ahavatolam

[ahavatolam]

I'm Jewish and I identify as a diasporist (not a zionist, not an anti-zionist, ftr). I'm also an anarchist which heavily influences my ideas on this topic, but I'm also not entirely opposed to a state of Israel. It just cannot be at the cost of anyone else. I believe Israel has a right to exist (as much as I believe any state has a right to exist), but its existence CANNOT mean genocide, ethnic cleansing, isolationism, or (ethno)nationalism. AND it would have to either share Jerusalem or Jerusalem could be it's on nation kinda like Vatican City. They have to share nicely with their neighbors or no one gets to play.

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the first half of bhar: anticapitalism!!! fuck the rich!!!!! social welfare!!! this is so cool!!!!!!

second half of bhar: we have a religious obligation to recover every hostage, no matter the financial cost. the shulchan aruch states that "every moment that one delays the ransoming of a captive, it is as if they were to shed blood." benyomin nesanyahu and the rest of likkud have not only committed atrocities against palestinians but has also done horrible things to israelis, jewish people, and most importantly for right now the hostages. this government pretends to be about protecting judaism and yet is perfectly comfortable acting against it

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בבא קמא פ״ב א:י״א

ת"ר חמשה דברים נאמרו בשום משביע ומשחין ומצהיל פנים ומרבה הזרע והורג כנים שבבני מעיים וי"א מכניס אהבה ומוציא את הקנאה:

Bava Kamma 82a:11

The Sages taught in a baraita that five matters were stated with regard to garlic: It satisfies; it warms the body; it causes one’s countenance to shine; it increases one’s sperm, and it kills parasites that are in the intestines. And some say that it also instills love into those who eat it and removes jealousy from them.

[ahavatolam]

Why doesn’t the Torah condemn owning human beings as property?

Because they were wrong. We now recognize that they were wrong. Here is a more robust explanation into the context of slavery during the time that Jewish texts permitted slavery, which were quite progressive for the time. Now, why doesn't the New Testament condemn any of the same shit as the Torah beyond vague "we can eat pork because Jesus showed up"? Why doesn't the Qur'an condemn Jihad against the Jews? If you want to come for the Torah you had better be giving equal weight to the immoral shit from other religions.

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A pro-Palestine Jew on tiktok asked those of us who were raised pro-Israel, what got us to change our minds on Palestine. I made a video to answer (with my voice, not my face), and a few people watched it and found some value in it. I'm putting this here too. I communicate through text better than voice.

So I feel repetitive for saying this at this point, but I grew up in the West Bank settlements. I wrote this post to give an example of the extent to which Palestinians are dehumanized there.

Where I live now, I meet Palestinians in day to day life. Israeli Arab citizens living their lives. In the West Bank, it was nothing like that. Over there, I only saw them through the electric fence, and the hostility between us and Palestinians was tangible.

When you're a child being brought into the situation, you don't experience the context, you don't experience the history, you don't know why they're hostile to you. You just feel "these people hate me, they don't want me to exist." And that bubble was my reality. So when I was taught in school that everything we did was in self defense, that our military is special and uniquely ethical because it's the only defensive military in the world - that made sense to me. It slotted neatly into the reality I knew.

One of the first things to burst the bubble for me was when I spoke to an old Israeli man and he was talking about his trauma from battle. I don't remember what he said, but it hit me wrong. It conflicted with the history as I understood it. So I was a bit desperate to make it make sense again, and I said, "But everything we did was in self defense, right?"

He kinda looked at me, couldn't understand at all why I was upset, and he went, "We destroyed whole villages. Of course we did. It was war, that's what you do."

And that casual "of course" stuck with me. I had to look into it more.

I couldn't look at more accurate history, and not at accounts by Palestinians, I was too primed against these sources to trust them. The community I grew up in had an anti-intellectual element to it where scholars weren't trusted about things like this.

So what really solidified this for me, was seeing Palestinian culture.

Because part of the story that Israel tells us to justify everything, is that Palestinians are not a distinct group of people, they're just Arabs. They belong to the nations around us. They insist on being here because they want to deny us a homeland. The Palestinian identity exists to hurt us. This, because the idea of displacing them and taking over their lands doesn't sound like stealing, if this was never theirs and they're only pretending because they want to deprive us.

But then foods, dances, clothing, embroidery, the Palestinian dialect. These things are history. They don't pop into existence just because you hate Jews and they're trying to move here. How gorgeous is the Palestinian thobe? How stunning is tatreez in general? And when I saw specific patterns belonging to different regions of Palestine?

All of these painted for me a rich shared life of a group of people, and countered the narrative that the Palestininian identity was fabricated to hurt us. It taught me that, whatever we call them, whatever they call themselves, they have a history in this land, they have a right to it, they have a connection to it that we can't override with our own.

I started having conversations with leftist friends. Confronting the fact that the borders of the occupied territories are arbitrary and every Israeli city was taken from them. In one of those conversations, I was encouraged to rethink how I imagine peace.

This also goes back to schooling. Because they drilled into us, we're the ones who want peace, they're the ones who keep fighting, they're just so dedicated to death and killing and they won't leave us alone.

In high school, we had a stadium event with a speaker who was telling us about a person who defected from Hamas, converted to Christianity and became a Shin Bet agent. Pretty sure you can read this in the book "Son of Hamas." A lot of my friends read the book, I didn't read it, I only know what I was told in that lecture. I guess they couldn't risk us missing out on the indoctrination if we chose not to read it.

One of the things they told us was how he thought, we've been fighting with them for so long, Israelis must have a culture around the glorification of violence. And he looked for that in music. He looked for songs about war. And for a while he just couldn't find any, but when he did, he translated it more fully, and he found out the song was about an end to wars. And this, according to the story as I was told it, was one of the things that convinced him. If you know know the current trending Israeli "war anthem," you know this flimsy reasoning doesn't work.

Back then, my friend encouraged me to think more critically about how we as Israelis envision peace, as the absence of resistance. And how self-centered it is. They can be suffering under our occupation, but as long as it doesn't reach us, that's called peace. So of course we want it and they don't.

Unless we're willing to work to change the situation entirely, our calls for peace are just "please stop fighting back against the harm we cause you."

In this video, Shlomo Yitzchak shares how he changed his mind. His story is much more interesting than mine, and he's much more eloquent telling it. He mentions how he was taught to fear Palestinians. An automatic thought, "If I go with you, you'll kill me." I was taught this too. I was taught that, if I'm in a taxi, I should be looking at the driver's name. And if that name is Arab, I should watch the road and the route he's taking, to be prepared in case he wants to take me somewhere to kill me. Just a random person trying to work. For years it stayed a habit, I'd automatically look at the driver's name. Even after knowing that I want to align myself with liberation, justice, and equality. It was a process of unlearning.

On October, not long after the current escalation of violence, I had to take a taxi again. A Jewish driver stopped and told me he'll take me, "so an Arab doesn't get you." Israeli Jews are so comfortable saying things like this to each other. My neighbors discussed a Palestinian employee, with one saying "We should tell him not to come anymore, that we want to hire a Jew." The second answered, "No, he'll say it's discrimination," like it would be so ridiculous of him. And the first just shrugged, "So we don't have to tell him why." They didn't go through with it, but they were so casual about this conversation.

In the Torah, we're told to treat those who are foreign to us well, because we know what it's like to be the foreigner. Fighting back against oppression is the natural human thing to do. We know it because we lived it. And as soon as I looked at things from this angle, it wasn't really a choice of what to support.

[ahavatolam]

I know I'm writing this right as shabbat is coming in and tbh I'm fine with that. I'm so tired of Jews saying that if they don't keep shabbat or practice Judaism in an orthodox way they're "bad jews" or "not observant." Um, no, that's not true. That's now how it works.

Reform Jews who use electricity on Shabbat are just as observant. Because Reform rabbis did the same work of Torah law interpretation, and came up with a different answer than orthodox Jews, but using the same process and approach to reading the text. They didn't go, "this is inconvenient so we're just not gonna do it." They said, "where orthodoxy sees electricity as something that may create a spark and therefore violates the melachot around making fire, we see it as a current, like water flowing, and just as it is permitted to use a faucet on Shabbat, so is flipping an electric switch."

If you choose to not be observant because it's not for you, that's fine. But orthodoxy is not the only way to be observant of Jewish practice. There's no line of what makes you observant and what doesn't, and that doesn't just go for Shabbat but it's the easiest example to illustrate my point. The Torah just says, "observe the Shabbat." That's it. If you look around on Friday night and go, "oh hey it's Shabbat, huh?" then tell me how that isn't observing the Shabbat? If you light candles and make kiddush and then go out to a movie, haven't you observed it? The Rabbis in the Babylonian era interpreted what Jewish practice looks like in a diaspora without the cultural/religious structure around a central temple, but that has been re-interpreted in every generation since and continues to be.

The real question is, are you making informed choices about your practice or are you just doing what works for you? Which is also fine, by the way. The thing that bothers me is when people think that only orthodox Jewish practices are "real" or legitimate. An orthodox friend of mine once started shit talking Reform Jews to me (why???) and how they aren't observant like she is. So I asked her if she tears her toilet paper on Shabbat and she said yes, of course. I pointed out that there are a lot of charedi Jews who would consider that a blatant violation of Shabbat and that, in their eyes, she wouldn't be considered shomer Shabbat. It's all a spectrum, there's no ONE right way.

My favorite Midrash is that the Temple had 13 entrances - one for each of the 12 tribes, and one for those who weren't sure which one they belonged to/didn't belong to any of them. Judaism is such an inherently pluralistic ethnoreligion, please stop buying into the brainrot bullshit that only charedim can do it correctly.

[ahavatolam]

living is a jewish value. partake in it. <3

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Need jumblr to stop saying Palestinians aren't indigenous to the Levant like

there are multiple lines of evidence that indicate they are the descendants of the NON Jews that remained after each exile

INCLUDING, but not limited to, genetic evidence that we are each other's closest relatives

you're not helping Jewish people by claiming this. you're just being racist towards Palestinians, and blaming them for *checks notes* being conquered a bunch of times

[ahavatolam]

I've seen a few posts about not being able to celebrate this year, and thought this might resonate.

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Pressing Halachic queries: Can you fuck in the Sukkuh? Should you fuck in the Sukkah?

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Positives about the sheer amount of repetition that happens in shul: It's tremendously helped me with being able to actually remember prayers

Negatives about the amount of repetition that happens in shul: I'm getting itty bitty parts of prayers that I remember stuck in my head

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Gotta love it when someone that RBs one of your funsies Jewish posts unfollows you shortly after because you RB a post saying Israel isn't why antisemitism is spiking: it's spiking because people are choosing to act on their biases.

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My body is a temple…unfortunately, it’s the Beit HaMikdash and it’s the 70 CE Siege of Jerusalem…

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n. Hereness.

n. Diasporism.

n. "Strengthening Jewish communities wherever they live."¹

Doikayt is representative of the belief that Jews deserve to be safe wherever we are; that we are true members of our communities, cherished, beloved; worthy.

Doikayt is a constant reminder to build connections, to link arms with our fellow; to show up for one another.

In honor of these values, a portion of the profit from the sale of each necklace will be given to tzedakah or mutual aid. 

PRE-ORDER NOW

[ahavatolam]

I'm laughing so hard at myself bc I wished someone "Shana tova" the other week but I'd only ever read it and not HEARD it. So some poor Jewish person got to hear my dumb gentile ass say "shannah toe-vah" in my hillbilly ass accent 😭

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