Facebook post about the Pittsburgh synagogue martyrs

Because it is fundamentally impossible to keep a Facebook post indefinitely, I'm going to copy over a couple posts I made there to here; they've gotten lots of discussion, and might be useful in the future, and Dreamwidth is actually USABLE.

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It occurred to me that not all my Facebook friends are Jewish, or know a lot of Jews, so I thought I'd take a moment to talk about Vice President Pence's deplorable and hideous action in having a Jews for Jesus "rabbi" speak at a memorial for the Tree of Life martyrs.

See, "Messianic Jews" aren't Jews. In fact, they're not that much better than the person who killed the martyrs. Oh, they're not physically violent the way the murderer was, and if I could snap my fingers and get rid of either racist/homophobic/anti-semitic/etc murderers or Jews for Jesus, I'd certainly go for the murderers, but I'd REALLY try to negotiate for second finger-snap.

There aren't a whole lot of things most Jews agree on. We disagree on the most fundamental issues you could possibly imagine, like the role of Jewish law, and whether G-d exists, what women can and can't do, the roles of gay people and transgender people and all SORTS of things. We have the most fundamental and loud and angry disagreements among ourselves about what is right and wrong.

But one thing we all agree on is that Jews for Jesus are vile.

Look. If you are a Christian, and you want to come to our services, attend a Seder with us, sit with us in the Sukkah, all sorts of things, you are welcome. You are SO welcome. We would LOVE to have you. If you want to see what sorts of things Jews do, because your religion has a historical connection to ours, please, come, enjoy, celebrate with us. If you have Jewish family, through intermarriage or conversion, and you want to be part of our community, we want you here. There are parts of our services that you could participate in, like poetry readings, singing psalms, all sorts of things. Sure, you won't be counted in the minyan, and you can't be called to the Torah, but there are a whole lot of parts, a whole lot of roles, a whole lot of honors that we would be happy to give you.

If you are a Christian, and you want to assume Jewish trappings in your own Christian services -- wearing talitot, holding your own "Seders", things like that, okay, now you're getting into some weird shit. We're definitely into "cultural appropriation" territory. But, y'know, still -- I can understand it. Syncretism is a real thing, and it's not like Judaism hasn't picked up stuff from OUR religious neighbors. Like, I'm creeped out by it a little, but only to the level of eye-rolling, and I'm not going to make a big deal out of it. If it makes you happy, well... I mean, I'd RATHER you didn't, but it's not really my place to say, y'know?

But if you're going to worship Jesus and claim to be a Jew -- now you've crossed a line.

It's hard to express just how wrong this is, just how horrifying Jews for Jesus are. Back when they were just a fringe cult, we could ignore them. But now that they are sharing the stage with the Vice President of the United States, they are attempting to be a genuine existential threat to Judaism, attempting to exterminate us. Oh, they're trying to use methods that are more polite than an AR-15, but not all that much less hateful.

Oh, there's not all that much we can do to stop them, certainly not as much as we would like to. In the Western world, we believe in freedom of expression, freedom of religion, even of hateful ideas. And while we can probably get enough people to understand that swastikas are hate speech, it would take a lot of doing to explain that Jews for Jesus are pretty much the same thing. And so we just let them be.

But by having a Jews for Jesus "rabbi" speak, Mike Pence was fighting on the same side as the murderer. I don't think most people realize that.

But I want you to know. I want you to know that, after eleven of our our people were martyred for the sanctification of Hashem, our government followed by trying to blaspheme in their names.

May his name be blotted out.

Second copied over Facebook post, about why Messianic "Judaism" is vile

I'm gonna put this as its own post rather than have it buried in comments.

Seems like it would be a useful thing to unpack exactly WHY Jews for Jesus/Messianic Jews are so horrific. I've been getting a few questions from people, and some pushback, which is a good thing.

In order to explain this, I think I pretty much have to start with Paul of Tarsus.

Christianity is a religion based on the teachings of Paul, who decided that Judaism was over, not a thing, and that he was going to start up a new religion to supplant it. And ever since then, Christians have been trying to destroy Judaism, by forcing us to convert. Some branches of Christianity, such as the one Vice President Pence follows, include the conversion or destruction of Jews as a fundamental tenet of their eschatology. Their Left-Behind-Series influenced religion requires Jews to have control over the land of Israel, then 144,000 of us to convert to Christianity, then the rest of us be killed. Something like that. I don't know, or care, about the specific details; what I know is that their religion requires my death. Or conversion, but, if those are the choices... *shrug* I know what I'm going for. I'm stubborn; the best way to get me to avoid something is to try to force me to do it.

Most modern Christians have pretty much deprecated this part of their religion, and created a new, much nicer religion, and I applaud that. But the horror that Christians have inflicted on us for two thousand years is burned into our Jewish souls, and we can't forget, no matter how much we would want to.

I don't have a problem with most modern Christians, or modern Christianity -- but I nonetheless flinch around them. It's not your fault. It's the fault of your ancestors. I don't blame you, specifically. But I do blame your great-grandparents. And I do blame the strains of Evangelical, Dominionist Christianity that KEEP that part even today.

So we Jews have a particular relationship to Christianity. It's different than any other religion, because it was founded upon attacking us, and hasn't let up since. It's waxed and waned, and, up until the last few years, it's been in a waning phase, but it's started waxing again. And even when it's waning, we still are... twitchy. Christianity is dangerous to us, in a way no other religion is.

No, not even Islam. Muslims and Jews are cousins. Yes, the Israel/Palestinian conflict is bad, and puts us in opposition to one another in many cases. But you have to understand -- it's a land dispute, not a religious dispute. Muslims don't have problems with Jews; Jews don't have problems with Muslims. Some of us have problems with where each other are LIVING, but that's different. Abraham had two sons, and two nations descended from them, and we cousins have fought over the land we both claim. But we are fighting over land, not over who we are.

Christians, however, have problems with Jews. Not all of you -- but if you dig into your history, you'll find that a lot of Christianity has been based around anti-Judaism, from its very first day. And while you have the ability to forget it, because it's not traumatic to you, we don't.

So Christianity is a special case.

I know Jews who are also Buddhists. I know Jews who are Pagans. And while plenty of traditionally religious Jews have serious problems with that, nobody denies that they remain Jews. Bu-Jews and Jewwitches are totally things that exist, and if one shows up at a shul, most people would be okay with counting them in a minyan and stuff like that.

I mean, sure, people might feel that Jewwitches were Jews who were in violation of some of the Ten Commandments -- but even at their worst, they'd be JEWS who were violating the Ten Commandments. They're still US.

But Christianity is different.

Taking on the worship of Jesus cuts you off from the Jewish community in a way that few other things possibly could. Because it's based on being non-Jewish, and on oppressing Jews. Much of Jewish identity over the centuries has been based on resistance to being taken over, and maintaining our religion against forces that tried to forcibly convert us. The Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Christians. We've been doing this for a long time; our heritage is, in large part, one of people telling us to stop being Jews, and us saying "No -- we are here, and we will outlast you."

But as part of this millenia-long process, some Jews fall away, and don't learn about what we are and what our history is, and about the Jewish soul of resistance to religious conversion.

And into that gap slip the Jews for Jesus, the Messianic Jews, who come to destroy us.

Some identites are compatible with Judaism. You can follow Buddhist teachings from some of the non-deistic schools and not run into anything that conflicts, for instance. But some are just not. Islam insists on one specific way of belief -- you can't be a Jew and a Muslim simultaneously. Christianity insists on one specific way of belief -- you can't be a Christian and a Jew simultaneously.

And there's nothing wrong with Muslims or Christians -- those are fine ways to believe, but you can't be a Jew at the same time. If a Jew chooses to convert, of their own free will and without coersion or confusion, to Islam or to Christianity, well, that saddens me because it diminishes our community, but I don't blame Christians or Muslims for it. It is what it is.

But Jews for Jesus and Messianic "Jews" find Jews who don't understand our history, and, like the serpent in the Garden of Eden, lie to them, and try to convince them that they can maintain their Judaism while worshipping Jesus.

But they're actually part of that eschatalogical branch of Christianity which wants to convert some Jews and kill the rest.

Someone in one of these threads somewhere accused me of hating Jesus, and that's not right. The truth is that I don't think about the guy at all. He's completely irrelevant to Judaism -- except inasmuch as people have killed us in his name.

People keep saying "But Jesus was a Jew!" Well, okay. So is Bernie Madoff, but we don't worship him.

There's a huge long list of Jews that Jews don't worship. Leopold and Loeb. Harvey Weinstein. I mean, it's just quicker to make a list of Jews that Jews DO worship.

And the answer is "none". We worship none Jews. (Well, maybe Carrie Fisher and Ruth Bader Ginsberg, but ...)

I guess that's about what I've got to say for now. It's a little more scattered than I really would like, but it's a start.

Third facebook post, copied over

A lot of conversations have been sparked by my last couple posts, and I thought of a couple things that I've been saying elsewhere that maybe I could pull into a central place. So this is my second thematically-related followup, my third in what is turning into a series of essays.

One of the things that makes it hard to explain things about Judaism to non-Jews is that most non-Jews I interact with grew up in a world dominated by Christian ideas of what religion is. And the thing is, Christianity redefined the idea of what "religion" meant. Pre-Christian religions and post-Christian religions generally look pretty different.

Generally speaking, people whose primary exposure to religion is through Christianity or Islam assume that religion is about what you BELIEVE. But in most religions other than those two and their daughter religions, belief is kind of a secondary thing. It's not NOT there, but it's one of many pieces, and not one of the most important ones. This is why there's no fundamental conflict between being an atheist and a Jew -- or, perhaps more accurately, to the extent that there IS a conflict, it is one that is well-established and respected in modern Jewish culture and history.

Lack of belief in Jewish theology isn't a major problem in Judaism.

However, the reason you can't be Christian or Muslim, and Jewish is because THOSE religions ARE belief-based. Lacking belief in Judaism isn't an insurmountable problem to being Jewish. But HOLDING belief in something that ISN'T Judaism IS a big honking insurmountable problem. It's one of the only ways you CAN give up your Judaism.

As one of my friends has said, "I don't believe in God. And the God I don't believe in is the God of Abraham, of Isaac, and of Jacob."

People ask if Judaism is a religion, a race, or both. And most Jews will answer that with "both", but I think the better answer is "it's not that simple."

Judaism dates from a time before religion, family, tradition, culture, language, and land were different things. We're not just a mixture of those things -- we are a thing that encompasses all of those things. As the millenia have gone on, and as those became discrete concepts in human cultures, we've sort of shifted and switched around and modified to try to fit into those new models, but, at our core, we're just plain older than that. One phrase we use, light-heartedly and kind of joking-not-joking, is "MOT" -- "member of the tribe." And thinking of us a a tribe gets a little closer than "race" or "culture" or "religion".

The fact that we're ... whatever the heck we are ... means that our religion doesn't really work on the same expectations as Christian and post-Christian religions. We're just about different things.

Here's a question that is interesting from a Jewish perspective:

So, you've got two bowls of water. Water flows into the top bowl, then spills over and flows into the bottom bowl. And the bowls and the water are both in a state of taharah. Now, if the TOP bowl becomes tamei, obviously the water that flows from the bowl into the other bowl is tamei, and the second bowl becomes tamei.

But what if the BOTTOM bowl becomes tamei? Does the TOP bowl become tamei?

Note that, to even understand the question, you have to understand what "tamei" and "tahor" mean, and that's really not an easy question to explain in the first place. People translate it as "ritually impure" and "ritually pure", but that's just an approximation of the term; they don't REALLY fit as translations, and I have no real idea how to explain them, even if I fully understood them, which I don't.

So, yeah, this one is a question you can really sink your teeth into, and it's the kind of question that MATTERS.

Here's a question that is boring from a Jewish perspective:

What happens to us after we die?

Oh, as individual people, sure, we are interested in that sort of thing, and Jews have come up with answers to that all throughout history. Which is why Judaism believes in Heaven, bodily resurrection, reabsorbtion into God with the loss of self and individual consciousness, reincarnation, and GAME OVER. As well as others. Basically, Jews have a tendency to pick up modifications of the afterlife beliefs of the other cultures we live among. Because Judaism, as Judaism, fundamentally isn't interested in the question.

So one of the difficulties in explaining Jewish topics to people who didn't grow up in a Jewish context is that the questions that people are asking are often category errors. It's like asking "how many grams of protein are in that memory of the smell of a rosebush that summer?" or "how long does it take to drive to purple?"

Yes, we also have practical questions that people can understand, like, "Say you were bulding a wall, and some construction materials fell into the street, and someone tripped on them and injured themselves -- how much do you pay in damages?" "If you have someone guarding your property and you get robbed anyway, under what circumstances is the guard responsible for making up your loss?"

And practical questions that might NOT make sense to outsiders, like "Does the Law say that you start counting the Omer from the morning after the Sabbath OF Passover (i.e., the beginning of the holiday of Passover is a Sabbath), or the morning after the Sabbath IN Passover (Passover is a week long holiday -- a day longer outside Israel to make sure that you cover the whole thing -- so it will always include a Saturday)?" That one nearly led to a civil war... (It makes sense in context. Basically, the entire cycle of sacrifices in the Temple is tied to the Omer count, so pretty much the entire religious chunk of the year would be different depending where you start.)

We have a history, a culture, a religion, a family, a belief system, a law code, a nation, a tribe, a people. We ARE a history, a culture, a religion, a family, a belief system, a law code, a nation, a tribe, a people. And since most people in the modern world don't usually deal with this particular amalgamation of ideas as a single thing, it's hard to get across.

Fourth facebook post; it's easier to write here, isn't it? I'll write it here and copy it there

In the comments of a previous post, Ginny Philips raised another really good basic question: so, where DO Jews get our laws from anyway? What IS the scripture we use?

Now, technically, I suppose people could do a Wikipedia search and get most of this information, but I am hoping I might be able to organize it into a little more understandable form.

I also encourage other Members of the Tribe to correct me in comments, because ... and maybe I should have mentioned this some time before y'all started reading ... I'm not particularly GOOD at the technical bits of halacha. I am Jewish, I care deeply about Judaism, but my actual practice of Judaism is far more in the, "Yeah, I really probably SHOULD do that someday" level than in the, y'know, going to services, keeping kosher, studying Torah, keeping Shabbat...

In my defense, please note that most of the actually observant Jews commenting have been saying things like, "Yeah, pretty much," and "That's more or less close enough for a basic overview". So, because I have been an arrogant pedant my entire life (I was going to say "my entire adult life", until I remembered that one of my first words was "AC-tually..."), I'm going to go ahead and continue to pontificate. (Verb choice kind of awkward given the subject matter....)

... even though I'm actually going to be using Wikipedia as a cheat sheet and checklist ... *sigh*

*ahem* Anyway...

We Jews have two basic sources of our laws, the Written Torah and the Oral Torah. According to our tradition, the Written Torah was dictated to Moses on Mount Sinai -- including the bits that hadn't happened yet -- and the Oral Torah was spoken, and Moses memorized it.

They are two co-equal sources of law, both given by G-d on Mount Sinai, to Moses, and through Moses, given to all of the Jewish people.

The Written Torah consists of three basic parts, called the Torah, the Ne'vim, and the Ketubim. We refer to them collectively as the acronym T-N-Kh, or "Tanakh."

The Torah is the Five Books of Moses: B'reishit, Sh'mot, Vayikra, Bemidbar, Deuteronomy, or, in English, Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. Like I said, our tradition says that these were given all in one chunk to Moses on Mount Sinai, which means that he wrote down all the bits about him dying before entering Israel, and so forth. I'm not going to go into whether this is literally or historically true, or about the textual analysis you can do to determine stylistically whether different parts were written at different times, or any of that -- for RELIGIOUS purposes, this is how we look at it.

The most holy object most of us Jews ever handle is the Torah scroll, the physical scroll upon which these five books are written. Physically, a Torah scroll is a bunch of sheets of parchment upon which the Torah is written in Hebrew, and then they are sewn together, and rollers are put at both ends. I'm doing a bad job of explaining this. Google it and look at pictures; that will probably give a better idea.

If you unroll a Torah scroll, the whole thing is close to fifty yards long.

We divide the Torah into weekly readings called parshot. Over the course of a year, reading one parsha a week, we read the entire thing end to end, then, on the holiday of Simchat Torah, finish it up, scroll the whole thing back to the beginning, and start over.

The second section is the Ne'viim, or Prophets. That has three sections -- the first prophets, the later prophets, and the minor prophets. The books of the First Prophets are Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings; the Later Prophets are Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Ezekiel, and the Twelve Minor Prophets are counted as one book with twelve prophets who I don't feel like listing, so you can look it up yourself. Sorry, dudes -- I know, you ARE important enough to actually be in the Bible, and, honestly, mad props to you, but it's ten o'clock at night and I'm getting tired. Okay, I will mention Jonah as the fan favorite minor prophet; some of you have probably heard me blather about why Jonah is hilarious, but not right now.

We don't read these in order, but alongside our weekly Torah readings, we also have Haftara, which are selections from the Ne'viim which are thematically related to the weekly parsha. I don't actually know what percent of the Ne'viim we cover over the course of a year, come to think of it.

The third section is the Ketubim, or Writings. Again, this is divided into three groups.
The first group is the poetical works -- Psalms, Proverbs, and Job. Yes, Job is a poem.
We read a lot of the psalms throughout the year as part of our prayer services, and there are also times when we just sit down and read them cover to cover, for comfort reading.

The second group are the five Megilot. Each Megilah is read at a specific holiday during the year. The Song of Songs is read at Passover, Ruth at Shavuot, Lamentations on Tisha B'av, Ecclesiastes at Sukkot (I wrote a piece once about that; I posted it last month... I should dig for it), and, of course, Esther at Purim.

And the third group is.. well, "Miscellaneous" -- Daniel, Ezra/Nehemiah, and Chronicles.

So... that's the WRITTEN half of Jewish scripture. Your average Jew is going to be pretty familiar with the Five Books, because we read it end to end every year, know chunks of Nev'iim, but not necessarily in order, because they're read as the Haftara, know the Megilot, because those are parts of specific holidays, know various psalms, but may be more or less familiar with different ones, and know bits of the other books.

Then we get to the ORAL half.

These days, the Oral Torah is no longer oral. Just before the destruction of the First Temple, as it became clear that things were getting bad, the rabbis decided to actually write the stuff down, to make it easier to preserve if the people whose job it was to memorize the stuff were killed. It was a controversial move, but, given that we still HAVE the Oral Torah, it was pretty clearly the right call.

The written-down version of the oral Torah is called the Mishna. But the Mishna is only the center core. It's dense, and not terribly understandable on its own. It supposed to be the starting point for discussion, rather than being the whole thing itself.

So, they include some of the discussion. Around the Mishna, you have the Gemara, which are transcripts and summaries of discussions the Sages had about the Mishna, including questions they raised, and rulings they made about the laws, which form a chain of legal precedents. It also includes stories, legends, parables, a little bit of snark and shitposting about each other, some bad medical advice, some okay medical advice, and a couple recipes.

The Mishna and Gemara together form the Talmud. And your average Jew is far less familiar with the Talmud than with the Written Torah. Most of us are willing to let rabbis just deal with that stuff -- it's dense and complicated. If we have questions, most of us will just as a rabbi and let THEM deal with it

Me, I know a couple cool stories from here and there in it, but don't really have any significant understanding of it. I mentioned in comments the story of the "snake oven" in Bava Metzia 59b, which involves an argument about whether a stove is kosher, a hopping carob tree, a voice from heaven, the destruction of a third of the crops in the country, the role of humanity and the role of heaven in administration of the law, and the death of the leader of the country as a result of hurt feelings. But the important part of the story is about how to be polite.

And then there's my FAVORITE bit, from Bava Batra 23b -- they're discussing the rule that, if you've got a dovecote, and a fledgling dove is hopping around on the ground near it, if it's within fifty cubits of the dovecote, it belongs to the owner of the dovecote, and if it's outside, it belongs to the person who found it.
"Rabbi Yirmeya raises a dilemma: If one leg of the chick was within fifty cubits of the dovecote, and one leg was beyond fifty cubits, what is the halakha? The Gemara comments: And it was for his question that they removed Rabbi Yirmeya from the study hall."

But, of course -- Jewish law and scripture doesn't stop there with the compilation of the Gemara. As Naomi Lebowitz Sipple pointed out, a major purpose of the Gemara is to show how we're supposed to hold these arguments. That's not the stopping point. We're supposed to keep going. So we have commentaries on the commentaries, and commentaries on THOSE. We have letters which form precedents, and different communities who make different rulings on things. And it keeps going, and going, and will CONTINUE to keep going, forever.