#/* Instead of how it was in the LARP where it was clearly based on props */

[gamemasterandmuses]

/* I have an idea for a starter, but it involves The Stick of Truth, a game I haven't played yet. */

[svartikotturinn]

I @’ed you because you decided to reblog this two days ago, and now you’re ‘surprised’ I’m responding, when in practice you are in fact following my Hebrew account, @chornykot. Deeply untrustworthy behaviour.

You’re insisting on this stupid-ass comparison with Autism Speaks even though it has never purported to consist of autistic people. There is no LARPing there. How do you keep missing the point so spectacularly?

You keep refusing to get the point that Hebrew was spoken. At some places and periods of time (notably Safed and Yemen) it was people’s first language, and even when it wasn’t, it was still a spoken language that Jews used for sermons, for speaking (again) to people outside of one’s community, and (yet again) for cultural output. Read (again) Shlomo Haramati.

Your offence-taking is actually indicative of yet another intellectual shortcoming of yours. You think Jews are particularly disadvantaged here, as if being part of a larger national community one actually feels a part of has been the natural state for most nations throughout history and not a very recent notion propped up by Modern Era nationalist movements. Being part of a local community and defining oneself as belonging thereto, or to a religious group instead, was the more common notion. Consider Italy, where regional linguistic diversity made mutual intelligibility impossible. Consider Turkmenistan, which was a group of loosely affiliated tribes rather than one nation, that had to make everything from scratch to become so. Consider the Romani people, who, despite some intellectuals’ best efforts, have not undergone this process. Hell, consider the Balkan, where people have decided they were nation A at one point and nation B the next based on things like which side offered them a decent pastor for their church. Actual nation-building, forming or at leat entrenching a basis all those disparate communities have in common, took (and takes) a lot of effort, and guess what? As the cases of France and Italy most famously demonstrate, you cannot do it without a shared language to build a shared culture on.

Also, what is up with your artificial divide between written and spoken Hebrew? You think there’s no carry over? If someone is able to read the prayers and actually understand what it is they’re saying, rather than relying on a translation and going through the motions, guess what: they have the ability to engage with the culture! Congrats, they can (given their personal inclination and willingness to engage with this culture) count as Jews instead of just ‘Ashkenazi–American’ or any other subset that originated from Jews but is clearly distinct therefrom.

Now, I’m getting kind of tired of your ignorance, dishonesty, and just plain stupidity (like, the hell does antisemitism have to do with anything here), but your nonsense keeps getting a cheer squad, so I’m gonna give you a challenge: define what it means to be Jewish outside of religion. Remember: things specific to a diaspora or two, such as specific cultural norms or products (cuisine, music, folklore, you name it), rather than Jews across diasporas, do not count. Once you’re able to come up with a working definition of what it means to be Jewish as a nation and not a religious group, then I might be inclined to engage with you again.

שומע יא אידיוט תפסיק לתקוף יהודים אמריקאים ולקרוא להם לא יהודים? מאיפה אתה חושב שאנחנו הגענו? לפני מאה שנה גם אנחנו היינו בגלות. תחשוב מה שאתה רוצה על יהדות רפורמית אבל מאיפה הטימטום לחשוב שלראות את האויבים שלנו כאשכרה אנשים זה לא יהודי, ומאיפה הטמטום שיהודים בגלות ברחבי העולם הם לא יהודים.

סתום ת'פה ותפסיק לפגוע בקהילה של עצמך כפרה.

I’m gonna take the opportunity and respond both to your stupid bullshit and the stuff I got from @spacelazarwolf and @the-catboy-minyan with this image:

This kind of bullshit is a perfect example of why so-called ‘American Jews’ get on my last nerve. They are not actually a part of the culture, they engage with it on an extremely shallow level, and then have the nerve to barge in and pretend they fucking own it. (Here is another example. Here is another one.) So no, I am not ‘threatened’ by them, I am deeply irritated. (Much the same way Irish and Scottish people in those countries are irritated by Plastic Paddies boastfully claiming to be descendants of Robert the Bruce, by the way.)

I don’t know who you are, anon, but I do NOT appreciate your bullshit strawmanning. I did not say this applies to all Americans, and certainly not to all Jews living abroad. I am talking about this type which does not do the absolute bare minimum, which is, first and foremost, speaking Hebrew. This is the one major thing that Jews have in common outside of religious practice: the lingua franca Jews have used for millennia (yes, even beyond religious practice—read some Shlomo Haramati), without which you might be in touch with your own community but your link to Jewishness as a whole will be hobbled.

Now, as for Pharaoh, here is what Jewish scripture and exegesis has to say about him. Notably, here is how the Talmud describes him physically. This is not a flattering description, it’s barely humanizing, it repeatedly refers to him as evil with the only thing resembling a redeeming characteristic being that he charged at the front of his advancing army as a form of showing respect to God by confronting him personally at that one particular time. The thing about ‘forgivenss’ is particularly galling, as it is specifically pointed out that he explicitly refused to repent, and he is outright stated to be an evil fool. Compare and contrast with Christian scripture. (EDIT: Also, you claim to be Jewish yet are entirely unfamiliar the lyrics to Dayenu. Curious.)

This is another thing you need to be meaningfully Jewish: you need to actually engage with Jewish tradition and texts (and to do that, you need to—once again, say it with me—speak Hebrew). Once again, that brand of ‘American Jews’ are not doing that, but rather watering down the real deal to something palatable to their own sensibilities, regardless of whatever actual traditions they might have to trample along the way.

And the worst part of it? Now Israeli teens who socialize primarily online and speak English instead, a language they are not native speakers of, are getting in on this bullshit and become indistinguishable from their ilk at a glance. Hell, a few years I even saw one claiming the Jewish Bible was originally in Yiddish on Reddit.

So quit your LARPing, quit your harping, and kindly fuck off.