if anyone, jewish or not (because I feel that non jewish people could also benefit from throwing out any lingering false associations between our core theology and christian core theology), is curious about learning more about how jewish thought / theology differs a lot from dominant christian narratives, specifically how “god” and “prayer” are very poorly executed english translations of our concepts of HaShem and tefilah/l’hitpalel, especially if you’re a jewish person struggling with the idea of religious judaism because you don’t feel compatible with what the dominant meaning and concept (heavily influenced by christianity) of the english words/concepts “god” and “prayer” are, please please watch some videos by Rabbi David Aaron specifically this one (x) and this one (x)
neither of them really come from a denominational perspective so don’t worry about if you’re heterodox or orthodox it’s just a really good look at authentic jewish theology. and some of the misunderstandings that he clarifies are, if left unclarified, big stumbling blocks for a lot of jews who are hung up on things like “do I believe in God” “do I have some ambiguous faith” “when I pray does God listen”, and those stumbling blocks could be avoided by having these conversations about what jewish theology really holds as true, especially since a lot of those phrasings we absorb from our non jewish surroundings that lead us to be confused and doubtful about our judaism are based in concepts that are… entirely unjewish.
like as a brief summary, “do I believe in God” is a question that is steeped in this christian dominant perspective that you sort of absorb in a lot of english speaking christian majority countries, where God = metaphysical dude far off in the sky that you have to profess blind faith towards, which… could not be further from what the concept of HaShem is in Judaism, aka HaShem is everywhere, HaShem cannot be depicted by any of our human conceptualizations of embodiment (like seriously depicting HaShem as a man in a flowing robe is a huge no no) and HaShem is more scattered divinity of Being than some humanoid ruler up in the sky (the video is a lot more eloquent than on this than me lmao). “do I have faith?” often references this idea that faith is blind and that “faith” is a state of mind not a set of actions. in Judaism there’s a lot more weight to actions than sitting around and thinking “yeah I have blind faith that there’s a God” (again that perspective draws on these weird ideas of HaShem as a distant and metaphysical being that are extremely unjewish) and “when I pray does God listen” comes from a non Jewish perspective of prayer as begging God to change his mind or something like that, which is again a very unjewish perspective and that second video link talks a lot about what the real meaning of l’hitpalel / tefilah is in Judaism and what are we doing when we daven, if not this english/christian centric concept of “to pray”
anyway I feel like those videos really solidified some things succinctly for me; I had the ideas cemented in my head theologically before but this was the first time I had heard them verbalized this simply so like check it out! the first video is very short, like under 10 minutes, and should be watched first imo, the second video is like 40 minutes, if you’re really interested but don’t think you’ll get to the second one on tefilah at least watch the first one on HaShem.
I had the first link wrong before! this version has the right link
@stepsonthejourney Not sure if any of this might be helpful to you, but thought I’d tag you in anyway!
Consider a fantasy story where, as often seems to happen in this genre, a young human is pulled from their world into a world of magic and elves and wizards and prophecies.
But this happens just about every other Tuesday in this world because the resident soothsayer is a little trigger-happy and is spouting off prophecies left and right. So there’s been an influx of teenaged humans without adult supervision and the reigning queen had to set up an investigative bureau and a complaints department just to deal with this problem.
So our human protagonist finds themselves in a dark spooky forest, stuck in some kind of ewok-style trap. Along comes a bearded elf (don’t tease him about the beard, he’s trying to make a good impression on the dwarf lady in charge of his department) who looks up at the net, sighs, and out comes the paperwork.
“If you wouldn’t mind, please state your name, age, and how you came to this realm.”
“How what now?”
“What was it? Wardrobe? Magic portal? Dragged under the bed by trolls?”
“Um…I just woke up here?” They mumble, confused.
“Alrighty,” the elf flips a few pages. “We’ll just skip to section D then. Any inherent magic? Any strange inheritances received lately?”
“No?” The protagonist leans on the net. “I mean, my former roommate gave me their old David Bowie CD collection, but I don’t think that counts.”
The elf nods once or twice, hard to tell if he’s listening or not, and pencils a few things in. “Alright, we’re almost done with the preliminary stuff, then we can get you out of there and down to the Bureau so we can get you home. Current status of parents or parental figures?”
The protagonist cringes. “Um…not applicable, I guess.”
“Oh dear. And your age again is-?”
“Er…fourteen?”
At this the elf sighs. “Oh no, not another one. Some days I’d like to shake some sense into that soothsayer, really, I would. I swear I am this close to setting myself up as the next evil wizard around here just so I can keep some of these would-be heroes out of trouble.”
He then flings his pencil, sharp as a knife, and down comes the net with Protagonist inside. The elf helps them to their feet and brushes the leaves off their shoulders.
“Alright then, you,” he grumbles, “Lets get you down to the Bureau with the other three prophecy-kids who turned up this week.”
He has so much paperwork to do now.
Inspector Clarek of the Royal Prophecy Complaint Bureau would like a break. He had to find exit portals and dimensional rifts for six kids in one week and half those prophecies didn’t even come true.
At this point, Clarek has snapped and named himself The Dark Lord Keralc. Got the title registered at town hall and everything. He’s taken to kidnapping the Prophecy Kids and undertaking most of their quests himself so they don’t get killed.
He accidentally ended up adopting twelve of them, including Casey there.
Today’s random internet researches, “Quartier Latin and the cultural-ideological habitus of Ottoman students”: http://iassr.org/rs/020309.pdf
It’s a short article but the relevant points for my dash are:
-Turkish students studied in Paris in the nineteenth century, and there are many records of this
-the official Ottoman Empire program began in 1830, to develop Ottoman manufacturing
-1/3 of students were sent from military schools and received engineering training, the others went into the medical school. Very few were in law until later on.
-a lot of them lived in the Latin Quarter and loved it
the old PDF seems to be taken down, but if anyone’s got access to Academia.edu, it’s a free download!
“National Geographic called me and asked me to write the feminist facts about how The Lion King gets lion pride dynamics all wrong. I happily complied. Lions are matrilineal!!
When I contacted Craig Packer, one of the world’s leading lion researchers, to talk about this story he was IMMEDIATELY AVAILABLE. He Skyped me almost instantly from a camp in Kenya and said he’s been waiting for someone to ask him this question since the original film came out.
Anyway, if The Lion King were real, Nala would be the star, Sarabi would be holding her up saying everything the light touches is our kingdom, Simba would have left and never come back, and when Nala got old enough Sarabi would have carved out a territory for her to rule.”
“Reasons men gave for lecturing me on lion pride social structure and telling me one of the world’s leading lion researchers is wrong (I am not kidding these are real): -Watched The Lion King DVD extras -Read a textbook 25 years ago -Has been to the zoo -Everyone just knows
If you ever wondered what it’s like to be a woman that communicates science, this is what it’s like. Any expertise you or your sources may have gained over decades of hard work are null and void because someone watched a DVD extra 25 years ago.”
