janothar:

janothar:

Hey, anyone interested in a jumblr book club? Maybe tie it in some way to @alternativetodiscourse? I’m right now mostly up for Jewish mysticism stuff, and could try to organize around that topic, but if people are interested in other things, we can talk.

I have created a sideblog https://jumblrbookclub.tumblr.com/ there are no posts currently, but if it gets enough followers that it seems like discussions could actually happen, I’ll start organizing through there.  @alternativetodiscourse, could you signal boost this?

I was thinking “Jewish Magic and Superstition” by Trachtenberg to start, which I know @zookmurnig is supposed to be reading, I’m reading, and is theoretically available at sacred-texts, but the whole site is down at the moment.  Sometime in the next couple of days I’ll list a bunch of books as possible options on that blog, and we’ll vote.

Yep! Sounds like it would be pretty cool. Signal boosting. (I’m not actually familiar with the book, if someone would care to enlighten me.)

loki-zen:

alternativetodiscourse:

animatedamerican:

bigsis144:

animatedamerican:

fenrisesque:

animatedamerican:

fenrisesque:

blood is not kosher

assuming vampires breathe, and are therefore alive, what do they do

If they’re alive and they need it to survive, it’s permitted (provided they don’t kill people in so doing).

If they’re not alive, halacha doesn’t apply to them.

Either way, there is no reasonable halachic restriction on a vampire drinking blood.

but would it need to be from a kosher animal
can they drink, like, dolphin blood

Okay now that gets interesting and I would want to actually ask a rabbi whether that would be a thing.  like, if one must consume the blood of living things to survive, does it make a difference whether one limits it to the blood of kosher animals or not.  I could see it being ruled either way.  (I would think if there is only one type of blood one can metabolize or if only one type of blood is available, one can consume it regardless.)

I remember learning that human blood (not sure about animal blood) is permissible to consume if it has not been “poresh” (”separated”) from the body (in the context of “if you cut your lip or your finger and immediately and instinctively put it in your mouth, you don’t have to spit out the blood”).

So 

Drinking blood out of a goblet or vacuum-sealed bag would be assur, but sinking your teeth into someone and drinking directly (so that the blood never touches the air or is in a vessel) would be okay.

I know that applies to one’s own blood, but I don’t know if the principle applies to someone else’s.  But it may count as a possible precedent!

Okay, so I asked my rabbi about this (… yes, my actual rabbi). Short answer, @fenrisesque​, is that the ideal situation is for the vampire to intravenously ingest blood that was donated by a human in order to stay alive, assuming that donation doesn’t kill the person. If homemade intravenously doesn’t work, then storebought oral ingestion is fine too. This applies whether or not the vampire can drink animal blood. Long answer, which I find fascinating but is long so under a cut:

Keep reading

Okay, so this is beyond awesome, as is @alternativetodiscourse‘s Rabbi.

If, in order to avoid looking like they might be doing a forbidden thing, the vampire has to wear a cloak and go bleh a lot, does this the imply that the Jewish vampire would be forbidden to conceal the fact that they’re a vampire? Seems like that could cause them some serious issues since modern stories involving intelligent undead nearly always assume you have to conceal what you are in order to survive. Which I guess might be permitted if the vampire counts as alive because you have to preserve life?

On the opposite assumptions (that is, if vampires count as dead) I knew someone who I think is ethnically Jewish but not practising IRL, who played a (formerly) Jewish vampire in a live role-playing game. The vampire’s assumption (and that of the setting) was vampires=dead, and so she didn’t consider herself a Jewish person any more really because that’s something for living people but the way she saw things was flavoured by her having been Jewish in life - in particular, because she was a walking corpse she was always ritually unclean. So, her way of holding on to her traditions was mostly to avoid what most of us Gentiles might think of as ‘Jewish stuff’ - that is, most forms of religious worship and celebration - because she respected those things too much to do them wrong by trying to do them while impure.

The interesting thing was that it ended up almost perfectly replicating the vampire-repelled-by-religious-stuff trope, but instead of being supernaturally repelled she just wouldn’t touch a holy text or go near a temple because she was respecting purity traditions as she understood them. Where at all possible, she avoided even touching living people because of the impurity thing.

Anyway I don’t remember this very well nor do I know enough about the relevant traditions to explore this in more detail but I do find all of this fascinating both as a writer of stuff with vampires and just generally.

Ooh, interesting addition. In order to drink human blood, a Jewish vampire wouldn’t be allowed to go incognito, because they’d look like they were a regular person drinking what could be animal blood. However, there might be other consumption options for them - perhaps intravenous consumption?