if I could ask God anything and get the real, genuine answer, I’d ask him why He commanded Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. He knew He was going to stop him. He knew that He’d never truly ask him to do it. He knew that if he went through with it then His promise would be frustrated.
The thing is… the story has led parents to think it’s okay to sacrifice their children, metaphorically and sometimes literally, for a false sense of moral superiority. How many LGBT+ children have been sacrificed in the supposed name of Christianity? How many autistic children? How many orphaned children? How many abused children?
Maybe it was the right lesson for Abraham, especially about how it paralleled Christ’s atonement. But it’s not a story that has translated well into modern times.
do you want the Jewish answer? It was to challenge him to think critically about commandments from g-d (and translating to religion as an institution, rulings from religious leaders and scripture), and it’s a challenge he failed. He was supposed to, theoretically, fight g-d and say “no, by no means am I going to do this. I don’t care that you created everything, that is my child and my world, and I’m not going to do it just because you said so.”
Instead, Abraham royally screws up, traumatises his son, and in doing so, loses his son, loses g-d’s will and favor, and in the Tanakh we never really hear from Abraham again after this point, because he failed.
It’s a story about someone blindly following in faith, and losing the most important things to them because they never stopped to think “Wait, did I hear this right? And if I did hear this right, am I so sure that this is something I want to follow?”
Isaac was Abraham’s only son at the time, and the child he had fought so hard to have. Him following an order blindly without thinking of the consequences is not supposed to be a good thing (It just kind of benefits the feudal society that eventually embraced Christianity, which is why the understanding was changed in Christian worldviews.)
I wish I could say I was surprised at the totally different meanings being derived here…
I am growing very, very tired of hearing that this is The Jewish Answer to this particular question. Because there is no The Jewish Answer to anything.
Jews have been discussing the Tanakh for as long as we have existed, and if you have ever encountered a difficulty within that vast and rambling text I guarantee you we have discussed it, interrogated it, weighed it, and absolutely not resolved it definitively. The idea that Abraham was supposed to refuse or question God’s order to sacrifice Isaac, and that he actually failed the test, is ONE (1) of VERY MANY Jewish takes on the story.
And it’s one that I personally can’t make ring true, because God tells Abraham he did right and will be rewarded for it. And what is the point of a test if you tell someone they passed when they failed? If Abraham has lost God’s favor, why does God tell him the exact opposite of that?
(Does that mean this interpretation is wrong? Of course not. Just that it doesn’t work for me. I’m sure I’m not the first to raise that particular difficulty, and I won’t be the last, and difficulties aren’t disqualifying.)
The fact that any parents anywhere think this story means they should sacrifice their children is, of course, a monstrous misreading – as is (in Jewish thought, generally, at least) the notion that the Binding of Isaac foreshadows the Crucifixion. The former assumes that God’s exceedingly specific commandment to Abraham is in any way intended as a general instruction to future parents; furthermore, both of these misreadings lose sight of the crucial climactic moment of the story, in which the child-sacrifice is prevented, because it is not something that God wants anyone, ever, under any circumstances, to actually do.
But I don’t think that necessarily means Abraham was supposed to argue, or refuse. I think Abraham was asked to do it specifically because he knew it wasn’t what God really wanted, and maybe the point of it was to see if his loyalty to this God of his was actually contingent on the fact that unlike most of the other religions around at the time, this one wouldn’t demand that he sacrifice a child. So is he really in this because he thinks it’s right, or because it’s easier for him? Maybe that’s what’s being tested here – and maybe (as has been suggested elsewhere) it’s not that God wants to find that out, it’s that God wants to give Abraham the chance to demonstrate it for his own self-awareness.
Or maybe it’s not that at all, because there isn’t just one Jewish answer.
This typically how I play atheist. I’ve played characters that have literally met gods and still refused to pray to them.
Atheists in settings with “gods” are basically just people who decided “those fuckers aren’t gods. We have records of them getting stabbed to death. Bitches are just really powerful magical assholes. If I wanted to worship a powerful magical asshole I’d go to the brothel.”
See, the problem with that is: where did you get the idea that “being a god” and “getting stabbed to death” are mutually exclusive? More importantly, where did this character get that idea, especially in a world where being stabbed to death is a thing that can happen to gods, and historically has?
“If they’re mortal / vulnerable, they’re not worthy of worship” is … well, sure, I can see someone deciding that. But who in that world would define “god” in such a way as to exclude literally every being ever called a god by anyone?
You don’t get ‘your god is not a god’ from atheists. You get 'your god is not a god’ from monotheists. (And from atheists who learned the definition of god-ness from monotheists.)
what’s the name for that species of joke where you mix and match true facts to make something twice as wrong as knowing nothing. if you bite it and you die it’s a stalagmite if it bites you and you die it’s a stalactite
It’s actually not the stalactite that bites you you’re thinking of stalactite’s monster.
it’s only a stalactite if it’s from the Stalac region of
my favourite genre of anything is watching best friends hang out
witnessing friendship can actually be something that’s so personal
witnessing friendship
can actually be something
that’s so personal
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
Some of my friends like to make fun of me, because I said the only shows or movies I wanted to watch were “A group of friends going on an adventure.”
But like….
Lord of the Rings
Stranger Things
My favorite Star Wars, Return of the Jedi
Star Trek
Young Justice
Avatar: The Last Airbender
Harry Potter
They accuse me of being childish, of not wanting to grow up. I just don’t care about angst-ridden argudramas where everybody is mad at each other 98% of the time. You can keep your angst-ridden grimdark “everyone broods and then probably dies” gritty prestige dramas and CW-hormonasulks. I want to see friends going on an adventure.
You know what? This is what’s really great about Critical Role.
Because not only do you get to hear/watch the story of a group of friends on a series of adventures, but you get to hear/watch said story being played out by a group of friends having the time of their lives together.
Cooking/recipe side of tumblr! Could I have some assistance, please?
As some of you know, I live in China. In the part where the entire province is under lockdown. Getting food has been a challenge, but I’m getting by.
The management of the gated community I live in provided bags of produce at a cheap price today. No sifting/sorting. Here’s a bag, take it or leave it. Of course there was a line, and I was watching the bags as they went by. They were all basically the same. Some had yellow onions, or bigger (and fewer) tomatoes, but more or less, yeah.
And while I’m familiar and know what I can do with the tomatoes and onions, I have no idea what to do with that much cabbage. Or celery.
If someone has any suggestion for something to utilize all this stuff, I would be most grateful. Suggestions for long-term storage very much welcome.
Many thanks in advance!
You can roast cabbage with butter or olive oil or both and some salt—roast it until it softens and browns, it’ll be delicious and filling and keep well in the fridge for over a week. Also, I haven’t tried this but since shredded cabbage will just melt into a slow cooked stew anyway, maybe try shredding and freezing it? (This is the round cabbage; idk what to do with Napa cabbage besides stir fries and salads, alas.) You can freeze eggplant too if you’re going to cook it in a stew or braise, just slice it first. And I bet if you chop the celery and freeze it in oil in an ice cube tray you could make little portions to add to soups and stews maybe? If any of this is incredibly mistaken I apologize tho
Slice the eggplant a cm or two thick (leave the skin on for texture) and brown both sides in oil, then add rice wine, soy sauce, and grated ginger and garlic. The eggplant will soak up the seasonings and become flavorful with a mouth-filling texture. Chop up some of those chives and add them at the end. You can cook the celery similarly but it’s not absorbent, so I would season it with salt and pepper instead of liquid seasonings. Maybe fish sauce if you have it and like it.
Another thing you can do with eggplant: slice the same way, toss with olive oil and seasonings (I like black pepper, garlic, thyme, salt, and lemon juice), spread out in a single layer on a greased sheet pan, and roast at about 420 F until darkish brown on the outside and melty golden inside. You kind of need to eat that right away, though.
I can confirm that you can freeze celery and then use it in soups and stews; it loses pretty much all of its crunch when frozen, but maintains its flavor nicely.
Come to think of it, all of those vegetables together would probably make a really great soup. Which could be frozen in smaller portions and thawed when wanted, if you have enough freezer space.
Ashkenazi baby naming superstitions - how far does not naming a baby after a living person go? Would you be comfortable naming a baby after someone’s middle name or if the baby and the other person’s name mean similar things but in different languages (like naming a baby Simcha after someone named Joy)? What about using a name that just so happens to be the same name as someone else you know?
For me personally?
I would not name after someone else I knew. But, if a name was coincidentally similar in meaning to another name that is not the same name, and who I was not deliberately naming them after, that would be a-okay. But again, that’s just my own personal thoughts on it
My older sister has a middle name that’s directly after my (Catholic) grandmother, who went by a nickname. My middle name before I transitioned was another language’s form of my aunt’s name. Naming a kid Simcha after Joy sounds fine to me, if Joy’s Hebrew name isn’t Simcha.
I wouldn’t be comfortable naming a child in honor of a living person even in a transformed version, not because of superstition (in the sense of fearing that it will cause something bad to happen) but because We Don’t Do That, and to knowingly do something for a living person that is traditionally done for the dead strikes me as a profound insult verging on a curse. (Yes, even if they wouldn’t see it that way at all, even if they don’t know about the tradition, Ido.)
Using a name that just happens to be the same as that of someone else I know, well, the more people one knows, the less avoidable that is. I wouldn’t have a problem with that.
i think all fictional couples should be evaluated by how funny an AITA reddit post about their first couple fight would be
… Three fictional couples popped into my head immediately and I can’t decide which would be funniest: Aral and Cordelia Vorkosigan, Fox and David Xanatos, or Silas and Delilah Briarwood.
Indulge me, friends, because I’m curious. What’s the first piece of queer fiction* you ever consumed? Mine was Mistress of Dragons, a lesbian fantasy novel I definitely should not have read at age 10 that I checked out of the library because it had a dragon on the cover
*by this I mean it has canonically (in text, not word of god) queer characters (who aren’t a walking gay best friend stereotype) who impact the plot, NOT just subtext or characters with less than a handful of lines
I’malmost sure it was @dduane’sThe Door Into Sunset, which is the third in a series but I didn’t know that when I first got it out of the library. There’s a chance it was Robert Heinlein’s Friday but I think I didn’t read that until later.
(To my mind, the former has aged considerably better.)
I’ve said something similar before: a good plot twist is one where the audience goes “I didn’t see that coming and now that it’s here I feel like I really should have,” and a bad plot twist is one where the audience goes “I didn’t see that coming and now that it’s here I don’t see where it came from.”
These are Bags of Holding for sale at a relatively cheap price. The catch? They’re used - plucked from the bodies of fallen adventurers. They contain random amounts of money or jewels, but are mostly stuff with 15 items of random things from the players handbook.
Characters cannot preview the contents of the bags. Items from the bags cannot be resold at that vendor for more money. And above all ALL SALES ARE FINAL.
Someone has sent me an anonymous ask calling me annoying – which is entirely fair, I’ve been annoying to a non-trivial subset of the human race for over four decades and I certainly don’t intend to stop now – and demanding that I block them.
Demanding I block them, I must reiterate, by way of an anonymous ask.
I … I’m not sure they understand how blocking works.
Extremely excited to say that @scribefindegil and I are finally starting to emerge from our filk hiatus, this time with a brand-new song inspired by a whole lot of queerplatonic feelings about Legolas and Gimli
(I know, right – a song in which I’m doing something other than viola! I’m really shy about my voice so that’s kind of a big deal!!)
oh god it must feel insane to play guildenstern every night and say that line at the end “There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said–no. But somehow we missed it. Well, we’ll know better next time.” Like an audience only has to see it play out once but as that actor every single night for months you have to watch this character re-forget and make the same choices and fight against the same tide towards the inevitable conclusion and swear that there’s a way to do it differently next time. rinse repeat.
And now I’m thinking of Hermes from Hadestown, singing this part every night:
“‘Cause here’s the thing: To know how it ends / And still begin to sing it again / As if it might turn out this time – / I learned that from a friend of mine.”
I’m kind of glad to hear that everyone does this. Because it means it isn’t colonizer bullshit, it’s what everyone does. It’s just people discovering new things. Everyone goes:
“Oh hey these people have their own style of [language A’s word for thing. Say, what do you call it?”
“Oh it’s [language B’s word for thing].”
“Got it, it’s [language B’s word for thing] variety [language A’s word for thing]”
This is seriously not colonizer bullshit, it’s just one of the common ways that loan words work.
linguistics side of tumblr please talk about how this is a type of reduplication
Andso, a finger on the monkey’s paw curled.
This isn’t a type of reduplication. Reduplication is a very specific linguistic phenomenon which refers to the duplication of phonemes, morphemes, words, or whole ass clauses, as a way to changing meaning, add or remove emphasis, or a whole bunch of other things. But it’s specifically about the repeatition of sound: ‘bread’ is reduplicated to ‘bread bread’ or ‘brebread’ or ‘breadad’ or what have you depending on your reduplication scheme; and not ‘naan bread.’
Naan Bread and such are an example of an entirely different linguistic phenomenon centering reduncency, except it isn’t the sound that’s redundent but the meaning assigned to the sound. It’s the broadest terms, naan bread is a tautology(linguistics); narrowing in on specifics, it’s Semantic Pleonasm, in which two words which convey similar information are paired together to give the best combination of information; Think “tuna fish” for a monolingual example of variety-category semantic Pleonasm. Then getting to specifics, we have Bilingual Tautological/‘Pleonastic’ Expressions, in which the combination of words are sourced from two differet languages. This is where we find ‘Naan Bread’ and everything else this post is talking about.
An example of reduplication, if I have got this right, would be to say “bread bread” to mean that you want the local or usual kind of bread rather than any kind that would require specification.
“Could you pick up some bread when you go out?” “Sure, what kind? Naan bread, challah bread, pita bread …?” “Ugh, just breadbread.”
[image description: excerpt of text about ancient Oxyrhynchus:
Yet we know far more about Oxyrhynchus as a functioning town, and abou tits people as living individuals, than we do about many more glamorous ruins.
We know where Thonis the fisherman lived, and Aphynchis the embroiderer, and Anicetus the dyer, and Philammon the greengrocer. We knkow how much farmers had to pay when they brought in dates and olives and pumpkins to market. We know that on 2 November, AD 182, the slave Epaphroditus, eight years old, leaned out of a bedroom window to watch the castanet-players in the street below, and slipped and fell and was killed. We meet Juda, who fell off his horse and needs two nurses to turn him over; Sabina, who hit Syra with her key and put her in bed for four days (ancient keys are good sollid objects); Apollonius and Sarapias, who send a thousand roses and four thousand narcissuses for the wedding of a friend’s son.
“The best translations into English do not, in fact, read as if they were originally written in English. The English words are arranged in such a way that the reader sees a glimpse of another culture’s patterns of thinking, hears an echo of another language’s rhythms and cadences, and feels a tremor of another people’s gestures and movements.”
I remember first reading Inkheart and at some point stopping to say to myself “I don’t know why, but I’m getting a feeling that this was translated from the German.” And I looked it up, and yes it was.
I don’t speak German, I don’t read a lot of stuff translated from the German, but something about the prose reminded me – in a way that nothing else ever quite has, even other works in translation, even other stories with similar plot or theme – of a work translated from the German that’s very close to my heart: The Neverending Story.
j r r tolkien named the elves in the Silmarillion the same way t s eliot named the cats in Cats (2019) and i can prove this to you with textual evidence
cat naming traditions as outlined in Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats vs noldorin naming traditions as outlined in Laws & Customs Among the Eldar
now you too are cursed with this knowledge
The Naming of Elves can’t be any old label This isn’t just silly authorial games. You may think that some are as bad as “Clive Staples” But I tell you an Elf must have THREE OR MORE NAMES. First of all, there’s the father-name to which they’ll answer, Such as “Skillful” or “Wiseguy,” or “Noble,” or “Hair,” Such as “Champion,” “Third One (so suck it),” “Commander,” All of them sensible? everyday? fare. And some names can be fancy without weird opinions Some for the gentlemen, some for the dames Like “Desirable,” “Victory,” “Sparkling Brilliance” By Eru I swear these are everyday names. But I tell you, an Elf needs a name that’s significant, A mother-name given with wisdom and sight Though often too late to be on birth certificates It’s always a true name and often it’s right. And mother-names sometimes are even prophetic Such as “Flameo Hotman” or “Quick Attitude,” Such as “Tomboy,” “The Boss” or “Has Dad’s Genetics” — But ya pity a ginger kid raised as “Doomed.” But above and beyond there’s a name that’s like property, It’s private and personal, not for your use The name that might not even be in your glossary But THE ELF THEMSELF CHOSE, and may share or refuse. When you notice an Elf in profound meditation, The reason, says Aelfwine, is always the same: His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name: His ineffable Elf label Essecilmenable Deep and inscrutable singular Name.
