perfectlyvalid49

[perfectlyvalid49]

I have tried to share the Gospel with Jews but many of them are not receptive and some of them even acted offended. Why are they so opposed to Christ?

It took me a minute to remember that almost nobody I know irl knows I'm on Tumblr...so this can't be a friend trolling me.

I think this question may be sincere, so I'm going to treat it that way.

Anon, Judaism isn't what you have been taught to believe it is.

Let's get apophatic

Judaism is not a broken and incomplete prequel to your own religion

Judaism is not proto-Christianity and has no Jesus-shaped hole.

There's nothing missing from Judaism. It doesn't need or want original sin, blood atonement, tests of faith, or eternal hell.

Jews are not waiting around for you to rescue them with your gospels. We've heard your good news many times.

Jews are not spiritually lost, incomplete, chained to the law, or trudging through some 'Old Testament' swamp hoping a Christian will come along and throw us a rope.

Judaism didn't freeze and die out in the Bronze Age.

Judaism didn't end with Isaiah, it didn't die in the desert, in exile, in captivity, or in the diaspora. It kept going through the destruction of the Second Temple, through the Mishnah, through the Talmud, through centuries of rabbinic debate, mysticism, legal thought, and lived tradition.

This idea you have that others should be grateful to hear your good news...and your hurt feelings when you don't get the response you hope for...?

That's because winning new converts to your faith was never actually the point of this exercise.

Now let's talk a bit about what Judaism is

Jews who practice Judaism have a full, coherent, spiritually rich tradition. You can tell that's true by the way that Christianity and Islam both based their own faiths on cribbing from ours.

This isn't an opinion, Anon. Read any serious Christian historian on the history of Christianity.

Judaism is a living thing which is much, much older and more enduring than whatever your preferred flavor of Protestantism might be. Again, this is not opinion, this is fact.

The Good News you're eager to share has historically been very dangerous to us. We're rightly wary about the intentions of people attempting to push it upon us. If you don't understand that, i urge you to address the chasm of your ignorance of your own faith.

Jesus is neither the problem nor the solution for Jews, he's simply not the point.

The God of the Jews does not:

Create humans as sick and wrong...

Command humans to be well despite creating them sick...

Sacrifice himself to himself...

...In order to spare humans from the sinfulness...

...with which he himself created them

Jewish theology isn't perfect (no theology is), but it is much more internally consistent and reasoned than any of the Christianities I've studied...and it does not have the dim Christian view of human nature. It does not use the promise of eternal reward or the threat of eternal punishment to coax or frighten people into social compliance.

Across history, more Jews have chosen death than baptism and that should tell you something. We've been asked, cajoled, and threatened with dispossession, violence, and death to trade our integrity for the supposed salvation we don't believe in many times before...and we said no.

We'll keep saying no.

Even secular Jews like me reject Christianity because it doesn't make sense to us.

We might embrace materialist reason, silence, humanism, or maybe one of the non-theistic forms of Buddhist practice, but we're not going to embrace any ideology requiring us to swallow the premise that we're broken and need to be saved by a religion which has actively, deliberately misinterpreted and persecuted us for most of the last 2,000 years.

Your failure to understand this context is further evidence that you don't know or understand the history of your own faith.

While you're solving that problem, please read a book about comparative religious studies.

Huston Smith's The World's Religions is an easy read and a great primer from a devout Christian on how to learn about the faith traditions of others. You could also watch this series Smith made with Bill Moyers (another devout Christian...a Baptist pastor, if I recall correctly).

For an amazingly educated, articulate, Christian take on the Hebrew Bible (which is the polite term Christians should use rather than 'old testament') try reading Episcopal Archbishop John Shelby Spong's Biblical Literalism: A Gentile Heresy.

It may surprise you to learn that I have read the synoptic gospels at least a dozen times and feel the same affection for them that I feel for The Teachings of the Compassionate Buddha or the Tao Te Ching.

I really appreciate the teachings of the Jesus of the synoptic gospels.

It's his fandom (starting with Paul) which I find largely toxic.

The Christians I love, those with whom I speak openly about religion, who have remained friends for decades (including clergy and devout Catholics, Baptists, Lutherans, Methodists, Episcopalians, and Presbyterians) are the ones who learned enough about Jewish history to stop trying to cram Jewishness into the box Christianity invented for its own purposes.

Jews and Judaism don't fit in that box because it isn't ours.

Jews are unwilling to cut off parts of themselves in order to assume a box-fitting shape you find more pleasing and flattering to your own faith and worldview.

If you're lucky, the Jew you approach to evangelize will be someone like me who is more familiar with both Hebrew Bible and your own synoptic gospels than you are, and who will patiently explain your factual, logical, and rhetorical errors to you...but when you encounter Jews with less patience who respond with hostility?

That's on you, and the sense of rejection you feel is the whole blessed point of the exercise.

But your evangelism bothers me less than how careless and unthoughtful you are about your own religion.

My ancestors and family were persecuted by Christians for their faith, but I have read the gospels of your savior and his church with an open mind and an open heart. I have taken them seriously and considered them carefully and deeply. I've discussed them with devout Christians, learned a great deal from those discussions, and have expressed my appreciation of those texts, the Jesus contained therein, and the beautiful way that some Christians make their God's omnibenevolence the center of their faith.

I'd bet everything I own that you haven't ever seriously studied anyone else's religion.

I desperately wish that even a tiny fraction of Christians would do as Smith and Spong have done and return the courtesy to the Jewish people, texts, and ideas from which their faith was born, but you, like most Christians, know next to nothing about the religion in which Jesus was born, in which he lived, and in which he died.

When you've fixed that - when you've spent a fraction of the time learning about Judaism that I've spent earnestly learning about your religion? C'mon back and I'll listen to your arguments with an open mind and engage with you to your heart's content.

Until then, you'd be wise to keep those arguments and your evangelism far, far away from Jews. Each attempt just widens the chasm between us.

Condescending to us about our faith when you know nothing about it (and seemingly precious little about your own) demeans us both and is unworthy of either faith tradition.

[perfectlyvalid49]

a message to the 'silent majority'

there's this thing people often say, when you bring up an incident motivated by bigotry, they say 'yeah, but that's just a small group of people that's exceptionally loud. most people don't actually believe that.' what they mean is that nobody (well maybe some people) is gonna make a really big racket just to say 'hey, im normal about this group of people'. most people do not actually support the hateful things the exceptionally loud group of people does. they might have biases but they won't go on a rant about how a certain group of people should be killed and if you asked them they would condemn the hatecrimes committed.

And the thing is, I get why the silent majority is silent. I know how difficult it is to speak up. When you feel like you don't know enough. When you feel like you can't change anything anyway. When friends or family are the people you would have to speak up against. When you know you'll get hate for speaking up. When you know people will assume things about you that aren't true because you speak up. When people connect your speaking up about one thing with also picking a side in an at most only tangentially related conflict. When speaking up means arguing against people who actually claim to support the same cause as you.

It also took me a long time to find the nerve to speak up. Even though I was disgusted and horrified by the things people said immediately. Because the people weren't just random strangers, they were people I thought of as friends. Because I had seen the way people who spoke up about the antisemitism got relentlessly harassed. Because I was afraid of people's reactions. I was afraid of losing friends or getting hate or saying something wrong.

Sadly while in some conflicts staying silent is a way to stay neutral, in the case of a group of people spreading hate and bigotry silence is complicity. Not intentional, but unintentionally. Yes, there may be the silent majority who doesn't support the actions of that small, loud group of people spewing hate, but if the silent majority doesn't speak up, they just give this group more power. If people can go somewhere and spread conspiracy theories and hate speech and prejudices unchecked. When no one stands up and corrects them. Then their numbers will grow, because there will be people who believe them, there will be people who get radicalised, cause no one ever tried to combat the conspiracies and misinformation and prejudices. If no one gets up and protects people who are getting attacked and harassed, then the attackers will just get bolder, they will be able to claim they have the support of the masses. And one day it will be too late. Because then staying silent means condemning your neighbours to death. And speaking up just means you'll die side by side with them.

So this is my plea to everyone who has been afraid to speak up these last few years: I'm pretty sure you are aware of the rise of antisemitism in these past few years. If not then I urge you to inform yourself. There are people both on the left and right who get bolder everyday. The spread misinformation and conspiracies, they harass Jews just for existing. Especially leftists claim to do this under the guise of helping palestine and are fast to denounce anyone who points out their antisemitism as a 'genocide supporter'. I understand how difficult it is to speak up against those people. The suffering in Gaza is horrifying and I wish I could just end it. And knowing I can't feels awful, being helpless feels awful. If then people come to accuse you of not caring or being evil or being everything you don't want to be, that hurts. It hurts so damn bad. And that is exactly the intention of those people. They are trying to emotionally manipulate you. They are trying to isolate you by marking you as an 'enemy'.

This is bullshit. If people are willing to turn on you because you try to raise awareness about antisemitism they unwittingly shared, then those people are not your friends. I know it's terrible to hear, but it's not you who is 'destroying the friendship'. If you politely point out someone elses mistake and they react with hate, then that is not your fault. Speaking out against antisemitism does not at all say anything about anyone's stance on the war. These are completely separate things. The suffering of the Palestinians does not justify antisemitism and people spreading antisemitism in the name of Palestine are not helping in any way. It is totally okay if you don't want to speak out about the conflict because you don't feel informed enough. It is indeed in my mind much better than sharing misinformation or reducing the conflict to a black-and-white, good-vs-evil type of thing. You are not obligated to speak up and form an opinion. Donating to an organisation that brings aid into Gaza helps much more than posting slogans on social media. Voting for people who actually have both Palestinians and Israelis best interests in mind helps more. Supporting the Israelis protesting against their current government, maybe even coordinating peaceful protests with them helps more.

What doesn't help Palestinians at all is antisemitism. It only hurts. It just leads to more suffering. There have already been Jews killed in the name of Palestine. Jews all over the world get harassed just for existing. The murder, rape and kidnapping of Jews by Hamas gets called 'justified resistance'. Jewish children get attacked, Holocause memorials get vandalised, Synagogues get firebombed. It doesn't matter in whose name and from whom these attacks come. They are wrong. And we need to speak up. Because more and more people get radicalised into thinking murdering random Jews is justified. And if you even just start by maybe looking at your own biases and prejudices, by maybe listening to actual Jews (I am not one btw so don't just listen to me) and informing yourself you will already make an enormous difference. And if you then reblog posts informing about the terrifying rise in antisemitism then maybe you'll motivate more people to speak up. And then you can help prevent even more people falling into Jewhate. Then you can protect Jews and fight against bigotry. Because it doesn't make a difference if Nazis are going around robbing and murdering Jews, demolishing their businesses and setting their synagogues on fire, or if leftists do it in the name of Palestine. It's still a pogrom. And you can decide whether you want to be like the German civilians who looked on as the flames of the burning synagogues were reflected in the shards of the broken shop windows while their neighbours were deported or whether you would be one of the very few people who helped protect Jews.

[perfectlyvalid49]

To sum up from the link - it turns out that, according to Australia's chief intelligence body ASIO, the regime in Iran was behind the attacks on the Adass Israel synagogue in Melbourne, the Continental Kitchen in Sydney, and likely more attacks.

The Iranian ambassador (plus other diplomatic officials) have been expelled from Australia. The operation of the Australian embassy in Tehran has been suspended, its staff moved to a third country. The Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) have been declared a terrorist organisation.

Colour me shocked, but not entirely surprised, given I've heard speculation that pointed to Iran coordinating these attacks. I'm hoping that this information will put paid to the false flag claims, but given some of the vile online discourse I've seen, I'm not optimistic.

[perfectlyvalid49]

I can't with "most Jewish 'antizionists' are actually evil and deserve to be punished and ostracized, just like all the rest of (((them))), because...they mourn the heroic Al Aqsa Flood! you know, when people were massacred at a music festival and in their own homes, slaughtered indiscriminately, raped, tortured, burned alive, beheaded, violently kidnapped only to be starved, brutalized, and often murdered in captivity. can you believe these disgusting genocidal antizionsts are actually zionazis in disguise if they felt any empathy or sorrow for their people? unforgivable, really."

that's what the post means, that's what she's saying. if a Jew isn’t thrilled to see their people massacred, they’re not acceptable.

by this paradigm, every Jew is a Z word (used obviously as a slur), and every Z word is a demonic baby killer who deserves to be eradicated. this is how antisemitism works, it is how it has always worked. and they think they're humanitarian for it.

there was nothing heroic about what was perpetrated that day, it has only caused more death, suffering, misery, and hatred.

on a related note, one thing to give Nerdeen is that this has always been her position, she’s never pretended otherwise, she’s never feigned that the actions of 10/7 weren’t victorious and exhilarating for her and exactly what she wants to see. she and Hadid don’t want a ceasefire, they want people to burn, and if more of their own are destroyed in that (which countless more would be), they don’t care as long as the end goal is dead Israelis and Jews.

[perfectlyvalid49]

i feel like im going crazy but it feels like the media is actively carrying out an antisemitic propaganda campaign. like. it's more than just biased reporting. they are reporting blatantly false stuff and antisemitic propaganda that isn't going thru the usual fact checking procedures. it feels so deliberate and coordinated

You're not going crazy, Anon - but it makes sense that it feels that way.

What you're noticing is real, documented, and measurable.

HonestReporting, CAMERA, and other media watchdogs have been tracking this for decades.

The patterns are consistent and widespread. The disproportionate coverage and the systematic use of passive voice when describing attacks on Israelis (versus active voice for Israeli responses) are everywhere.

You're pointing to something beyond normal bias. You're noticing the abandonment of editorial standards when it comes to Israel stories.

Major outlets now run with Hamas claims uncritically. Journalists repeat "genocide" claims without applying the actual legal definition. Newsrooms that normally would fact-check a celebrity's breakfast choices suddenly accept "Al Jazeera said it" as authoritative.

Most newsrooms have basically become advocacy organizations that also happen to publish articles.

I think there are a few reasons why.

There are influence campaigns at work

Iran, Qatar, and Turkey fund and amplify anti-Zionist propaganda across the globe via state-linked networks and nonprofit fronts (see: Press TV, Al Jazeera, Middle East Eye, Iranian-linked Twitter/X accounts, etc.).

Russia's goal has long been to sow division in Western democracies, and it’s happy to boost both antisemitic and anti-racist content if it keeps people angry and mistrusting.

The PFLP and its affiliates, like Samidoun, have ties to protest infrastructure in the West, especially in Europe and on college campuses.

Social media logic is mainstream now

Newsrooms are staffed by people who came of age online, where Israel is already coded as the villain. "Israel Bad" content performs well, drives engagement, and pays the bills.

The oppressor/oppressed dynamic is mainstream now

Many outlets have adopted the oppressor/oppressed dynamic and can only see Israel as the oppressor. Normal journalistic skepticism gets suspended when you're fighting injustice.

There's virtually no risk

It's much safer to bash Israel than criticize Hamas. Israel won't issue fatwas or send death threats to journalists who get stories wrong. What's the worst that can happen, from their perspective? That 2% of the population unsubscribes while they gain a 4% market share as "Israel Bad" content drives traffic? That asymmetry shapes coverage.

It's not all coordinated...but it always feels like it is, right?

That's because antisemitic tropes are sticky. They replicate easily because they tap into ancient cognitive biases about Jewish power and deception. It doesn't require a conspiracy for multiple outlets make the same "mistakes" in the same direction, just shared assumptions about who deserves skepticism. And it's always one side.

Consequently, journalism that would be laughed out of the room for any other topic gets rapidly published about Israel. Blood libels get dressed up as investigations. When outlets get caught repeating Hamas talking points verbatim, they either ignore criticism or double down. The BBC does both. Often.

I'm hopeful it won't last forever. Every fabricated atrocity story they have to retract chips away at their credibility. I'm hopeful that publishing fan fiction about Israeli war crimes doesn't actually improve their reputation as serious news organizations.

Judenhass wearing social justice clothing is still Judenhass.

You're not crazy. You're witnessing professional standards collapse in real time.

The long view of history, though, shows that the truth has a way of surfacing eventually...even when powerful people are working overtime to keep it buried.

[perfectlyvalid49]

Dr. Seuss was not even in the general area of fucking around.

[perfectlyvalid49]

You're going to mention the death by having sex with an alien that kills everything it has sex with in Mass Effect, but not the fourth ending they added when they patched in the extended endings?

Reject your options, choose violence, and don't just kill yourself, but end galactic civilization!

I just love it when video games let you do really stupid shit that kills you immediately. I love being like "oh this is a terrible idea" and being able to do it and then die. It's good game design.

[perfectlyvalid49]

I will absolutely send pix of any furniture we get out of it, but I am beginning to despair that we'll never get the wood! We've been told every day since Friday that they'll send someone to take the logs to the mill "today" and as of Monday morning, the logs are still in my front yard. We did use them as benches all weekend while the kids were playing outside, so silver linings, I guess.

Also, after much discussion with what feels like half the neighborhood (we live in the sort of neighborhood where this was *big news*) we've named the tree Charlie. I know it's not fair to compare a baby to an adult, but we all agreed that in comparison to the maple, the oak is very much giving a Charlie Brown's Christmas Tree vibe.

Also, thank you for all the advice you've given! I literally posted this while I was on a family road trip, and the stuff you said (and also some of your followers? Most of the notes on this aren't coming from my usual crew) gave my husband and I things to discuss (and me to look up while he drove) so we could make a somewhat informed decision instead of just pointing at a picture and going "that one's pretty!"

Bad news everyone!

This is the absolutely gorgeous maple that lives in front of my house. We don't know how old it is, but we suspect it is at least 30-40 years old.

What's the bad news? This giant split in the trunk (my hand for size reference):

We talked with our friendly local tree service, and it sounds like we can't save the tree. There are things that can be done, but they'd just be delaying the inevitable.

So the plan is to take it down and plant a new tree in its place. We've been given several recommendations by the tree man, but I'm not sure which one I like best, so I'm gonna show you all and see if tumblr has an opinion.

Option 1: Red Oak

Option 2: Exclamation! Sycamore

Option 3: Fire King Beech

Option 4: Tulip Poplar

Option 5: Hackberry

[perfectlyvalid49]

A general tip for students who are sending those dreaded Religious Absence Emails to your professors: Rather than asking permission to take the day(s) off, politely let them know that you will be taking the day(s) off.

In other words, consider not saying this:

"May I miss class on [date] so I can observe [holiday]?"

It's not that there's anything wrong with the above, per se. But because it's phrased as a request, it risks coming across as optional — a favor you hope to be granted. Problem is, favors are not owed, and so unfortunately asking permission opens the door for the professor to respond "Thanks for asking. No, you may not. :)"

Instead, try something along the lines of:

"I will need to miss class on [date] because I will be observing [holiday]. I wanted to let you know of this conflict now, and to ask your assistance in making arrangements for making up whatever material I may miss as a result of this absence."

This is pretty formal language (naturally, you can and should tweak it to sound more like your voice). But the important piece is that, while still being respectful, it shifts the focus of the discussion so that the question becomes not "Is it okay for me to observe my religion?", but rather, "How can we best accommodate my observance?"

Because the first question should not be up for debate: freedom of religion is a right, not a favor. And the second question is the subject you need to discuss.

(Ideally, do this after you've looked up your school's policy on religious absences, so you know what you're working within and that religious discrimination is illegal. Just in case your professor forgot.)

[perfectlyvalid49]

If your movement has antisemitic members using the cause as an excuse to harass Jews and Jewish members who stand up against the antisemites, and your response is to kick out the Jews and claim the antisemites were unfairly slandered, your movement is an antisemitic one and you were the one who made it that way

[perfectlyvalid49]

Updates!

We talked it over with our tree guy, and he said that the disease for red oak is transferred root to root, and there are no other red oaks in our neighborhood, so we should be safe.

He was very excited about bringing some biodiversity to the neighborhood, and my husband and I liked the idea of an oak (and it won the poll!) so we gave the go ahead on taking down the maple and planting a red oak earlier this week. They came to do it Friday.

This is what I came home to after dropping the kids off at camp:

And this is what was left after they took off all the branches:

We did come up with a cool idea though! We found a place that would mill the trunk for us, and we have a friend who builds furniture who said he'd be willing to make something for us at cost. We're going to see how much wood we have once it's all cut and he'll tell us what sorts of things it's enough to make. Our hope is to get a nice new dining room table out of it (our real hope is to get a nifty gaming table that we can put in the dining room and occasionally also use for eating), but we'll see what happens.

Meanwhile, here's our new baby oak. Hopefully in a decade or two he'll have grown up big and strong, but until then, we'll take care of him.

Bad news everyone!

This is the absolutely gorgeous maple that lives in front of my house. We don't know how old it is, but we suspect it is at least 30-40 years old.

What's the bad news? This giant split in the trunk (my hand for size reference):

We talked with our friendly local tree service, and it sounds like we can't save the tree. There are things that can be done, but they'd just be delaying the inevitable.

So the plan is to take it down and plant a new tree in its place. We've been given several recommendations by the tree man, but I'm not sure which one I like best, so I'm gonna show you all and see if tumblr has an opinion.

Option 1: Red Oak

Option 2: Exclamation! Sycamore

Option 3: Fire King Beech

Option 4: Tulip Poplar

Option 5: Hackberry

[perfectlyvalid49]

Does archery really require top surgery?

Probably not (unless you’re into that!)

[perfectlyvalid49]

jewish culture is feeling like you're playing into antisemitic stereotypes whenever you talk about your spending habits

[perfectlyvalid49]

🩺

[perfectlyvalid49]

They're right. The median voter is a stupid, entitled piece of shit who sees voting through a consumer lens, not as civic duty, and tbh it's not just the median voter when the leftist anti-voting fandom's whole shtick is "Democrats have to earn my vote against far-right fascists!" in a way that's similar to "let me speak to the manager or else I won't come back to this store!" Just an absolute refusal to grasp that voting for a party isn't like buying a product, it has real-world consequences that the voters ultimately choose. I keep saying it but too many eligible voters in America just refuse to believe that their decisions (or lack thereof) at the ballot box have any impact on society whatsoever--they want to be able to fuck around and not give a shit and for nothing to change--which is why they resort to "both sides!" bullshit to justify not paying attention to what the parties actually do and voting accordingly, and so they can turn around and deflect blame from themselves by blaming Democrats for not doing something that's either illegal or something they cannot do because voters explicitly denied them that power. This is deeply shameful behavior and we need to keep making these dickheads feel bad, because holding their hand after 2016 clearly did nothing but make them think their bullshit grievances were legitimate.

[perfectlyvalid49]

[perfectlyvalid49]

Hey I have an idea. What if we did, like, the BIGGEST mutual aid program EVER. Like. Literally everybody pays into it so it'll have a TON of resources. And then!! It'll give aid to literally everyone. Everyone. And it'll do everything! Healthcare, education, even shit like roads and bridges, small business loans, crazy stuff. It'll be so much more efficient to have everyone in this one system than to have, like, a million different nonprofits reinventing the wheel in a million different ways. Especially if everyone has to pay into the system instead of, like, only donating to the stuff they like. Yeah, yeah I know it'll take a lot of organizing to run this system. So since everyone participates in this mutual aid, here's what we do. Once in a while, we all get together, and we pick who's gonna run the mutual aid system—