Anonymous asked:
jewish-privilege answered:
In Jewish custom, you’re not supposed to write or enunciate the full name of G-d outside of formal liturgical situations–in prayerbooks and in prayer, for example. So, outside of those settings, the name isn’t written or pronounced in full, or substitutes are used (“Hashem” simply means “The Name”, for example).
Personally I object a little bit to hyphenating the English word “God,” as it bears no relationship whatsoever to the actual Name. (As I’ve occasionally put it, “It’s not a name, it’s a job description.”) I don’t know of any formal opinion that agrees with me on that, though.
I had a rabbi in high school (he ended up being the m'sader kedushin for my sister and brother-in-law and was a survivor who had taught at the school since 1945) who said that writing “G-d” is unnecessary because it is nowhere near the real name of Hashem. He said if you insist on writing “G-d,” you should also say “ginger kale.” Ever since then, I’ve written “God” with no compunction.
I enjoy seeing the way it’s done in different languages. I’ve seen d-eu, d’us and d-os.
I mostly do it as a cultural marker: Jews omit the middle letter, I am a Jew, therefore I omit the middle letter
Yeah there’s no actual need to do it (certainly not in English) but for personal emotional reasons I don’t like writing out a full Divine name, but I also don’t like the implications of taking something away, so I follow a Renewal practice of writing G!d with an exclamation point to remind myself of G!d’s overflowing expansiveness… I have a friend who writes G?d for their own well-thought-out reasons. :)
I like “G@d” myself - it’s not as in-your-face as “G!d” to me, and also, isn’t mixing the @ in such a perfect analogy for Judaism you guys
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.)
Hello friends! I would like to Take This Time to point you to an interesting new online magazine, jGirls. It’s a space for creations by all self-identified Jewish teenage girls - a “forum for girls to create and engage in a Jewish community of peers on their own terms,” in their own words. They’re super cool! The actual content is going to start rolling out really soon, and until then, any submissions you have would be Very Much Appreciated.
Here is the link to their current webpage, and here is a link to Rick Astley’s “Never Gonna Give You Up.”
In response to the ask I just received (which I am looking into right now!), I want to clarify: I am 100% open to answering fanfiction trope halacha questions as well as fantasy questions. Like, I am so down for it. Please ask me fanfiction trope questions.
blueandnoah asked:
hi! so i’m a non-jew, but i lived in a jewish residential building last year that was home to jews and non-jews alike. we were supposed to keep kosher in the dining room, but other areas in the house were fair game (i say this as an indicator of how liberal/not the house was). as a vegetarian there wasn’t much for me to eat at meat dinners so i’d have bread and margarine, but now that i know about ma’arit ayin, i wonder if i shouldn’t have done so. certainly one of the cooks once asked me if the margarine was butter (so it wasn’t totally clear what i was eating). so basically, as a non-jew obligated to keep kosher because of the rules of the house, should i also have followed ma'arit ayin, or is that a separate thing that didn’t apply to me? (i’m not living there anymore, so this is a question borne of curiosity and not of necessity.) thanks for any consideration =)
That’s a really thoughtful question! The quick answer: because of the fact that margarine is commonplace, eating margarine during meat meals wouldn’t have been a problem of ma’arit ayin even if you were Jewish.
Essentially, due to ma’arit ayin, some actions are prohibited despite not technically breaking halacha because they look like you’re breaking halacha - like, imagine you went to a Jewish community which had never seen soy burgers before and started eating one with cheese. They’d probably assume you were breaking kashrut, even if you weren’t, and so that wouldn’t be okay from a perspective of ma’arit ayin.
In the modern day, margarine is well-known. People use it a lot, and even if it initially looks a little strange, we can reasonably assume that you weren’t eating butter. (The cook may have asked because you weren’t Jewish and they weren’t sure if you had, I dunno, forgotten about milk and meat, but given the respectful tone of the ask I’m going to assume you were reasonably well-trusted in this area.)
One caveat: the sources I looked at about this discussed only how Jews should behave. It is possible that I have missed a nuance that comes with you not being Jewish, or missed something elsewhere. As usual, followers please feel free to respond/add to the post. And anyone who wants to ask me a question can always do so in my ask box or by messaging me.
Hey,
I’ve been thinking a bit about this blog and… okay, so I get a decent number of asks/messages, and they’re pretty split: many of them are “hey look at this cool supernatural thing! can we talk about it in Jewish/halachic terms!” or “hey I have this halachic question!” while others are “is this antisemitism?” or “are Jews white?” or “can I convert?” or “can I call myself part of x/y/z group?”
In the past, I’ve answered both types of questions, albeit occasionally uncomfortably. I am not going to do this going forward.
I will continue to happily answer all of the weird halacha and similar questions from a Jewish perspective as thoroughly as I have been doing so far (… and probably with the same time delays… I’m sorry…). But I do not have the mental or emotional energy, or the expertise, to answer the second group of questions. That is not what this blog is for.
Thank you all for understanding.
“It’s That time of year again!”
– Goy
But seriously. It’s time for Chabad Chanukah Mitzvah Tank Mivtzoyim - we go around in an RV, giving out menorahs, candles, doughnuts, and anything else for your basic Chanukah needs! If you’re interested, I’ll be posting our locations on here.
For jumblr guys in the brooklyn area who would like to participate and join us on the “Mitzvah Tank”, please send me a message!
“Tis’ the season…”
- Goy
But seriously. It’s time for Chabad Chanukah Mitzvah Tank Mivtzoyim - we go around in an RV, giving out menorahs, candles, doughnuts, and anything else for your basic Chanukah needs! If you’re interested, Please spread this around, and stay tuned in for our locations for each Night of Chanukah. We will be in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and doing a few daytime runs as well, where we’ll also give out shabbos candles and opportunities to put on Tefillin!
What kind of cheese do we eat on Pesach (Passover)?
Matza-rella!
Have a happy end to your Pesach everyone!
Anonymous asked:
Aaah sorry I sat on this for so long that is Good Positivity!
Anonymous asked:
Hey anon!
It took me a long time to answer this because I wanted to reach out to queer Orthodox people I knew first to see what they said, because I thought their voices might be more helpful than mine.
As I probably should have expected, they had a lot of different answers. The key point they all made, though, is this: nowhere in the Torah is attraction prohibited. It’s that simple. Nowhere in the Torah is attraction prohibited. If someone is trying to tell you that it’s bad for you to like the same gender, they don’t have anything close to a foot to stand on. (Also, I will fight them for you.)
In terms of further discussion - for example, saying attraction is okay works, but people tend to feel the need to express sexuality - I would recommend talking to people one-on-one. There are a lot of answers that speak to different people. On tumblr, a few people offered to talk to you over private-message, whose blogs I can tell you if you message me and I can connect you to other people as well off tumblr.
(I won’t give anyone else your information, if you’re worried about that.)
One last thing: being queer and Orthodox can be hard and lonely. I don’t like that that’s the case, and I hope that will change over my lifetime. I just… hope that you know that, no matter what, there are frum people who will fight for you, who will accept you without a second thought, who will share your simchas, no matter what your gender is and what gender you love.