Thread by @Delafina777

I actually have a theory about this, and I hadn't thought about it in relationship to gender before, but it meshes well.

And that is that Judaism creates binaries *in order* to collapse them.

https://twitter.com/dirtstachedyke/status/1398762685874032645

Like, in theory, Judaism is one of the most binary worldviews ever, right? The whole shtick is about separating things into binaries. From Day One, literally. God separates light from darkness. That's how creation gets underway.

And it seems like the text is saying that the only way to manifest reality is to divide it into oppositional binaries.

And as far as Jewish practice, it's all about separating things into the sacred and the mundane. Time, actions, etc.

But *why* do we divide time and our actions and our modes of being into the sacred and the mundane?

It's to *find* the sacred *in* the mundane.

Like, nothing's more mundane than eating bread, right? Bread's been a staple food for most of the planet since civilization got off the ground.

So why say a blessing before eating bread?

It's primarily about being mindful. Not just eating it without thinking. It's gratitude practice.

Or, to put it another way, it's about making sure we take a moment to feel wonder at it. "who brings forth bread from the earth" -- what? bread doesn't grow out of the earth?

Grain grows, and isn't the cycle of seed to fruit pretty miraculous itself? All that coming from one little seed. People collect it. People make flour. People bake it into bread.

Suddenly the distinction between natural process and human activity is collapsed.

It's the two of them together that create this everyday miracle. What we understand and can do, and what happens invisibly to us and without us.

We divide things into the sacred and the mundane so we can find the sacred *in* the mundane. (And looping back again, recognize the sacred as everyday.)

It's like a string vibrating to create a single note.

What you see isn't the motion back and forth between the two sides. It's a single, if blurry, string. What you hear isn't wavering between two pitches, but a single pure note.

It's both oscillation between two poles AND singularity.

Every binary in Judaism is basically doing a Schrodinger.

Which seems to me to help explain why it meshes so well with queerness.

It's hard to talk about this in a way that doesn't sound like mysticism at best and straight-up woo at worst, but I can't emphasize how mainstream and everyday it actually is to Jewish practice.