Thread by @ZoharAtkins

New essay just dropped!

Unfamiliar Territory etzhasadeh.substack.com/p/unfamiliar-t…

"Revelation is an other-worldly event that should motivate our love for the world. Torah teaches us that our love should both include and transcend our need for the familiar."

“The essence of home only reaches its luminosity abroad.”

(Martin Heidegger, “The Language of Johann Peter Hebel”)

“People are social and political creatures who belong to groups, but they cannot be reduced to them. Read charitably, the Torah’s foregrounding of 12 tribes suggests that Israel must contain multitudes if it is to avoid the pitfalls of Babel”

“It’s easier to cry against hegemony and essentialism than to thwart them, because if you cut off the head of a large monster ten smaller ones grow back—and few can or want to spend their lives decapitating monsters”

“The Torah wisely offers us a split screen. On one side, it shows us human nature as it mostly is—tribal, kin-based, self-involved. On the other, it shows us human nature as it occasionally is—broad, values-based, other-centric.”

“If we are bound exclusively to family than we are condemned to the lowest common denominator of whatever it happens to believe and value (even when it’s wrong).”

“But if were are not bound by family at all, we lose accountability, tethering, a primordial sense of relationship, story, and trans-historical time, that are portals to the divine.“

“The Torah isn’t anti-family nor is it simply pro-family. Rather, it highlights a potential tension between the family (the given, the familiar) and Torah (the choice, the transcendent.”

The Midrash records that Torah is given in the wilderness so that no group can claim it as exclusively theirs. The Torah cannot be owned; it is a radically unsettling force that disturbs our sense of belonging and ownership...”