#dirty jobs

[muddyoveralls90]

[truckman816]

[facialhairy]

Mike Rowe (has a magnificent smile)

[edenfenixblogs]

hey i saw the post about your cousin's bar mitzvah, and well first of all congrats to her. but also uh one thing you mentioned made me curious- what *am* i supposed to do should i find a dead body on the side of the road, if it's no problem for me to ask? not to worry you or anything like that but i guess it'd be useful to know if i pass a car crash on a road trip again.

Ah! What a good ask!!!! I see you committing to the act of learning more about Judaism as an act of allyship, and I appreciate you! Thanks so much for taking an interest.

Obligatory disclaimer: I’m not a biblical scholar or a Talmudic expert. I’m just a Jew who likes being a Jew.

So my Torah portion was in Leviticus. For those who don’t know, Leviticus and Numbers are often considered the doldrums of Torah books. It’s not where a lot of the well-known exciting parts happen. Those books generally contain a lot of lists of rules and mitzvot.

But this is actually why I like the way Judaism reads the whole Torah in order. It forces us to confront the “boring” stuff. And in so doing, we have to think harder about why that stuff is included in our books.

So that’s why my assigned portion was interesting to me.

The actual text basically says “don’t touch dead bodies.” But I remember reading the Talmudic scholarship which was especially interesting because its focus was to elaborate on all the exceptions and then talked about the importance of doing good deeds without a reward and not punishing those who need to do things like touch dead bodies.

The point of the text isn’t to condemn people who are doing the “forbidden” thing without any cause. The text outlines a lot of rules (many of which are not relevant anymore) and, frankly excessive punishments for breaking the rules.

But Judaism doesn’t end at the literal text. Talmud (rabbinical interpretation) is equally important.

My take on the material was this:

There are some things that, on the whole, we shouldn’t do. We shouldn’t touch dead bodies. We shouldn’t come to synagogue when we are sick. We shouldn’t cheat on our spouses. Etc.

But sometimes, you do need to break the rules. And for some things, someone must always break the rules. There must be someone in any community whose job it is to touch dead bodies. Someone must bury the dead. At the very least.

For people in that position, it is so vitally important that we do not throw the literal text in their face. It is important that we do not condemn them or shun them or otherwise exclude them from our community. Judaism is about community. And you cannot have a community that is based upon excluding people who do essential jobs. Rather, thank them. Because they are doing a good thing with no inherent reward. Quite the opposite. Those people should be celebrated. They take on the hard work knowing it carries risk of exclusion and judgment, but they do it anyway. Because it’s right.

Back in the day, if you saw a dead body on the side of the road and no one seemed available to bury it? Bury it. Give that fallen soul dignity. Then pray about it. Physically and emotionally wash the sin* away. (*sin in Judaism is not the same as the Christian idea of sin. Sin is more akin to an “oops” or “missing the mark.”) And take pleasure in doing something good for humanity and knowing that nobody else had to take on that sin for you.

So, nowadays, if you see a dead body on the side of the road? Call the person whose job it is to deal with that. And thank them for doing this very emotionally difficult work. Welcome that person into your community. Be kind to them. It matters. Because there is no community at all without them and people like them.

And in general? The more broad lesson to this is to of course be kind to people who do unglamorous but necessary work. And to take on that unglamorous work ourselves when necessary. That’s how we keep our community functional and healthy. Do good deeds without expecting a reward. Do what’s right even when you expect a bad outcome. Do good and right things for their own sake, because that’s what we exist to do. Create goodness in the world. The reward is the better world we create.

Thanks for asking @clawdia-houyhnhnm

[invisibleicewands]

[vertigoartgore]

The Jennings family portrait (around the early 80's in universe) from FX's The Americans (2013-2018). Can you tell which ones are Russians spies and which one are real Americans ?

[guardwyrm]

i ❤️ vultures i’m such a huge fan of The continued cycle of life and death and rebirth and the sun and pestilence and doing the work that must be done for the cycle to continue despite others’ disgust and living hand in hand with death and how interesting of a relationship that is

[reality-detective]

* * * News Interruption * * *

Installing spacers on a 765,000 volt line.

[muddyoveralls90]

[truckman816]

[haggishlyhagging]

“Mining women, of course, had no time or occasion to worry about their appearance. The work was so cruelly hard that it was not unknown for a girl to fall into a dead faint from exhaustion as soon as she climbed into the basket to be drawn up to the surface at the end of her shift; when this happened, she usually pitched out of the shallow wicker container and down the shaft to her death. Other fatalities were caused by the weight of the trucks the women had to pull — at twelve and a half hundredweight, a runaway wagon easily crushed or mangled its "drawer." Even normal conditions of working were horrifyingly severe: the youngest girls had to crawl through passages as low as 16 to 18 inches, while grown women were expected to navigate tunnels no higher than 30 inches. In a 14-hour day, they would crawl for anything between 10 and 20 miles, with no opportunity at any point to stand up or straighten their limbs. In the winter, said Fanny Drake, a Yorkshire pit-woman, she worked for six months up to her calves in water; this took the skin off her feet "just as if they were scalded." Betty Harris of Little Bolton in the neighboring county of Lancashire found that her troubles came more from the girdle and chain by which she pulled her truck along, for it cut and blistered her sides "till I have had the skin off me"; but the only time it really bothered her was ‘when I was in the family way.’”

-Rosalind Miles, Who Cooked the Last Supper?

[consolecadet]

I’ve been watching Dirty Jobs before going to sleep because I finished Unwrapped. My thoughts so far are:

It’s much harder to unwind to delights such as “alligator farm” and “sewer repair” instead of “candy factory” and “buffalo wings stand”

Mike Rowe has some juicy cheeks under those sad khakis

[stellarpurplecollar]

Journal: Cheese Louise and Butter Fingers...

When you are on a bipolar manic, making grilled cheese sandwiches is a sort of forced meditation. You have to keep the heat to get the cook just right, you can't leave or really do anything else withou risking distraction and buring dinner. So you have to wait --sweat it out at the stove top-- at least in my case because we have one working air conditioner and it isn't in the front rooms. Nope, we have to tuck ourselves away in the bedroom during the day. Sans air conditioning means the near total shut down of the house; no television, barely any lights, and only the cats dumb enough to hang out in the heat as my only conversational companions. And this heat? I am from the San Antonio, Texas area. Today (7/12/2023) we hit 104 degrees, feeling like 112 degrees.

Stillness. So as not to lose focus on the food. Sweat--to keep my pores clean. Butter--to clog my pores again. Too hot to leave the house. Too dark this late at night to leave the house in case I run into trouble on the road... and with nowhere to go since nearly everything closes at nine or ten.

I am left with only an oven door and my imagination; pretending to hold on to the cheap seat bar of a roller coaster car. And I am terrified of roller coasters. Yet, I am believable enough to convinve myself my seat rattles and my ears are deaf with the hollaring winds of motion and the shrieks of the poor sap in front of me. Until the door creaks and someone walks in, breaking the sad excuse of a spell.

I tried using the dishwasher door handle, but opening it up on an incline was a bitch. The oven opens up much easier, especially on the jerky turns.

A whole lot of love and a whole loaf of bread; I get stuck with an odd number of sandwiches. How upsetting. One lightbulb and the ventilator hood light over the stove top... Looking around in this hazy-lit mess of a kitchen, I involuntarily assign myself up for kitchen duty tomorrow morning. In this sad lighting, my gc's look awesome. Let's see what comes to light.

Enjoy your dinner, Tumblr.

With a cheezy grin,

She Who Is Collared

[beginnerblueglass]

These shows were my childhood. I’ve just gotten back into watching them again and I’m having so much fun!!