#avoter

[utilitycaster]

it is extremely funny to me when people's complaint about a video game is "I am a GAMER and I play OTHER GAMES ON HARD and when I played THIS ONE ON HARD I died therefore it is bad." I have a master's in physics and when I tried to do this job that required a master's degree in microbiology I killed all the cells and they fired me, this job is bad and full of shit.

[comepraisetheinfanta]

GIFTS FOR THE HOLIDAYS

Do Not Be Daunted - Art Board Print

Do Not Be Daunted - Poster

Do Not Be Daunted - Acrylic Block

Do Not Be Daunted - Art Print

[unic0rnsandmurder]

One of my life's hard-won lessons is that people basically do what they want to do.

If someone is treating me poorly and they do not respond to my requests to stop or change their behavior, that's not because I didn't ask the right way. It's because this is how they want to act.

So I'm going to skip the political recriminations that the left didn't offer the right messaging or that Dems need to work harder to appeal to [insert demographic here] voters.

The voters had the information they needed and they have made their choice. It is not our job to coax people into caring about others/the planet/their own future. Voters are not cats hiding under the bed. It's insulting to everyone to act like they are.

This is what most of the voters wanted. Accepting that fact means we are in a much better position to do real good where we can instead of continuing to bang our heads against the wall of indifference.

I reject the idea that I have to make caring palatable for people who don't wanna. Letting go of that "obligation" to perfect the message frees my energy for things that will actually move the needle.

Remember the Pirkei Avot: "You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it."

[maimonidesnutz]

NEW DESIGN: Continuing the tradition of important rabbis (or figures) in contemporary garb, I present to you: Hillel the Elder in a flower crown! Why did I draw Hillel in a flower crown? Maybe it is because of his known kindness and openness…or maybe it’s just because I was feeling a little silly. Either way, now it’s an image that exists.

The text says “if not now, when?” from his famous teaching in Pirkei Avot: “If I am not for myself, who is for me? But if I am for my own self [only], what am I? And if not now, when?”

For me, it’s a movement. It means grounding, balance, and action. It’s a way to address both the joys and pitfalls that come into your life. It’s a way to expect them and move through them.

It’s more than a saying, it’s a way to live.

Available in many colors and styles! (Scroll down from the image to see all the products in the “similar products” field)

https://maimonides-nutz.creator-spring.com/listing/floral-hillel?

[jewishpangolin]

That quote, DAMN, thank you for that. It's etched on my heart now.

I recently found out that this is actually a splice of two different quotes. The part from "It is not your responsibility..." to the end is actually in the Talmud, but the first part was written by Rabbi Rami Shapiro in 1995. Still a good quote, I just wanted to make sure I set the record straight.

[apenitentialprayer]

are there any Jews who view Jesus in a positive way (aside from like messianic Jews who, as far I’ve understood, are considered evangelical Christians by all other Jews)

Okay, ah, to answer this question simply: to my knowledge, as far as Jewish communities who (1) self-identify as Jewish, (2) consider themselves practicing Judaism, and (3) deny that Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah go, none of them have an "official" stance on Jesus. Jesus may be a false Messiah, but this is only a "doctrine" in Judaism the same way that the fact that Vissarion of Siberia is a false Parousia of Jesus is a "doctrine" in Christianity — which is to say, not so much an actually asserted belief, but a natural corollary to more deeply held beliefs.

That being said, individual Jewish people have held a variety of beliefs about Jesus of Nazareth. Some of them are, well, quite negative. For example, one Hasidic story tells of how the Baal Shem Tov saw Jesus and Sabbatai Zvi (both false Messiahs) stuck in the same level of Hell together; the infamous Toledot Yeshu, a parody gospel, certainly does not paint Jesus or His Mother in a particularly good light; Maimonides doesn't even use the usual "may his name be blotted out" as he would when talking about an enemy of Israel, but instead uses "may his bones be ground to dust" after citing Jesus by name.

There are relatively sympathetic views among those whose views are negative too, for the record; for example, there's a story of a Rabbi, Yehoshua ben Prachya, who was said to have been incredibly cruel to a student, and by the time he chose to relent that student had already gone off to form his own idolatrous sect. Struck by the consequences of his harshness, he would go on to emphasize the importance of kindness and giving people the benefit of the doubt. Though the timeline doesn't match up (Yehoshua lived two hundred years before Him), some commentators identified this student as Yeshu the Nazarene.

But, let's actually answer your question. You will find a spectrum of relatively positive views. Bob Dylan technically falls outside the parameters I listed above because he does seem to believe Jesus is the Messiah, but I'll use him as the extreme example, because he continued to be active in his Orthodox Jewish community after his conversion. You also have Leonard Cohen, whose Jewishness was very important to him, who could at least understand the importance of the mystical connection to Jesus that Christians claimed as their own — "the figure of Jesus, nailed to a human predicament, summoning the heart to comprehend its own suffering."

You have some scholars, like Amy-Jill Levine; in the work she did in The Misunderstood Jew, The Historical Jesus in Context, and The Jewish Annotated New Testament, she tries to emphasize the idea that the Person of Jesus is something that can bring Christians and Jews into closer ecumenical dialogue; that if Christians could get more comfortable with the Jewish context of Jesus, and if the Jewish community could see the New Testament as a corpus of texts that isn't non-Jewish, but rather a particular type of first century Jewish, then there could be ground for both groups to better understand each other.

During the early modern period, there were attempts by some Jewish thinkers to reclaim Jesus. Rabbi Jacob Emden argued that Jesus never meant to abolish the Law, and that He has actually "done a double kindness in the world" by increasing veneration of the Torah and bringing light to the Gentiles, if only the Gentiles could learn how to properly interpret their own Scriptures (talk about flipping the script!). Moses Mendelssohn also claimed that Jesus never meant to abrogate the Law, and suggested that Jesus and the early Christian community could be models that modern 19th century Jews living among oppressive Prussian authorities could emulate.

The above paragraph was about Jewish individuals who tried to distance Jesus from traditional Christian understandings of Him. So I'm going to end, I think, with Rabbi Jacob Neusner, who engaged the Gospel on its own terms. In 1993, he published A Rabbi Talks with Jesus. In this book, Rabbi Neusner imagines himself as a first century Jewish man and tries to earnestly listen to and consider the words of Jesus as depicted in the Gospel of Matthew. This work places the words of Jesus in conversation with the Rabbinic tradition, and ultimately ends with Neusner being unconvinced and unable to follow Jesus as His disciple. Pope Benedict lauded this work as an authentic exercise in interreligious dialogue, and cites it frequently in his own Jesus of Nazareth.

[frownyalfred]

In re: pickuah nefesh and omega heats. My wife LOVES to remind me that it’s a mitzvah to fuck on shabbos, so maybe in an a/b/o world the mitzvah of satisfying a heat overrides fasting.

Also can you even imagine the crazy shit that would be in the Talmud in omegaverse… the sages discussing slick… you’re right that’s enough internet for the day. //capsrecedinghairline

You asking me this on Shabbat and me answering this on Shabbat says a lot about us, huh 😅

I suppose, as others have noted, that the line is drawn when you consider whether satisfying or not satisfying a heat/rut will have an actually detrimental effect on a person. Will they just be uncomfortable? Will they get sick or possibly die?

Just thinking about how shomer negiah would work with various dynamics makes my head hurt.

[wellconstructedsentences]

You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it.

Pirkei Avot

[anonymousdandelion]

“You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you at liberty to abandon it”

(quoting Mishnah as a means of encouraging myself to wade back into trying to write my WIPs)

[there-is-magic-in-you]

My Judaism is Anti-Zionist

[schreibvibe]

Liev Schreiber in Fading Gigolo (2013)

[counterpunches]

Israel has always asserted its right to live. At the fringes of history, often the object of events, Israel has always seen itself at the center of history and the cause and subject of what happens. To be a Jew, to be Israel, always has demanded conviction despite, not on account of, the condition of the world - and of Israel itself. So it was then, and so it is today. To be a Jew is an act of affirmation, an act of faith, an act of hope. It is not a ratification of how things really are. To know what to answer the unbeliever is to know how to live in the world as it is. To maintain the faith of Israel is to know how to live in the world as it should be; and, we believe, as in God's own time, it will be

-Torah from our Sages: Pirkei Avot, Jacob Neusner (1984)

[comepraisetheinfanta]

[livethrushit]

during my Rage And Depression nap i had a dream that i was asking why we didnt have a manga version of the talmud. so now i must ask: WHY DONT WE HAVE A MANGA VERSION OF THE TALMUD

[maimonidesnutz]

“You are not obligated to finish the work, nor are you free to abandon it” (Pirkei Avot 2:16)

Happy Earth Day!

[hyperpotamianarch]

Golem

All right. So, I wrote a piece on the topic in the past in the 17th Shard forum, this is going to be slightly revised and hopefully deeper.

TL;DR: Golems as represented in modern media are slightly inaccuate, as the original Jewish folklore indicates they should look human and be incapable of speech. Also, their name means, more or less, "half-made". Long elaboration follows.

Anyway, Golem. You've probably heard of the concept in the past: a man made of clay, artificially animated via mystical means, from Jewish folklore. Today, I am here to talk a little about the history of this concept and term, and state some personal opinions on its represantation in modern Fantasy literature. So, let's begin!

The most famous Golem in folklore is likely the Golem of Prague. It is fabled to have been created by the Jewish rabbi Yehudah Loew (more commonly known as Maharal) to defend the local Jewish community from blood libels during the 16th century. Without getting into too much details, the Golem officially served as an aid in the local synagogue (more or less), was deaf and mute and dealt with blood libels mmostly using brute force to bring in witnesses, generally. I might be basing it too much on my great-grandfather's retelling, though. Either way, at some point due to a malfunction Maharal was forced to turn it off and leave it in the attic of the Altneuschul in Prague.

At least, that how the stories go. Stories, I might add, that were only popularized by the 19th century, long after Maharal has died. It is, though, one of the most famous Golem stories - so much so that it got readapted multiple times by Jews and Gentiles alike, and serves as one of the tourist attractions in Prague (or so I'm told). It is not the origin of this specific mythical creature, though.

You see, going back all the way to the Talmud, we find in the tractate of Sanhedrin, 65B:

"Rava created a man, and sent him before Rabbi Zeira. Rabbi Zeira would speak to him but he would not reply. He said to him: You were created by one of the members of the group [one of the Sages]. Return to your dust." (translation from Sefaria)

Meaning, essentially, that creating what we now call a Golem was known back in that time. The creature is not called a Golem in the Talmud, though. The method of creation is sort of unspecified, but the next line mentions using the Book of Creation - Sefer Yetzirah - to create living beings (in that case, livestock), so one might assume the creation of a man is the same. Surprisingly enough, Sefer Yetzirah is still a known book of Kabalah. While it doesn't (to the best of my knowledge) contain detailed instructions o how to create humans, it does tell you about how G-d created the universe.

Two further points of note in the story will be how the nature of the Golem is discovered through it's seeming inability to reply, and how in the moment Rabbi Zeira finds out what he is - he kills the Golem.

That last point is one of the arguments being used by the 17th century rabbi ḥacham Tzvi Ashkenazi in his resposa book, regarding whether or not a Golem could be counted for a Minyan - a group of ten men that is required for certain Jewish prayers. The question is, essentially, does a Golem count as a person? Rabbi Zeira killing one is relevant, because murder is obviously not fine in Judaism, so since he did that - perhaps it's because a Golem does not count as a human. I don't really remember if this argument is what decided the final conclusion, but I'm pretty sure the answer ended up being that a Golem isn't elligible for a Minyan.

Who asked ḥacham Tzvi this question? ... Is something you might ask, had I given you the time. The answer is... well... no one. While Jewish responsa literature is usually based on real life Halachic questions and answers, sometimes there are rabbis who invent questions. This one specifically is likely related to what ḥacham Tzvi says about his grandfather, Rabbi Eliyahu of Chelm - that he created a Golem.

Now, a couple of things: a. You may be interested to learn that this particular piece of resposa became surprisingly relevant with the advent of artificial insemination, proving that even the weirdest of questions can be meaningful. b. This is more or less, among reports of Golems, the one closest to its supposed original time. This is why you might see people consider the Golem of Chelm a more reliable story than the Golem of Prague. c. While ḥacham Tzvi doesn't give any details, the regular story of the Chelmic Golem is that it never stopped growing for some reason and that's why Rabbi Eliyahu had to turn it off. d. ḥacham Tzvi never referred to the created man as a Golem.

So, now that we're caught up on two major folktales about Golems, why are they even called that? What does the name mean?

Well, apparently the term was used for this kind of artificially created humans since the 18th century, if you believe Wikipedia. The word itself, though, appears in the Mishnah in the tractate of Avot, 5:10, where it's used as the opposite of a wise man. There, we are given 7 defining traits for a wise man - mostly simple requirements of polite conversation. Those traits include: not talking before some wiser than you, not interrupting while your friend is speaking, not being too quick to answer, asking and answering in accordance to context, replying to things by order, admitting when you don't know something and admitting to the truth. A Golem is a person who does the exact opposite.

When I first thought of that, I thought that it might be a good idea to popularize "Golem" as a term for the Internet Troll, who tends to, indeed, be the opposite of the above. feel free to use it like that if you want - and please let me know if I'm acting like a Golem, I would like to know to correct myself when I require correcting. Anyway, when you look at it this way it almost sounds like an insult: this man created by other humans is the polar opposite of being wise. And maybe it is, but I'm not sure this is the whole reason for using this name for a Golem.

All right, maybe I've been dragging it like this for long enough. So, ina an attempt to avoid too much theatrics, I'll just say that in Hebrew the word Golem sometimes is used to mean "an unfinished tool", or "half made", and one could claim that this is something the fool and the Created Man have in common: both are not quite finished, one mentally and the other spiritually. The Created man is incomplete spiritually because he lacks a soul, something only G-d can give. This is also why a Golem can't speak, since this divine soul is the source of Human speech, as per the Onkelos translation for Genesis 2, 7: "and it became in Adam into a speaking spirit" (rough personal translation from Aramaic).

So, here's the point: according to all of the above, you might realize that a. a Golem should be incapable of speech, and b. it kind of should look more human than a lump of clay. Obviously, it doesn't matter in modern culture, where there is already a clear image of what a Golem is - even if it's a little inaccurate. Still, I enjoy being somewhat pedantic over stuff. I have read a couple of books with Golems in them, and I don't think many of them were actually loyal enough to the source of the myth. That doesn't make them bad, but I'd like something more accurate for once. Unsong might be a good example for a work that did it somewhat right - but I'm currently stuck in the middle of it and unsure whether I'll continue for different reasons, so that is that.

In Hyperpotamia, such as it is, Golems might be used as guards. The more Internet-Trolly kind are, sadly, citizens - they do go against the grain, afer all - but are not much well liked. Ad yes, this is a weak attempt at creating a gag for my blog. Feels a little forced, to be honest - we'll see if it works.

Thank you for reading, and have a pleasant day!