keshetchai
My Blog about Religion
Des/Devorah. Mexican-American & Jewish. I converted. You can ask me questions!
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CARTOONS AND TOYS
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Bava Metzia 59
"If the Law is like me, this tree walks,
Streams reverse course, the sky talks,
And the walls in this hall
Will begin a great fall!"
Nonetheless, the majority balks.
"Eliezer ben Hyrcanus! See,
We don't pasken by river or tree.
Those are cute parlor tricks,
But to you we say, 'Nix!'
And I think God himself will agree!"
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Also last night the roommates decided last minute to scrap our plans for making fish and rice (which I can eat) because they didn't feel like it, and instead ate leftovers and cupcakes which I couldn't eat. Awesome. Had to scramble to figure out a simple and easy pesachdik meal last minute for myself that wasn't the dinosaurs for a second night in a row. The other meals I have on hand take TIME to make. I'm just so tired.
Living with roommates Pesach jumpscare: wanted to put brown sugar in my matzah hot cereal mix. Reached into the brown sugar container.
TOUCHED A WHOLE THICK SLICE OF BREAD.
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Guess whose roommates also just made a batch of banana nut muffins AND a blueberry cobbler???? Did you guess the girl who promised she cared a lot about learning to accommodate other people's dietary needs when baking, and also would be cool with passover over a year and a half ago before she moved in??
Living with roommates Pesach jumpscare: wanted to put brown sugar in my matzah hot cereal mix. Reached into the brown sugar container.
TOUCHED A WHOLE THICK SLICE OF BREAD.
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...."deliver us to the promised land" as a barely obscured christian message is a really funny take.
Meanwhile in the Haggadah....
prince of egypt is not a christian movie. the exodus is a jewish story. it’s found in other religions, and can even have a heightened level of significance, like for black (specifically african american) christians. but it is a jewish story from jewish scripture written from a jewish perspective about jewish persecution. enjoy it all you want. but don’t go on about how much you love prince of egypt then erase the fundamental jewish spirit of it.
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Nah. Still kinda like cardboard but I bet I can toss em in some spices and have an okay time with it. I just was in a last minute shopping panic and saw the dino nuggets in the kfp freezer case and was like "yeah I bet I have enough executive function to make those." lmao. Most expensive nuggets ever too, ugh.
hey its okay.....
.....kosher for pesach dinosaur chickie nuggies
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hey its okay.....
.....kosher for pesach dinosaur chickie nuggies
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I think this is going around again because it's passover so allow me to share the seasonal carbonated soda drink for people who love themselves:
Dr. Brown's The Original Cream Soda
Black Cherry is also acceptable.
(I don't think they make cel-ray kfp, or at least, I can't find it.)
Happy passover everyone.
Also please check in on your gentile friends and make sure they don't drink this, I'm worried for them:
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Living with roommates Pesach jumpscare: wanted to put brown sugar in my matzah hot cereal mix. Reached into the brown sugar container.
TOUCHED A WHOLE THICK SLICE OF BREAD.
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sorry we mistook your boyfriend for a cinnamon roll and we sold him with the chametz. yeah it's just a temporary agreement, you can have him back in eight days. he'll be okay he's safe in a locked cabinet with the pasta
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attention this is your captain speaking chag sameach pesach to all celebrating and a reminder do not open the airlock to greet elijah the vulcan rabbinic council ruled that opening the door to the room where the seder is occurring is sufficient elijah can get on a starship just fine himself he just likes to be personally invited in to your seder we dont need another incident like last year thank you
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inflation is crazy. back in my days you could buy a goat for two coins. until the cat eats it, that is
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Yesterday the Other Roommate ordered two whole pizzas AND cheesy bread and when I got home at 4:45 they hadn't arrived yet and she waited to tell me until after everything arrived that she ONLY ordered pepperoni pizzas for her, my roomie, and her friend — because she didn't know what time I would get back to the house.
Honestly? Microaggression bullshit. It's not even hating Jews she just hates me specifically lol.
She knows the weekend train schedule to the city runs every two hours bc she's used it herself
I have been consistently returning home from the city on the weekends at either 4:40ish or 6:40ish but almost always the former. This has been going on for over 12+ weeks.
People eat leftover pizza??
Ordering two pepperoni only pizzas for the other three people is petty shit because she knows I can't eat it.
To say nothing of how I gave up on dealing with chametz cleanout this year because of shit like this lol. Last year she sorta tried to go along with it since I always buy the groceries and do the cleaning but they switched to eating chametz before it was over. This year I just assumed it would be pointless to try and lo, she orders a bunch of pizza right before. (First roommate also bought a ton of bread on her last grocery run and I was like GIRL.... Please,,,,)
Anyways unfortunately even though I want to dumpster any pizza leftovers for the satisfaction of it because she was being shitty on purpose, it's not a fight worth getting into.
This will be the most chametz in the house for any pesach since I converted though, and it's not my house or in my control. But it still sucks. It's shitty.
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Wow there is a very solid winner here. Also the answer is my mom just found them on Amazon. Bless her I think she just searched like "funny passover shirt."
I couldn't find the exact version of my 4Q shirt (there's a lot of cool design variants) but the darkness one has a silly goth font:
...no third option. You must pick!!!
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Anon the best trinity explanation I've seen was St. Patrick's Bad Analogies. No really, that little YouTube video covers it and a few major heresies as well.
I feel like it helped solidify what I thought I knew and then expanded it to where I'm like: "okay so I do get it intellectually and I comprehended that, but also I don't get it personally, and that's fine."
Edit: Can't help with neoplatonism though. I've also been the person just sort of stumbling through the weeds to learn things.
I do use the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy to like...cross reference? Like Wikipedia or something. Also handy to make notes of where I'm confused (because sometimes IEP is over my head/too specialized) and then determine if this is like a specialist thing that i don't need right now to understand the basics, or if it's something more foundational that contributes to why I'm confused.
Oh also maybe sacred texts has something. Public domain translations and texts aplenty over there.
How to understand neoplatonism without your brain turning into a mush?
Don't tell me that Hinduism is even more complicated or something, I can't even get how the triad works!
Be forewarned, if you're having trouble getting your head around the Trinity, neoplatonism is gonna take some serious work to get your brain around. But! We encourage intellectual endeavors here! So let's start with the basics.
To vastly oversummarize: Plato and Aristotle had conflicting ideas on how divinity worked. Neoplatonism is what happens when you try to combine them.
If you're gonna give neoplatonism a stab, you need to familiarize yourself with Platonist and Aristotelian philosophy. Once you've done that, you can dip in.
Neoplatonism is basically three guys: Plotinus, Porphyry, and Iamblichus, but you wanna focus on two works in particular.
The Enneads, by Plotinus
De Mystiis (On The Mysteries), by Iamblichus
As for how do this, understand that there is no shame in starting where you are. When I approach a topic I'm unfamiliar with, I have a process:
1 - Give the primary text a skim. This gives me an idea of how tough the ideas are gonna be for me.
2 - Dig around for YouTube videos and recorded lectures. This is a good way to prepare yourself for a serious read.
3 - Give the primary text a proper shot. Highlight areas where you don't really understand. Keep track of where the text loses you, and where it finds you again.
4 - Seek expert assistance. Armed with that list of questions from step 3, find someone smarter than you, and ask them questions. Im lucky enough to be friends with a cast of academics, but you can literally just shoot most professors an email. 9/10 times they're happy to discuss things things with an interested party!
5 - Repeat steps 3 and 4 forever, as there is always more to learn.
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...no third option. You must pick!!!
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Not...entirely? Like sharks are not smooth, and that's the whole joke. But my joke is that things like linsey-woolsey do exist and I think it's a fabric of economic convenience and necessity but not one of like, comfort, "behavior", or ease to wash.
My joke is not saying something blatantly untrue. It's stating an opinion (initially the implication is that this is maybe also God's opinion, which is funny).
My joke is pointing to a bunch of male commentators suggesting there's no real "reason" for this mitzvah and saying "here's a single very mundane reason why this makes sense, actually — that mix suuuuuckkksss." ["Linsey woolsey was a fabric for the lower sort, & plain white is described on some of the poorest enslaved people & servants." There's a reason why this is not a popularly used blend today and why it's sold as a specialty historical fabric lol.]
later I expanded on why it sucks from a textiles perspective. A lot of cellulose/animal fiber blends are kinda wonky! Like...they can do weird things. And materially these fibers are pretty different! Again I stress it was a textile people wove for economic necessity reasons, because it can kinda function for the jobs needed, not because it was like, good. And elsewhere I did delve more into the built in merchant/artisan protections of heavily regulating separate wool and linen industries so prices didn't get undercut badly. Linen was a big deal in ancient Israel and a major economic product!
And then I explicitly made it a feminist commentary based on this joke and the idea that this is somehow "chok" because everyday weaving and laundering is historically a "woman's job."
[barring a side discussion here about later European tapestry weaving being mostly male artisans, the bayeaux tapestry isn't actually tapestry and that says stuff about gender in art history etc etc.]
This is...purely theoretical re: the Rabbis, but also my expansion is based on fairly common art historical and archaeological feminist critique. Like I know that contemporary male scholars have often made assertions that something is "unknown" or "inexplicable," only for a female scholar/practitioner of (whatever thing), or even a male craftsman(!) to write a paper like "this isn't mysterious at all, that's obviously (x)." So of course I believe that the male Talmudic scholars probably have the same instances of perspective blind-spots as contemporary male scholars often do/did.
That's just a much broader structural criticism, which applied to the Talmud and later Talmudic scholars isn't exactly unfair. They do sometimes ask women about "women's issues" and treat them as experts within the Talmud but like...there's still a huuuugeee gap.
It seems like it's without reason, but also whose reason were they looking for? How did they decide that? Who did they ask? Why was it such a mystery? If you're trying to say the reason was just holiness & separation — the rabbis themselves could've literally said that, but they didn't.
So to address "function of halakha" well...if it was about setting us apart from the gentiles, if the argument was to not do as they do in Egypt because paganism— then the rabbis of the Talmud would've just....said that. That's a perfectly sensible reason! It's not without logic because we're told repeatedly not to do various things the Egyptians do. That's clearly "best way to live as a Jew," and certainly would've been seen as logical and explicable.
Fwiw the mishnah says (kilayim 9)
Only that which is spun or woven is forbidden under the law of kilayim, as it says, “You shall not wear shatnez” (Deuteronomy 22:1, that which is shua (combed) tavui (spun) and nuz (woven). Rabbi Shimon ben Elazar says: [the word shaatnez means that] he [the transgressor] is perverted (naloz) and causes his father in heaven to avert himself [from him].
Which is not "because the gentiles mix it"! But the mixing of these fabrics makes you naloz and causes god to avert himself from the shatnez wearer. (Which again this sets embroidery used in the temple apart, and also the separate wool and linen garments).
Nothing is forbidden on account of kilayim except [a mixture of] wool and linen. No [clothing material] is subject to uncleanness by scale disease except wool or linen. Priests do not wear any materials to serve in the Temple except for wool and linen. Camel’s wool with sheep’s wool, that have been mixed together: if the greater part is camel’s wool, it is permitted [to mix it with linen], but if the greater part is sheep’s wool, it is forbidden; if it is half and half, it is forbidden. The same applies to hemp and linen mixed together.
So....comedically, "it sucks and God dislikes it specifically."
Also wool-linen blends only become acceptable when you adjust and are only using one or the other as a small part of a bigger fiber blend. The sheep wool can be used in small amounts to improve the camel's wool and then get mixed with linen, or the linen can be used in small amounts with spun hemp and then mixed with wool, but a direct linen-wool mixture is o-u-t. (There's a hilarious aside here about shatnez wearing being forbidden even if you're trying to evade the tax collector, which...wild lmao).
I also ... Like to be clear I am not personally arguing the Talmud or halakha is mostly a scientific document for the purposes of public health. (I know a lot of other people make more of that argument re: pork/shellfish but...)
I was arguing that when a bunch of dudes said this was a statue perhaps a statue not based on human reasoning/rational logic they were maybe overlooking some very obvious rationales.
And the porcelain thing was because you mentioned a history of analysis and critical thinking being why these scholars would've considered something like this already. So I mentioned something that we've had plenty of time to consider as a new technology under halakha with critical thinking but never actually did that. That's my evidence that critical thinking and questioning doesn't mean the ongoing history of halakha has captured every possible reason, fact, or question involved.
[ Also because that's an actual frustration of mine because porcelain is, theoretically, an ideal kosher material due to vitrification. Accessibility to being Jewish and kosher could skyrocket if you could kasher porcelain with boiling hot water since it's vitrified. I mean if you can kasher a solid quartz slab countertop with boiling water there's no reason why porcelain should be different. It's closer to stone and glass than earthenware!! That's why porcellaneous ceramics are called stoneware!! — This peeve is the result of extensive ceramics studying and handling hundreds and hundreds of sherds and then categorizing and typifying them lol.
...come to think of it, porcelain represents the platonic opposite of how I feel about linsey-woolsey. I dropped out of a PhD program partly because they weren't supporting my porcelain focus/research enough. I love porcelain as a material and am comedically overenthusiastic about it, whilst I am comedically dunking on linsey woolsey for sucking.]
listen to me very very closely: the biblical prohibition against mixing linen and wool is the most SENSIBLE THING IN THE WORLD, do not write it off as silly, unreasonable, or unnecessary. g-d didn’t tell us not to mix linen and wool for no reason, g-d told us not to mix linen and wool together because mixing them is an affront to textiles
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