HEY JEWS

this year i've been roped into giving a lecture about the midrash where the angels protest to G-d that He shouldn't give the Torah to the Jewish ppl but should keep it up in heaven. Moshe responds to them by saying, "do u have a desire to worship idols? do you have parents you need to respect? do you have to follow laws of fair business when you buy and sell?" etc and so he gets to bring it down. i'm talking about this story in the context of the agricultural law that states that if you're going to sell a piece of land, your neighbors have right of first refusal (the angels in this case being the neighbors, and moshe's answers actually being legalese to disavow their claim.)

while i'm here... this link is blowing up my fb feed today:
http://www.xojane.com/relationships/hasidic-women-sex

I think we can safely consider the point missed.

That article makes some reasonable points, but I wonder what the author's take is on, for example, the yiddish flyers I have seen mere blocks from my apartment that say that women should step aside whenever men are coming down the sidewalk, or the delis that require women to sit separately with the kids while men sit together (tbf, I find this as offensive to the men as it is to the women -- I want to eat with my wife).

OTOH, we ate dinner in the home of a chabbadnick family not too long ago (my wife's co-worker) and one interesting thing we learned was that chassidic women are often more educated in a worldly sense than men, since the men spend all their time studying talmud and the women are forbidden to do so.

I knew that! In fact the message I got was that women are pretty likely to work outside the home, even to be the "professional" member of the househole bc the families need their income and the men are called to study instead of work.

Yeah.

Chabbad Lubavitch is also a group with sort of an "outreach" philosophy so they may be even moreso. But I was sort of surprised to see, e.g., that they shopped at Whole Foods and Trader Joe's on occasion and served belgian beer with dinner. Probably not even the best details, just the ones that stuck out in my mind.

I think of the Lubavitch as the happy Jews--and Trader Joe's has TONS of kosher stuff that's not easy to find (I'm told), so that's a big favorite.

that article appears to commend an ancient religious codex for how successfully anticipates the mores and proclivities of liberal new york in 2012, which is of course the greatest cultural paradigm yet seen

just one B, btw in Chabad (incidentally, my family's ortho tradition)

hey jews I have questions about much of the above but it will have to wait till the morrow why because going to bed now

oh but before I go I now have a jewish personal trainer and kvetch with naked jew ladies in the whirlpool at the JCC. Pretty sure I'm passing, no one has called me out!

Ha

both really worth reading:
schafer on boyarin - http://www.tnr.com/article/103373/books-and-arts/magazine/jewish-gospels-christ-boyarin
brill on schafer - http://kavvanah.wordpress.com/2012/05/30/peter-schafer-responds-to-daniel-boyarin/

the second link kinda gives institutional/intellectual context for the first

cool, love this stuff

smdh this morning @ http://finkorswim.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/Ami-Mag-Student-Loans.pdf

It sounds like a cliché, but I was the "top bochur" in my yeshiva.

lol, srsly

omg that article

i cant even

ye gods

American orthodox culture is so far from my experience and appreciation of Jewishness (they wouldn't consider me halachically jewish for one thing). Super disquieting.

Ha. Hahahahaha. That guy. His wife is like 300% better off now, surely?

For sure. Poor kids tho. I know this isn't a phenomenon unique to the American charedi community but deciding your marriage is shit, and then having a bunch more kids, is srsly wtf to me. Btw, I am the big exception from my graduating high school class wrt kollel. Probably 90% of my class did at least some kollel after marriage and a sizable proportion is likely still there.

its really kind of crazy to me that he not only expects his wife to support him for the rest of his life, and his kids, but he resents that she works long hours, and resents that she has student debt, and somehow he's the victim of a great lie. for fuck's sake

i keep thinking that some kind of clerks-esque slacker torah scholar movie would be hilarious (maybe only to me)

What did he say, again? "I was looking forward to the day when she would admit defeat"? I can imagine the anguish she'd be feeling by that time, having to admit to her scholar husband that as much as she tried to protect his lifestyle with her own labor, she was going to need some kind of grudging help from the father of her 4 children.

he's clearly a terrible human being

"I can't say that I wasn't at fault, too. I should have made more of an effort to repress my resentment."

kinda says it all, really.

whats the weirdest is that he actually wrote the article himself, portraying him as the victim in this situation

"I can't say that I wasn't at fault, too. I should have made more of an effort to repress my resentment."

kinda says it all, really.

― Peppermint Patty Hearst (VegemiteGrrl), Friday, June 1, 2012 11:59 AM (23 seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lollll so true

it's kinda the charedi version of an article by a young person who got a degree in liberal arts and is heartbroken that they can't write poetry for a living. of course ilx sympathizes much more w/ the lib arts person...

i doubt ilx does, but it's not really the same thing involved as in that hypothetical liberal arts article they're not expecting someone else to shoulder the burden

yeah, i realized that's obv a big difference the moment i posted. he has kids and an ex-wife that he's failing to take care of.

haha are you kidding, no way ilx sympathizes with the lib arts poet

i really don't understand how learning torah can seem more important than taking care of your family. maybe this is why that world didn't work for me.

torah is diaper-free iirc

i do think there have been occasions where ppl express sympathy on ilx for the lib arts grad, but that's way afield and i didn't mean to turn this into a discussion about that.

i don't think it's really worth comparing. tbh.

I'm not sure where to start with that article. . . these are not the nice jewish boys I know!

he probably went to a shitty second-rate yeshiva anyway

I don't care who that guy is, really, but who PUBLISHED his bullshit whining, anyway?

these guys: http://amimagazine.org/

it's a frummie magazine

wow. this isn't the standard dynamic of employment in haredi communities, is it? on reflection, i definitely see more women than men working in the communities near my neighbourhood but i can't imagine that this situation is the norm...

definitely not the standard, and not the standard (afaik) in most chassidic communities. i could be wrong about this, but i think it's a uniquely non-chassidic right-wing charedi phenomenon (and really probably only among certain students attending probably 2-3 dozen schools throughout the country).

From this Tablet Mag interview with Sam Harris:

Well, that’s the kind of uniquely distorting lens of Judaism, because only a Jew could say I am an Orthodox Jew but I don’t believe in God. That is not an oxymoron in the same way as it would be to say I’m a devout Catholic who doesn’t believe that Jesus was the Son of God, or I’m a devout Muslim who doesn’t believe the Quran is the word of God. Judaism is, in every form, the least committed to a clear otherworldly vision of what happens after death. You can be a Jew for whom all of the trappings of Judaism, the religion, are very important, and yet there’s absolutely no content to your religious beliefs. You like the food. You like the music. You like the clothes. You like the ethical strictures and the weird rituals, and the limitations on your freedom that can only make sense based on some kind of theology that you now no longer endorse.

Uh oh!

Yeah, so what? It's fun to do those things! That's basically the mission statement of Reconstructionist Judaism right there.

I would sort of like to see the rest of the context of that statement.

I don't think he's entirely wrong, but I think you'd find a lot fewer atheist jews in an orthodox synagogue than in a reform one, and I also find the statement about afterlife kind of a non-sequitur -- I don't understand why believing in god is necessarily linked with an afterlife.

there's some story that i don't remember clearly at the moment about someone smoking a cigar on shabbos while learning talmud, and when they ask him why, he says, "because it's geshmak!" also, i guess there was a rumor that some students at Slobodka yeshiva used to smoke on Shabbat:

"Their studies were not limited to mathematics. Often before class they would engage in deep Talmudic disputation, "…often without yarmulkes, on Shabbos, smoking cigarettes. They just loved to learn Talmud. It is hard for us to understand that frame of mind. We only associate ‘learning’ with the religious experience, while they learned purely for intellectual motives," Rabbi Wein observed in one of his taped "Biography" lectures."

nb i have no idea how true this is (i don't even know if rabbi wein said it was true in that 'lecture')