Not just because I was born in the sidra of Korach is it one of my favorite Torah portions.

The back-to-back portions of the Spies and Korach orient us in eternity--because their errors are the errors of the ancients and of the moderns. The spies are ancient in mindset. The Talmud says the spies claimed "Even the Master of the House cannot remove his vessels from there;" that is, the report for which they were punished was a report questioning G-d's power to conquer the Land.

And what's stranger, it works!

Alright I'll explain the whole "Jewish tunnel in Brooklyn" thing to you with the proper context 🧵 In the beginning, G-d created the heavens and the earth.

This made many people very upset and was generally regarded as a bad move. 1/?

lil' 🧵re:atheism

on the Jewish view, Idolatry is not a denial of G-d but the belief that there are other uncreated powers -- or to put it existentially, it is the idea that G-d merely exists, rather than is the single ground of all existence there is also something "tantamount to idolatry" called shituf, with different roots and different applications. shituf literally means partnership. it's not as bad as idolatry but still forbidden. It says that though G-d is the single ground of all existence, others help.

A Chassidic story for you to take into Shabbos:

Before Reb Yitzchak Vorker left this world, he promised his son that he would contact him from heaven and tell him how things were for him in Gan Eden. But four weeks passed, and his son didn’t hear from him. He couldn’t understand what was going on, so he went to his father’s best friend, Reb Menachem Mendel of Kotsk, and said: “Rebbe, I’m so worried about my holy father. He promised to come back and speak to me, if only in a dream. But it’s been four weeks, and I haven’t heard anything from him.

Community note desire for headshots cannot overwhelm the multi-decade mimetic inertia of internet reddit brain about religion

https://twitter.com/eTeacherBible/status/1680841262604382209

(the community note is full of it, and eventually the current academic orthodoxy about the Bible's alleged composition (a particularly weird 19th century German hatchet hatchet job, among many) will soon see its last sunrise)

I recently attended a meal with a ~25 yr old law school grad who's about to take the bar exam.

Questions they asked in earnest:
-How does the atom bomb work, like isn't the air in my hands made of atoms right now?
-Why were people so worried about communism? -Why would anyone need thousands of atomic bombs?
-"Why did killing King Ferdinand start the war?"
-Why were people against the theory of relativity?
-Why did the US get involved in a war in Korea?
-Was the US really on the same side as China, against Japan?

I think the euros have never quite been able to wrap their head around American culture not manifesting as operas (though there are those too)

https://twitter.com/SchattigeDer/status/1675786150168895488

"you mean you just do culture, without living in the same village for a thousand years and running down Jews on your horse? But what do you even write about?"

There is something just straight idolatrous about insisting the object formed by one's hands is greater than oneself, and then defining oneself down to accomplish it I always return to the teaching of the Chasam Sofer, who explained that idolators shaved their entire heads in order to reflect their idols, in which they could not recreate convincing hair. They reduced themselves to convincingly argue for the superiority of their handiwork.

Here's a thought - what happens if you have an itch for being allowed to think based on intuition and experience but feel precluded for whatever reason from "spirituality", left-coded things, or feminine-coded things?

https://twitter.com/kilovh/status/1653752499248025600

You'd get a tidal wave of base village essentialism. People with equally incoherent and equally feel-good (for them) "thinking hobbies" but centered around what are perceived to be traditional hierarchies. Expounding the simple but inevitable consequences of formal essence

Thinking of my two adventures in Meron on Lag Ba'Omer...one of the "let's not do that again but I'm glad I did it" things ofc that's what I said after the first time too...

Per some scholars, ancient Judaism's most remarkable trait was its protean formlessness such that it was able to simply absorb the ideas of every single other ancient culture whole cloth and become a totally new and unrelated thing called "rabbinic Judaism" Whatever Judaism was before the Rabbis, it was able to become not a "sacrificial cult" and extremely roman and also hermetic but actually zoroastrian however quite helenist, all of those cultures having actual legitimate flavor in the BCE years,

THEY'RE WISER ON AVERAGE (IN THE TRIVIAL SENSE THAT THEY AREN'T STARVING AND HAVE READ A BOOK) BECAUSE THEY LIVE IN THE RUINS OF A CIVILIZATION BUILT OVER MILLENNIA ON THE ANCIENT WISDOM BRIAN In the non-trivial sense, Brian is *quantifying* *wisdom* it hurts me just to read it

oh dear

https://twitter.com/uncledoomer/status/1620154398851874817

I have to give reddit its due, at least there you would find ten thousand nerds to downvote and explain thoroughly why this is a terrible idea

it may not seem like it, the senses may at first rebel against the notion, but this is a selfish demand for Jews to become more selfish. and less Jewish.

https://twitter.com/stilehorse/status/1620197018852528128

Jews didn't react to Whoopi and Ye as some kind of moral opprobrium, "bad things are happening and we as a society need to do better," a statement that requires the speaker to stand above the object of their criticism

I know every track on't is a masterpiece but this is a masterpiece

I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a better four-track album ending than Climbing Up the Walls -> No Surprises -> Lucky -> The Tourist

It's soooo good

https://twitter.com/neon_evangayion/status/1619462796051353602

A bowl of weetbix with warm milk, a rusk and a piping cup of tea is bliss

it's not any particular theory that's most at fault, it's the second-order hubris of thinking the whole world is captured, that there's a network of knowledge that (apart from particulars that don't matter by definition) embraces the universe without remainder it's the ability to say "it was the same story as everywhere else" without guilt or shame

"Rabbi" in the Twitter username is a bigger red flag than "PhD" man

https://twitter.com/Mivasair/status/1619500080125595650

I have more soi dissant rabbis blocked than any other group profession

Sefaria is kinda killing it lately

https://twitter.com/SefariaProject/status/1619757792058802178

I mean it in the positive sense. I know some of you elitists are reading this and thinking "yeah they're killing it, if it is any appropriate respect for torah"

Whenever someone starts praising my religion for the sustainable group dynamics I just mentally substitute the mafia for them Having to deal with this new thing where some rabid adherent to evolutionary psychology drains humankind of all humanity and declares the highest aspiration to be mere self-perpetuation and then STILL can't escape the qualities of the old religions and had to read them back in

have some free time tonight, so here's a list of reasons why you should be extremely skeptical any time someone says your MIND is your BRAIN

(like dr. dennett here) 1. Your sovereign subjectivity. Who is this guy, as some collection of mere sensations, to tell YOU what YOUR direct experience means? Literally anything he says will come through that experience. He will never be close enough to your experience to be an authority on it.