Was reminded today that Judaism actually has a ritual for reuniting with friends you haven't seen in a long time.
If 30 days or more have passed since you have seen your friend, upon seeing them, you recite the following blessing:
Blessed are you, Eternal One, source of all being, who as sustained us and brought us to this moment.
If it has been 12 months or more since you have seen your friend, you say the following blessing:
Blessed are you, Eternal One, source of all being, who revives the dead.
That one hit hard. We've been buried in our homes for the past year, and we've lost so many people, and any one of us could have died from COVID.
What if we let ourselves treat seeing each other in person again as miraculous?
What if we truly treated these reunions not as a given, but let ourselves really feel that there was a possibility that we might not have gotten them?
What would we want to build between us that was new? What would we want to let fall away?
Guys, especially, would you build something new with your best friends? Would you let our culture's disapproval of affectionate physical contact between men fall away?
And for everyone: if you treat this as a second chance, what would you try to create with it? What intimacy that you wanted before would you ask for, if you were dead, and got a second chance?
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Hey, fellow elder millennials, if you're wondering why your salary seems high on paper but you have no money, it could be because you're still thinking in 2000 dollars, and 2023 dollars are very different.
I have a theory that our expectations for how much money is worth get stuck around how much it was worth when we first started having to pay for our own living expenses.
Obviously that varies--kids who grow up poor probably have to think about it a lot earlier--but for a lot of people my age, I suspect the first time we really had to think about, like, a food budget was when we went to college.
Yeah, the thing about diversity is it doesn’t mean any particular way of being is superior full stop. Different ways may do better in *some circumstances.*
Being different from the norm can feel superior because your way of being is *underutilized.*
The thing you learn if your brain doesn’t work like the standard, when you dig into how the world isn’t designed for you, and then apply what you’ve learned about yourself to observing other people?
There are no normies.
Everyone is a mosaic, and I don’t think there’s any one of us for whom every last piece fits the standard.
And if the ways in which you’re different are ones that are denigrated, it’s very tempting to view your difference as making you complex and deep where others are shallow.
So, don’t take it from me: take it from someone with a PhD: the way we conceptualize “religion” means that the only religion that exists is Christianity (and *maybe* Islam). (Thanks, @maklelan !) (1/x)
This is why I generally use the term “tradition” or “culture” or “practice” when talking about Jewish stuff.
As I keep saying, the religious/secular distinction is a Christian framework, and it is—sometimes explicitly, sometimes unacknowledged—a tool of colonialism.
The idea that you can just pull out the “religion” module of a culture and replace it with a different one (if you’re doing Christian evangelism) or none at all (if you’re doing antitheist evangelism) is… not how cultures work.
IIRC correctly, there's a correlation between higher IQ and higher rates of depression and other unhappiness--as one of my therapists said, "it's harder for smart people to figure out to be happy."
Like, we have a habit, in our fiction, of characterizing happiness as foolishness or oblivious. Simple people are happy because they don't know better.
But identifying what *actually makes us happy* is an emotional intelligence challenge most of us fail.
And almost everything in life that we pursue is a proxy for happiness: we think love will make us happy, we think fame or recognition will make us happy, we think money will make us happy.
We sacrifice a lot of things that might make us happy to pursue happiness proxies.
I’m hardly the first person to say this, but Luke’s gloss on the lost sheep parable that there’s more rejoicing over the repentant sinner than the 99 who didn’t stray has probably done more harm to the world than anything in the NT other than the Great Commission. So toxic.
Like imagine being a child abused by your youth pastor and hearing in essence that having abused you is PART of why he’s more spiritually valuable than you are.
After all, one needs to sin in order to repent. Combine that with the Christian idea that suffering is ennobling and not only is your abuser using your pain as a necessary component in his spiritual elevation, but he’s doing you a favor by giving you a chance to suffer nobly.
So—and this is not about Jamie Foxx, I’m not touching that one other than to point out that you should prioritize listening to Black Jews over anyone else on it—let’s talk about why the figure/story of Judas is antisemitic by itself, and why that’s so invisible to most Christians
The reason some Jewish scholars have suggested that the story of Judas is a later, ahistorical, and intentionally antisemitic addition is that it *doesn’t actually make sense* in the story.
It certainly is dramatic and emotionally evocative—conspiracy! betrayal! tragic end for a guilty villain!—but if you actually *read the story,* it’s superfluous.