Glibertarians.com 2018 Archive

Category: Jews

  • The Jew Brings Christmas Morning Links

    The Jew Brings Christmas Morning Links

    There’s a concept in Judaism you’ve likely heard of called “shabbos goy.” And here’s the background to understand that concept.

    In Judaism, the five books of Moshe (Torah) are supposedly IT, the words and deeds of Yahweh, directly. And the laws of Yahweh. As I’ve talked about in other Jewsday posts, over time Pharisaical Judaism arose, wherein each word and phrase in the Torah is subject to tortured analysis and a lot of new rules set by rabbis. Curiously, those rules often seem to benefit certain people, as well as establish the power of rabbis; the kosher laws are a perfect example, with varying interpretations and complex new (compared to 2000 BCE) rules in force creating much opportunity for inspection and certification firms, not to mention rabbinical counsels. Here’s an example: the Torah says that the meat of a calf cannot be cooked in its mother’s milk. Generations of Pharisaical rabbis have turned this into a complex set of regulations requiring two sets of dishes, strict separation of any dairy product from any meat product, ritual purifications, and true biological weirdness (think of how dairy and beef are raised in the modern world). The Jews who feel that the Torah says what the Torah says, and fuck rabbis trying to complexify it and work out loopholes, are referred to as Karaites and are a minuscule minority.

    I think some parallels are familiar and striking.

    In any case, Pharisaical thinking resulted in the institution of the shabbos goy, a non-Jew hired to perform labor on the sabbath that Yahweh forbade Jews to do. But it’s a typical rabbinical workaround, interpret the sabbath as benefiting and binding on Jews, then rule that it’s OK to make some goy do your work for you, but with a whole set of rules and loopholes around that as well. And don’t get me started on how the rabbis have interpreted the word “work.” Here’s an example of the reasoning of one orthodox Pharisaical school of thought, just so you can get a flavor of how convoluted and ridiculous this shit is. So an orthodox jew (who can’t operate light switches on shabbos) can’t say to the goy, “Please tun on the light.” But it’s A-OK for him to say, “It’s dark in here,” and the goy will then know to turn on the light. See, we have the rules worked out!

    So here it is, the goy holiday, and you guys don’t have a word for the opposite of a shabbos goy, me. A Noel Hebe? Well that’s OK, you deserve a day off and it’s going to be a slow day here anyway.

    After nodding to the wonderful Glibertarians’ Christmas Tradition, let’s do birthdays and links.

    Birthdays are rich and thick today. Genius-among-geniuses and religious crank Isaac Newton; pioneer jazz trombonist Kid Ory; believe it or not, Robert Ripley; iconic film actor Humphrey Bogart; one of my huge influences, Gerhard Herzberg; television auteur, discoverer of The Shat, and remarkably short fellow Rod Serling; and ultra-dreamy Canadian Justin “Zoolander” Trudeau.

    Now on to the news.

     

    Progs love to talk about the death of the middle class. And they’re right. But of course, the cause is… Prog policies.

     

    A news story with much interesting (((sociology))) in it. And a good flavor of why the orthodox are highly unpopular in Israel, yet most are afraid to buck them.

     

    For years, I have had a set of rules about movies which generally works for me. One of them is, “Any movie by Robert Zemeckis is going to suck donkey balls.” Apparently, I was ahead of the curve.

     

    Why is hockey so violent? Is it the pent-up rage in Canadians? The effect of puck fumes on the human brain? Or is skating itself inherently violent?

     

    STEVE SMITH SIGHTING.

     

    More Trump-inspired antisemitism. Wait, what? But it’s OK, his career is in no danger because of the Grievance Pyramid.

     

    Commie Pope is commie. This is my shocked face. All yours, Catholics, hope you’re enjoying it.

     

    Team Blue continues to eat its own.

     

    Why anti-war folks like me are warming up to Rand Paul. The Left is, of course, appalled and are doubling down on their newly-found war boners. Hey, y’all are welcome to volunteer to go fight whatever war you want; you DID say that if Trump won, you’d leave the US. Here’s a way to feed two birds with one scone.

     

    As much contempt as I have for Jerry Brown, at least he seems actually concerned with criminal justice. Kudos, and I wish every governor was as concerned with making sure that that people in prison are actually guilty rather than procedurally guilty.

     

    OK, which of you is this? Fess up, you’re among friends.

     

    How can anyone think that corporate welfare is inherently corrupt? The Tobacco Commission????

     

    Old Guy Music today is my favorite Christmas song. SP tells me, “You’re putting up too many Jeffrey Foucault songs. People won’t click them.” This is a brilliant song, so please prove her wrong. I get chills every time I hear it and think about the wonderful poetry.

    The star up above the 5th Avenue Christmas tree
    Is shining tonight through the cold and the rain
    To light all the faces in the live nativity
    Down on the floor of the stock exchange

    Dark is the night, cold is the ground
    The armies march out to defend
    And the Ghost Repeaters of the revelators
    Are singing “Peace on Earth and Good Will to all Men”

     

  • The Reason for the Season

  • A Very Special Jewsday Tuesday Tradition: Chanukkah

    [Editor’s note: Yes, this is a repeat of last year’s piece. But, don’t think of it like a tired, old, overdone rerun. Think of it more as a new Glibertarians choliday tradition! (TRADITION!) ~ SP]

     
     

    Yes, it’s that time of year again, when Jews all over the world celebrate their most treasured and most holy days… well, not really, but I’ll Jewsplain.

    First, the part everyone knows: this is supposedly the commemoration of the Maccabees doing something or other. But here’s the catch- Jews do not accept the books of the Maccabees as canonical and derive their understanding of Chanukkah and the Maccabees from the Talmud. The usual reason given is that the Macs came along too late, the canon was completed. But it may be deeper than that, so let’s start with the familiar parts.

    The whole megillah happened around 2200 years ago when I was just a wee yeled. The Middle East was a seething cauldron of petty rivalries, bloody wars, and conquests back and forth, unlike today’s quiet and civilized environment. The two major warring empires were the Ptolemies and the Seleucids, who were proxies for various swarthy European types. There were some Macedonians, Romans, and Persians in the mix as well. Like I said, it was a mess. And as usual, the Jews were right in the middle of the shit because of their geographic location and because Yahweh liked fucking with us.

    If you read through the histories of that era, it’s a confusing mess because so many of the warring monarchs had the same name, with only nicknames and numbers allowing you to tell them apart. But the overwhelming cultural bit of this was the spread of Greek civilization, which brought things like rationality, philosophy, mathematics, and science to the gibbering tribal masses of Asia and Northern Africa. Unlike the tribal kingdoms, the Greeks were very big on universal culture and values, as well as a surprising tolerance for other ways of life- they basically were the first assimilationists, and in ways that would seem very familiar to Americans.

    Now, the official story is that those awful Greeks, who at that point in history ruled over Palestine, had a culture that was so attractive that the Jews started assimilating, speaking Greek, adopting airs of tolerance, eating pork, wrestling naked, and wearing clip-on foreskins (that is not a joke, they really had them). This, of course, could not be tolerated by the Jews, goes the usual narrative. And then, in a total reversal of Greek policy, the latest tyrant, Antiochus IV (Epiphanes), was said to have outlawed Jewish religious practices and forced everyone who hadn’t adopted Greek culture and mores to do so by clipping on foreskins and chowing down on ham (anticipating the later American Jewish custom of eating pork by dismissing it as “Chinese food”). So after the usual litany of atrocities, which prominently featured defilement of the Temple in Jerusalem, they naturally rebelled. The Talmud gives its version of one of the atrocities, the story of Hannah and her sons. One at a time, Antiochus ordered each of Hannah’s sons to eat bacon, and each son in turn refused, shouted a slogan about their devotion to Yahweh, and was then killed for maintaining their religious righteousness. After watching each of her sons in turn being executed, Hannah threw herself off a building in a fit of grief and madness. An inspiring tale, nu?

    The familiar tale continues with the great Judah Maccabee leading his ragtag band of righteous Jews into a successful rebellion against the heathen Greeks, driving them out of Palestine, then rededicating the Temple by the use of various priestly rituals. Note the last. The miracle of Chanukkah was the burning of a ritual lamp in the Temple for eight days while consuming only one day’s worth of oil, which is all they had in terms of ritually pure oil.

    As a libertarian sort, I’ve learned to be a bit cynical and assume that any story like this glides past unsavory truths. I also assume that cupidity rules and is usually the driver of events. So, with that in mind…

    At that time, there were multiple schisms among the Jews- the famous Life of Brian scene about the Judean People’s Front versus the People’s Front of Judea was not entirely a joke. Three of the major factions were the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Hellenizers. The Pharisees and Sadducees fought over who really had control of Jewish law, with the Pharisees maintaining that the rabbis were really the ones to control things, the Sadducees insisting that it was the Temple priests, and the Hellenizers being the Reform Jews of their time, incorporating Greek practice and language into the Temple rituals and eschewing the fundamentalist interpretations of Jewish law (yes, this is an oversimplification, but the big picture always is).

    Judah Maccabee was the son of Mattathias, who was a Temple priest and a fundamentalist. Within the priesthood, the Hellenizers and fundamentalists struggled, with the Hellenizers having won out. Their priest, Menelaus, deposed the fundamentalist priest, Jason, by paying off Antiochus. This was a good investment since this gave Menelaus control of the Temple treasures and receipts. Mattathias, being a fundy allied with Jason was clearly a loser here. In his view, anyone not following the religion in the way his faction thought proper should be executed and they certainly did their share of killing. And indeed, one of the outcomes of the rebellion was the execution of Jason as a heretic and traitor to the One True Faith.

    So a cynical person might look at this as less of a rebellion against Antiochus, but more of an internal struggle between factions fighting for power and treasure. The winners write history, so the fact that the Greeks mostly didn’t interfere with religious practice before or after the Maccabean rebellion but somehow Antiochus was the exception and tried to wipe out Judaism could possibly be… well you know what self-serving storytellers and drama queens those Middle East folk can be. The cynic might look at historic parallels and see the Maccabees as akin to the modern Taliban, fighting against the encroachment of civilization (literal, in this case) in favor of a strict and violent fundamentalism that just coincidentally put them in power. And that’s what we celebrate for Chanukkah.

    Fun fact: the Hebrew word for a Jew who has given up strict religious practice is “apikoros,” which derives from the Greek “Epicure.”

    One more cynical observation: why the books of the Maccabees are not canonical among the Jews despite lots of slaughter and a Yahweh miracle. Although the usual excuse is timing, someone miiiiight notice that the decisions about canonicity and religious practice were made by the faction which survived and ended up controlling Judaism- the Pharisees, bitter foes of the Sadducees, with whom the Maccabees, as priests who got their share of Temple treasure and tribute, were aligned. But that would be overly cynical, right?

    Fun fact: Judah Maccabee was the first Jew to make contact with the Romans, seeking assistance in his fight against the Greeks. As readers of Matthew will note, this did not end well for the Mac family.

    Fun fact: although potato latkes seem like the canonical Chanukkah food in the US and Europe, in Israel they’re almost unknown. The treat of choice is… jelly donuts. And why is that? Because the bakers in Israel have traditionally been part of state-sponsored trade unions. And although latkes are easy to make at home and best served fresh, donuts are more difficult and are much easier to pick up at a (union) bakery. Just look for the union filling.

    And speaking of latkes, here’s the way to do it right.

  • Jewsday Tuesday: Is Thanksgiving kosher?

    “You shall not do as they do in the land of Egypt, where you lived, and you shall not do as they do in the land of Canaan, to which I am bringing you. You shall not walk in their statutes.”

    The excerpt is from Leviticus 18, and is often interpreted by the Orthodox to mean, “Don’t do goyish shit.” That means no Christmas trees, Easter eggs, or… Thanksgiving. Now indeed, it’s not as simple as that, and various Orthodox authorities come down on both sides of the “Can Jews do the turkey thing?” issue. The folks who wish to avoid the controversy figure, “Well, we always have a Shabbos dinner on Friday night, so we’ll just do all the turkey, green bean casserole, candied sweet potatoes, and cranberry sauce then, and Yahweh will be none the wiser.”

    Don’t try to fool Yahweh. He can get pretty nasty if he feels like you’re trying to get around his commandments.

    But really, is that commandment all that it’s claimed to be? And is Thanksgiving kosher?

    We’ll start with the latter. First, could Thanksgiving be considered a religious holiday? If so, it’s definitely forbidden to celebrate. One could say, nah, it’s a totally secular American thing, no Jesus, no crosses. On the other hand, its origins are in religious Protestant practice. Two Jews, three opinions, and of course, rabbis have come down on both sides of this. However, most lean toward, “Not Christian, at least not explicitly, so we can pretend. Turkey is kosher if a Jew slaughterer offed it. And as long as we’re doing the dinner all kosher-food-like and aren’t sitting at a table with people who are going to worship idols like Jesus, we’re cool with Yahweh.” Whew.

    But wait! Some rabbis have pointed out that because Thanksgiving follows the Christian calendar (“Third Thursday in November”) and is not at a fixed date according to the Jewish (lunar) calendar, the default is, “It’s goyish and we shouldn’t go near it.” Shit.

    Anyway, bottom line of that side of things is that there’s no definitive answer. For whatever reason, Yahweh didn’t mention the Pilgrims to Moses.

    But the former question, what does the commandment in Leviticus 18:3 really mean, is to me a more interesting question. Traditionally, it’s interpreted as I said before, don’t do any kind of goyish shit. But it’s tough to read it in context and come away with that conclusion. This chapter is one of the juicier set of rules, and it makes you wonder if Egypt and Canaan were actually Arkansas and West Virginia. Here’s the rules from Leviticus 18, in order:

    • Don’t follow Egyptian or Canaanite rules
    • Follow Yahweh’s rules
    • Don’t fuck any close relatives
    • Don’t fuck your mother
    • Don’t fuck any of your father’s other wives
    • Don’t fuck your sister or half sister, even if you grew up in separate households
    • Don’t fuck your grandkids
    • Don’t fuck your stepsister
    • Don’t fuck your aunt on your father’s side
    • Don’t fuck your aunt on your mother’s side
    • Don’t fuck your father’s sister-in-law
    • Don’t fuck your daughter-in-law
    • Don’t fuck your sister-in-law
    • If you fuck a woman, don’t fuck her daughter, daughter-in-law, or granddaughter
    • And if you marry a woman, don’t marry her sister (more about this one in a bit)
    • Don’t fuck a woman on the rag
    • Don’t fuck your neighbor’s wife
    • Don’t burn up your kids if there’s some other god involved
    • Don’t fuck men (assuming you’re a dude)
    • Don’t fuck animals

    At least to non-rabbinical me, it’s clear that Leviticus 18:3 cited by the more obstreperous rabbis isn’t about holiday dinners, it’s about fucking. By all rights, Leviticus 18 ought to be called The Fucking Chapter; there’s only a short diversion from fucking to a quick mention about not burning your kids, then it goes right back to fucking. So unless you intend to violate the turkey’s cavity in front of guests, or toss your kids into the oven while invoking Jesus, I think Yahweh’s rules just aren’t in force here. Turkeys are kosher, and as long as you follow the rest of the kosher rules for the dinner and don’t pray to Jesus, it’s unlikely to offend Yahweh that there’s a Christian calendar involved.

    Before we go, I want to point out that this week’s Sedra, Vayeitzei, is apropos to the rules. It’s the story of Yaakov, Leah, and Ruchel. You’ll remember that Yaakov went to work for his Uncle Laban, tending sheep. The agreement was, tend the sheep for 7 years and Yaakov could marry Ruchel, Laban’s cute younger daughter. He does the herding work, and the morning after the wedding and the consummation, Yaakov wakes up to discover… oh shit, it’s the older, uglier sister. I FUCKED LEAH! THAT WAS NOT THE DEAL! Laban, who is clearly a major dick, tells him, basically, “Tough noogies, you married her, you fucked her, she’s yours. Now, if you still want cute little Ruchel, I think that another 7 year hitch ought to do it.” Yaakov realizes that if he wants to bang some higher quality trim, he’s going to have to go back to the sheep. But he’s no dummy- he says, “Look, I’ll do it, but if we wait yet another 7 years, Ruchel will be past her use-by date. How about I marry and fuck her now, and I’ll pledge to put in the sheep time after the punga punga?” Laban agrees, Yaakov now is married to and banging both sisters. Oh, and as a bonus, he also gets to bang each sister’s handmaid.

    Damn, 14 years of sheep doesn’t seem like such a bad deal, in perspective.

    Note though, that Yaakov lucked out and managed all this before the rules kicked in. Otherwise, he’d be in clear violation of at least three of them. I guess Yahweh just got prissier in Mosaic times.

    Have a great Thanksgiving, and don’t forget the yarmulkes. And the fucking.

     

     

     

  • You know what really grinds my gears?

    You know what really grinds my gears? Disappointment. Kind of like below:

    I will resist the urge to point out thst it is not I that lacks taste.  On some level I decided I should be open minded enough to write something objective about Unfiltered Sculpin….

    …but this article is about disappointment.  They had no Unfiltered Sculpin, therefore this is my review of Breakside Lunch Break IPA.

    Left: sickeningly sweet. Right: unsweetened.

    Seriously, though. How hard can it be to stock things and stock things correctly? I did the retail thing before and I get that its demeaning, menial work.  Totally suited for somebody with a philosophy degree. Then people like Starbucks have to go, and make things with pretty much the same label. For example, their Cold Brew Coffee comes in multiple versions but the one I get is Black. I get the Black Unsweetened. The problem is—morons, who hire other morons to design the format of their bottles, run Starbucks.  In short, Starbucks are a bunch of morons. Here’s what I mean.

    Notice how they look nearly identical? I am in a rush and want some coffee in the morning because like most of us, I have an addiction to caffeine. I don’t want the dizzying high and the spellbinding low that comes from the ensuing insulin dump that comes from drinking several spoonful’s of sugar. I just want the buzz.

    I can hear you now, “don’t they teach people how to read in Mexico?” I don’t know, but they did teach me to read in Arizona and yes, I can just read the label. This is my own damn fault and I recognize that; I really do. I am half awake, in a rush, and quite frankly I am not the only one that misses this, as I often find the sweetened coffee in the place of the unsweetened coffee. That tells me the morons that run the local Kroger are also in the business of hiring morons that think there is no difference between sweetened coffee and unsweetened coffee, to stock their refrigerated beverages section.

    The worst part is I always find out by opening it and taking a swig. I expect to get a blast of burnt coffee and then BAM! Instant tooth decay. This is an outrage, and something should be done to prevent morons from creating confusing labels, so other morons can put the wrong product on the wrong shelf. Something like this:

    Don’t tell me libertarians never have any solutions to societal ills.

    Its not rocket surgery, Starbucks, just make it green or blue or something, and I will stop calling you morons….okay I’m probably not going to stop calling you morons.  I will, however buy from somebody else.  Turns out Stōk keeps it simple by having a red label (sweetened) and a green label (not sweet).

    As far as the beer goes, its not bad for an IPA. In the grand scheme of things it is disappointing that I can’t find Unfiltered Sculpin at the moment but I probably wouldn’t really like that either. Breakside Lunch Break IPA: 3.2/5.

  • Life of Pie: living next to an old graveyard

    Free street parking, moslty
    What is the meaning of life and death?

    I live in a fairly central area of one of the busiest cities in Europe. At the end of my street- well not mine per se – is a wall. If this seems totally unremarkable to you, it’s because it is. It is an old wall, fairly long and not particularly distinctive. It does not have a gate or any another entrance on this side, and above it all you can see is tree tops. Most people who pass the wall have no idea what is behind it, nor do they care.

    On the ehm… other side, so to speak, lies a quite old and mostly abandoned graveyard. Due to some peculiarity of human psychology, some people find living next to a graveyard unsettling. I am not one of those people. Being mostly abandoned, it is little more than an unkempt park, siting on 7 hectares of quite prime real-estate (600-800 dollars per square meter or maybe more) and containing some 30 thousand graves. The cemetery is no longer active, so you don’t have to see funerals –maybe one or two a year –  or mourners walking about as the graves are old and the families are no longer living in Romania. The cemetery is called Cimitirul Evreiesc Filantropia, meaning of which I assume you can eventually figure out without translation.

    For most of my life I paid it little mind. It had, off course, some perks being an area with no buildings, it was quiet and provided glorious, available street parking, which in a city like Bucharest can be a godsend, so to speak. Usually the departed don’t drive, although they may still have a valid license and, on occasion, vote.

    Good contrast with the architectural marvels of communism
    A good background is important

    It is one of 3 Jewish cemeteries in Bucharest and, according to the caretaker, 832 recorded in Romania – although many have been destroyed under the Antonescu regime. This is an Ashkenazy graveyard, build in 1865 on the site of an old quarry. The other two, known as Giurgiu cemetery and The Spanish cemetery –incidentally on much less valuable real-estate – are Sephardic. Giurgiu is the largest of the three – 14 hectares – and second largest in Romania after the one in Iași.  I always though Ashkenazy versus Sephardic to be purely a geographical designation, a Jewish appellation d’origine contrôlée (AOC) if you will, but the cemeteries seem separate.

     

    Sometime this year it occurred to me that I had never visited it to see what is beyond the wall. In cities like Paris, visiting cemeteries was a thing people did. I decided to change this, and one sunny Saturday morning I went to the entrance, only to find it closed. I did not know cemeteries close, but this one did, every Saturday. So on a sunny Sunday morning, I went for a visit. At first I was not even sure this was possible, to visit it I mean, but it was, with only the request that I wear a small round hat. And since I visited and took some pictures – not particularly good ones, mind you, I only have my phone and am a bad photographer – I thought I would share. So basically trigger warning – pictures of cemetery and graves and stuff, for those who do not want to see such things. Now, normally, I would not make a post on a cemetery, but found this one interesting.

    After the entrance is the chapel. Beyond the main alley started. It was long – 1 kilometer or so- and looked like it got lost in distance and vegetation.

    Walking down it, it had a sort of story atmosphere, as it became progressively less maintained and wilder as you moved along.

    The further back, the older everything was and the alley narrowed

    Towards the end it was barely there until it stopped in thick bushes

     

    Here and there, there are small stone benches, usually with the name of the person who donated it.

    One thing I noticed, unlike orthodox graveyards, there were no real crypts or mausoleums build by rich families. There were some more elaborate graves, but mostly just had a grave stone.

     

    I noticed two kinds – simple stone and black marble or granite, the second ones having survived the passing of time much better. I saw no white marble or lightly colored granite.

    About half way down the alley, there is a monument to Jewish soldiers who died in the Romanian army in World War 1, 119 of which are buried in this cemetery. Until this monument the cemetery looked at least somewhat maintained. After this the wilderness started. The main alley was narrower and in poorer repair.

    While the main alley still looks somewhat taken care of, on the sides of it the cemetery looks quite abandoned

     

    From the main alley there are, as expected, there are side paths. This were sometimes paved, but mostly not and often just look like a path in the forest. Some of the gravestones were completely lost in the vegetation.

     

     

    In the wooded area you can occasionally see really old stones lost in the thicket.

     

    There is an area which I could not access, the vegetation was to thick. I was told that at the center there is a pond. Not originally there, but formed when the ground sank as a result of movements caused by the building of a subway line nearby. It dries durring summer, but in the autumn to spring period, part of the graves are underwater. I could not get a shot of this so just took a geneic picture of the area.

     

    It is, all things considered, a very peaceful and contemplative place. Walking through it, you get to places where you almost cannot hear the traffic, something rare in Bucharest. And, unlike other graveyards in which there are always groups of people walking about, I was alone here and did not see another person besides the caretaker at the entrance. This may be a bit sad or not, depending how you look at it. The families of the people here probably moved on long ago, to the US or Israel or some other country and in a sense, many areas of the graveyard seem long forgotten. Time has moved on. It can be depressing or somewhat comforting, depending on how you look at it. So I will leave it at that, maybe with just a few more pictures.

     

     

     

  • Greetings from Del Boca Vista!


    Random thoughts from the Sunshine State.

    March in Del Boca Vista is…bland. It’s just…pleasant. It’s not horrible, it’s not great. It’s just unremarkable.

    Day after day, the same weather, the same activities, the same people. Which, according to OMWC’s (((Mom))), is just the way they like it. (The only mystery around here is how such a lovely lady could have spawned OMWC.)

    OK, Webdominatrix is enjoying the lack of snow. I am enjoying the lack of Chicagoland traffuck.

    Whenever I come to DBV, I am struck by the fact that nearly everyone I see is an oldster. The grocery stores are filled with elderly people in motorized carts blocking the aisles. The parking lots are filled with giant cars with NY Giants bumper stickers. The restaurants are filled with senior citizens enjoying the ubiquitous Early Bird Discounts. The swimming pools are filled with…well, I’ll let your imagination be your guide there. Let’s just say, tattoos are generally not attractive on 85 year old bodies.

    There is nothing wrong with free association, but it pulls me up short when I realize I’ve gone days without seeing anyone under 70 who isn’t a server or health care aide.

    Much as I love my MIL, I’ll be happy to get back to the nonstop excitement of living with OMWC.

  • Jewsday Tuesday: Bar Mitzvahs, Half-a-Torah, and Monster Fish

    Jewsday Tuesday: Bar Mitzvahs, Half-a-Torah, and Monster Fish

    Mea culpa, I’ve missed Bible stories long enough that we’re already through Bereshit and already in Shemot (that’s Genesis and Exodus, respectively, for all you goyishe kopfs). So I thought I’d check out this week’s Torah reading and… weird coincidence which sidetracked me. Allow me to explain.

    You heathens have no doubt heard of Bar Mitzvahs*, and have some idea that it’s the passage of a (((boy))) into manhood at the first Shabbat following his 13th birthday. Not that you can get served at a bar, so the first part is clearly misleading, it’s the Aramaic word for “son.” The expression, translated literally as “son of the commandment,” stands for the concept that at this age, you’re required to follow the 613 commandments handed down by Yahweh to Moses. Oh, and there’s seven more that the rabbis made up** to make a nice round 620, so there’s a Pharisaical nutpunch as punctuation. More importantly, at that age, your father no longer has responsibility for your fuckups of religious ritual and taboo. In fact, traditionally, he says a prayer of thanks that when his kid does stupid teenage shit, it’s not his responsibility any more.

    Where did that magic number of 13 come from? Yahweh? Moses? Nope, this is all part of the Pharisees taking over Judaism after the Saduccees got evicted from the Temple. It appears nowhere in the Torah, so again tradition has become rule of law (as in so many things). Rabbis were very good at making up shit like that, then claiming that it was the invisible ink part of the law that you had to be a rabbi to understand. Their takeover of Year Zero Judaism was quite analogous to how the Mullahs took over Shi’ite Islam, but with the added bonus of eventually getting their man-made stuff codified- good luck finding a Sadducee or an Essene these days.

    In any case, if you’re one of (((us))), you’re automatically Bar Mitzvah at that age, no ceremony necessary. Sort of like reaching drinking age. Nonetheless, (((people))) love ceremony, so that’s become inextricably bound to the Bar Mitzvah concept. As part of the tradition, the Bar Mitzvah man-boy reads the seventh portion of the sedra and the entire Haftorah during the Shabbos service following his birthday.

    Which leads us to… what the fuck is that?

    OK, first the Torah stuff. You’ll recall that the Torah is divided into sedras, analogous to the goyishe chapters, though beginning and ending in different places. Each shabbos, a sedra is read, in order, until we’re through reading the entire Torah at the end of the year (celebrated as the holiday of Simchas Torah). Each weekly reading (sedra) is divided into seven parts, and as an honor, seven men from the congregation are chosen to read each of the parts- it is symbolic that the Bar Mitzvah reads the seventh part as part of the recognition of manhood.

    Next, the Haftorah. As a kid, I figured that meant “one scroll instead of two,” but I was a warped kid. In actuality, a Haftorah is another one of those made-up rabbinical things that no-one quite knows how it got there, but hey, it’s there. It’s a reading after the seven portions of the sedra, but taken from the Prophets instead of from the Torah. In theory, it’s supposed to have some linkage to the weekly sedra, but that linkage is often mysterious to us non-rabbinical sorts. The whole origin of the Haftorah concept is fuzzy- there are numerous hypotheses, and every one of them has a hole that would make a bagel proud. As is my custom, I’ll blame the rabbis.

    Anyway, the Haftorah is there for the Bar Mitzvah to read. Or more properly, sing. And you’re not allowed to pick the tune, there’s a set system called cantillation which specifies how the Haftorah is sung. And Jews being what we are, that’s all confused as well, with about a zillion different cantillation systems in place depending on where you’re from, what book you’re reading, and likely the time of day and the weather. And there’s even different Haftorahs associated with the sedra, depending on which sub-strain of Judaism you’re in.

    About six months before the Bar Mitzvah, the poor kid starts taking lessons so he doesn’t fuck up the lyrics or the tune. The cantillation comes first, with a practice set of words with markings- each mark is a musical phrase, so the kid spends hours singing the Jew equivalent of Doe Re Mi before being turned loose on an unsuspecting Haftorah. Then months practicing the Haftorah until it’s practically memorized, though there’s a cheat sheet on the alter to help the kid out on the Big Day. Now just because this is a sadistic tradition, the kid then has to learn the cantillation for the Torah portion, which is a whole different system. And when he sings the Torah part, there’s no vowels or cantillation marks so it’s gotta be memorized as well, no cheat sheets.

    After all this, the kid soon finds out that no-one thinks of it as his Bar Mitzvah. Nope, it’s his mother’s Bar Mitzvah. No one is going to say, “Are you going to Barry’s Bar Mitzvah?” but you’ll hear, “Are you going to Shirley’s Bar Mitzvah?” Maybe that’s because of the big party that the family throws afterward, where the kid is given his official Jew Gold and his bag of fake Jew Gold to fool the goyim.

    So… why this diversion from the fascinating story from this week’s sedra? It has Charlton Heston, Yul Brynner, plagues, and a cast of thousands wearing Egyptian costumes. You’d expect that I’d do a retelling. But when I looked up this week’s sedra to start writing, I had a bit of a startle- IT WAS THE SEDRA AND HAFTORAH FROM MY FUCKING BAR MITZVAH! I’m still traumatized from it. See, because I have a good musical ear and was a bit brighter than average, my rabbi decided that I ought to be especially privileged and honored, so I was forced to learn the entire sedra, not just the usual seventh portion, and had to sing that for my Bar Mitzvah as well as my Haftorah. Thanks, Seymour, thanks a fucking lot. That’s why I’m an atheist now.

    At the party afterward, my buddies and I all snuck away and got high, and I got a congratulatory BJ from (((Shelley))), so at least there was that.

     

     

    *There’s also a horror known as a Bas Mitzvah, or Bat Mitzvah in Sephardic dialect, which applies to 12 year old girls. I shall ignore this entirely because the transition from brat to JAP is not a pleasant one for anyone involved.

    **Yes, I know, the other 613 are made up, too. But not by the rabbis. If you’re religious, by Yahweh. If you’re secular, by the priests.

  • The Unbearable Whiteness of Being

    The Unbearable Whiteness of Being

     

    This will be quite a bit less thorough than my last writing, primarily because of the subject matter.  The earlier piece was easier to come up with examples for, as it is so transparently obvious that the metric system is more overrated than any other system, with the possible exception of Urban Meyer’s spread.  [Note to editors, please remove that bit if Oklahoma gets crushed in the first round of the playoffs.  Likewise, if the Sooners take the whole thing before this gets published, feel free to add “Booya!” or “Oh no he di-in’t!” or similar.  Also, definitely include this clip. Editor’s note: I have no idea what happens in sportsball-world, so I left this in for the lulz].  At the end of this article I expect to receive an offer for a tenured position in Whiteness Studies.1

    I hereby proclaim my theory of whiteness based on two indisputable facts:  first, that whiteness (as specified below) increases over time (at least until very recently) and second, that “mighty white of you” was a compliment.  Now when I am talking about whiteness, I mean that term as it applies to the United States (sorry Rufus).  I doubt I need to recap but maybe for Pie, there was a time when in America, the White Race was the English Race.  Even the Germans were considered non-white by Ben Franklin.  Ponder that for a moment.2  Even as late as the 20th century, “true whites” were also referred to as WASPs (anyone else find it odd how that term seems to have completely vanished?) or White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (remember how the KKK hated Catholics).  Now here is the thing:  “white ethnics” never went away.  Which leads me to my first point:

    Whiteness is not an ethnicity; it is a meta-ethnicity.

    I didn’t see this much growing up in Indian Territory, but when I moved to upstate New York, I entered a place were white ethnic enclaves are still a thing.  The local paper’s sports section has a story titled “Danes Defeat Dutchmen” and as God is my witness, I can tell people from those towns apart by sight.  Ditto those descended from Poles.  And the Irish, and the Eye-ties and…  There is enough endogamy going on up here that the various white ethnicities maintain their physical and cultural (expressed through styles of dress) differences that I never expected to see from my few decades living in the south-central part of the country.  There is no conflict between someone being “white” and being “Italian,” because they are separate categories of taxonomy.

    A helpful guide to tracking your white heritage

    But what about me?  I am a white man[citation needed].  I don’t really have access to an actual ethnicity.  I’m all mutted up.  I have a German (maternal) grandmother (Northern German, she would stress, not one of those silly southern Germans), but all I really have of a heritage from her is a smattering of verbal imperatives and the ability to play this on the accordion.  (Side note:  none of the women in my family descending from that grandmother, including my sister and her daughters have pierced ears.  Proper German girls don’t piece their ears.  That’s for those Polish trollops.)  My father’s mother’s mother’s mother was of the (((tribe))).  That left me the ability to correctly pronounce “kibitz” and “chutzpah,” but the inability to remember more than half of the Sh’ma Yisrael at any given time.    One of my grandfathers managed to do a genealogy going back to the Norman invasion, but the other only made it back a few generations since most of them were actively trying to change their identities as they *ahem* sought greener (or at least less jail-filled) pastures.  Yeah, they pretty much fucked anything that would let them.  Oh, and in my only defense of Elizabeth Warren ever, I can confirm that every child born in Oklahoma is told that they are descended from a Cherokee princess.  Apparently they looooved the D.3

    Anyway, if Albion’s Seed is correct, the Borderers (Scots-Irish, Border Reavers, “Scum of Two Nations,” whatever) brought their tendency to eschew any cultural identity with then when they settled in the US.  I’d guess this would be why there is a large portion of the country that has no real interest in an ethnicity and therefore are “white by default” as Ozy Franz would never say.

    Now about this mutting process, is it the case where I do have a “real” ethnic identity, but I just don’t identify with it?  I… don’t think so.  My mother almost never made strudel.  I think she made spätzle once.  She did make pork meatballs in sauerkraut on a fairly regular basis and liked to cook pork ribs with onions and apples, but you couldn’t really call her cuisine “German” outside of some ironclad rules on meal preparation (each supper needed a starch, a meat, a yellow vegetable, a green vegetable, and a salad).  She cooked pots and pots of chili.  Mountains of meatballs with enough spaghetti to consume the entire harvest of Ticino.  Corned beef and cabbage.  Pinto beans and cornbread (did I mention she was born in Milwaukee?).  And those unfortunate culinary relics of the pre-Carter era which need not be spoken of.  The point is, my culinary “heritage” is a hodge-podge of things that tasted good to my mom that she learned to cook, just as my genetic heritage is a hodge-podge of those people my ancestors liked to bang.

    So how is it that nowhere people like myself and also pureblood ethnics all fall under the rubric “white?”  Because…

    Whiteness does not refer to your ethnicity; it refers to your relationship with other ethnicities

    If your ethnic culture is in a state of mutual intelligibility (and I would say respect) with the dominant ethnic culture, you are white.  That’s it.  If the WASPs understood and tolerated the way another group lived, and that group reciprocated, they became less “other,” especially in comparison to TGOT.  This is not to say that this understanding is deep or even accurate.  It’s just enough that the other cultures are grokked as being comprehensible, even if not currently comprehended.  This is why whiteness expands.  Groups experiencing a cultural exchange (appropriation!) and especially those living close enough to intermarry will inevitably gain mutual understanding.  Unless, of course, you make an effort not to.

    Any group that does not actively resist becoming white, will become white

    “I can has culture?”

    There is a good example of a (((group))) that made an effort to keep itself separate and isolated from the larger society that it lived in, and it worked in maintaining otherness for a couple of millennia.  In the US, that’s rapidly changed.  I can’t speak for other parts of the country, but in Austin, people of Mexican descent are white.  So are Vietnamese, though the average gringo in Austin knows a lot fewer words of Vietnamese than they do Spanish.  I think this trend may be happening nationwide, as I’ve heard Jews and Asians referred to in the derpverse of reddit/twitter/tumblr as “Schrödinger’s POCs.”  About that term–POC, I absolutely loathe it.  It is as wrong as a term could possibly be.  It creates false connections where none exist and disregards those similarities that do.  Any mindset that can claim that my US-born and raised coworker of West Indian descent has less in common with me than he does with a subsistence yak farmer in Tibet is simply diseased.  It’s as insulting as telling a political lesbian that her sexuality is defined by her lack of desire for penis4.  I do understand why the term exists, though; it’s a deliberate attempt at destruction.  Everyone got their aluminum foil ready?  *takes a drink of water, inhales* Whiteness expands, since it’s just the ever-increasing understanding of one’s neighbors.  Capitalism expands because it works.  A certain worldview which has a penchant for red flags and brass ornaments equates both of these as hegemonic movements.   *Voice changes to O’Brien’s.*  Action needed to be taken to stop the cisheteropatriarchical  albumkyriarchcapitalistic5 forces.  Whiteness is a state of mutual understanding.  That needed to be broken.  So, break the culture.  Eliminate the canon.  Make sure that the only books that an entire generation has read is Harry Potter.  Make the educational system focus on literature that is recent, so there won’t be any intergenerational touchstones.  Ensure that the only common references available are from mass media, and ensure that you can determine what makes it into the mass media.  Emphasize differences.  Emphasize slights.  Emphasize hurts.  Let nothing pass unremarked, no aggression is too micro to not demand an apology for.  Make sure that apologies demand humiliation so that you may inspire resentment.  That’s the genius of POC.  Whiteness is a state of commonality.  POC is the definition of difference.  It’s an identity based on opposition to that idea of mutual understanding.   Prevent cultural exchange, make it a new sin, call it “appropriation.”  Abolish the word “normal.”  Everyone’s identity must be broken down to as many different axes of oppression as possible, for each axis is another attempt to demonstrate just how alien we are to each other, another potential fault line.  Eventually, the only thing that people should have in common is their subservience to the state.

    I can has grant monies nao?

    1 I do not actually expect this to happen.

    2 “You know who else didn’t consider Germans white?” may be the first time where the game cannot actually be answered.

    3 An alternate interpretation is that there is just a whoooole lot of inbreeding going on.

    4 Do not actually attempt to do this.  It will not go well.

    5 Fun fact:  randomly mashing on a keyboard generates leftist academic concepts.