opening speaker at a major anti-Semitism conference. But if you ask people to name the leading philosopher in Europe in the second half of the 20th century, the dominant answer would be Martin Heidegger - a Nazi.

And if you ask them to rate the 10 most important thinkers of Europe, at that time you often find a second Nazi on that list: German law professor and political theorist Carl Schmitt.

I strongly suggest reading the interview. I intend to get his book myself.

Technion releases first ever nano-Bible | Jerusalem Post

2007-12-17T13:28:00.001-05:00

Next up, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin...

You want small? You want portable? How does the size of a grain of sugar sound?

Alone again, yet not, I know

2007-12-14T18:22:00.001-05:00

It's now about ten minutes into Shabbat as I type this and once again, the Jewish blogging world goes quiet until Saturday night and services, prayers, candles are on the minds of many. I am at work keeping my word to work the schedule I agreed to before I set on converting.

It's not easy being here. Since setting on this path, I've started learning Hebrew, wearing a kippah, reading a translated Torah, eating kosher whenever I can, reading of Jewish and Israeli history and paying attention to the news, hustle, and flow of modern Jewish and Israeli life. There's no bar to any of the things I need to do. I can pray English or Hebrew any time of the day. I can speak with G-d whenever. Shabbat is the lone observance I cannot reliably make yet.

Nevertheless I try. I light my battery-operated light, I pray, I try to stay up and not get depressed.

Someday I will get the schedule I want. Someday.

Father says killed daughter in Canadian hijab case | International | Reuters

2007-12-12T19:23:00.001-05:00

G-d does not want you to do this.

A sad end to the over-sexual-objectification of women by men who claim to be pious. A pious man can sit in a strip bar and not think more about naked women than they might catch cold. A not-so-pious man is so insecure about his own self-control that he'll beat his daughter to death over whether or not she wears a scarf.

If all a woman is to you is a fuck toy that needs to be boxed, you're not pious. ESPECIALLY if you think physical violence is acceptable in the pursuit of it.

A lesson for certain people who won't of course learn no matter how much we wish they would.

Saudi Arabia, US named worst 'climate sinners' | Jerusalem Post

2007-12-07T02:55:00.001-05:00

In the name of the power of Mama Nature, bow down you unclean heathen!

Rabbi plans for autonomous Jewish state | Jerusalem Post

2007-12-07T02:34:00.001-05:00

So, why not give Samaria to the Samaritans?

Worthy quotes because G-d is talking to you all the time

2007-12-06T20:05:00.001-05:00

Agent Smith: Why, Mr. Anderson? Why do you do it? Why get up? Why keep fighting? Do you believe you're fighting for something? For more that your survival? Can you tell me what it is? Do you even know? Is it freedom? Or truth? Perhaps peace? Yes? No? Could it be for love? Illusions, Mr. Anderson. Vagaries of perception. The temporary constructs of a feeble human intellect trying desperately to justify an existence that is without meaning or purpose. And all of them as artificial as the Matrix itself, although only a human mind could invent something as insipid as love. You must be able to see it, Mr. Anderson. You must know it by now. You can't win. It's pointless to keep fighting. Why, Mr. Anderson? Why? Why do you persist?

Neo: Because I choose to.

The top five blogs I check every day

2007-12-05T17:46:00.001-05:00

Rabbi Lazar Brody
I may not always agree, but I find that he started out as a soldier and became a rabbi to be amazing and something I am not sure I could manage.
Rabbi Without A Cause
RWAC gives an excellent inside view of the daily issues and thoughts of your average currently serving and preaching rabbi. I think it important to give consideration to that, that a rabbi only human and has as many questions and feelings as you do.
DovBear et al
I even read Bray's posts and replies without instantly dismissing him.

XGH
The twin blog to the above, in my mind joined at the hip.
Baal Devarim
I rather like the brilliant spots that bubble up here.
Wolfish Musings
Various blogs you cannot easily relate to and this is not one of them.

I still check out RenReb but she's posted nothing in what feels like forever now, and several others like Orthomom, but every day, I check these five for sure.

Fundamentalism SHOULD mean...

2007-12-04T15:42:00.001-05:00

Finding out what the fundamental nature of a thing is, and then pursuing that thing in line with that nature.

What is the fundamental nature of G-d? Well, He has no power greater than Him yet is not chaotic and whimsical. So He can do whatever He wants but will not do just anything. Therefore, He has a nature. He has a conscience.

What is the fundamental nature of religion? Well, it's about finding spiritual truths that apply to the human condition, psychological and emotional, moral and ethical, who and what we are.

What is the fundamental nature of science? Well, it's about finding facts that can be tested as simply as using water to find level and cut stone to that level, or as complicated as measuring the "ticking" of a cesium atom.

Notice I DID NOT say it was about finding truths. So everyone trying to deconstruct Judaism by reading Paul Davies... understand the difference, because the theologians of modern science who think it about great heady epiphanies and truths sure won't.

Green Hanukkia' campaign sparks ire | Jerusalem Post

2007-12-04T15:25:00.001-05:00

Green Hanukkia' campaign sparks ire | Jerusalem Post

In a campaign that has spread like wildfire across the Internet, a group of Israeli environmentalists is encouraging Jews around the world to light at least one less candle this Hanukka to help the environment.

The founders of the Green Hanukkia campaign found that every candle that burns completely produces 15 grams of carbon dioxide. If an estimated one million Israeli households light for eight days, they said, it would do significant damage to the atmosphere.

Also, this quote of Tom Wegner:

"There are many people who just light candles for the tradition and for their children," he said. "To tell a child on the eighth day that we are not lighting the last candle as a sacrifice for the environment is an act that is not only educational but also will prevent the release of a huge amount of carbon dioxide that would hurt the environment."

ROTFLMAO

Yup, science sure is logical, rational, and non-religious. Sure... While we're at it, I have this bridge in San Francisco to show you...

Once again children, there is NO scientific evidence WHATSOEVER that HUMANS are causing "global warming". There IS scientific evidence that Earth is coming OUT OF AN ICE AGE. That is, not only going from glacial to interglacial, but actually headed out of the ice age entirely. There is far more evidence that we are at the tail end of an interglacial and in the last 5,000 years or so of it. According to the ice core evidence, which the global warming as caused my humans enthusiast USED TO trumpet but now studiously ignore, towards the ends of interglacials the temperature increase curve rises sharply before a brief stability and then roller coaster drop back to cold.

See the ice core graph at Wikipedia.

But of course you say, "Suitepotato, you can't mean it. Every little bit of CO2 must count!"

Okay then, stop bathing so much. Stop eating and drinking so much. Every bit of waste you put down the drain into the sewers counts towards our planet's pollution.

While you're at it, stop lighting candles at all. Every bit must count.

Try electrics? NO! Every bit counts and those batteries cost energy generated at a coal or oil powered plant.

STOP BREATHING! YOU'RE EXHALING CO2!!!!

Now, Judaism is beset by this idiocy. What's next? A call to end matzoh production because it uses wheat from modern farming methods figured to be not Earth friendly? No gefilte for you, you defiler of the waterways! Put down that etrog, it came from land better used however nature sees fit and besides, it should fall to the ground naturally as nature intended.

Which religion would you rather have? One that ALREADY teaches respect for the environment to the extent that every aspect of taking food from it is prescribed and regulated in total minute detail? Or one that tells you that you aren't allowed in the environment in the first place and only just happen to be here and if it wasn't for your opposable thumbs and well developed brains that you'd have been superceded by something else in evolution?

G-d save us from our idiot fears and overarching egos that we believe we can destroy your world of asteroid impacts and super-volcanoes with mere Chanukah candles...

A quick test of Microsoft Windows Live Writer

2007-12-03T03:02:00.001-05:00

Wow. Not bad. Even lets me compose as if I was writing right inside the blog itself.

Will tell you more as I discover it.

G-d bless you all.

Odd little signposts along the way...

2007-11-29T21:03:00.000-05:00

Growing up, I was always far more comfortable with Jewish comedians of the Borscht Belt golden years than others. Don't get me wrong, I was no prude. I listened to George Carlin, Robin Williams, and so forth... but I always had a special spot for Alan Sherman, Mel Brooks, etc.

So the Saltines I've been eating for years are just pseudo-matzah in a smaller size...

I once invented a language in my head for a book I was writing and accidentally named a character "angel of death" in what appears to be a semitic pre-cursor to Hebrew and Arabic. Never heard of it before today.

If Christians didn't exist till long after Jesus and Jesus was Jewish, then why make a whole new religion? Wasn't Jesus acting within Judaism? I could have sworn his work wasn't aimed at let's say pagan Romans...

Why have I always felt like I missed out on something whenever I come across mentions of Shammai and Hillel and their exchanges? Sure, I loved playing an Atari and an under-sixty general life expectancy doesn't sound great, but something happened during that period that was really special and important.

I've covered my head with a hat or sweatshirt hood since I was a little kid. Never liked being without one.

While always aghast at the violence, was still much for the Old Testament.

Strange some days...

Answer to the previous question

2007-11-29T13:35:00.000-05:00

Previous Question: What have you done to be Jewish lately?

Actual Answer For Me: Therefore, I do homage and respect that which those who've gone before have laid out, even though it is only perhaps to most a small thing.

Respect for tradition of a thing which is done out of respect for G-d.

Not the kippah or the crochet, that which they embodied. The reason they were done.

For those undergoing paroxysms of doubt in their faith, know that the great respect for tradition with faith in an earnestly held belief in a good thing is one of the ways Jews are perceived by the outside world. This is why you should hold on.

I know so many have questions. They struggle with literalism versus implication, G-d's direct word versus inspirational writing, the portrayal of a vengeful G-d versus a nice and loving G-d... They struggle this way in Christianity. I'm sure Muslims do as well and in fact know very well that some do from the Muslim section of the local book store.

Don't you think that asking shows that you even care in the first place? Don't you feel that asking is what He wants you to do?

Okay, now do you think He is a sadistic bastard? No? Then why would He want you to ask and despair? He wouldn't. He wants you then to ask and... what?

Go back and re-read those quotes I posted early this AM before I headed to bed.

What have you done to be Jewish lately?

2007-11-29T02:39:00.002-05:00

My task yesterday: I crocheted a kippah.

My task today: I wore it.

If yours was missing, or you never had one and were in the boat with me, converting, and it was considered here in our modern times important for Jewish men to show respect for G-d by covering their head with a humble covering, would you make your own?

Why did I make my own? Because my co-religionists deem it important. Important enough to make an entire industry of their manufacture, and wear them constantly. Make them a signature visual affectation of being a Jewish man. Therefore, I do homage and respect that which those who've gone before have laid out, even though it is only perhaps to most a small thing.

Respect for tradition of a thing which is done out of respect for G-d.

I don't need it to be in the Torah. I don't need the Talmud to spell it out. The faith of simple men and women and their decency was all that was needed. That is why anything matters. Because we with great caring believe it does. As G-d says all the time, believe whatever you choose to believe. You will anyhow. Just be careful what you choose.

Tomorrows task: complete the crocheted book cover for my pocket paperback copy of the Torah so it will remain in good shape and easier to keep with me. I'm told it is important by people I respect... Not to mention a certain deity who has taken to making odd philosophical and moral points right when I am getting out of the shower. More about that another time.

I am called crazy because I say G-d talks to me...

2007-11-29T02:39:00.001-05:00

...and I call you crazy for not listening when He talks to you.

Some favorite quotes...

2007-11-29T02:37:00.000-05:00

From The Matrix Revolutions:

Agent Smith: Why, Mr. Anderson? Why do you do it? Why get up? Why keep fighting? Do you believe you're fighting for something? For more that your survival? Can you tell me what it is? Do you even know? Is it freedom? Or truth? Perhaps peace? Yes? No? Could it be for love? Illusions, Mr. Anderson. Vagaries of perception. The temporary constructs of a feeble human intellect trying desperately to justify an existence that is without meaning or purpose. And all of them as artificial as the Matrix itself, although only a human mind could invent something as insipid as love. You must be able to see it, Mr. Anderson. You must know it by now. You can't win. It's pointless to keep fighting. Why, Mr. Anderson? Why? Why do you persist?

Neo: Because I choose to.

From The Prophecy:

Thomas Daggett: [narrating] In the end, I think it must be about faith, and if faith is a choice, then it can be lost - for a man, an angel, or the devil himself. And if faith is never completely understanding God's plan, maybe understanding a part of it - our part - is what it is to have a soul, and in the end, that's what being human is, after all.

From The Prophecy II:

Valerie Rosales: [referring to God] It's not that he stopped loving you. It's because you don't listen.
Gabriel: What does he say ?
Valerie Rosales: [whispers into Gabriel's ear] Jump.

From The Prophecy III:

Gabriel: In the end, there's still the word. Everywhere. In heaven with angels, the Earth and stars; even the darkest part of the human soul. It was there the word burned brightest, and for a moment... I was blinded.

(all taken from imdb.com for op-ed use, even if the op-ed is implied by the arrangement)

WORSE than Slamming the Door on Converts

2007-11-26T03:04:00.000-05:00

The worst sin in the world is not killing. It is not rape. Nor child abuse. Nor anything else you see mentioned in the news. Those things can for the survivors be outlasted and with the strength of the human heart be surmounted.

The worst sin in the world is destroying hope. Without a belief however irrational it may seem that life will continue and even improve, their is no motivation any longer for action. Actions turn to other motivations. Darker ones. Hopeless ones. All the world tumbles down to Hell.

We see it every day. We see the other sins. Those are the after effects of denying hope.

The first hope is that our creator loves us too. We want to be accepted and loved, just the way we are, by that which made us. It's as strong a drive in our hearts as wanting our mother and father when we are in peril. Stronger than sex, more powerful than hunger, we want G-d to love us too.

I say too because we have an inherent sense that G-d loves, and someone else. We see our cup as half empty and think that everyone else has something going for them just a little more than we. We think G-d loves everyone else. Some of us take up clothing, books, and scrolls imbued by the trust of our fellows and spread that message. Even then, those spreading the message wonder. Come to think of it, when was the last time you told your Rabbi that G-d loved him or her? Who comforts the men and women of the faith when they need it?

Now, ever more, with this happening we are reminded of in the title linked article, as well as this other one I may have mentioned thanks to Rejewvinator, we are seeing in Judaism a terrible slide in the direction that Christianity has already slid: taking away the hope, slamming the door on the idea... that G-d loves you.

You're not a Jew by their standards... then what are you? Just a human being?

There's nothing "just a" about you. Remember that this entire world began with G-d waking up one day before time was even time and noticing His own existence and commenting, "I am."

Don't let go of that hope. You are. You are, and He loves you too. And that is something even He can't take away from you.

Let not the schism be.

Goodness but the flue does bite...

2007-11-26T02:43:00.000-05:00

And I got it!

Well, we can be thankful that unlike the writers of Battlestar Galactica who think that downloaded Cylon memories can carry actual material organic bacterial/viral infections with them, we know this Internet won't transmit the bugs.

So, more posting this week. See you around!

A response to The Dead End of Jewish Culture

2007-11-16T22:55:00.000-05:00

As this little snippet shows, Christianity is not the only place when men of the religion are looking out their doors wondering where the congregation went.

American Jews have been occupied for four decades in a desperate attempt to stay the tide of assimilation and intermarriage (not to even speak of their more hideous confrere: conversion). I remember as a teenager in the early 1960s sitting through sermons where our rabbi pontificated on the various solutions to The Problem. Yet exactly what is the Jewish leadership trying to perpetuate? Jewish genes? Jewish culture? A fondness for kreplach and klezmer and Isaac Bashevis Singer?

If so, no wonder the Catholics are winning. They don't strive to inculcate in their children a love for Catholic culture. They don't try to whip up enthusiasm for the celebration of St. Patrick's Day nor spend millions to make sure that every Catholic child decorates an Easter egg. They are propagating a religion, complete with God and soul and afterlife. We are pushing a culture, complete with Sholem Aleichem and dreidels and lithographs of the Western Wall. But for a culture, no matter how engaging, no one is ready to sacrifice one's life -- nor the love of one's life. Against Christianity we have pitted not Judaism, but Judaica.

Fear not that the answer lies beyond your reach but fear that human nature makes it very unlikely you will want to go there.

The reason is the same as mine for leaving Catholic Christianity for Conservative Judaism: fear replacing love, even the most cherished rituals of the faith being reduced to cultural affectations without meaning to the soul of the congregant, and a stunning lack of personality and chutzpah from the man at the podium.

I spoke no lie before... the answer is not going to be what you wanted to hear.

First, there is structural damage in the form of fear replacing love. This is perhaps easier to see in Christianity's history than in Judaism's but make no mistake there is far less relating of reasons to see G-d's love in the rituals as opposed to grave warnings of transgressing. No Jew has ever been struck down for having a pork chop. So the warnings of divine retribution over breaking His rules are made to look silly and hollow. The average Jew isn't stupid enough to fail to notice any more than the average Christian. Read the frum orthodox bloggers and see how many are buck and chafing at the yoke now. Check out Rabbi Lazar Brody's upset candor in this article for an example of the mistakes of some rabbis in being strict for the sake of G-d to the point they trample on Him.

Second, when there is not only no love but not even fear the rituals become like a kid who eats his sandwiches just so, someone who makes sure never to walk on the cracks on the sidewalk, etc. No better than superstition and you might remember Maimonides warning us on that. Worse yet, they go from that to subconscious "we've always done that" acts. Judaism is being reduced to Judaica.

Third, sorry to say rabbonim but you're looking pretty darn shabby. You need to work on the delivery. You and the Catholic priests, the Protestant priests, etc. For many congregants, your presentation isn't a lot different than Eddie Izzard's take on the Church of England and Christianity in general.

Why have so many Catholics gone over to Evangelical Born-Again Christianity? Pumping grace. Hands in the air, singing to the Lord, passion. Catholicism lacked this passion for them. So did the old-guard Protestant denominations. It is NOT for no reason that there are more and more Evangelical and Pentacostal Hispanic churches ever day. Imagine if every third minyan broke off and became not only their own synagogue, but their own movement.

At this point the core of Christianity is a giant hunk of Alka-Seltzer, the edges frittering and devolving away into ephemeral memory. THAT is what is happening to Judaism. The major difference being that Jesus' example of rebellion in the name of conscience is not so well understood on the conscience end as the rebellion end. Judaism doesn't have a strong example of devolving to further movements and new ones are momentous happenings. Should that change, expect a legion of Reb Carlebachs* of various qualities to pop up whose ability to read the Hebrew in the Tanach and Talmud is perfectly wonderful, but whose schooling and scholarship is lacking, so they make up for it in joyous noise that engages the congregation. Much light without heat, much noise without meaning. After a while, that too will go out as it is going out among so many devolved Christians.

Some might preach what is right for the right reasons, some might preach the wrong thing for the right reasons, others will preach the wrong thing for the wrong reason and human nature being what it is, this is the most seductive. Where do you think Jim and Tammy Baker came from? Christianity is already way ahead of you.

Rabbonim, before you reject what I say, will you not ask is there nothing in what you believe and hold dear that is not capable of being the fuel for faithful fire that engages the congregation just as much? Is the way of the mitnagdim so much more seductive to you than the first chasidim? Are you so worried and so full of doubt that you can no longer express love and hope and happiness to the Jew in the street as well as that?

I am confident you can.

While some may argue Judaism is a faith born of hardship and only hardship and strictness can make it stay relevant to us, I do not believe that at all.

I have faith in you rabbonim. If you only have faith in yourselves, you can throw aside your fears of facing your own shortcomings, facing the questions of Torah literal versus implied reading, the scary possibilities of titanic shifts in canon, as easily as you toss aside a napkin.

Remember, if you have to choose between love and fear, love is the better to choose. Never forget that when you teach why kashrut is what it is. Not that those who violate it are courting gehinom.

*I mean as in singing rabbis, not that Reb Carlebach was without substance. If you photocopied him and photocopied the photocopies each in turn nine hundred times, what would you have? Not Carlebach, that's for sure.

Another DovBear post worth jousting joining in

2007-11-15T20:54:00.001-05:00

But not in the Haloscan comments where some of my replies are like sticking War and Peace into a short pamphlet on the dangers of diabetes. So read Toby Surfaces and you'll see what I was piqued to write about. By the way, neither DovBear or any one specific person lit my fuse.

First, don't mistake G-d's grace in making you in the first place for not having a right to be here (in the world, in Israel, the US, wherever you posit the generic 'here' to be). You DO have a right to be here and even HE can't take it away without reversing Himself and that would undo Him. Therefore, by His own existence are you guaranteed the right. He made it so, therefore it is. Thank Him, but don't think Him so cheap that His gift can be undone any time He has a whim. It was way greater a gift than that and that greatness is why you owe him thanks.

Even if you die, you were and could say like Him "I am". Don't lose sight of the vast implication of that. He tied you inextricably to Himself sight unseen. This over all other things is why you owe Him your allegiance.

Second, don't mistake the mistakes of reasoning and emotion on the part of others as justification for engaging in them yourself. It is also Christian dogma stated or not that Jesus was not supposed to be accepted among his own people in his own time. It was the will of G-d that he not be. You can hardly blame ANYONE for G-d's predestination. Ours is not to reason why and all.

Naturally, humans want to blame someone for the death of someone who means something to them. You can't go and wag a finger at G-d and say, "you can't do that, you can't take away the messiah from me like that" and who else is there left to blame?

After the short brief stay in the Greek world, for better or worse, Christianity was taken up by the Romans. Do you really think they're going to blame their new all-powerful G-d for Jesus' death? We're down by two of three now. Who's left to blame? Really short game of musical chairs there. G-d's throne is immovable and the Romans never stood to the music.

Yet Jesus would not have blame tossed about so if you think there's neurosis in the world of Judaism, all of Christianity is neurotic on this one issue. Never mind all the ten thousand others.

While the teachings of the Catholic church wimbled and waffled on that subject of "Who Killed Jesus?" (everyone, in the study, with the lead pipe, I kick major backside at Clue, Monopoly too) in a way I thought highly morally repugnant, your average Christian on the street didn't hate Jews despite not really hanging out with them on a religious level. They weren't Jews, they were Jackie at the deli, and Bill at the office, and so on. They just didn't understand them and the church didn't help them understand being a Christian so how much more lost could they get?

(As an aside, why do you think that there are now so many "Jews for Jesus" people popping up now at the same time as so many Orthodox Jews blogging skeptical thoughts? Same reason: nagging conscience. Jesus' existence is the first assumption of Christianity and nothing else seems sensible so they're trying to do Jesus honor by doing what he seemed to be doing... getting people back to G-d. They just want to try to honor Jesus by adopting something of his cultural and religious ways without letting go of the Catholic central dogma of Jesus as G-d's superhighway toll collector and the nifty original sin spot remover as if Jesus was a moral Billy Mays.

Not possible perhaps between modern semi-post-diaspora Judaism and them but said form of Judaism did NOT exist then and if you think you hear Michael Buffer in your head yelling now before religious disputes imagine going back to the prime time of the Sanhedrin, imagine ground zero of Shammai and Hillel. "Let's get ready to rumbbbbbbbblllllle!"

But they at least are acting like G-d exists in a world that doesn't seem to. When they start blowing up stuff in the name of G-d, let me know.)

Does this mean I'm saying let antisemitism pass? HECK NO. I am quite likely the last on Earth to pass this.

Neither though should you paint with so broad a brush. Make no enemy of those better your friend and neighbor and of those better your enemy, reconsider. They're always better off on the friends list no matter what.

That is why your enemies should sadden and vex you, not that you are a victim, but that they are missing out on being your friend and G-d commanded you to be good to your neighbor and they are stymieing that putting you in a lose-lose situation where the best Pyhrric victory you can manage is to learn from their behavior to not become like them.

Returning hate and ignorance with love, albeit sad and heartbroken, is no different than your G-d does for you every time you imperfectly break His directions. Hard for you? Imagine how ticked off He must get some days.

Thankfulness is due to G-d for everything. Even the bad things. As has been taught repeatedly.

My task for day: read someone else's blog

2007-11-15T15:01:00.000-05:00

After the mountain of output from my smithing at the keyboard I realized I'd had no time to read any of the other blogs I read.

Will be back later today maybe, definitely tomorrow G-d willing.

Also, I am extremely angry at the lack of common sense in people in general regarding the idea that if you are going somewhere, drive like it. I'd rant and that's not what I want to do today.

Further along in the road...

2007-11-14T19:19:00.001-05:00

So I had stopped going to Sunday School, and then to church, and refused to go near a bible. I had one in my nightstand, but I never read it anymore. The world was painful to me pretty regularly, and I tried to track my doings, and couldn't find a formula of crime and punishment from above. It seemed pretty disproportionate and unfair.

Which is of course not to say that going without necessarily made my life all cream and sugar. It certainly didn't. Good... bad... needle stops on indifferent. Wasn't hurting, wasn't helping. If you want to be transcendental you can say what doesn't help you hurts you by wasting time when you need helping but no need to nitpick.

As the years ticked on my family fell apart. A new marriage for my mother went no better than the last but not for the same reasons unless you want to go to root causes in which case they were the same reasons: total self-absorption causing an inability to compromise, to see the other side, to see their own flaws, to admit those flaws to themselves and each other, inflexibility, unstoppable force meets immovable object. I went from two sets of grandparents to three and back to two. How do you give a kid your family and get everyone opening their hearts to each other and exchanging Christmas gifts and cards and kisses and hugs... and then take that away? I never got to see my step-father's parents again before they died. I wondered if they missed me the way I missed them.

My sister became an adolescent and as sisters often do, decided I was no longer her big brother. I was now Public Enemy Number One. If there was a crime in the world, of any kind, men were responsible, starting we me. For my part, it was like getting demoted by an employer you thought liked you, and a kick in the crotch for good measure. Being her big brother was one of my few secret joys. For a few hours a week total, I was someone important to someone, even if it wasn't any of my now three semi-parents. Now I was persona non grata.

You ever see that MASH episode where Houlihan cries to her nurses about how much it hurts to walk past their tent and hear them laughing and know she wasn't welcome? I was sooo there. Got the t-shirt and tote bag. Many times. Like whenever the same kids I played with would no longer play with me if my sister was playing with them first.

Somewhere around her middle high school years she left altogether taking up with some guy who sees in her I know not what. She's like a cat in a permanent state of wet fur, really. At least to me. I never did one thing to her. Not merely nothing to deserve this treatment, but nothing at all. It's strange how people sometimes can just arbitrarily choose to make enemies with people who want so badly to be their friend. You know, she was gone from my life for years before she was gone from the house. Just this sort of blonde blank spot that made me always afraid...

So she's off with him to this day, or back with him. That's another story altogether and later.

Time continued ticking by and with me much more alone than ever I imagined I could be. I used to think the way I could be at a total loss of anyone in the old neighborhood to play with some days was bad. Now living on the other side of town, just me and my mother and her parents was something totally other.

My road was looking pretty shabby. Muddy, potholed, and not going anywhere different or better than I'd been before in any real way. Even with my mother trying out Evangelical/Born Again Christianity.

For those of you born and raised Jews who know nothing about what is going on there other than the mass media, they have less to do with Jesus of Nazareth than the Catholic Church does. It's one part "the Catholics got it wrong", one part "don't worry be happy", one part "fire and brimstone" and one part "Who's this G-d person? The name is J-E-S-U-S!" and none of it tastes real good. Not to me, never did.

I remember how tired and sleepy I was going to a Grace and Vessels meeting. Grace DiBiccari would come out in her dress that was somewhere between a baby's baptismal font dress and a Dolly Parton Grand Ole Opry gown, all white, and with her big poofy black hair and the band would play and she'd sing and she'd preach and I wasn't following any of it.

Maybe I would have followed more if I'd not been subject to the Catholic Guilt Factory first, but then again, maybe not. Protestantism had its own Guilt Trips travel service no matter which denomination and from within, there's not a lot of what you see on the news about ordaining homosexuals or women, or talking about financial flow, there's lots of Jesus whatever. If you think that out of all the would-be messiahs that Jesus at least seemed to have a really good intent and start but Pauline Catholicism opened the flood gates of bastardization, then you'd have to think the Evangelicals were setting out to erase any message he had in a big flouncy fluffy content free pumping the sky atmosphere.

Really. As in Jesus (enter your preposition here). Like... Jesus saves.... and takes half damage. That's a Dungeons and Dragons joke by the way. You could also say Jesus saves... AND SCORES! That's the hockey joke. Not Jesus wanted to drag people back to focus on G-d, not that Jesus wanted to remind us of our creator... Not that Jesus stood for step back and a breath in a world that was on edge looking to blame anyone who got in the way...

No, Jesus has no message with these people. You're saved! From what? Well, the devil. Who is evidently the spitting image of the late Anton LaVey, but with hair.

That was about it. Accept Jesus as your personal saviour now, operators are standing by. Order your personal saviour now, get one more half-off. Also, this nifty travel size bible...

No, be good, honor your parents and you parents don't be cynically taking advantage of it. No lead by example be good and upright...

I slept at these things more than anything else, and through them later on television. Even Gene Scott made me switch the channel faster than the eye could follow.

Nevertheless I wanted to believe that G-d was there. He just didn't seem to like me. I was hurting so bad and everywhere I turned for solace more or less told me all my problems were my own and my fault. Sure, I'm Satan incarnate. That's why you lied to me about being sick that weekend you were supposed to visit me dad... Not that you were playing hooky and taking my step-brothers to the aquarium which I'd have given my left arm to go to see with you all... I was just not worthy, that's it...

I kept an old tin coffee can in my bedroom and in it the cloth-backed picture of Mary which hung round my neck at the time of confirmation, a real wood bead rosary, and a wooden cross that my mom gave me when I was all of six or seven. I'd look at them sometimes, and usually at night when I was all alone and tired after work, and sometimes, I'd cry. I'd feel like I was looking into some place I wasn't welcome, whose owner didn't want me. How could He possibly? Two parental break-ups, changing extended family line-ups, terrible school life, dead-end young adult-hood, sister hating me, grandparents counting down to death, no money, nothing under the Christmas tree, lots of hypocrisy and blame coming from the messengers of G-d, news constantly bad, and lest I forget, no friends living in the ass end of the town nowhere near any socializing opportunity.

My mom had her crocheting and the bible. My sister had her mysterious boyfriend. My father had my step-brothers and half-sister. I had...

Through a series of bad choices, dead-end jobs, and futureless drudgery I continued on growing ever more angry and sad. If I screamed with anger, tears would be on my face at the same time. I didn't know if I wanted to kill someone else or myself more, and was growing fearful of the race to the finish to see which it would be.

The one thing I thought I knew was, "well, even G-d doesn't want me. I am screwed."

I remember that I'd cry a lot. I wasn't looking for sympathy or pity and aren't now. Just so you know.

I'd cry to G-d, begging Him to let me come home. Home was where the heart was, my heart wasn't in any of this, and short of it having nowhere to be, then there must be somewhere I belonged.

He wouldn't say anything. Or maybe I couldn't hear over the crying inside. When would my dad tell me he was proud of me? When would my step-dad tell me I was good enough to be his son? When would my mother understand I was more than the boy she didn't want? Was someone ever going to like me? How nice did I have to be to get someone to not hate me? When would the phone ring and someone be on the other end for me? Even after my sister had left, calls came for her. None for me. Not even my dad, just to shoot the breeze.

Years passed, every one not bringing anything new. My dad played golf and tried to teach both of my step-brothers and my sister's boyfriend even... but never once did he ask me. He talked with me about how great the graphite clubs were. I think the last time he actually did something where he taught me something must have been just before the divorce... I must have really done something horrible to make him leave. He seemed to stop sharing with me then. All those years of waiting to become a legal adult, a man, and nope... nothing more did he teach me father to son. Not even his beloved game of golf. Maybe he thought I was too... not sporty enough. My brother was handsome, fast, strong, got girls, and played little league. So did I and I was on the team that won the town championships.

Like that mattered to anyone or was remembered by anyone. My dad wasn't there for that either. Other guys had their dad show... not me, I had my mother bring me.

Are you there G-d? Hellloooooo?

Not a response. Either He wasn't talking or I couldn't hear him. Six of one, half dozen of another.

My mother became I thought my best friend, but in her own way withdrew from me too. She'd change the subject whenever I tried to strike up any meaningful conversation. Remind me of having cable television. Or that I had books to read. Yeah thanks mom. I come talk to you and you'd rather I go play outside. I guess there might be a squirrel to tell my suicide note to.

I wrote that damn letter in my head over and over. I was going to make everyone sorry or at least escape the horror that no one would be sorry. If no one cared at finding me hanging there, then at least I'd be too dead to notice.

My grandfather spent time with me, but it was like I was Gilligan to the Skipper most days. If not being yelled at then certainly still underfoot and just someone to tell anecdotes to. About WWII no less. Death camps, tanks running over casualties with guts splattering everywhere, Nazi dive bombers, French countryside running red with blood... Great stuff for a kid.

Yeah, I'm bouncing around here as the memories bounce around. Parallel overlapping stripes of themes one on top of another. I was good enough to... ehh... but not whatever enough to spend time with talking about anything that meant anything to me. Why did dad go? Why didn't he visit me regularly as if visitation meant anything? Now that I was older why did dad still not pal around with me and choose my step-brothers instead? Why didn't my mother talk with me? About anything? Why did my grandmother not talk to me? Why did my grandfather talk at me and not to me?

"So if I must be lonely, I think I'd rather be alone..."

There's something to that line from Stabbing Westward's Save Yourself. Better to have never known anyone or any love or happiness than to lose it.

I kept writing that note over and over in my head and finally stopped, figuring I'd just wander off and simply not come back. They'd not notice. It would cause no one any pain.

However, before I could, someone who didn't heretofore talk to me did.

The Internet isn't just a cesspool...

2007-11-13T23:45:00.000-05:00

It's also an indispensable tool. For instance I was troubled by one English translation of Deuteronomy 6:5 where it was written about loving G-d with among other things, all your "possessions". How can I love G-d with my blender? That sounds transcendentally kinky and verrryy wrong.

Well if you Google these terms: deuteronomy 6:5 possessions, you get this.

Now it makes more sense and I'm not so troubled anymore.

It was at aish.com by the way in case you were wondering. I've seen about five different phrasings so far across Jewish and Christian sites in tonight's look-up.

Chabad.org pages on demand!

2007-11-13T20:51:00.001-05:00

Or if not by your demand, then because I can find something uplifting faster than a tax hike.

The Discovery of Planet Earth. I quote:

We got to the moon. The moon was barren. We sent probes to Mars. Mars was dead. To the icon of beauty, to Venus. She was dressed in poisonous, burning clouds. And then the pockets of the United States Congress were also barren to fund our useless dreams.

It was then that we looked back from outer space and discovered something we had never imagined. A shining jewel in the vast darkness. Never before had we known her beauty. The most beautiful planet a mind could dream of.

I needed to read this. Thank you G-d. I suggest you take the mouse more often too. I really don't need to see some places on the net. They make me so unhappy. This doesn't.

*Disclaimer for the depressed skeptics: Can you please let people be with what fulfills their spirits for a moment? There doesn't have to be a weighing of the educational, moral, ethical, or other values on every little thing. Sometimes fluff serves a very non-fluffy purpose. Read the previous story on this blog about what happens when you don't have happy uplifiting messages in your life and indeed, just the opposite.

All about the death of hope

2007-11-13T20:15:00.001-05:00

This is the end result of what we see in the world today, the selling of hopelessness.

It happened much faster, but the end result is what the world is doing to itself all the time. Tying a belt around our collective necks and hanging ourselves in despair.

Fear, anger, frustration, despair, hopelessness. They need to have big warning messages on them. DANGER: DANGEROUS SUBSTANCE. DO NOT INGEST.

While I feel bad for the girl, she is gone now and all that are left to feel bad for are the living. The parents who lost their child and now are warped by pain, and those who began this dangerous foul lark, whose consciences will forever be tortured.

Give G-d your condolences when you pray next. He's got His work cut out for Him in this.

Is Suitepotato a convert or is he in process of converting or what?

2007-11-13T19:34:00.001-05:00

This question is a good one Chaim. It gives me an excuse to blog. Like I need one. :)

The beginning:
I was born to if not good observant then at least passingly caring Catholic parents. They weren't bad people. A little self-absorbed with their own pains I suppose. Knowing now how they were raised by my largely now late grandparents, I am sometimes surprised they didn't become ardent atheists. Stand up, sit down, kneel, cross this way, cross that way, yes we're attending a Catholic chuch but be nice and smile like someone suffering fools gladly for your Baptist minister uncle. G-d says no meat on Friday, okay, Vatican II says G-d was kidding, what, you want to know if Jesus was the messiah for his sake or G-d's? We're awaiting another Lateran Council for clarification. Okay, pray in Latin. Just kidding, back to English. Make nice with the guitar playing nun and don't tick her off, she's on the diocese softball team and that guitar makes a real big bat.

It was into this confusing allegedly Christian world I popped. Almost as if a foretelling of my future I was circumcised right away. It was already being phased out back then and there's no big emphasis on the so-called Old Testament in Catholicism except where it serves to make the priest de jure think you're listening just a little bit more than five seconds before he mentioned G-d turning people into salt. Snipping any part of your anatomy is not something Catholics spend any time on, nor should they. I'm not comfortable with anyone's spending too much time on my anatomy. Good thing brit milah is as quick as possible or in my case to be hatafat dam brit.

As an aside, if you dare to visit stilemedia.com and cycle through the self-destruction visualized therein, you might come across things even more disturbing to do to your genitalia there. Also, you might need medical help to get your eyelids to close properly again as they'll have gone so wide, your eyes might fall out. YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED. Downright unholy stuff there. I've seen it so thank you G-d it's just a little sterilized needle prick and over with, like taking your blood sugar test.

Onward through the years I went in the church not particularly getting anything spiritual out of it. Sit down, stand up, kneel. Catholic Calisthenics every Sunday, facetious quibbling over Friday's choice of main dinner component when pizza or McDonald's was more likely, more evasion of the usual questions children ask when they smell b.s. in the water.

"We execute murderers and other criminals?"

"Sometimes."

"Did Jews execute other criminals?"

"Not since they were in charge of their own nation. The Romans executed people."

"So Jesus wasn't killed by Jews."

"Er..."

"Wasn't Jesus a Jew?"

"Yeah..."

"So the Romans executed Jesus?"

"I guess so... Go outside and play."

I'd look up at the cross in church, wondering if that five hundred pound wood and plaster kitsch would fall on someone, and get nervous with fright whenever the priest stood directly under it. G-d was supposed to be a real hellish deity, able to outdo Satan for sheer audacity. The devil would only seduce people to bad things. G-d would create them one minutes and drown them in flood the next. Even the devil never got to throw death around in that big a way. G-d made hurricanes which were more powerful than atomic bombs according to science class. Satan made... what?

G-d never did anything with that cross. It hung there all the while the priest went on in the manner of what would later be somewhat satirized by Eddie Izzard except that he was using it to poke at the Church of England. It might as well have been about hair and fashion magazines. It ran together like mush and as I got older and paid more attention it contradicted itself.

This of course is not good. Contradiction is to gentile kids what the Internet is to some Charedi men. A real neck snapping double-taking whoa there horsey moment. I had my crisis of faith start at Sunday school which for those so Jewish they never learned a thing about Christians other than the holiday sales, was sort of like a fat-free sugar-free ultra-light version of what my wife still refers to as "Hebrew School" which was in actuality little more than a far too late and too little touch-up in a hurry before her bat mitzvah.

We were supposed to cover all the minutae that couldn't fit into a sermon or the usual repetition of prayers held out before us like a superstitious attempt at warding off woodchucks from the garden with old folk-tale mixtures of urine and other things... and about as effective. Bad things still happened to good people. Kids I knew were still crying themselves to sleep hungry, as I did many times. Parents slept around on each other. Divorce was rampant. Drugs were everywhere. Yet somehow the world was firmly held to work a principle of bad stuff only happens to bad people. Therefore, if you are pained, you've been bad.

Little old Italian Catholic grandmothers could go toe to toe in a guilt olympics with any Jewish grandmother. G-d sees what you're doing, He knows you're even thinking about back-talk, and He's already getting your punishment ready... Now go do what I tell you and turn the heater up and then go rake the lawn, and then put the leaves on the mulch pile, and then get the mower. Don't complain. It's G-d's will you respect your elders... No matter how much they milked it.

Like I said, b.s. in the water. What did I do? When did I do something to deserve going hungry? What did I do to deserve it? What in the name of G-d could I possibly have done? I was seven for crying out loud! I'm not this Hitler person the teachers go on about. I'm just seven!

The following year Jim Jones crept out of the shadows and onto the television. I wasn't him either. I was just eight.

It only got worse. The idea was put to me and no argument accepted, G-d punishes people so they must deserve whatever bad happens. My father cheated on my mom. My mom decided that the whole Christ-preached forgiveness thing wasn't for her and filed for a divorce almost the same day. What did I do to make my dad move away? What did I do to make my mom mad at my dad? I talked, pretty much screamed at Jesus Christ and G-d. WHY???!!!

Never did hear anything back. Maybe I was screaming in pain too much to hear Him.

I tried reading the bible cover to cover. Started with the old testament and saw just more of the idea that G-d was a pretty persnickety deity. Seemed to have a thing for some guy that they must have named Lincoln after and all his kids. There was the whole bit about the boat and all the animals, which they endlessly use for kids' books religious or not because kids like animals and boats. Noah had both? Can't miss! They were light on the whole sinful world part though. I wondered if all the people who drowned did so because they were busy doing drugs, sleeping around, and too heavy with gold chains on their necks to swim. You know the part that I'm talking about? Imagine the sights of Studio 54 being your model for the imagery.

It went on endlessly it seemed about some people called Jews that Jesus came from who seemed to get the crap kicked out of them for no apparent reason on a way too regular basis like G-d was messing with them. I could feel for them. I got the crap kicked out of me at school for no reason on a regular basis.

After a while, I fell away from my attempt somewhere just before the death of Jesus. I already had that one special delivered in Sunday school. It was their whole central schtick. They went to great lengths to infer without saying it that Jews killed Jesus while downplaying that Jesus was a Jew though they didn't spare the mentions when it came to the Romans. Then we were one big happy family, us versus those guys with the scrub brushes on their silly helmets.

Well anyhow, G-d wasn't anywhere in there. He didn't talk to me when I read any of it.

So I looked elsewhere for G-d. I stopped going to church and Sunday school simply by waiting till my mother was least able to spend time on fighting with me over it. Either argue, or get the groceries, laundry, and part-time job done. Pick on or the other, you can't have both.

My mom meanwhile was having her own crisis of faith which led her to the church of arts and crafts before bringing her around to born-again Christianity which was a whole other world of say one thing about G-d then demonstrate another pain and misery.

Which is where the next post will take up...

Messianic Musing 2

2007-11-12T19:28:00.001-05:00

Okay, as I said...

Did you get it? I thought all weekend about it.

G-d frequently asks questions in an order that seems reversed but there's a reason to it. The first question was who said we needed saving. Hmmm? Anyone?

Okay, no, proceed to the second, who or what do we need saving from?

Come on... The answer for BOTH questions is... well, go look in a mirror.

So recently health care was mentioned on RWAC...

2007-11-12T19:20:00.001-05:00

Wherein I said:

That which need be done or achieved to be meritorious of His direct intervention itself brings about a state no different than had He directly intervened and may be if you are wont to, chalked up to Him.

At least, that's what I was once told.

However, it can also be said you cannot help people who will not accept it. Most health costs are for those things that never should have been taken so far. Cigarette smoking, fatty diets, lack of exercise, nasty unhealthy foods, etc.Does today's America look like it is full of people who want to be told what to do, what is moral, what's good for them?* No. You can't tell me what to do! Just suggesting is an attempt to control me! I will stick bananas in my ears! (Until they cause enough irritation to require an emergency banana-ectomy.)

So go back to what I started with. When people start doing and living better their remaining medical issues will be so inexpensive by comparison with right now that we can easily afford universal health care without any political games, without property expropriation, without taxation without alleged representation, etc.

*Yes, in a weird way. They just want to think THEY invented the idea.

To elaborate:

The problem is clouded because we're assuming that every medical problem is not the patient's fault or cause. And in doing so we assume that none of those in the future will be either.

We need to do several things:

1. Stop assuming that things must be just because they are. We have lots of fat smokers. We do not necessarily HAVE TO HAVE lots of fat smokers.

2. Stop assuming that current trends will continue. If they did then by the time I was 37, I'd be 68,719,476,736 (2^37-1) which is somewhere around the time I pay off my mortgage. As a continuation of number 1, we WILL NOT ALWAYS HAVE lots of fat smokers, not for the least of which reasons is that the present ones will die and more subtly, we can prevent more.

3. On the heels of numbers 1 and 2, START assuming WE CAN do something about the root causes of the vast majority of health issues.

Why are we in this morass? Because 1, 2, and 3 were violated. We assumed we'd always have health care that didn't cost a lot, there were lots of doctors, we had many advances happening every day... we assumed we could live any way we wanted and above all those three, we violated number 4.

4. Stop letting people off the hook into the future. We ARE responsible for MUCH of our health issues AND while we CANNOT do anything about the past, we can stop being idiots and learn from our mistakes and deviate onward through the future away from the path to destruction. Forgive, but do not forget. Judge but offer a course of correction and help. Be stern and just, but be loving and embracing.

Here's an excellent Jewish angle: the laws of kashrut are what they are for what reason? Because G-d is an anal-retentive sadistic food critic? No. Why then? Well, at the very least if you don't want to get into the moral minutae, you can assume that a kind loving G-d has a moral reason for it all. Therefore, are we not violating the rules by treating them like a free pass? As long as the shochet did a superb job, eat as much meat as you like? No. We are allowed to eat meat as a divine but dark gift. Life is G-d's crowning achievment. He lets us kill some animals and eat their flesh but it should never be something we take for granted.

It doesn't matter if the shochet is an angel and can turn off the cow's life without a knife like flipping a switch. Something still died for that meat. It was what can be semi-laughingly called a necessary evil.

You should therefore think harder about what you eat. While G-d doesn't command vegetarianism much less veganism, He certainly does seem to be raising one eyebrow and glancing at it like a secretary trying to get her boss' attention like "psst! Hey! Look who's at the front counter!"

Maybe you should see what G-d is angling at and eat a little more healthy.

I was shopping for groceries the other evening and thought back to Braveheart and thought, "many years from now, dying in a hospital bed, would you be willing, to give all the days, from this to that, to come back here and tell your appetite, you can take my attention, but you'll never take... my nutrition!"

So I shop the kosher and health food sections, not fifteen feet apart, not coincidentally having almost identical occurences of the Circle U. I've cut my pipe and cigar smoking. I've lost weight. I've cut the withdrawal time on my antidepressent by two weeks worth of nausea and diarhea. I feel a lot better and have much more energy. I won't need nearly so much medical care in the future. And it was all by my choice to listen to G-d.

So rabbis... Start your sermonizing!

One of the first sites I check every day...

2007-11-12T15:46:00.001-05:00

Lazer Beams with Rabbi Lazer Brody

There's nothing I can write which will compare with reading it. Maybe its just my musty religious past that makes it so new and refreshing and yet so familiar (nuns with guitars after Vatican II anyone?) which makes me appreciate it. Maybe because in a way it's like one of those books on the Baal Shem Tov and other Chasidim. There's just something very not fake about the love here. VERY NOT fake.

Messianic Musing

2007-11-11T05:22:00.000-05:00

Me: Has the messiah come and if so, who, and if not, when?

G-d: Who said you needed saving?

Me: Uh...

G-d: And from what?

Me: Er...

G-d: Yeah, you get back to me on this when you answer those questions.

Me: Okay...

Learn Hebrew

2007-11-08T19:51:00.001-05:00

Learn Hebrew is a simple but very nice Flash based web site from Jacob Richman which I first began using some months ago now.

First, you can choose what amount to Flash flash cards (er, possibly redundant but... whatever) mousing over the text of which and left-clicking will cause a very clear voice to intone the selection.

Second, the voice used is very clear. Did I mention that? Okay, it bears repeating. Also, the pronunciation is in the modern Israeli Sephardic style. Shabbat is pronounced with a definite T sound and not an S. So this won't help you follow the Charedi community with the heavy Yiddish infusions, but you can figure it out.

Third, there are many different categories of cards to choose from, not just Aleph, bet, etc.

My only real problem with it, and I have this problem with every single other free Hebrew site is there is no clear set of rules and variances taught for when to use a yod or vav to indicate an extended vowel intonation or which nikkudot mean which intonation based on which letter they are used with. Shin, bet, tav is very clearly shabbat. However, why the choice of how you are suggesting the vowel sound be "ah"?

Similarly, the choice of tet or tav, vet or vav, is left unexplained. As it is somewhat strangely in the Hebrew for Dummies book. Put together, you get the problem of the spelling of vet. It starts
with a vet with tsere under it followed by a yod then a tav. I assume Israeli kids get some sort of explanation. Can I have one?

Other than that, this is a great site to start off with learning the letters. I expect more to come from Jacob's site so will be watching.

My response to a DovBear post...

2007-11-08T17:14:00.001-05:00

This is regarding this post made there today about Jews at Yeshiva World ranting angry things about Hillary Clinton.

Long before I became in any way religious, when my spirituality was limited to running from G-d in fear that He didn't like me enough to give me a chance so why bother talking with Him, I did nevertheless have a conscience anyways.

It kept me from making bigger mistakes than I might have otherwise made. It just took a very long time for me to recognize His gift He gave me like other people.

I recall one thing that kept pricking me and that was the impiety with which the liberals treated Jews. Piety is not the sole domain of the G-dly. It's a state of being in our make-up whether or not we acknowledge G-d and if we're really good and humble, we can still be no less holy than someone who has practically committed the entire Torah and all the Talmud to memory and has earned the love and respect of all the people. It's just better with G-d because that's why the impulse is there. To help us match up with Him.

Anyhow, if piety is something man can experience without G-d, so too is impiety. Liberalism was impious to me. It said one thing with total seeming passion for it being not just any truth or a truth, but the truth yet at the same time, it embraced ways and actions which anyone who was truly piously caring could see were at odds with the statements.

I tried to reconcile them but could not. It was made harder and harder by the ever more extreme ways. Political correctness made it clear: it was about the primacy of their rule, getting their way, not their way for they had no way other than to get their way.

Now it made sense. They wanted to be in charge and stay that way. They were afraid that the opposite of being in charge was to be a loser. They couldn't stand that idea. So with total passion they told me how they were smarter, more caring, and filled with better intentions than me. All I had to do was submit. Sounds like certain people we all know, doesn't it? Now you know why those people rankle. Now you know why they set you on edge.

Liberalism was the extremist humanist fringe. Religion isn't about G-d. Faith even. You can strongly believe in the primacy of an idea without G-d ever entering into it. But if there's no one to ask, how do you really know?

That's when self-righteous delusion becomes a replacement for true righteousness. Humanism was a religion and liberalism a self-righteous crew of hypocrites. An excellent idea that mankind is not a simple animal and is not necessarily bound for evil without G-d (He made us so how bad could His creations be I wondered) was twisted by the essential weakness: no higher power to ask. We had to take their word.

Surplus cheese, surplus because it was made not to fulfill a demand of the people but because politicians paid farmers to make it with taxpayer monies so the farmers would in return vote for those same politicians is not tzedakah. It is to give trash to someone and claim it is valuable. It is a con.

Food stamps that limit people to the least popular products that given a choice you'd not ever buy unless you were starving is not tzedakah. It is to say the extent of your charity is the least possible thing.

Taking money from other people under threat of throwing them in jail for refusal instead of your own wallet is not tzedakah. It is theft in the name of avoidance of tzedakah.

Giving just a small portion of that money to the poor, just enough to be miserable and hopeless on is not tzedakah. It is to perpetuate their poverty.

Giving the bulk of that money to non-poor people so they will continue to sing your praises and keep you in power is not tzedakah. It is to bribe people for your aggrandizement.

Counseling the poor to take the scraps and be happy with it is not tzedakah. It is to counsel despair.

Counseling the poor that they should remain poor because it is easier than struggling in the rest of the world to not be poor is not tzedakah. It is to counsel hopelessness.

These things I witnessed first hand growing up poor and Catholic in a wealthy Protestant town of nouveau Christians. Christians in name only. Christians who did not in any way feel the slightest kinship with the charity of their own proclaimed savior. You think I can't know the gulf you perceive between the Baal Shem Tov and the Chasidim of today?

That small but wealthy town was liberalism central. One could practically hear the breaking of arm bones as people clapped themselves on the back for their supposed good deeds even as they sneeringly looked down on those they supposedly did the deeds for.

And beneath those sounds of expensive leather shoes walking the town hall, and straining joints, and mutual appreciation, you could hear children crying themselves to sleep hungry because mom was discouraged from holding a job that might have filled their stomachs. None of those liberals did. They were too busy having award dinners for each other.

Hillary is such a liberal.

I am not saying Republicans are a lot better, but in the scheme of things, Democrats certainly aren't remotely good. They did me and mine great unkindness and then treated me like an idiot, telling me what great things they did for me. I wish they'd simply spit in my face and walked on. It would have been less hurtful than to be sold the despair and hopelessness that made so many nights so cold.

While G-d says not to hold on to hate for them, He does not say to be an idiot and turn a blind eye to their ways.

Maybe some of the people commenting are simply having a gut reaction. Maybe they sense her ilk for what they are: self-righteous, arrogant, impious, inhuman, unkind, and chesed-challenged morons.

I'm sorry G-d. They still make me angry.

So where is that impiety regarding Jews? The same as it was for us poor and every other group of people on Earth in their eyes. Nothing matters to them but getting their way. That is the total sum of their way. Their own primacy. They will turn on Israel and sell it to her enemies the instant it is opportune to do so. Just as they've done to the poor, to minorities who they've counseled hate and division to, to females whose sorrows they used to turn them to hateful conclusions towards men who loved them, to children who deserved good upbringing and just wanted to be prepared for the world and were turned towards loving nothing and believing nothing. Everything they've done has been about themselves.

Their impiety to Jews, to people with a history of being used and abused and blamed for everything under the sun the way people blame G-d for everything that offends or unsets them, was to lie with passion about their caring for Jews, while at the same time doing not a thing for them of any true caring, mouthing snide condescension about them in private lest they be heard publicly to be as mean thinking towards them as they are about the observant Christians from which these unobservant self-absorbed boobs spring, while they make mealy-mouthed mumblings about the rights of Palestinians to a homeland while deflecting any and all questions of the responsibility of the Arab nations who've steadfastly refused their own Muslim brethren and laying all blame on Israel so much so that when you point out the glaringly obvious result of constant appeasement is Israel's destruction they give only a smug smile and a shrug.

From the Christian past of me, from the poor past of me, from the past of me from which I've walked out, that long road from man-made Hell to American Jews and Jews from anywhere else... I beg you to not be reflexively open to Hillary and her crew. They don't love you. They don't even like you. They are not your friends. They don't want you at their clubs, they don't want to hear about G-d or your love for Him, they don't want your love, they don't want your ways, and they don't want you to have them, and they don't want you to have Him. Anything that distracts from them and their ways and their greatness is a threat to them. It is not so much evil as a simple consequence of doing everything based on fear of not being in control.

Do not fall into the trap of so many Christian churches who thought they were so mighty they could change liberalism from within and fell to the seductions of the liberal elite of power and influence and financial success. You can't. Their impious unfaith is a black hole from which your good intentions will not escape. The meaning of faith in G-d will be stripped and devoured, until your ways are hollow skinned carcass to wear to look like something it no longer is, just as so many Christian Protestant congregations are now. They'll wear Judaism like a skin.

Kabbalah will be reduced to a red string they will say makes them know all about you and totally have your interests at heart, even as they are cozying up to Palestinian terrorists and telling them how much they have their interests at heart.

Oh wait, it already is...

Thank you DovBear for this...

2007-11-08T16:38:00.001-05:00

Just saw his post regarding King Abdullah's visit to England.

Check out the video link in that article. I nearly died laughing.

My response to G-d's apology.

2007-11-08T13:48:00.000-05:00

Me: I forgive you. You just wanted to know and some things follow from some other things. Some things just are. You wouldn't hurt me on purpose. You've been my friend and never steered me wrong. I just didn't listen. I'm sorry I was so afraid you wouldn't like me that I didn't even talk to you for so long. I wouldn't have liked it if someone did it to me and of all the people I should observe the golden rule with, I turned away from you of all people.

I'm sorry G-d. I should have said so earlier, for all the times I didn't acknowledge you. It wasn't fair to you.

Thank you for everything I have. My wife, my mother-in-law, my dogs and cats, and all that. Thank you for being my friend.

G-d would like to say something...

2007-11-07T23:43:00.000-05:00

I've said before that I talk to G-d, as should you, from that place He speaks to us, in our conscience and through the kaleidoscope of us.

So, in talking with Him recently, I've decided to put out some stuff He wanted to say as if He was speaking right from my fingertips at the keyboard here.

Here's the first thing He wanted to say.

G-d: Hi. I just want to stop by for a minute and, really, stop bowing. I appreciate it, really, but it gets in the way of you listening to me.

Cool.

I wanted to say, today, and I've said it before but most of you don't hear me because well... I made you in my image so you seem to want to mimic me and when I do it you do it and you can't hear me apologizing over your apologizing.

That's what I wanted to say. I'm sorry.

I didn't mean to make things as painful as they are, and well, it sort of turned out that way. I know, most of you don't blame me completely and you really understand that phrase that suitepotato uses, which I won't repeat because he is the cranky curmudgeon and not me. Stuff happens so to speak.

Though we all know it, it still needs to be said. I'm sorry. Really. I know that in making you like me you're as hurt as I am and even more frightened some times. I know that with the invention of free will and spiritual autonomy that I have effectively self-limited my powers of intervention in ways that you understand easily.

I ask you to trust me, when I tell you, that I am not lying, not covering up anything, and totally honest... I am aware of the situation and am on the job. I have help ready where ever I can put it, and it's there if you want it. For starters, you could simply ask me.

Really. I am happy to listen and even suitepotato's yammering hasn't stopped me. You can talk to me any time, any place, just say hello and I will be glad to help wherever I can. Not through suitepotato or any priest or rabbi, though if you need the help of someone else who realizes I'm here because you're afraid, that's cool. I love entertaining groups. All of you are welcome.

If you're in jail or in the hospital, on a bike or in a canoe, or you are penniless or wealthy, no matter when, it is never too late. I never close. I never take a vacation. Well, I can, but I do it at the same time because for me what makes me happy and restful is knowing that you're talking to me just like you feel so much better when you're acknowledged.

See? My image. Apple does not fall far from the tree.

Just one thing. I can't guarantee you'll understand any more than I do or that you'll like the answers, but I'm willing to work with you to understand. Maybe life won't hurt so much if we work together.

That's all. I'm sorry life is scary and painful sometimes, and I am here for you and you can talk to me any time.

See? I told you He was a cool deity.

Recently He said...

2007-11-06T18:24:00.000-05:00

G-d: What's wrong?

Me: I'm... a little upset. At me.

G-d: The book again?

Me: Yeah. I kinda got... wrapped up in the idea and not the meaning again. I just want to go home so bad and since you said I could I'm impatient and-

G-d: You'll get there.

Me: It's not a lack of interest by my family that should bother me, should it?

G-d: Neither should it be a lack of theirs either. Do you know for sure they don't have deep thoughts?

Me: You couldn't tell me without breaking the rules?

G-d: Not really. I can't tell you anything that you could not know for yourself already. I can do what you asked, and help you find what I already gave you, but I can't give you that. What do you think?

Me: They must. Seems unavoidable in being human.

G-d: More to the point what do you have faith of them for?

Me: Not simple because they're human, but because I know them... They do, I guess. Would be nice if they'd share it with me. We went on that trip for the wedding, I wore the kippah, I tried to follow along in the siddur, I felt what they offered me. We went home and it was like they weren't Jewish or anything else anymore. I remember her garbling the blessings over the menorah... and me, I bought the candles.

G-d: You hated sitting through those evangelist meetings with your mother for the same thing you'd kill for now.

Me: I hate rote groupthink and silencing my questions just to get along, but some days what I would do just to have her pray with me. Or for her mother to take it seriously when I spend time in the kosher section. I have never done anything to suck up to them not from day one. I am what I am and we married and that is it. I'm not doing this for them. I just never realized how little they care any more. Just because her dad died.

G-d: Are you sure that's why?

Me: How can you possibly exist or give a damn if her dad died on her birthday? Why should they talk to you? I know shit happens to good people for no reason. I never thought you were punishing me. No, I did, but the way a kid does. Not seriously.

G-d: Sure?

Me: No, not really. I just... We're... adults. It's not our first time at the dance. We should be able to get over what happened to someone else umpteen years ago and get on with our lives. Why put any importance on raising our kids Jewish, which she once upon a time put to me as important, if we don't actually ever do anything Jewish as a family? Just because the former keeper of the religious flame has passed doesn't mean we can't try to remember.

G-d: Maybe it hurts less to remember less. We all have our way of dealing with depression.

Me: What's yours?

G-d: Talking with you. All of you.

Me: How does our not listening make you less depressed?

G-d: It's the ones who talk back who make me happy. Sometimes, it does seem as if no one cared about me either. I don't mean all the things you do in rituals... just to be acknowledged. I... I know the world doesn't need me. That was the genius of it. I could set it running and never look back and it would just go... and then I made you and I so badly wanted to know what I was, who I was, I put me into you, and now you are as alone and confused and hopefull as I am. Believe me, I didn't want to saddle you with the concerns of being a creator. I just wanted to not be alone.

Me: So then you know what it is that I'm feeling here.

G-d: I don't have anyone for minyan. No one to tell me I'm doing the right thing other than because they're afraid I'll punish them. Other I mean than you're doing by talking to me. When you talk to me, you're actually treating me like my opinion matters. Like I exist. Like I'm right to have made all this.

Me: What can I do?

G-d: Same as me, which you'll agree is entirely ironic...

Me: Just keep on keepin on...

G-d: Pretty much. They mean well. Really they do. I'm not saying that out of pride in my creations either. They want better and they can feel what it is. Your wife and mother-in-law included. Just keep on learning and if they don't even attend when you go to the synagogue to complete the process, something of them was in you when you went so... they did go... in a way...

Me: You don't want me to spend my time crying, do you?

G-d: About what you now know that you didn't before? No... Please... I'm sorry I didn't tell you earlier.

Me: No problem. You had a good reason. You weren't trying to hurt me.

G-d: Thanks. No one ever considers I could do something for a good reason but still cause hurt. They try to explain it away. I am capable of hurting my kids too.

Me: And if you weren't of what value could your love be? You had to choose your way or it would be meaningless. You'd be a rule of physics.

G-d: Now you're sounding like me.

Me: I don't mean to. Not to throw it back in your face. I know you're hurt too but... you don't have to be any more. I'm handling it. Really. It wasn't something anyone would have known before. Not like they have a meter for it.

G-d: Well, I could have made it easier for you to fit in.

Me: I might have forgotten who I was and that would have wasted a life and delayed my work another generation. I got stuff to do like everyone else and it won't get done if I don't know who I am, to tell me what my job is.

G-d: Yeah, this free will thing does have some rough edges.

Me: Thanks for it anyways. I did at least learn to crochet first.

G-d: You have nothing on your kitchen table to make cozies for.

Me: Don't tell my wife, she'll buy something to cheer me up and money is tight enough.

G-d: That's the spirit!

Me: Some day that story will make more sense?

G-d: More now than now makes than before, yes. Finished, no. That story hasn't finished yet, and you have a lot to do.

Me: Wish me luck.

G-d: What do you need that for? You have me.

Me: Oh, great...

G-d: Come on, I'll pay attention this time. I promise.

Me: I want to learn cat's craddle before I go.

G-d: We'll see. Now turn around and get on with your day. I'm right behind you.

Me: ...

I closed my eyes and wanted to cry. I didn't want to do what He was telling me. I wanted to talk more but work and my day's thoughts were banging at the doors of my mind and I had to get on with it. Not because He said so, but He said so because it was so and He's not a sadistic deity. He means well too. Since He put so much of Himself in us, we must to. I mean to do what I have to.

Whatever that is.

Thankfully, He decided to be His smirking self: Dante's Prayer by Loreena McKennitt came on the net radio then and plays now. That song always made me want to cry. I have work to do.

What's in the book stack?

2007-11-05T21:49:00.001-05:00

Starting at the bottom...

The Light and Fire of the Baal Shem Tov, Yitzhak Buxbaum
This is an excellent book to read to see the grand start of Chasidism should the blog wars among their present day adherents make you wonder if there's any purpose to it. The short answer, YES.

Hebrew for Dummies, Jill Suzanne Jacobs
Like the Rosetta Stone products, I rarely get anywhere with a language taught in a ...For Dummies book, but this one has a definite place in learning spoken Hebrew as practiced in Israel, or at least in the tourist industry catering to visitors to Israel.

Webster's New World Hebrew Dictionary
If you don't have this, and are learning Hebrew, I guarantee you need this. Hands down, the most thorough inter-language dictionary you can find for Hebrew to English and back again translating.

Discourses on Livy, Niccolo Machiavelli
What is this doing in there? Well if you think you've got mental whiplash from seeing it in that stack, then I suggest reading it after you're read The Prince. Talk about a paradigm shifting without popping the clutch!

Hasidic Tales, Rami Shapiro
This is a definite book for beginners on understanding the legends of early Chasidism because it comes with an overview for each story explaining basic Jewish cultural and religious points as well as a very quick explanation of the unstated or implied nuances those who aren't familiar with the area might not understand.

The Jewish Way, Irving Greenberg
This one book gives more time to shabbat than anything short of a book on the subject by itself and goes on to cover the rest of the temporal concerns of Judaism regarding holidays and times of the week. Very well written and engaging, but might make you feel your present shabbat so lacking as to make you cry in shame for the lack of warm homey folksiness and take up knitting to make a cozies for your best place settings.

Embracing Judaism, Simcha Kling
The Rabbinical Assembly puts this book out and when you check their website for information on conversion, this book comes up first. For those considering converting within the conservative/Masorti way, this and The Jewish Way are a sure way to find comfort and belonging in Judaism.

Tales of the Hasidim, Martin Buber
This is the paperback two-in-one version of Martin Buber's classic, but be prepared: it is no simple easily penetrable thing. You have to read some of the stories several times to realize they were meant to be amusing and others twice as much to figure out the lesson. Nevertheless, that doesn't mean you shouldn't try.

Jewish Americans, Robert Stein
I bought this at the local dollar store believe it or not, which somewhat disturbed me since I didn't see any of the other Coming to America books for other ethnicities there. What? Jewish history in America doesn't sell? Shame on those of you (in not-so-strict) Jewish households not buying such books for your coffee table where the kids can see them. There's much to remember about America and Jewish culture's contributions and though quick and simple, this book hits you with several dozen.

The Chosen, Chaim Potok
What can be said about this book not said ten dozen times and which I could do a better job with? Nothing, but I will give you my take: EXCELLENT. I played little league baseball so the connection between the boys via that first baseball game is especially poignant. I would put this on public high school English literature lists in place of Catcher in the Rye and other junk (yes, I read it and I read Breakfast of Champions and neither clocked me in the face like The Chosen).

The Torah, G-d
JPS translation to English for my Hebrew-challenged noggin and if you want to quibble over the translational and historical accuracy then go argue with JPS and not me. An excellent beginner's copy so as to not be completely lost when whatever Chasidic blogger you're reading is babbling about Amalek and you won't be thinking the trains aren't running.