HEY JEWS

i was thinking about buying the new jonathan safron foer haggadah but then i was like, "eh."

He was just here (in DC) on a haggaddah book tour, but I did not go out of my way to attend. His mom is a director at an uber-outreach 'gogue in town (6th and I). That's where I took my first Jew class!

Mordy, I was just reading over this thread and thinking you'd be the best rabbi ever.

invited to a seder this friday with a family of Israeli jewelry dealers

Good opportunity to sell some gold?

xxp thanks, that's really sweet to hear :) (and much nicer to hear from you than from my parents)

we're gonna go cuz their daughter is buddies with my daughter but honestly have no idea what kind of situation I'm walking into

I have had this thread bookmarked since it started and secretly lurking for 2 years, finally worked up the courage to say:

Hi Jews I love you all <3

Jews rule.

Oh wait should be on is this antisemitism thread

also quincie I will cosign yr Mordy Would Make the Best Rabbi statement.

how do we make this happen?

since it's passover, and i don't think i've ever told this story on ilx, this is the craziest passover chumra (aka stringency) i've ever heard. i had a rabbi in yeshiva whose custom it was to draw water into all his bathtubs and storage containers before the holiday and only use water to cook + drink from that supply. why didn't he use a sink during passover? because there's a (somewhat obscure) law about kashrut. what do you do if you drop something trief into something kosher? it depends on the item, but there's a concept called batul (nullification). most items are nullified if they're less than 1 in 60 (and some if they make up less than the majority). but bread on passover is not nullified no matter what the ratio. so he draws all the water before passover, when bread is still nullified by being 1 in 60, because if he drew water on passover, and there was even a microscopic crumb in it, it wouldn't be nullified and he would be eating bread on passover.

nb, this is totally crazy and even very religious ppl like my parents + my rabbi, etc, all think it's OTT

Interesting, Mordy. Your post led me to this Q&A on the "Mystic Sixty": http://ohr.edu/ask_db/ask_main.php/195/Q3/

The Talmud and Midrash state: "Fire is 1/60 of hell, honey is 1/60 of the manna, Shabbat is 1/60 of the World to Come, sleep is 1/60 of death, and dreams are 1/60 of prophecy. Dreams are the buds of prophecy."

On another note, I'm a little stressed b/c I haven't done my Seder food shopping (never mind cooking) yet!

Argh last minute Seder meal planning.

lol, so funny you posted that. i was inspired by the comedy poll thread to tell a friend tnite that watching movies is 1/60 of death (referencing that quote)

haha so many applications come to mind.

we're gonna go cuz their daughter is buddies with my daughter but honestly have no idea what kind of situation I'm walking into

― You big bully, why are you hitting that little bully? (Shakey Mo Collier),

Hopefully just a nice seder

mordy that story is so crazy but also kind of awesome

I love Jews. prob said so before but if i wasn't a bulletproof atheist and armchair Buddhist I would convert. also lazy and it takes a long time

I love us too. I love the way we know how to hold a grudge

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aZzZu8nLUNI

On another note, I'm a little stressed b/c I haven't done my Seder food shopping (never mind cooking) yet!

Argh last minute Seder meal planning.

^^^ this.

Per usual, I forgot how soon it was until it was nearly upon me. And I'm still holding myself to my four-year tradition of hosting a seder chez moi instead of just spending one night with each side of the family.

All that and finals and term papers.

Good luck with that Alex! It's okay to get some of them store-bought macaroons, really.

Well I've got my shopping list ready at least now.

I've decided that the real miracle of Passover is how many freaking matzo balls you can make out of like a thimbleful of matzo meal. It's insane and downright spooky. Probably has something to do with that whole 1/60 ratio thing Mordy brought up ...

I was just reading about the chametz thing. I wonder if walking round my neighbourhood tonight ppl will try and offload free bread on me, ha.

See gbx I also considered myself a bulletproof atheist until I learned that I could embrace Spinoza/Kaplan/Reconstructionist Judaism with nary a change to my non-embrace of what my ex-Catholic husband refers to as "sky faries" and my hairdresser calls "Space God." These guys basically re-defined divinity in way that makes sense to me.

Actually I would like Rabbi Mordy's thoughts on Spinoza/Kaplan/Reconstructionism. Very much.

I suppose I should at least familiarize myself with Spinoza, he seems to come up all the time

Also, I would like to repost this:

Hey Jews I wrote a little passover ditty, sung to the chorus of "Eye of the Tiger":

It's the
Bread of affliction
It's the bread of the Jews
Risen bread--it's not kosher during Pe-sach
And my boss--says "be careful! It is con-sti-pa-ting"
I-don't-care-I-just-ate-sev-en sheeeeeeeeeets
Of the mat-zah

― quincie, Sunday, April 12, 2009 9:44 PM (11 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

― quincie, Tuesday, March 23, 2010 2:16 PM (2 years ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^^^

See gbx I also considered myself a bulletproof atheist until I learned that I could embrace Spinoza/Kaplan/Reconstructionist Judaism with nary a change to my non-embrace of what my ex-Catholic husband refers to as "sky faries" and my hairdresser calls "Space God." These guys basically re-defined divinity in way that makes sense to me.

― quincie, Thursday, April 5, 2012 7:40 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Well, except that I started off with parents raised orthodox-ish who then went secular, went back to an orthodox shul when they had kids and then left for a reform one because they couldn't answer the 'why can't i sit with mum' question i posed at 5. And then I proceeded to keep going to an orthodox-ish after-school hebrew school, be more religious than most of my immediate family, seriously considered going to (reform) rabbinical school for a good six years and then realized that calling or no calling, no matter how well my personal theology makes sense in my head, being a queer rabbi who thinks the human search for/concept of the divine is more important that the question/fact of G-d's existence and (at least compared to institutional Judaism in North America) is pretty outside the norm on Israel issues probably wouldn't really work out too well. But a lot Jewish ritual and theology are too meaningful to me personally to be to just abandon - and not in a cultural Jew Woody Allen and bagels way - like in a....tallis and fasting and prayer way...

'religious Jewish not-quite-atheist' doesn't really make sense, so i tend to go with under-constructionist.

But yeah - Spinoza/Kaplan/Reconstructionism are intriguing to me a lot of the time.

Overheard from a haggard mom shopping for last-minute Passover supplies at the local supermarket: "This would be soooo much easier if we were in New York."

I hear her! By the time I went down to my neighbour kosher supermarket to get some maror the only ones left were smaller then my forearm.

I can't find shitty Manischewitz!

Me neither. :(

At the second Giant I went I found stuff. Heard a story on PRI radio about how Israeli matzah, supposedly made by employees getting paid at a lower rate, is being marketed heavily in the US. But at the Giant grocery store I went to, the Streit's US made matzah was cheaper. Now they have whole wheat and organic.

Matzah ball mix refridgerating for an hour, soup cooling so I can skim the schmaltz, chicken strained from soup to remove bones, etc., roast on hour 3 of slow-cooking. Might actually pull off the Pesach-in-one-day adventure.

Oh shit I have no matzah. Will pick some up on the booze run en route home.

WaPo had an article about Passover retreats today; apparently they are gaining in popularity for folks who want all of the kosher-for-pesach and none of the work.

We're taking Hiltons full of orthodox jews here.

Wow. That's intense.

Am I a failure if, unlike my mother, I am incapable of cutting maror into immaculate sticks of white horseradish of identical length and width?

They just don't look *pretty*.

love that ditty quincie

http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/passover-retreats-are-designed-to-tempt-the-busy-modern-jewish-family/2012/04/05/gIQA5OMTyS_story.html

here's an excerpt:

Dozens of hotels, from the French Riviera to the Florida coast to Pennsylvania’s Amish Country, are being temporarily transformed into Passover getaways by armies of kosher experts.

Cruise ship nightclubs and hotel conference rooms have been converted into seder spaces. Rabbis have blessed special boundary markers, usually meant for Orthodox neighborhoods, around resorts.

The retreats, most of which have appeared over the past 15 years or so, lure people with golf, religious singers and mentalists, along with lectures on Israel and parenting. One retreat in Connecticut is staffed by five matchmakers for parents seeking a nice Orthodox mate for their child. At the same time, Passover retreats are also cropping up among less observant Jews who are motivated not by kosher rules — which they likely don’t follow — but by a desire to kick-start their faith and rituals.

For Lehman, 66, the decision to ditch the conventional for hotels (in Florida, the Poconos and the New Jersey coast) has made Passover a richer time for her siblings, in-laws, children and grandchildren, who are spread around the world. They hike and visit. What they don’t do is cook or clean.

“Last year, the place in Orlando was across the street from Sea World,” said her husband, Phil. “The kids loved it.”

On Friday, the Lehmans will drive to the Lancaster Host Resort & Conference Center in the Amish countryside in Pennsylvania. For 10 days, the resort will be filled with 1,000 mostly Orthodox Jews marking Passover. Promotional materials mention tennis, swimming (men and women separately), video games and nearby outlet malls. The Lancaster retreat, which began four years ago, is thought to be the closest large Passover resort to the District.

TBH that article also described a passover hiking retreat in the desert outside Moab, which sounded pretty cool.

Hey Jews I just dled "The Hasty Haggadah" on my kindle. That plus non-kosher restaurant seder should have me pretty well covered for a non-jew.

whole wheat matzah in matza bri is not as good as regular matzah

hey quincie - i keep wanting to talk about spinoza but i'm put off by the amount i want to write and the time it'll take to do justice to it. very short version is that i love spinoza, and am really only a believer bc of a mixture of him, gnosticism (as distilled by 17th century kaballah + the altar rebbe's chassidut), and abraham joshua heschel's torah min ha'shamayim. i'm not quite as enamored with kaplan + the reconstructionist movement, tho i once attended a reconstructionist yom kippur service. just a little too flighty and not theologically (or intellectually) rigorous enough to really appeal to me (at one point they asked everyone to turn to their neighbors and bless them to have the "serenity to accept the things you cannot change, / Courage to change the things you can, / And wisdom to know the difference." blargh, And it was at that point my darlings, that marks the first place in The Service at which Tonstant Weader fwowed up.

anyway, tho i would love to talk about spinoza (particularly panantheism - the idea that G-d is both the entirety of nature and above it*), the altar + esp mittler rebbe who have these wild narratives about hishtadlus (the progression + mechanics of reality) and heshel who basically gave me my get out of jail free card for belief** despite the fact that the torah is full of crazy stuff that i can't sign off on (like stoning homosexuals). but this'll have to wait until after passover when i've got a lot more time i think

* i was just noticing/reaffirming in the haggadah last night when G-d says, "me and not an angel, me and not a messenger" how important it is that spinoza advanced pantheism to panantheism so that you can have an active creator who is simultaneously filling all of creation and also above it, acting in it day to day. religion without a creator that i can actually ask to do things doesn't work for me at all.

** very short version bc i realize i can't just say that and not explain it - he says there's a heavenly torah and an earthly torah and that the second one is a translation of the first. he locates in the revelation narrative this moment where a suprahuman document is put into human words - particularly the words of desert-dwelling israelites. so we can simultaneously accept the torah as the closest thing we have to this heavenly document of perfection, while still being wary at any translation that would've made sense to the times + ethics of ancient Judea, but that seems ethically problematic to us today. it kinda gives us the space to radically change + alter things that bother us, but without harming the essential platonic form. (modifying this can also help deal with all kinds of historical evidence that traditional apologetics can't deal with - aka documentary hypothesis, etc.) this is already getting lengthy tho and i realize there's like a thousand more things i want to say about it, so this is pretty much why i didn't want to start discussing until after chag. but anyway, happy passover all! :)

overheard at my family's seder last night "google the 10 commandments, somebody."

^^^lol

Mordy, thanks for the quick hit, looking forward to more.

I managed to secure the last box of normal (well, "thin, unsalted") matzah at the local grocery last night; have managed to hold myself to two sheets so far. More to come at tonight's non-kosher restaurant seder conducted by two non-Jews.

can i just say, i will never understand why people buy whole wheat matzo, or egg matzo for that reason.

there was a minor revolt last night when all the "good" matzo got eaten about 15 minutes in

egg matzo isn't that bad

just not my thing