Joshua Cypess Profile picture
He/his. PhD social scientist & Orthodox (former) pulpit Rabbi. We're all in this together. I'm also on yksb. #BringThemHome #Steelers #Mets

Mar 31, 2021, 36 tweets

37.01/ Week 37, March 29-April 2, 2021, thread begins here.

Week 36 is linked below

37.02/ This looks like a fruitful account. This particular entry has an intro that displays a kindred spirit IMO

37.03/ While I'm grateful that Coca-Cola has gone through the trouble to make their products kosher for #Passover, I cannot understand drinking Diet Coke willingly. Honestly, if unlabeled, I'd assume it was some drug-store's generic cola.

TL;DR: Diet coke is nasty.

37.04/ My son set a timer for waiting for the #NYM opening game. Baseball season hath arrived, dayyenu!
timeanddate.com/countdown/gene…

37.05/ Two things, so far, that I hope are permanent changes after the pandemic ends:

1. Total disability accommodations in work, school, and entertainment. In 2022, we should be able to zoom into everything we virtually accessed in 2020-21

2. Utter cessation of #AprilFoolsDay

37.06a/ #ReshetKeshet. I'm tired of the gaslighting, here's the truth: #Passover is difficult. It's meant to be. Your feelings & emotions are valid & true.

The cleaning is arduous & the demand for simcha is a recognized sacrifice.

Chametz is fine, see:
etzion.org.il/en/meaning-sha…

37.06b/ I call it 'gaslighting' because the mechanism of all mysticism is destabilizing propaganda that tells us we can't trust our senses.

The mystics malign chametz as 'satan' & say asceticism is optimal. We rationalists cry foul at this bunk.

37.07/ Amazon has decided to embrace evil. It's an Internet-era process I'll call 'Facebookization': once a company that does important & useful things becomes a monopoly, their lust for nihilistic greed squeezes every penny from its employees while gouging & hurting customers.

37.08/ Spellcheck... I love you, but I will never, ever use the word 'fir.' I mean 'for' 100% of the time.

I promise I will actively avoid that word even if I were suddenly interested in pine trees.

37.09/ #ReshetKeshet. Speaking of gaslighting (see 37.06), I need to find a filter for google (see 37.07) that allows me to search Torah subjects and not get flooded with messianic links & other supersessionist insanity.

Turn the other cheek & get the heck out of my religion.

37.10/ Ah, for the Venn diagram of periodic table punsters, see the original post & some top replies:

&


37.11/ First of all, it's #Passover , so, read the room guys. Second of all... a bagel? This is taco-bowl-cinco-de-mayo territory.

37.12/ Been saying this for years but I'm glad this guy gets the guff first. Metric system has many things going for it... except Celsius. Should've made boiling 1000 not 100?

37.13/ Excellent point!

BTW, I cannot understand why a suspended doper - and thus inveterate cheater - A-Rod has a job representing baseball. Systematized malfeasance.

37.14/ Would've preferred a safe (my wife's a pianist and this pic makes her sad), but I do acknowledge that people suffer for art

37.15/ Checks out:

37.16/ "schadendorphines" is an incredible word

37.17/ This is profound and true: the mass vaccination effort is the pinnacle of human civilization: mutual aid combined with the highest level of medical & communication technology and conducted by a functioning, caring government.

37.18/ Exactly. This is why we need to excoriate enablers along with the predators/perpetrators. Banning Trump (ym'sh) neutered him. De-platforming WORKS

37.19/ My daughter said her class had an argument over whether an image was of pink vs. purple. I immediately suggested "fuchsia" & showed it to her & she agreed.

Another triumph for my youthful love of the box of 64 Crayola crayons!

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuchsia_(…

37.20/ #ReshetKeshet thread about food on seder night. #Passover2021

37.21/ Filed under "the world can be weird," when I was trying to nail down the size of a 'pras' (see 37.20) I looked up 'egg olive pras size' and discovered a type of egg called an 'olive egger' and I can see the future page of gemara based on this

cluckin.net/olive-eggers-a…

37.22/ #ReshetKeshet HOLY GUACAMOLE! Hebrewbooks has just uploaded every volume of "אספקלריא" Aspaklaria, the self-described "compendium of Jewish thought." This is an amazing series that both expensive & huge. Now it's free & searchable!

data.hebrewbooks.org/updates/5781/n…

37.23/ This is good advice: 8 oz. of water for each piece of matzah. I've known people who had significant deleterious health effects from too much matzah. No joke. It's almost literally like eating glue, if you're not careful.

37.24/ As an orthodox rabbi, it's odd to see a controversy involving race insensitivity to NOT be about something orthodox did. As a sociologist, I'll say this type of appropriation seems sadly inevitable for a type of reflexive, unthinking syncretism.

37.25/ This is described well: "slippery slope arguments always pretend there's only one slope that's slippery"

Yet, there are logical reasons - cultural inertia, the inherent imbalance of wealth/resources/power of conservative forces - behind the fallacy

37.26/ Did not know this. Not surprised that the indifference was basically misogyny.

I'll look further into it b/c the Genovese murder has taken on mythic value and it'd be valuable to turn it into a model of the culture for enabling abuse

37.27/ The last line of this powerful piece by @MoiraDonegan is brilliant:

"After all, when men have personal experience with a subject, we do not call that bias. We call it expertise."

theguardian.com/commentisfree/…

37.28/ I'm running out of time before #Shabbat, but this Aesop fable reminds of the dvar Torah I gave about the 'rasha' of the four children. #Passover

read.gov/aesop/063.html

37.29/ No lies detected

37.30/ I hope the analysis in this short thread is correct, that the GOP prefers to legislate through their stolen courts because doing so in Congress exposes their terrible policies & is nearly always a failure

37.31/ Yet another reminder that even GOP operatives know how unpopular their platform is

37.32/ Why even read fiction when stuff like this is around us all the time.

37.33/ Exactly. I mean, I was reluctant to jump on the criticize Birx Bandwagon because of the inherent structural and cultural misogyny against women in power... but boy howdy she was terrible

37.34/ See below for a recent solution to the "kids Haggadahs have problems with non-diverse images of Jews and Egyptians" issue:

I haven't bought this #Haggadah, but I probably will for next year. #Passover2021

37.35/ It's getting close to Shabbat/Yom Tov, so #ShabbatShalom to all. Happy gobrux & mishing for those who do that stuff only on day 8.

@threadreaderapp please unroll.

@threader_app please compile.

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