#judaism parallels

[short-wooloo]

Jedi Chanukah

An idea came to my mind

I've seen a number of posts which highlight parallels between the Jedi and Judaism, even beyond the more obvious

being that we are around the time of Chanukah, it got me thinking

as I understand the origins of Chanukah in its most basic sense, the Holiday came about from the Maccabean Revolt, where the Jewish rebels defeated the Seleucid Greek empire and kicked them out of Judea

what does this have to do with the Jedi?

well aside from the basic concept of Rebels defeated an empire, there is something else I have noticed

During the Seleucids occupation of Judea, they attempted to quash Judaism in the land, outlawing the faith and trying to enforce Hellenization by converting the Temple of Jerusalem into one for Zeus, while also having pigs be slaughtered for sacrifice there, all and all very petty and cruel attempts to hurt those of the Jewish faith

there are some interesting parallels to this in SW

Now obviously Emperor Palpatine and his Empire made the Jedi faith/culture illegal, murdering and persecuting the Jedi (with help from Jedi traitors Vader/the inquisitors, another parallel as the story goes there were Jews who collaborated with the Seleucids), but it doesn't stop there

in the disney eu canon, Palpatine takes a page right out of the Seleucid handbook in his defilement of the Jedi Temple, not only did his forces assault this sacred place and murder its inhabitants, Palpatine turned this temple-a place of faith, learning, and knowledge-and made it into his personal palace

revolting, and considering how the sith narcissistically see themselves as gods, it nicely lines up with how the Seleucids took the Jewish Temple and made it an alter to their gods, Palpatine made the Jedi Temple into a temple of his own self worship

now what has happened to Jedi temple after Palpatine's death and the empire's fall has not been revealed as of yet (here's hoping for the Rey Jedi Order movie), but I believe there is a chance to further mirror the story of Chanukah here

as the story goes, after the Seleucids were kicked out, the Maccabees went about with some house cleaning, liberating the Temple in Jerusalem, getting rid of all the greek god stuff and rededicating the Temple to its original purpose, and along the way experiencing a miracle which would birth a central part of Chanukah

What if we get something similar in SW with the Jedi? After Rise of Skywalker, Rey and her reestablished Jedi Order reclaim and return to the Jedi Temple of Coruscant, cleansing it of Palpatine's dark influence/stain and rededicating it to its purpose as the Jedi's home and center of learning

and maybe along the way a new tradition develops in the Jedi Order, a commemoration of their return to their ancient home

So in short

Lightsaber Menorah

[sailing-ever-west]

We've really lost sight of Judeo-Christian style name-changing as a narrative theme bro. Someone else (God in the case of the Bible) giving you a new name because they chose you. Because you're a new person simply by virtue of being so profoundly loved. Because someone deemed you so special and important that what you were called before doesn't cover it. Simon is a fine name but you will be called Peter because you are the rock I will build upon. Abram is not grand enough for the patriarch of God's people, you will be called Abraham. Saul was a king whose life ended in ruin, and your old life will die like him. Now you are Paul.

It's so beautiful from both a religious standpoint and a literary one and I really think it should be used more alongside the other common Judeo-Christian parallels in fiction.

[zukkacore]

The funny thing is that I do characterize pre shatterstar Jace as basically a fantasy atheist but I do think worship of Cassandra would fix him

[lefthorse]

my recent favorite thing to do with my free time is begin digging online for things pertaining to sephiroth. and i mean digging i mean i was finding fanart that was excavated from fansites before they died. anyways i found an article written pretty recently about ffvii and how sephiroth himself helped the author connect to judaism and im actually ill because this also happened to me.

he was always jewish to me

[quasi-normalcy]

.

[yardsards]

can i ask about your experience as a quaker (or growing up as one? i just saw you mention bein one in some tags)

i jus don't know much about them

so i was not raised quaker, i was raised baptist. which was. 0/10, do not recommend. all the guilt of catholicism with none of the stained glass lmaooo

like, i did resinate with the idea of there being some sort of higher power and i liked the idea of getting together with other believers to discuss spiritual matters but as i got older and started thinking for myself i realized i really didn't like a lot of things about the church. i hated the bigoted beliefs of its members. i hated the emphasis on blind obedience to authority. i didn't believe that the whole literal truth could be found within one book, specifically one group's interpretation of said book. and the idea that people were born inherently bad and sinful and that a supposedly kind and just god would condemn people to eternal suffering just for not believing the "right" things just did not sit well with me at all

when i went off to college i decided to try out a few different churches around town. i ended up settling on a progressive presbyterian church. the community was great and very accepting of queer people. i had some minor qualms with the theology but it wasn't like with my parents' church where every sermon made me feel increasingly nauseous, and i generally felt *good* during and after the services

and then covid hit and while they did stream their sermons, i lost that sense of community and just kinda... fell away

throughout all this i was researching different faiths online, both christian and non-christian. and one faith that kept popping up a lot that i liked the sound of was quakerism. like at one point i remember taking some online quiz of like "what religion do your values most align with" and quakerism was very in the lead. (before this, i'd only really been exposed to quakerism in history textbooks and assumed the religion died out alongside puritanism)

in the end what got me really interested was actually a video by a youtuber i liked, a queer/disability advocate and historical fashion enjoyer who also happened to be quaker

and after looking more into it, i decided to try attending a quaker meeting. which was easier due to covid cuz i could find a church online (located physically hundreds of miles from me) that did their sunday services over zoom

and so i attended and the people there were great and were doing actual good in their communities. and the way services were run, and their beliefs about what god *was* and all of that just hit me with an intense feeling of like. holy shit this is what i've always wanted from religion.

the video explains the sort of core beliefs and practices of quakerism better than i can but the main belief is that like. every person is godly. as such, it's our job to treat all living people as equally and kindly as possible. additionally, since we all have god inside of us, we need to look inwards and come to our own conclusions about our own religious beliefs and practices (and generally respect other people's religious beliefs even if they differ from our own, so long as they're not causing real tangible harm)

i haven't attended any meetings in a while, due to that group going back to semi in person (they still stream it out but it feels more like being a spectator than a member) and there being no quaker meetinghouses in the tiny town i currently live in, coinciding with me being too depressed to regularly attend anything. but i'm planning to start attending quaker meetings again once i move to a real city

[dindjarindiaries]

Because of Jon Favreau's Judaism, I wondered if he has personal reasons to have Din Djarin hold onto his religion, even while others question its relevance.

I’m thinking the very same thing

[mypimpademia]

Noah Schnapp needs to be locked away forever

[moonlitcomet]

I don't know how people can stand making cultural characters without doing insane amounts of research on the cultures they represent, because I've spent the past couple hours doing a ridiculous amount of research so I can write a Jewish-coded character appropriately.

[wathanism]

it's so funny how every time i see a post abt spirituality or religion that i agree with, there's always 17 jewish folk in the notes like "posts that are extremely jewish," and i love that. no i don't know a thing abt judaism but y'all seem to be vibing so much harder than i ever did when i was muslim and i respect that

[shithitsmynipples]

Okay this is random and a little off base rn but I’m up at 6:45 am so here goes.

As a Jew, I kinda hate when a group of people is experiencing systematic discrimination and posts start going around like “friendly remember that it’s extremely disrespectful to compare this to the holocaust” like obviously it’s not cool to be like ‘omg this is just like that!!’

But genocide doesn’t start as genocide. It’s starts as excluding people from public life, it starts as labeling them, segregating them, dehumanizing them. When we see that writing on the wall I actually think it’s important to go “hey you know what this reminds me of..” especially cause it’s probably the only genocide a lot of white people give a fuck about.

We weren’t the first, we won’t be the last and I don’t believe it cheapens our history or our pain to say that. I think coming from a cultural history of persecution and genocide makes it our duty to call out oppression when we see it happening to other people. Never again doesn’t just mean us it means anyone.

[bijoumikhawal]

Rotating siskarak in my mind again

[trendfag]

its just so annoying being in a class being taught stuff you know is wrong because you were taught the correct information in previous classes

[spidermanifested]

another black sails fantheory ive seen around a lot is that silver is jewish, usually specifically sephardic, but despite its prevalence i havent been able to find anybodys actual thesis statements about it. so if there are Essays out there (especially by somebody with more historical-slash-judaism knowledge than i with my meager wiki-crawls) i would love Links

however once again ive pondered a bunch of the stuff ive noticed personally, about mr john "if thats even your real name" silver. and honestly at this point id be kind of surprised if it Wasnt the actual context the writers shaped his character around. everything just seems to come together really neatly

hes impressively literate for his circumstances/time period, and really good at quickly memorizing large amounts of text. a solid religious education could very well explain this

specifically– and this is one of the things that feels like a huge bit of intentional subtext to me– the scene where hes hiding with the lepers and memorizing the urca schedule REALLY seems to evoke someone reading scripture under a prayer shawl

not only does he not know how to cook pork, but does not even seem to know what pork looks like when finished cooking

the pretext flint used to get his crew to hunt down the hamiltons' ship was that it was carrying sephardic riches. this is a completely throwaway detail we learn secondhand, in a story where there are very, very few completely throwaway details

silver speaks at least some spanish. this comes up Once and goes totally unquestioned by everyone around him, likely because they think he just picked it up as a sailor. he almost certainly has not been at sea long enough for this to be the case. speaking ladino as a first language on the other hand would give him a huge leg up (so to speak.) in that department

further point. around the time period of the show, the biggest sephardic community in the world lived in thessaloniki in modern-day greece. it was:

a) one of the most major seaports in the ottoman empire

b) a famous center for learning, which boasted 100% literacy of its jewish population

and c) despite its long and prosperous history under ottoman rule, beginning to decline along with the rest of the empire, for many interconnected reasons, including but not limited to: Problems With the Governments Handling of the Textile Industry (where have we heard that before)

lotta unrest. religious schisms and doomsday prophecies. reactionary groups of overempowered soldiers attacking civilians for stress relief (again. where have we heard that before). people, unsurprisingly, started leaving

so if you did want, against john silvers express wishes. to theorize a backstory for a surprisingly educated stowaway of Mystery Origin, who has Mystery Trauma and doesnt want anybody to know who he is or where he comes from, and which would give a new level of relevance to all the greek stuff that permeates the show (down to the actual name of the thing!), along with containing parallels to several other backstories and events in the show proper,

Well this one make sense i think 👍

[skydaemon]

so we (and by we, i mean the very specific overlap of jews and nerds among whom i make my home) talk a lot about how tolkien's dwarves, in both the books and movies, were likely influenced by certain jewish stereotypes. obsessed with gold/wealth, secretive (especially about their language and religion), refugees from their ancestral home, portrayed with big, sometimes hooked, noses and interesting facial hair, and most specifically: the favourite little meow meows of one particular god, causing them to be shunned and persecuted by other races and creeds. this is likely unintentional, coming from the subconscious of tolkien in the same way orcs were "based on mongols" (ew colonialism) and activating subconscious biases/stereotypes in the people who designed the dwarves for the movies. it's subtext, albeit subtext that influenced the next eighty years of fantasy.

but what i don't see much discussion of is the fact that in terry pratchett's discworld, it's intentional. terry pratchett's dwarves are, more or less, jews.

carrot is a human adopted by dwarves, based on human standards. but within dwarf culture, he IS a dwarf. specifically, he has undergone specific rituals and memorised certain passages, making him LEGALLY a dwarf. this is basically how conversion works in judaism. indeed, as in judaism, it's considered rude to even mention that carrot is six feet tall and obviously wasn't born into the culture he has adopted.

the dwarves also have internal rifts - there are a group of 'orthodox' dwarves who consider the dwarves in ankh-morpork (who have adopted other customs and don't follow traditional roles) not to be dwarves at all, and don't recognise carrot as a dwarf for the same reason. they believe that the way to be a dwarf is to live in an all-dwarf community and follow their traditional rules, while other dwarves believe they need to change with the times and integrate (at least somewhat) with larger society. jewish as fuck.

there's also the interaction of dwarves with gender. when cherie comes out as female (which isn't a recognised gender by dwarvish society) she is ostracised for taking on the feminine roles common to other discworld races. however, she could never THINK of cutting off her beard, because she is still a dwarf. i see parallels with women in judaism taking on roles traditionally considered 'masculine' (e.g., as rabbis, wearing tallit and kippot) and the acceptance of queer people into jewish communities. there's lots of great discussion about cherie as a trans character on tumblr, btw.

finally, something that particularly strikes me is the line from carrot in tfe, where he says that the biggest dwarf city on the disc is ankh-morpork. obviously all diaspora communities can relate, but it's really something to know that new york is the city with the most jews in the world (960k to jerusalem's 570k. btw, 3rd is LA!).

i just love that, again, consciously or unconsciously, pratchett incorporated more positive elements of jewish culture into his portrayal of the dwarves.

[schraubd]

In the Image of God

A recent study found that Jews are the demographic group most accepting of trans individuals in the United States.

When certain Christians assert a religious freedom right to discriminate against trans individuals -- particularly, a right to misgender them -- their argument typically proceeds something along these lines:

1. They believe every individual is created in the image of God.

2. Part of that image is the person's sex (and by extension, gender).

3. In particular, a person's sex/gender is inalterably assigned by God from conception.

4. They are forbidden from lying or falsifying God's choice.

Therefore, they say, they are religiously obligated to refer to people by their chromosomal sex, regardless of how they identify or publicly present. This religious duty, in turn, is used to press against rules and policies which require respectful treatment of trans individuals (including refraining from deliberately misgendering them, deadnaming them, and so on).

What's interesting about this framework is that a lot of it actually resonates with how I view the relationship of my Jewish faith and trans individuals -- with some crucial alterations. To wit:

1. I believe every individual is create in the image of God.

2.  Part of that image is the person's sex (and by extension, gender).

4. I am forbidden from lying or falsifying God's choice.

The major distinction, of course, comes in prong 3:

3. A person's sex/gender is not necessarily or inalterably assigned by God from conception, but rather can be part of a person's own process of discovering who they are. Where such self-discovery leads to a person to conclude they are trans, non-binary, or any other identity that departs from the sex they were assigned at birth, they are not deviating from God's plan. They are uncovering their authentic self as God has created them.

The result of this process is part of God's image. Those who refuse to accept it are not cleaving to God's image, they are rejecting it.

God's process of creation is not, in my understanding of Judaism, a set-and-forget sort of deal. It is not a matter of passively being puppeteered by a divine hand. It something we do together -- we are partners in creation. To deny the results of that partnership is, for me, a denial of God's plan and practice just as much as it is for adherents of other religious views who adhere to a more static and calcified notion of the role of the divine.

And so for me, and I suspect for many Jews, the religious freedom obligation pushes in the other direction. Many conservative states have, or are considering, laws which require (at least in certain contexts) non-recognition of trans identity. For Jews (and others) who share my religious precepts, these laws would force me to deny -- to bear false witness to -- a key attribute of how God created some of my peers. I do not believe -- and this is a deep, fundamental commitment -- that God's "image" of trans persons was for them to be locked in a body or sex or gender identity that clearly is not authentically theirs. When they find their full self, they are equally finding God's image of themselves.

Consistent with my lengthily expressed feelings on the subject, I suspect that what's good for the goose will not be good for the gander. Despite the clear parallel, liberal Jews who assert religious liberty rights to be exempted from laws seeking to enforce by state mandate a transphobic agenda will not meet with the same success enjoyed by their Christian peers.

Nonetheless, there is value in promoting this sort of framework, and in unashamedly asserting Jewish independence from hegemonic conservative Christian notions of true religiosity. It is not woven into "religion" that God's image requires rejection of trans individuals' full selves. That is a choice, an interpretation of some religions or of some who call themselves religious. Other religions, other religious persons, have a different interpretation of how to respect and dignify the facet of God that is in every one of us.

via The Debate Link https://ift.tt/vlsH4T2