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tehuti88-art · 1 year

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7/14/23: r/SketchDaily theme, "Car Wash/Free Draw Friday." This week's character from my anthro WWII storyline is Georg Klemper, father of Godfrey Klemper. He's a minor, posthumous character though his past actions played a big role in Klemper's character development. There'll be more about him later in my art Tumblr and Toyhou.se.

Nothing much to say of his design other than he's supposed to look a bit haggard/worn from farm work. He got his first name from the oldest ancestor I was able to trace of my surname, a farmer born circa 1590 in Hesse, Germany. Since then though I've traced back a couple more generations and my oldest surname ancestor is Hans, circa 1545, though there's already a (posthumous) Hans in my story.

TUMBLR EDIT: Georg's history is largely unknown to me, with him being a minor posthumous character, but I can easily guess what his early life was like, as his son Godfrey Klemper gives the answer. In the main story, a Nazi character draws up Klemper's family tree from his parents' names, Georg Klemper and Agnes Schwartz. He proclaims that Klemper hails from "a long, proud line of peasant farmers!" (Klemper is much less enthused about this than the genealogist.) In the Nazi Germany of the story, the peasant farmer is actually considered the ideal; just forget a moment about all the rich urban Nazis who never dug in the dirt once in their lives (wink-wink) and consider the concept of "Blood & Soil" (Blut und Boden), which idealizes, and rather romanticizes, the idea that to be a "true" German, whatever that is, is for your very heritage and ancestry to be tied to the earth you were born upon...at the risk of putting up a big old red flag, I think I rather understand and empathize with that basic concept, at least as far as my own heritage (or until recently, lack of heritage) goes. Without knowing where I came from, I felt I had nowhere to which I belonged, and was literally groundless, without my own culture to belong to. Incidentally, it turns out the ground of my surname is literally medieval/early modern farmland in Hessen (Hesse), Germany. But anyway. Another important aspect of Blood & Soil is that oh yeah, cities = BAD!, and what comes from cities?--JEWS!--so that aspect is an obvious load of BS that ruins the whole thing. (Like I said, there were plenty of urban Nazis, and I'm pretty sure there were rural Jews, and something they had in common was being born on German soil.) Back to Klemper.

Why is Klemper's centuries-long ancestry of dirt-poor farmers considered so glamorous? Because, according to the Nazis, it makes him a good true German, an Aryan, and Klemper being a literal soldier peasant--he joined the Wehrmacht while underaged, following the loss of both parents--just sweetens the deal. He physically resembles the type, too--while of average height, and rather slender, still, he's fit, fair, blue eyed, and has Aryan features; the Nazis want to use him for propaganda, put his face on posters to recruit more soldiers. Klemper is weirded out by this idea--"My face!--why do I want to see my giant face always looking back at me from the side of a building like der Führer?--why does anyone want that!"--not to mention rather disgruntled, as at one time he was targeted for court-martial--and possible execution--following his rumored involvement with a Jewish partisan...a MALE Jewish partisan. So, yeah...that's definitely not the Nazi ideal. Klemper privately complains to Lt. Ratdog, his latest partner, how awfully convenient it is for the army to overlook this detail when it suits them, while still making sure he's punished for it (an appeal to the SS prevents his court-martial and even lets him keep his military position, yet with a permanent demotion attached). I think they do end up making a poster out of him, but it's not really his choice; he's just cannon fodder being used to recruit more cannon fodder. Him having the ideal Aryan face and family background is what counts the most.

Ratdog, meanwhile, deliberately conceals his own ancestry through much of the story. It's not just the...hinkiness...of his exact family ties that he desires to hide (see his sister Edelgard's entry for the icky details), but the fact that his ancestry is considered the exact opposite of the current ideal, too. Ratdog is a Herzog, duke, and like Klemper, his family line extends back hundreds of years in eastern Prussian Germany. As he points out after Klemper digs up this info, Klemper's own ancestors might very well have once toiled the land on the same estate as Ratdog's ancestors. The normally rather völkisch Klemper shows a rare moment of broadmindedness in admitting that he doesn't care--he and Ratdog aren't their ancestors, what was done so far in the past, by people they didn't even know, isn't their burden to bear.

Blood being something you can never fully escape, however, seems to be a recurring theme in this story. Ratdog's past comes back to haunt him, and Klemper's does as well, in various ways. The main reason Klemper leaves his old family farm to join the Heer is because he's been left groundless: His father has been dead for a few years, his mother has just passed away after an extended illness, and while Klemper--merely thirteen years old--is busy struggling to dig her grave in the woods next to his father's grave, a rogue Wehrmacht unit ransacks and burns down his family farmhouse. Klemper returns to find it in flames, and lingers nearby until only the stone foundations and cellar are left in the smoldering ruins. He already cried over his mother and father; staring at his vanished home, he has no more grief left, just numbness. He'd taken his father's old rifle with him, so the rogue unit didn't get hold of that; he takes the Stahlhelm and ID papers off a dying soldier he passes (the soldier asks Klemper to kill him, and Klemper, rather used to death already, obliges, then doctors the papers the best he can), and pauses to listen to a wandering recruiter trying to convince a handful of his fellow country dwellers to enlist. Although the recruiter gives the "sixteen-year-old" Klemper in his oversized stolen Stahlhelm with his oversized rifle a skeptical look, he ignores the hinkiness of his ID papers, and Klemper is handed a new (oversized) helmet and (oversized) rifle and sent off to his new unit to get firsthand training.

Klemper faces lots of unpleasant incidents being victimized by older men, as he often finds himself drawn to them, yet is gullible and easily taken advantage of. It's a statistical fact that a victim faces greatly increased chances of becoming a victim again, and this is sadly so in Klemper's case. For him, as it turns out, his initial and primary victimizer is his own father Georg. Although Georg is depicted as utterly despicable so far in Klemper's recounting of this incident to Elias Baswitz (the aforementioned Jewish partisan) in an adult WIP of mine, the story is far more complicated, as such things tend to be. Klemper's own actions, and his words to Ratdog later in the story, illustrate this; although he still harbors a deep well of trauma, anger, and hate for his father, on the other hand, he obviously still loves him as well, and feels extreme remorse and guilt over his death. When Ratdog expresses confusion over him honoring his dead father at his grave, Klemper acts similarly perplexed by his mixed feelings, but shrugs and offers the best explanation he can: "He's my Vater and he's blood. What am I supposed to feel?"

The truth is that Klemper's father wasn't always an a-hole, and his own circumstances, so similar to Klemper's, contributed to his personality and actions. The Klempers, and pretty much everyone else in their area, are of a long line of farmer peasants, with all that that entails--namely, a difficult struggle of a life. I don't think Georg fought in the Great War as he was too busy keeping the farm running, though he marries Agnes and their son Godfrey is born into a country that's still reeling and struggling to survive, itself. Based on Klemper's age when he meets Ratdog, this is roughly the early Twenties, though Georg never joins the Nazi Party--out here near the literal frontier, so close to the border that Georg sometimes hires itinerant Poles to help work his land (this is how young Godfrey learns to speak Polish), such concepts as voting and political parties are a virtually unknown concept; by the time news reaches them of the Führer's rise to power, it's old news, and it really doesn't affect them much.

This isn't to say that Georg would necessarily disagree with Nazi ideals. Though I'm not sure about Agnes's beliefs, Georg and others way out here follow an odd mishmash of pagan, völkisch, and Christian beliefs, many of which would be well in line with what the Nazis teach; he passes this on to Godfrey, who both embraces yet rather struggles with this worldview as a young adult later on, when he comes into contact with differing peoples of differing beliefs. BUT, similar worldview aside, Georg doesn't care about the Nazis either way because he has his farm to think about. He's not culturally enlightened by any means--he's likely racist in his own ways--but he doesn't dwell on it, because you can't be picky about race when you need the assistance of Slavs to keep your farm running. As for Jews, I don't think they ever even cross Georg's mind. The Klempers and their neighbors live in their own small world largely cut off from the drama of the Third Reich; this is the world that ends up so heavily romanticized, and turned into propaganda, by the Nazis, yet their depiction of it is often far from the truth. There's no glamor in the farmer peasant life. Just lots of struggle, hardship, and barely getting by.

Farm life is complicated in its simplicity. Everything boils down to routine and repetition. You keep the farm running, which means keeping workers. And when you haven't much money to pay workers, you make your own. Thus Agnes: The role of the farm wife is to have children. A lot of them. The reason that line of farmer peasants has done so well in surviving for so long, despite the difficult circumstances, is that the women have large broods of kids to help keep things running and to keep the line going. Even girls are more useful than not--after all, they can be married off, sealing ties between families, creating the next generation. Sons are preferred, but daughters will do. I don't yet know the circumstances of Georg's and Agnes's marriage, though I do know they genuinely care for each other, while the union is primarily for utilitarian purposes. Out here, you don't marry for love, though it helps. I think Agnes cares more for Georg than he cares for her, BUT, based on the fact that he remains married to her and remains faithful, it might simply be that he conceals his emotions better. Because Agnes proves not to be as useful a wife as hoped.

It isn't that she isn't a devoted, hard worker--she is. She more than carries her weight, working her fingers to the bone to keep the farm going and to care for her husband. She's a good faithful wife. Yet she's not much of a mother--the primary and most important role she's supposed to fulfill. No matter how hard the two of them try, they remain childless for quite a while. Agnes starts to despair, and Georg grows frustrated; when finally, it happens--Agnes becomes pregnant. She wishes to be careful, to protect this precious, much-needed life as much as she can, but farm work beckons as always, and she keeps at it as long as she's physically able, going into labor while out in the field one day. Georg hurries off to fetch the nearest midwife--no doctors out here--though Agnes has already done most of the work by the time they return, and Godfrey is born not long after.

Godfrey is a puny, colicky, sickly seeming baby, but he survives, and grows stronger (though he never does get chubby or plump out much), and by the time he leaves toddlerhood is already helping out with chores. (Same as these folk having no time for politics, they have no time for childhood, either.) Agnes would love to dote on him, but there's no space for spoiling a child on the farm, so she settles for being his comfort, always smiling at him and giving his face a gentle little touch before continuing with her work, and singing him lullabies and telling him the old folk legends before bed; she also often gives him a little bit of her portions of the day's meals, because he's a growing child and she reasons he needs it more. Georg, meanwhile, isn't an affectionate type--more often than not, he's giving Godfrey a light cuff upside the head to wake him or remind him to get back to work (the boy is easily distracted). He always speaks sternly, always orders him to see to his chores or get moving or quit dawdling. He's not violent or overly abusive, though, and even the head-cuffing is restrained--meant to startle Godfrey into compliance rather than frighten or hurt him--and once in a while, when the child works especially hard or the day is especially productive, he mutters, "Gute Arbeit" (good work) and even briefly ruffles the top of Godfrey's head before they go back home. It isn't much, but to little Godfrey it's the world. He does everything he can to make his parents happy and proud of him.

It ends up not being enough, however. Agnes never has any more children, meaning Georg needs to hire more workers, meaning he needs to spend money or trade resources. The strain of this wears more on the little family as time goes on, and Georg handles it poorest of all. He grows perpetually frustrated and disgruntled at how little their efforts pay off, and takes this out on both Agnes (for not giving him any more children to work the farm) and Godfrey (for being a rather disappointing boy). The brief days of the toiling but somewhat happy family are past, and more often than not, Georg can be found snapping angrily at his wife or cuffing his son a bit harder than he used to. He doesn't do any of this out of spite--he's just never been taught any more effective ways to handle his emotions. The truth is he's struggling to keep it together just as much as the others are, and he too feels ashamed to not be the self-sufficient, successful provider he's supposed to be.

Despite these setbacks, the three of them do still get along and work together the best they can, and Georg's heart is still in the right place...until after one especially stressful day, one of his hired workers offers him a bottle of beer to "help take the edge off." Georg refrains at first--he rather looks down on the pastime of drinking, which he considers a waste of time and resources. Still, the worker jiggles the bottle at him and cajoles, and he really does feel like he needs a break after so much hard work--a lifetime of it--plus he's so tired and thirsty; he takes the bottle and takes a reluctant sip. Then a swig. He can't help it, his throat is so dry he quickly downs the whole thing. His worker laughs a little and offers him another but this time he refuses and heads home, he doesn't want to overdo it. He's already buzzed, however--without really understanding or knowing it--and has to admit deep down that the drink did take the edge off. He doesn't feel so short tempered with Agnes and Godfrey when he gets home, and the evening is actually a somewhat pleasant one, the first in a long time.

Well...moderation is a tricky thing. And Georg soon enough learns that. You don't become an addict overnight; it's a gradual process--Godfrey learns this much later on with methamphetamine, and Georg learns it now with drinking. He never gets into hard liquor, just sticks to beer--that in itself helps trick him into thinking it's not so bad--but it's too easy to progress from buzzed to drunk...and in stark contrast to being buzzed mellowing him out a little, when it comes to being drunk, Georg is a mean one. After a few beers he finds himself simmering with resentment over his lot in life; a few beers more than that, say just the right (wrong) words, and his fists start flying. He never intends to get angry-drunk, he longs to simply stay with that slightly drunk relaxed feeling, yet he can just almost never limit himself to one bottle, he keeps hoping he can linger with that warm hazy feeling. You'd think if one bottle makes you feel good, surely another would make you feel twice as such? But that's not the way it works for Georg, who's had so much rage and despair lurking under the surface before now. The bottle loosens him up and as a result, all THAT comes surging out. And Agnes and Godfrey are on the receiving end.

Wife and son are confused at first by this growing change in his behavior; they aren't familiar with the effects of alcohol, either. But they catch on. The bottle is what turns the normally stern but moderate Georg into a raging brute, and anything can set him off. The first time he smacks Agnes across the face, it's a shock, but it quickly becomes routine. Then, Godfrey as well. And then not just smacks, but beatings. He doesn't bother even trying to hide the effects of the blows--he'll hit them in the face as readily as in the ribs--because most of their interactions are with the itinerant Poles who don't even speak the same language, and a few visits with distant neighbors who are unlikely to do anything. It's nobody else's business to get involved. These outside parties do cast vaguely sympathetic glances at the battered pair--on one occasion, an older Roma woman who stops by to trade outright glares malevolently at Georg the entire time--yet that's the extent of their involvement, and Agnes and Godfrey don't expect them to step in, anyway.

They simply put up with this situation for a few years--just another hardship of country life--Agnes trying to explain to their increasingly discouraged son that this isn't really his beloved father, Georg is still in there somewhere--the Georg who would cuff him a little but only when necessary, and would tell him good work--it's just that der Flaschendämon, the bottle demon, has hold of him, and he can't get free. Indeed, Godfrey catches glimpses of the old Georg when he's not drunk--Georg isn't the apologetic type, but he does feel extreme guilt when he's sober, and keeps wanting to stop drinking, but doesn't know how--and the more time goes by, the fewer are the times when he's sober. He even starts drinking early in the day and works the fields while drunk, nearly getting into accidents a few times--Agnes covers for these incidents and silently patches him up when he hurts himself--and arguing with visitors until the Klempers are increasingly isolated from their handful of distant neighbors, and depend almost entirely on the wandering workers. Things get worse--Georg drinks harder--the sorry situation feeds off itself. Without any of them knowing it, everything starts to come to a head.

A neighbor here and there still bothers to do business with Georg when necessary. The men from one family stop by now and then to help work the land. They have a young son, around Godfrey's age, named Rolf. Godfrey and Rolf don't get to interact much--they're also busy working--but one day they manage to find a few moments to take a break and sit side by side under the trees at the edge of the field, gazing out into the sunlight. Rolf peers shyly at Godfrey, and smiles. Godfrey thinks his green eyes are the most beautiful eyes in the world, and though it confuses him, he kisses him. He worries just briefly that he'll scare Rolf off...but Rolf smiles back at him even wider, and even grasps his hand. Godfrey hasn't had many occasions for smiles or happiness or love in his short life, but his heart thumps, and he tentatively smiles back. He'll remember this moment like it only just happened until the day he dies.

Georg is out in the field with the other few men left since it's starting to get late. And yes, although still toiling hard, he's been drinking most of the day, slowly but steadily growing more and more sullen and ill tempered. The others are avoiding him by now, knowing he'd likely deck them for no reason; they're too busy chatting with each other a bit to notice what Georg notices. What Georg notices, when he stops plowing for a moment to catch his breath and wipe his brow, is Godfrey sitting with Rolf near the edge of the field, and he feels a twinge of anger, ready to yell at him to get back to work--when Godfrey leans toward the other boy and kisses him. The blood drains from Georg's face and his lungs feel like they're sucked inside-out. Everything else in his field of vision, the other workers, the sky, the field itself, goes black as his sight shrinks to a dot, like looking down a tunnel with Godfrey at the other end. All he sees is his son kissing another boy. A lifetime, two lifetimes, centuries of hardened farm life and rural teachings pounded into him that this is wrong, this is awful, this is not what boys are meant for, yet here's his son, his ONLY son on whom the farm and family line depends, doing this, going against nature and country ideals and Gott Himself--all of this suddenly comes roaring up into Georg's chest, and his vision literally goes red as blood fills his eyes and his own heart pounds up into his throat, the thudding and ringing filling his ears. His fingernails gouge into the plow handle before he doesn't merely let it fall, he slams it down at the ground, whirls so hard he twists his ankle yet doesn't feel the sting, and yells at the top of his lungs, "GODFREY!!"

Godfrey and the other boy--Georg doesn't know his name, doesn't care--both turn to look at him, freezing, eyes going wide. Georg starts storming across the field, making a beeline for them. He's never seen such fear and dread on his son's face before, not even before giving him a walloping, and the tiniest, tiniest voice in the last sober bit in the back of his brain says don't do this, but it's promptly screamed down and drowned out by rage. He half-expects the boys to go running as boys tend to do, but Godfrey's always been good and obedient, has never questioned his authority even once, has always done everything Georg told him to do. These are all things that should make him take pause, yet they just enrage him even more--his son, HIS son, should never act this way, and he grits his teeth and clenches his fists hard enough to draw blood as he nears the two. "YOU! Go on home!" he yells at the green-eyed boy--he doesn't care about him whatsoever, he's not his kid to discipline--and the boy hastily clambers down from the tree root he's seated on and goes running off to the other men still in the field; Georg pays no attention to how they stopped working the moment he screamed his son's name, nor how they gather their equipment and bustle off toward the barn, pulling the boy along with them although he reluctantly looks back at Godfrey. Godfrey has eyes for only his father--Georg snarls when he reaches out and grabs him by the wrist, yanking him out into the open so abruptly that Godfrey yelps and stumbles. He ducks his head, obviously expecting a blow, yet Georg turns and hauls Godfrey along after him as he stalks back to the farmhouse.

"Schwuchtel!" Georg hisses, fingers digging into Godfrey's wrist, "Slacking off doing THAT? You like that so much? That's what you learned? How about I teach you some more, then...?"

He drags Godfrey into the house, holding off until they're inside before smacking him across the face, hard. Godfrey lets out a pained noise but doesn't yell. He does cry out at the second, even harder blow, however, and Agnes hurries into the room--she's carrying a bottle of beer, having expected Georg to give his customary demand upon entering the house, and so is startled to find him hitting Godfrey instead. He yanks the bottle out of her hand even as he hits Godfrey a third time, takes a deep swig, feels even more enraged--he punches this time, knocking Godfrey down, then lands a sharp kick. Agnes finally tries to intervene, but he snarls and gives her such an infuriated glare, fist raised, that she cowers back--like Godfrey, she's good and obedient, she never fights back. And even as Georg grabs his son's arm again and yanks him back up onto his feet, his lip bleeding and his eye swelling and tears brimming, Godfrey doesn't protest, doesn't even call for his mother to protect him; Georg turns and heads for the stairs, dragging Godfrey after him as he clumsily ascends and then pulls him down the narrow hallway.

He reaches Godfrey's small bedroom, tears open the door, hurls Godfrey inside so he hits his bed, hard. Godfrey gasps and blinks up at him, eyes wide and wet. Georg grinds his teeth so hard it should hurt, though he doesn't feel it, doesn't feel the swelling in his ankle or in his knuckles from the blows he already landed, doesn't feel anything but blind fury--he takes another drink, again sees red like looking through a tunnel and hears the ringing and roaring in his ears. "Filthy little Schwuchtel!" he snarls. "You want to be a little wife so bad? I'll teach you how much fun it is to be a little wife. Then you'll want to be a man." Godfrey watches as he tips the bottle and pours out the beer on the floor, then Georg slams the door shut and stalks toward him.

I've already mentioned this incident in Elias Baswitz's entry; I can't go into detail about what Georg does here, but it's awful. Agnes cowers downstairs at first, though when she hears her son start screaming, she gingerly climbs the steps, shaking like a leaf--she wants to help him so badly, but is too afraid of enraging her husband even further. She covers her face and cries until the door to Godfrey's room slams open again and Georg comes stomping out, teeth bared, fist clenched--he hurls the bottle away with a crash and heads for the stairs. Agnes cowers back again, though as he draws close she manages to summon just enough courage to ask in a small voice, "What did you do to Godfrey...?" Georg ignores her--and at last she feels a tiny angry twinge of her own. "Georg--?" she says, louder, as he passes--then, clenching her own fists and nearly yelling at his back, "What did you do to Godfrey--?"

Georg halts, bristling--his temper hasn't worn itself out yet, if anything, he's even more enraged than before and doesn't even know why--all he knows is for some inexplicable reason, years of crushed hopes and expectations have collapsed upon him, all his life's hard work and all his family's hard work seems like it's been for nothing, all over one stupid little thing. His brain is so fogged with rage and alcohol that the realization doesn't occur to him--his son's always obeyed--always done everything he can to make him proud--of course Godfrey always planned to carry on the family tradition, same as he did, as it's all he knows. Of course he would have found a girl to marry and have children with, no matter how against his nature, no matter how miserable it would've made him, because that's the way he's always been. And even if his luck continuing the line had been even worse than Georg's and Agnes's, still, he would've tried, because he loves his father.

The tiny part deep in the back of Georg's head suspects this. Were he to go to bed, sleep it off, wake sober again in the morning, he'd feel horror and guilt over how far he let it go this time. Maybe, just maybe, it'd finally be just enough to jar him into making a change. But he's never heard Agnes raise her voice before, and it's like a match striking inside. He stops and turns to look back at her. He expects defiance, yet sees only fear; despite summoning her tiny shred of courage, she's still terrified. Georg suddenly thinks of all their years of trying, for a family more than just Godfrey--puny girly disappointing Godfrey, near-barren disappointing Agnes, and most disappointing of all, Georg himself, unable to fix all this--all the generations that went before are howling in his ears at how ruined his family is--and the tiny voice is snuffed out. He sees as if in slow motion, his hand swinging, Agnes's eyes shifting to the side to watch--an echoing CRACK--and she hits the bannister and goes tumbling down the stairs.

Agnes lands on the ground floor with a sickening thud, but as Georg descends she manages to slowly push herself up onto hands and knees, gasping for breath. She looks up at him, her cheek already starting to swell, and shakily says, "Georg--" before he reaches her and hauls her to her feet by the front of her dress. "Mutter!" a voice dimly cries before he tosses her again, and she hits the wall. She still doesn't pass out, saying, "Georg--!" again in a wavering voice, so he pulls her up a second time. This goes on for a moment or so--Agnes yelling his name, Georg alternating between tossing her around and punching or kicking her--the more she refuses to just give up, the more enraged he gets. The pathetic one-sided fight goes around the room, jostling furniture, shattering glass, until he hurls her at the floor near the arched entryway into the den. Agnes lands hard with a muffled yelp--Georg gnashes his teeth and clenches his fists and stomps toward her--and then a flicker of movement to Agnes's side makes him stop short. The long barrel of a rifle is pointed right at him. He blinks in surprise--it's his gun, normally kept on the wall in the den just beyond, what's it doing here?--then he blinks again when he sees who's holding it. Godfrey is shaking so hard the rifle jiggles unsteadily in his grasp, and he looks just as petrified as Agnes. "Godfrey--?" Georg says, confused, and Agnes echoes him--"Godfrey?"--a strained note in her voice. She's just as surprised as Georg is.

"S-stop hurting her," Godfrey stammers in a small voice, his eye swollen almost shut, his lip split and bruises littering him.

"Godfrey," Agnes says again, pushing herself up a little and lifting a hand--an appeal to put down the rifle. Georg sees his son--his puny weakling son--standing his ground for the first time in his life, wielding the family rifle (Godfrey's never shown any fondness for weapons despite Georg trying to teach him), a gun so huge it looks utterly ridiculous in his arms, making him seem even punier trying to hold it aloft and aim at the same time--the recoil alone would likely knock him straight off his feet. There's some sort of irony here--Georg had always wanted Godfrey to toughen up, to be a man, and now here he is with a firearm--yet it's pointed right at Georg himself--and he looks so pathetic with this massive weapon he obviously can hardly use that rather than feel pride that his lesson got through, Georg just feels disgust, as well as his anger deepening. His fists clench again.

"What do you think you're doing with that?" he growls; "Piddling Schwuchtel! Put it back!"

"Godfrey, give me the rifle, bitte," Agnes implores; her voice grates on Georg's raw nerves and he snarls.

"Shut up! Alte Landsau! He's like this because of you always coddling him!" Then to Godfrey: "Give me that gun, you little piss, or I'll make you regret it even more!"

He takes a threatening step forward and Godfrey's foot goes back--but aside from that he doesn't budge, and doesn't lower the gun. In a tiny shaking voice, eyes watering, he then says something that confuses the hell out of Georg: "Der Flaschendämon. Let--let him go. I want my Vater back."

Georg blinks again, wonders what that means, then immediately stops caring--"Give me that gun, you Schwuchtel, you can't even fire it like a man!"--and he makes a grab but Godfrey jerks back, the barrel swinging. Georg raises his fists and his voice in a fury--"WHEN I GET MY HANDS ON YOU--!!" and hears Agnes, her own voice raised--"Godfrey!"--and Godfrey's wailing voice--"I want my Vater back!"--and then the tiny sober part of his brain remembers, that's right, Godfrey does know how to use the rifle, he taught him, he wanted him to stand up for himself and be a man--right before a brilliant flash blinds him, fire blasts in his chest, and he stumbles backwards, toppling and slamming into the floor. He regains his vision just long enough to see the wide wet eyes of his wife and his son, the rifle barrel smoking, before everything flickers, the darkness rapidly crawls in--like looking down a tunnel again--and instead of red, everything goes black.

The aftermath will be recounted in Agnes Klemper's entry (September 1st).

[Georg Klemper 2023 [‎Friday, ‎July ‎14, ‎2023, ‏‎2:00:40 AM]]

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cassandraclare · 4 years

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Geneaology

Rorochan92 Hey Cassie, I read about people being concerned that Jesse and Lucie are cousins. Are they cousins? I can’t figure it out. Also, if James and Cordelia get married, and if they have kids, how come Jace doesn’t know he’s related to the Carstairs when he meets Emma? Why don’t they talk about it more?

Ok! Let’s tackle this in two parts.

Jesse and Lucie: I … think that must have been a misunderstanding? They are not in any way related. Jesse’s uncle is Gabriel Lightwood. Gabriel Lightwood is married to Cecily Herondale, who is Lucie’s aunt. The only way they’d be related would be if Cecily and Gabriel were related, which they are not. Jesse and Lucie are distantly connected by marriage, which is not weird, especially in a smaller community like the Shadowhunters who are a tiny fraction of people on the planet. She is likely just as related to Matthew or more so (i.e. not much.)

(And before there is too much pearl-clutching about that, this kind of reminds me of people in my box fretting about whether Kit and Ty would be related if Jesse and Lucie ended up together. They would not be in any meaningful way. Those ancestors are far enough back that they would be considered by any geneticist to be unrelated, and by Shadowhunter terms, they’d be practically total strangers. It’s already a small community, good luck finding someone who doesn’t share some common ancestor with you. (I am Ashkenazi Jewish ( a group which comprises 0.2% of people on the planet): the assumption is that if I meet another Ashkenazi Jew, they’re my tenth cousin. Which is to say, we share some common ancestor way back but are not related. Let me put it this way: whether or not Lucie and Jesse end up together, whether or not the present-day Blackthorns are descended from Jesse’s branch of the Blackthorns at all, Kit and Ty will be the same amount of related, which is: not.)

Another rule of thumb is that “it is 99.9999% likely … that any given person you meet is at least a 16th cousin. And 97.2% likely that they are a 15th cousin” — and that’s the general population, not a smaller community like Shadowhunters, or Ashkenazi. It is not something that concerns me, nor should it you! There is a reason no soap opera plot turns on the discovery that someone is your fifteenth cousin. They are essentially unrelated to you. This is like freaking out that Magnus and Alec have a common ancestor. I guarantee they do. We all do. As the LA Times says, “Everyone is related to everyone else.”

Nobody in these books is marrying a first or even second cousin, though I would point out that’s exactly what Elizabeth is meant to be doing in Pride and Prejudice, with Mr. Collins, and exactly what Mr. Darcy is supposed to be doing with Anne de Burgh, and exactly what Edmund and Fanny do in Mansfield Park (they’re first cousins.) This was considered a way to keep wealth in the family, and was most common of course in royal families, which should provide some pearl-clutching historicity fun. :)

As for Jace — I mean, no, I would think of it as very bizarre if the people in the TMI/TDA era made a big deal about having distant common ancestors. Okay, so if Jace is descended from Cordelia, then she is one of sixteen great-great grandparents that he has. She is one of far, far more ancestors: literally hundreds. I think people may be compressing time in their heads and not thinking about the exponential growth of generations. Cordelia is one thirty-second of Jace’s genetic makeup, if they are related at all.

Also, not only does Jace barely know who Stephen and Marcus (his grandfather) are, he has no reason to memorize his family tree. Why on earth would he? I don’t know who any of my great-great grandparents are. I know the name of exactly one great-grandparent. I’ m not sure why Jace, who feels no great connection to the Herondales, would be researching this stuff? And memorizing it? And apparently caring more about someone removed from him by five generations that he cares about, say, his grandmother’s relatives? Why is no one complaining that he isn’t tracking down the Whitelaws or the Montclaires? (He doesn’t care to, but they’re all more closely related to him than the Carstairs.)

The answer to that is: because readers have read the books, and to them the Herondales and Carstairs are significant names, and those names have a connection. But the characters have not read the books. It would be as bizarre for Jace to go lunging at every Carstairs he might meet as it would be for Alec to weep all over the Monteverdes. Jace is not closely enough related to Emma for him to think of her as a relative regardless of whether James and Cordelia end up together or not.

We have to remember: these characters do not know that there have been previous book series in which names like Lightwood and Blackthorn are important. When Jace finds out he’s a Herondale he doesn’t leap on Alec either exclaiming that now they are related or something because a hundred and fifty years ago they had ancestors who got married. They’re not related, and neither of them would likely know about those marriages. To us, these characters are important: to Jace and Clary et al they can’t be without destroying a sense of verisimilitude that these are real people with real people concerns, not book people whose concerns are about other book series.

#tmi #tlh #shadowhunters

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thechembow · 4 years

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To the woman who assaulted me at Ace Hardware today,

Jan. 15, 2021

I am your neighbor in Frazier Park. I love this mountain and feel so blessed to live here. You must enjoy its beauty as much as I do, because it is unsurpassed. The woods and wildlife give me solace. I have also always had good experiences among the humans of the mountain, shopping locally, where we all know each other and everyone is friendly. I like supporting our community and keeping everyone working and happy. I’ve never had a bad time shopping in Frazier Park, so it was somewhat of a shock to meet you this way today.

My husband and I were picking up some bird seed at Ace Hardware. If you live in Frazier Park and not in Pine Mountain Club, it’s still legal to feed the birds! We love our feathered friends. They have also been giving me nice brass shavings from their key machine which I use to make orgonite, an energy device which promotes rainfall, clears air pollution, and makes living with EMF safer. My husband, Gabe, and I have been making and gifting orgonite for almost seven years now, and we have covered all of California and much of the US west to end the drought. You might be interested to know that we have put orgonite all over this mountain too. It sure has been snowing more and more every year since we got here and the forests are alive with new baby trees, far outnumbering the trees that die of old age. There were awesome wildflower blooms out in the Antelope Valley and Gorman these past few years. It might also comfort you to know that there are Earth pipes along San Andreas Fault here and at the top of Mt. Pinos, healing the damage that was done here by your ancestors, who stole the land from the Chumash Indians and clear-cut the forests. This will help prevent earthquakes. We have gifted somewhere around 200 orgonite pieces to these mountains, from the Grapevine to the Central Coast. I wrote a book about it too. Our life and most of our resources have gone into planetary healing.

Now that you know a little more about me, I would like to know more about you. I wasn’t covering my face today like you were because I am not a member of your religion. We should be tolerant of other peoples’ beliefs. I am tolerant of your choice to hide your face from your Creator, although I don’t agree with it. I would never hit you and insult you for wearing a mask or for any other reason. What told you that I was to be deplored because of my exposed nose and mouth? When you called me a “f-ing b-tch” and punched me in the ribs, it didn’t hurt physically because you’re old and weak. But I was wondering if it was your mom or dad who taught you to do that? Did you learn it in school or in church? I’ve never been cursed at and hit by an old woman before.

I put on the mask in order not to offend you, although I didn’t have to. You continued to yell, and you were very close to me when you yelled that I would infect you. If I’m so disgusting and disease-ridden, it would be a good idea to stand a few feet away from me when you insult me. I think about 6 feet should do it. It’s also not a good idea to punch a sick person because you could get my germs on your hand. How come you disappeared out the back door when I called out, “She assaulted me!” If you’re right, you should stick around.

Incidentally, soon after we met, I tried to run into the grocery store to grab some garlic. Like at the hardware store, the employees there never get on my case for my need to breathe and show the face God gave me. I got verbally assaulted there by a customer again, which wasn’t as bad as being hit and verbally assaulted at the same time. But the woman there was much younger than you, so you may want to give her some pointers on how to really hurt your neighbor. She said, “You’re killing my family.” She also blamed me for her sick dog. It was more likely a combination of pinworms, Ascaris, a variety of liver and intestinal flukes, some tapeworms, solvents and heavy metals that killed them, along with the ventilators they pop peoples’ lungs with if they come into the hospital with a cold. I’m reading a fascinating book right now called The Cure for All Diseases by Dr. Hulda Clark. It explains all of these diseases you think are infectious and how to cure them. You need to zap your parasites and stop sharing your worms! Stop putting filth in your mouth and reinfecting yourself, says Dr. Clark. Germs are not jumping around in the air. You can learn to heal anything that’s wrong with you with this book.

In your case, you’re definitely watching too much news. I would venture to guess you’re also taking an assortment of pharmaceutical drugs which are masking symptoms of your own worms and the bacteria and viruses they carry. You probably use a smart phone. Lots of old people who don’t even understand the technology do. I wish you would be more like my grandma, who never hit a lady in the store nor uttered an obscenity. She never would have used a smart phone either. She was beautiful, strong, dignified, spoke several languages, loved fine art, cooked great meals and enjoyed life. It’s sad what a shriveled lump of fear you’re become. My grandma survived the very oppression you are doling out today by a miracle of God. Goodness knows, her life was in danger every moment for being Jewish and from Germany at the wrong time. Now I also feel like I’m in danger. If you’ll physically assault a stranger for having a different belief, then what if someone stronger or armed would do it? This is not something I want to find out. Fortunately I have a relationship with God who protects me and am saved by Messiah Yeshua. He reconciled me back to God who forgave my sin of falling into pagan culture like you have. Your world is a fantasy land, but it’s really more like a nightmare, and it is dying like you have died.

There were a few people in the store after you fled the scene who showed me sympathy. But I now know how bad things have gotten. You showed me that today. You made me feel physically sick, not just emotionally distressed, with a little help from your insane ally at the grocery store. Just last week I could go into most places in Frazier Park with my face showing. It seems your time is running out and your world is spiraling out of control. For now, I would rather not argue with you. I will cover my face in your presence and you won’t know I don’t worship your god. It gives me more inspiration to become more self-reliant and less dependent on the businesses of your world. I hate the mask with a passion. I hate what it represents and how you look in it. I think it’s very sad that you love your pathetic false god and believe this absolutely ridiculous narrative to the point that you would assault another woman. C0VID is a mental illness!

Well that’s all for now. I hope to hear from you soon. Maybe you will realize it was wrong to hit me and curse at me and I’ll forgive you. Then we can be friends and have a kosher barbeque when the weather warms up. I’m not holding my breath, no pun intended.

Your neighbor,

Sharon Daphna

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anthonybrxdgerton · 6 years

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Shadow of Night reread

A few days ago I re-read Shadow of Night by Deborah Harkness. It took me very little time to do it (which was surprising, considering the fact that i re-read the first book for almost 2 months). I will be doing my reactions about episodes as well (as soon as I re-watch them) and comparing the show to the first book.

My reactions, notes and everything under the cut. There are some trivia I forgot about, things i hope to see in season 2 of A Discovery of Witches, some stuff referencing the next & previous books and what not.

BEWARE OF SPOILERS FOR THE BOOKS. IF YOU HAVEN’T READ THE BOOKS, DON’T READ THIS POST. Enjoy!

[ a discovery of witches | shadow of night | the book of life | time’s convert ]

the book takes place in 1590 & 1591 (matthew & diana scenes) and 2009 & 2010 (present day scenes) in the span of 7 months

diana's hair change colors when she timewalked into 1590 - they're long, red and curly, and they change - not exactly back - when they return to the present - they're straight, silky strands that were brighter redish gold - just like my mother's hair. it does't say anything about the length though (probably in the next book);

2 of my favorite quotes describing Matthew in this book: The man was as tall as a giraffe. | Bloodred stockings would do more than capture a wandering eye, given that the man who proposed to wear them was a six-foot-three vampire, and most of his height was leg..

“Surely you’ll let me kill him now, de Clermont. I’ve wanted to do so for ages,” Hancock said, cracking his knuckles”. “No. You can’t kill him.” Matthew rubbed a hand over his tired face. “There would be too many questions, and I don’t have the patience to come up with convincing answers at present. - Hancock never liked Kit, I also love Matthew's reasoning lol

- AT THE SIGHT OF PHILIPPE'S LETTER MATTHEW CRIED VAMPIRE TEARS ESPECIALLY THAT THE LAST TIME MATTHEW SAW PHILIPPE HE COULD BARELY HOLD A PEN IN HIS HANDS AND PHILIPPE LOVED WRITING I AM NOT OKAY

“Then who . . . ?” I trailed off. “Ysabeau? Baldwin? Surely not Marcus!” I couldn’t believe that Matthew’s mother, his brother, or his son could be involved [in the Congregation] without someone letting it slip. - oh, diana... Question: did Deb knew it was Baldwin when she was writing it? In A Discovery of Witches Matthew acted like he didn't know who was on the Congregation "And Marcus? Find out who besides Peter Knox and Domenico Michele are members of the Congregation."

- Until I have made peace with the past, I will not set foot in France. - we know Gallowglass showed up in Sept-Tours in 1945 when Philippe was dying. Did he go there before too?

“Explain yourself.” The words were quiet, but they didn't conceal Philippe's fury. - he is nor just mad because Matthew has a wife now. He is furious because he can sense that BOTH Diana and Matthew are from the future - this is what Philippe wants Matthew to explain.

Also, interestingly, reading A Discovery of Witches I've noticed that Baldwin called Philippe "dad" while Matthew calls him "father". Coincidence? But then in the Book of Life Baldwin calls Philippe “father” so... Idk anymore. That being said, verin calls him “Atta”;

“The twelfth century was not good for you, and we allowed you to read entirely too much poetry." - I need to know more now! What exactly did Matthew read in 12th century?

"It is regrettable that you are not going to Florence, then. But it will be a long time before you will be welcomed back to that city, after your latest escapades there." - Matthew, what the heck did you do there? Please tell me you were NOT behind the siege of Florence, i beg you... But then again, Ysabeau did say that Matthew caused wars in Italy when he was bored...

Tamen mea lingua graeca est peior.” “Then we shall not converse in that language either,” murmured Philippe in a pained tone. - HE JUST WANTS TO SPEAK IN GREEK, THAT'S HIS NATIVE LANGUAGE, WHY DOES NOBODY BUT YSABEAU SPEAK IT. BUT that explains why he made sure greeg was still taught in schools later - he wasn’t only looking for Diana, he wanted people to speak his native language too

“Philippe doesn’t seem to think so.” “Then bed him. - lol, if only

"He is my son. I will not fail him.” Philippe’s mouth tightened." PHILIPPE I LOVE YOU NO MATTER WHAT ANYONE SAYS

“For someone wedded to a witch you are quick to judge the passions of others, Matthaios. Louis is your brother.” Goddess bless us, another brother. - Diana is not happy having huge family lol

I had been wrong. Philippe had not been trying to break Matthew, but only his guilt. Philippe had not failed his son after all. - MY FEELS

“I forgive you,” his father repeated, throwing his arms around his son in a fierce embrace. “I forgive you.” - IT KILLS ME EVERY TIME, THEY BETTER KEEP THIS IN THE SHOW

i love how Philippe just makes Diana his blood daughter without a second thought lol

“Think—and stay alive.” Philippe clapped his hands. - one of my favorite quotes

Alcides Leontothymos beseeches you to hold this child Diana in your hand. - i am right to think Philippe is in fact Heracles, right?

Philippe trying his hand at engineering and failing every time will always make me laugh. You may be thousands years old vampire, but some things you will never learn

Philippe, Diana and Matthew's goodbye always kills me SEASON 2 BETTER DO IT JUSTICE

“Anomalies,” Ysabeau murmured. “Philippe was always looking for anomalies in the world. It is why I still read all the newspapers. It became our habit to look through them each morning.” - Phiippe knew he would not be alive by the time Matthew and Diana were together, but he was always hoping he could see her again. he hoped that Diana would be at least born while he was still alive and he always knew that when Diana and Matthew came back to their times, there would be anomalies throughout history. That's why he told Gallowglass and Verin to search for them too, to keep Diana safe.;

“That’s what Philippe says about Granny,” Gallowglass muttered under his breath. “Just before all hell breaks loose.” Give me more Ysabeau and Philippe you cowards;

“Matthew knows the book, for his brother gave it to me.- So Mary Sydney knows Godfrey too. Does she know the rest of his siblings?;

[Marcus] made a muffled oath. “Tell your intuition to take a break, for God’s sake.” I need to see Marcus and Ysabeau interacting in season 2, their banter will be amazing

Every time I read Marcus seeing miniatures for the first time and missing Matthew so much kills me too - the show did them dirty, i need more of them together too;

I forgot how much I ship Marcus & Phoebe;

I wish we could see the requests for magic Diana has received in season 2 and her not being able to do anything about that, i need this conflict SO MUCH. Does she help? What is she doesn’t and her neighbors will out her as a witch? This could be SO GOOD please show, deliver;

Diana’s symbol is rowan tree;

“Baldwin’s never lost a million of anything in his life.” - just throwing this out there because I love Baldwin with all my heart;

917 is the Knight's of Lazarus telephone number. it belonged to Philippe, then to Matthew and now to Marcus. Philippe chose it to honor Ysabeu's birthday (September 17th). What i wanna know - is it her birthday or re-birth. ALTHOUGH it should be 179 - In Europe (and Philippe was Greek after all) we, unlike Americans, write the day first and the month later;

When Gallowglass learned that Baldwin had been called to Sept-Tours at Ysabeau’s behest for some unspecified emergency involving Matthew, the Gael knew it was only a matter of time before the historical anomalies appeared. i think it was when Diana was kidnapped by Satu, right? Just want to be sure;

Gallowglass is smoking, i completely forgot about it;

Rudolph is flirting with Diana so much (ughhhh) because his source in Congregation told him that Matthew only married her to save her life a.k.a. charges of witchcraft;

Matthew helping Jack with his nightmares is the sweetest thing he's done so far;

One of Philippe's names is Ariel, what are the others?;

Abraham (Jewish weaver in Prague) comes from Chełm. Is this why Benjamin moved there?;

I need to KNOW the story about Baldwin and Dracula, Deb. Come on.;

“He did. I swear it. Baldwin ordered him to leave or face the same fate as the Impaler. You should have seen Baldwin’s face. The devil himself wouldn’t have disobeyed your brother.” i want to see it too lol;

apparently, Gerbert told Ysabeau about the prophecy about a witch with the blood of the lion and the wolf. I wonder if this was one more reason she was anti-Diana at the beginning or did she dismiss it as something not important;

And speaking of colleagues: How, after years of buying you Harvard bibs and mittens, did I end up with a daughter who teaches at Yale?” good question lol I WANNA KNOW TOO;

Bennu, Stephen's familiar, is a bird.;

#saveEm2k19;

Matthew nearly had a heart attack when he discovered that his beloved Range Rover was not waiting for him in the underground garage. Instead we found a navy sports car with a soft top. hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha it always cracks me up;

Edward Kelley sent the first page to Rabbi Loew, the second to Hubbard. Who gt the third and who sent it to Diana’s parents?;

Annie stayed with Shakespeare after Matthew and Diana left and Jack was with Hubbard.;

Also, Matthew made Diana a diplomatic passport for easier traveling;

Overall, I loved this book. There were some boring moment that didn’t move the plot forward at all (like most of Prague, especially the hunting or the play, making the philosopher’s stone with Mary Sydney) that I hope the show will cut it out completely or shorten it. Hopefully, they give us at least 2 episodes of Philippe at Sept-Tours - now that they got 10 episodes, they have a chance to do it properly. I also love the magic lessons from Goody Alsop and other witches, though I suspect, season 2 will only give us 1 witch (but I hope we will see Sophie’s ancestor too. My favorite characters are Philippe, Pierre and Jack and I hope we will get plenty of them (please include Pierre, show!)

#all souls #shadow of night #deborah harkness #ysabeau de clermont

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bisexualamy · 2 years

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my parents are irish catholics (but i was born and raised in france), and yeah this NEVER gets discussed. as far as im aware there's no plans for the family to all be buried together. tbh though this could also be bc my parents arent very close to their families and very much built their lives Seperate from them, so the idea of being buried with them would be ridiculous. as just the immediate family, we've never discussed it, not bc its taboo just bc as far as i know neither or my parents have any direct plans for what they want to happen (they probably want to be cremated but don't know what to do with the ashes). anyway yeah there's no notion of like… being put with the ancestors of the rest of the family, and i don't think there is in irish families in general. a lot of french catholic families have like Big Families and are very close and think its very important to Stay Together so i wouldnt be surprised if they did have family plans

You bring up another very interesting wrinkle here which is that if you want a traditional Jewish burial you can't be cremated. I don't know personally of any Jew who was willingly cremated and I'd go as far to say there's a stigma against it (again, it violates traditional laws, and it invokes images of the Shoah). I think that also lends itself to this cultural cemetery plot thing because your options for your death plan are just limited if you want a Jewish burial. And since death is commonly discussed theme in Jewish texts anyway (see: the age old joke of "they tried to kill us, they didn't, let's eat" as a good rule of thumb for any holiday that's not a fast day), it sort of makes sense that planning death would be more of a family affair.

Interestingly enough, afaik while being buried in a plain pine box is traditional it's not actually required. The law is that you just have to be able to be naturally returned to the Earth (that's why Jews are traditionally buried very quickly; you can't embalm the body). I've always thought it would be nice to be wrapped in cloth and plant a tree on my grave, which I think qualifies as a proper Jewish burial.

#anonymous #hailing frequencies open

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croneboulder · 2 years

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re: recent post, and my journey to learn about my heritage, for witchy purposes and otherwise

so, in a lot of ways, I’m really, really privileged in how easy it is to track back my heritage. i can’t imagine the kind of like... cultural mourning of either kidnapping of, and/or violent erasure of, evidence of your ancestry or heritage. like, I’ve got no diasporic jewish heritage, or african heritage cut off by slavery, that I know of at least. so I’ll preface with that. the fact that I can even trace it is a privilege, and I feel like that needs saying, both more often in general, and by me specifically, before i whine about some other shit lol

details under a read more, discussing both sides of my family. its interesting (but heavy) stuff!! tw for discussion of colonization, slavery, civil war, and the KKK on one side, and discussion of famine and homophobia on the other side.

won’t lie, checking out my heritage on my dad’s side was so goddamn rife. a cousin of mine (an adopted one, funny enough) did a huge project when they were younger, tracing our family history back a good long ways. like, further than anyone else had bothered before. I think she even traced it back across the pond to a couple details about where we were from in Europe.

a huge part of my heritage is American, though, early english colonies and onward, basically staying in the same state. its really interesting, because I can look back at a lot of REALLY local stuff (local to the coastal area of my home state at least, before we nudged over to the center of the state) and know that it’s relevant. but y’all, it’s a fucking minefield looking back through your heritage in early colonized America when you’re from a southern state. Just staring at that family tree, scared to read some of the captions my cousin had added, just a mantra of ‘no slave owners please, no confederates please, please please please’ over and over lmao. Like, if I’d have found that, I’d have done the work to process and come to terms with that... y’know, like any white person should do, regardless of if their ancestors were directly guilty or not. I got lucky, in that respect, very much so. I’m sure there’s some horrific shit in early colonization, but that certainly wasn’t written down- a lot more on their involvement in the revolutionary war, since they were real close to some important battle sites and strategic bases, and unquestionably involved in SOME way. Skip ahead to slavery, they were too damn poor to own slaves, some of that side of the family working alongside slaves as indentured servants, even (there’s that privilege again, though, whaddya know!). Skip ahead to the civil war, they were in a very neutral state, as far as that far south is concerned- the last state to secede, I think, and thus the slimmest chance possible they were confederates (still possible, but statistically the lowest chance it COULD be). Skip ahead to more current politics, you’ve got local politicians, local business owners, local journalists (one of my great grandfathers being all three lol) campaigning against the presence of the KKK in their small towns. Like, right there, there’s a lot to actively be PROUD of, actually. In some ways, wrangling my dad’s current racism has been more of a fucking pain than looking back through my heritage.

It’s still loaded as hell- I’ve been contacted by the Daughters of the Confederacy multiple times, and I remember my mom said she threw those letters out, or even burned them when she was especially mad at the racism in the news, up until I was 18. the first letter of theirs she gave me, she gave me a choice to join them for a debutante ball, figuring I’m an adult who has to make that decision themselves. which i obviously turned down bc like. why the everloving fuck would I. but in general, lots less to work through than I thought.

meanwhile, my mom’s side..... kind of a blank slate, thanks to, fuckin drumroll, conservative and evangelical bullshit fucking christianity. its own form of cultural erasure, but so very self-inflicted, I fucking hate it, and just.... even MORE loaded, surprisingly, and that shit HURT to even try to wade through. plus, way more wishy-washy borders, which is natural, and a lot less of a problem, all told.

I’ll go back as far as I really have, because my mom is main source for that, and she never looked into it much. my grandmother, on her side obvs, was the first to be born in America- she had some stories of my great grandmother and grandfather, my most direct link to the actual Netherlands. Famine hit their area of.... southern Netherlands, I think?... and moving to the states was their best bet. It was actually a toss-up for them, whether they would’ve settled in Iowa or Alaska, which is pretty buckwild to think about, that heritage could’ve ended up SO different from my great-grandmother onward. However, I just don’t have much information on that. My grandmother lived a long time, but by the time I was old enough to give a shit about my heritage and even think to ask her questions, I kinda hated her, was definitely scared of her in a way I would probably deny at the time. I remember my mom telling me to flat out LIE to her about when we left to drive to see her, because she would give my mom shit for making someone pump gas or take care of us at a hotel on the sabbath. my mom had to break the news to her, on that same trip, that they had never ACTUALLY found weapons of mass destruction in Afghanistan, unlike what the single conservative radio station she ever listened to had claimed. and I could see, even if subconsciously at that age, how fraught their relationship was- my mom was the middle child of seven, of a single mother after her dad died when she was four, rough enough on its own i imagine. she was always the rebel, questioner of the status quo and her own pastor, the second to branch way from the conservative environment after her oldest brother. she grew up in a church that made those pregnant out of marriage announce it to the entire congregation, repent vocally but still never really live it down, ending with the most bitter and unsupportive laying-on-of-hands, which my mom said was her most horrifying memory of growing up there. meanwhile, my mom married a man who was pro-choice, which NONE of her siblings did, at least at the time. most of her siblings refused to talk to my dad for years, and several didn’t come to their wedding because of it either.

So, I heard everything third hand from my mother about that, when I finally bothered to ask about it, period, maybe six years ago (three years after my grandmother had died). and as I mentioned, my granddad died when my mom was so fucking young, so it’s not like SHE was able to ask him about anything about that side. All I know is that he was also Very Very Dutch/German in heritage, but his side had been in America for longer than my grandma’s side. Anyway, as rough as my relationship was with my grandma, my mother’s relationship to her was even more so, though she loved my grandma way more than I ever did. I don’t know how much she’d ever wanted to learn about her heritage, though, and I wonder if that was part of it.

There’s... so many blanks to start with, considering all that, and there is NO WAY I could’ve dug up any folklore, local or further back, because at some point, Christianity became the most vital part of my cultural identity on that side, and I tentatively remember it being my grandpa’s side that was the main culprit (not surprising, since his side’s been in midwest America for longer). so on that side, I’ve just had to skip past my most recent history, and there’s... a certain bitterness that I’m harboring about that. that I can’t explore it via my own family, and not because it was really decimated by an outside influence, at least in the same way as slavery or genocide would have done.

add to it, that I don’t even have the option now, to contact most of that side of my family- especially those with the most ties to Iowa and the rural farming heritage that traced back to the Netherlands. I came out as bisexual on facebook, and I burned all of the most significant bridges to that heritage. I didn’t mean to salt the earth, make it so it’s basically impossible to trace back that culture the way I want to, but hindsight is 20/20, and there’s no taking it back now. Plus, I don’t know how I would have felt about it anyway, even if I’d managed to gain some understanding from those people, with the inevitable stain of their hatred on what I could’ve learned.

all of that is to say.... its been Quite The Process, and thanks to the response to that recent ask, I’ve got some places to claim that heritage for myself, to get started. but it’s still gonna be rough.

#how do i even fucking tag?#long post #folk witchcraft #conservative christianity tw #ancestor worship

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dfroza · 4 years

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to come to view life as a child

(through baptism eyes)

to “believe...” in the True illumination of the Son.

Today’s reading of the Scriptures from the book of Matthew illuminates the significance of this. and just as we are told to be baptized in the water of earth when we come to believe, we are also asked to be open to invite the Spirit into our own (welcoming the entrance) who illuminates as Light inside that guides us into truth.

for we’re all searching for our identity in this world, and we only truly find it in the eternal.

we find our True selves in Love and its sacred truth.

[John the Baptizer]

It was at this time that John the Baptizer began to preach in the desert of Judah. His message was this: “The realm of heaven’s kingdom is about to appear—so you’d better keep turning away from evil and turn back to God!”

Isaiah was referring to John when he prophesied:

A thunderous voice! One will be crying out in the wilderness,

“Prepare yourself for the Lord’s coming

and level a straight path inside your hearts for him.”

Now, John wore clothing made from camel’s hair, tied at his waist with a leather strap, and his food consisted of dried locusts and wild honey. A steady stream of people from Jerusalem, all the surrounding countryside, and the region near the Jordan came out to the wilderness to be baptized by him. And while they were publicly confessing their sins, he would immerse them in the Jordan River.

But when he saw many coming from among the wealthy elite of Jewish society and many of the religious leaders known as Pharisees coming to witness the baptism, he began to denounce them, saying, “You offspring of vipers! Who warned you to slither away like snakes from the fire of God’s judgment? You must prove your repentance by a changed life. And don’t presume you can get away with merely saying to yourselves, ‘But we’re Abraham’s descendants!’ For I tell you, God can awaken these stones to become sons of Abraham! The axe is now ready to cut down the trees at their very roots. Every fruitless, rotten tree will be chopped down and thrown into the fire. Those who repent I baptize with water, but there is coming a Man after me who is more powerful than I am. In fact, I’m not even worthy enough to pick up his sandals. He will submerge you into union with the Spirit of Holiness and with a raging fire! He comes with a winnowing fork in his hands and comes to his threshing floor to sift what is worthless from what is pure. And he is ready to sweep out his threshing floor and gather his wheat into his granary, but the straw he will burn up with a fire that can’t be extinguished!”

Then Jesus left Galilee to come to the Jordan to be baptized by John. But when he waded into the water, John resisted him, saying, “Why are you doing this? I’m the one who needs to be baptized by you, and yet you come to be baptized by me?”

Jesus replied, “It is only right to do all that God requires.” Then John baptized Jesus. And as Jesus rose up out of the water, the heavenly realm opened up over him and he saw the Holy Spirit descend out of the heavens and rest upon him in the form of a dove. Then suddenly the voice of the Father shouted from the sky, saying, “This is the Son I love, and my greatest delight is in him.”

The Book of Matthew, Chapter 3 (The Passion Translation)

Today’s paired chapter of the Testaments is the 36th and closing chapter of the book (the ancient scroll) of 2nd Chronicles:

[King Jehoahaz]

Jehoahaz was twenty-three years old when he began to rule. He was king in Jerusalem for a mere three months. The king of Egypt dethroned him and forced the country to pay him nearly four tons of silver and seventy-five pounds of gold.

[King Jehoiakim]

Neco king of Egypt then made Eliakim, Jehoahaz’s brother, king of Judah and Jerusalem, but changed his name to Jehoiakim; then he took Jehoahaz back with him to Egypt.

Jehoiakim was twenty-five years old when he began to rule; he was king for eleven years in Jerusalem. In God’s opinion he was an evil king.

Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon made war against him, and bound him in bronze chains, intending to take him prisoner to Babylon. Nebuchadnezzar also took things from The Temple of God to Babylon and put them in his royal palace.

The rest of the history of Jehoiakim, the outrageous sacrilege he committed and what happened to him as a consequence, is all written in the Royal Annals of the Kings of Israel and Judah.

Jehoiachin his son became the next king.

[King Jehoiachin]

Jehoiachin was eighteen years old when he became king. But he ruled for only three months and ten days in Jerusalem. In God’s opinion he was an evil king. In the spring King Nebuchadnezzar ordered him brought to Babylon along with the valuables remaining in The Temple of God. Then he made his uncle Zedekiah a puppet king over Judah and Jerusalem.

[King Zedekiah]

Zedekiah was twenty-one years old when he started out as king. He was king in Jerusalem for eleven years. As far as God was concerned, he was just one more evil king; there wasn’t a trace of contrition in him when the prophet Jeremiah preached God’s word to him. Then he compounded his troubles by rebelling against King Nebuchadnezzar, who earlier had made him swear in God’s name that he would be loyal. He became set in his own stubborn ways—he never gave God a thought; repentance never entered his mind.

The evil mindset spread to the leaders and priests and filtered down to the people—it kicked off an epidemic of evil, repeating the abominations of the pagans and polluting The Temple of God so recently consecrated in Jerusalem.

God, the God of their ancestors, repeatedly sent warning messages to them. Out of compassion for both his people and his Temple he wanted to give them every chance possible. But they wouldn’t listen; they poked fun at God’s messengers, despised the message itself, and in general treated the prophets like idiots. God became more and more angry until there was no turning back—God called in Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon, who came and killed indiscriminately—and right in The Temple itself; it was a ruthless massacre: young men and virgins, the elderly and weak—they were all the same to him.

And then he plundered The Temple of everything valuable, cleaned it out completely; he emptied the treasuries of The Temple of God, the treasuries of the king and his officials, and hauled it all, people and possessions, off to Babylon. He burned The Temple of God to the ground, knocked down the wall of Jerusalem, and set fire to all the buildings—everything valuable was burned up. Any survivor was taken prisoner into exile in Babylon and made a slave to Nebuchadnezzar and his family. The exile and slavery lasted until the kingdom of Persia took over.

This is exactly the message of God that Jeremiah had preached: the desolate land put to an extended sabbath rest, a seventy-year Sabbath rest making up for all the unkept Sabbaths.

[King Cyrus]

In the first year of Cyrus king of Persia—this fulfilled the message of God preached by Jeremiah—God moved Cyrus king of Persia to make an official announcement throughout his kingdom; he wrote it out as follows: “From Cyrus king of Persia a proclamation: God, the God of the heavens, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth. He has also assigned me to build him a Temple of worship at Jerusalem in Judah. All who belong to God’s people are urged to return—and may your God be with you! Move forward!”

The Book of 2nd Chronicles, Chapter 36 (The Message)

my personal reading of the Scriptures for friday, march 5 of 2021 with a paired chapter from each Testament of the Bible, along with Today’s Psalms and Proverbs

A poetic post from the heart of my thought-life that contains the poem “believe...”

A post by John Parsons about trust:

If you can't detect God's hand in your circumstances, then trust His heart... The heart of faith affirms: "gahm zu l'tovah" (גַּם זוּ לְטוֹבָה): “this too is for good,” particularly when the present hour may be shrouded in darkness... Whenever I am confused about life (which is often enough), I try to remember what God said to Moses after the tragic sin of the Golden Calf: "I will make all my goodness pass before you and will proclaim before you my Name, 'The LORD' (יהוה). And I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and will show mercy on whom I will show mercy" (Exod. 33:19). God’s character does not change: the LORD is the same “yesterday, today, and forever.” The meaning of the Name, however, cannot be known apart from understanding the need of the heart....

Earlier God had revealed to Moses that the Name YHVH (יהוה) means: "He is Present" (i.e., the word is a play on the Hebrew verb hayah [הָיָה], "to be"), and therefore God is “always there” (Exod. 3:14). The great I AM (אֶהְיֶה) means God stands outside of the constraints of time, “one day is as a thousand years” and “a thousand years as one day” before Him (2 Pet. 3:8). Just as a thousand years is but “a watch in the night” (Psalm 90:4), so one day is as a thousand years. God’s Spirit broods over all things and sustains the entire universe. God is “necessary being,” the Source of Life, and foundation for all other existence. God’s creative love and power sustain all things in creation...

Now while the idea that God is the Source of all life in the universe is surely important, it is not entirely comforting, especially in light of man’s guilt and anxiety over death. After all, we do not stand before the “god of the philosophers,” but rather the personal God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The meaning of the Name YHVH - that He is merciful, gracious, slow to anger, abounding in love and truth, and so on - therefore presents additional revelation in face of man’s inherent brokenness and spiritual need. Some things in life are only known in the passion of faith... things like love, beauty, honor, and so on. The Name of the LORD as the Compassionate One is only known in humility, when all human pretense is stripped away and the inner life is laid bare in its desperate need. The Name YHVH is God’s response to the heart’s cry for deliverance, for compassion, for mercy....

What is God like - what is His heart - is the first question, and how we answer that will determine how we deal with all the other questions that come up in theology... What do you feel inside when you stare up at the ceiling before you go to bed? In light of the ambiguity and heartaches of life we might wonder if God is there for us. Does God care? Is He angry at me? Does He really love me? This is the raw place of faith, where we live in the midst of our questions. The Name YHVH means “He is present,” even when we are unconscious of His Presence in the hour of our greatest need.

The legalist is actually enslaved to the idea of God’s conditional acceptance. His deep creed is: “If you (outwardly) obey, then you belong.” The message of the cross scandalizes the realm of the outwardly religious because it boldly states, "if you believe, then you belong...” As Kierkegaard rightly observed, "And this is the simple truth - that to live is to feel oneself lost. He who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look around for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order into the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce." For Kierkegaard, religious rituals devoid of a sense of crisis within the heart are little more than a sham. “I think of the times I tried to use him to make my life secure, and undisturbed, and painless. Also the times I was enslaved by fear of him, and by the need to protect myself against him through rites and circumstances” (de Mello). Religious behavior (i.e., rituals, ceremonialism, etc.) is a tawdry substitute for trusting that God's heart (YHVH) is forever present for you. [Hebrew for Christians]

3.4.21 • Facebook

Today’s message from the Institute for Creation Research

March 5, 2021

One God

“Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD.” (Deuteronomy 6:4)

This great verse has been recited countless times by Israelites down through the centuries, setting forth their distinctive belief in one great Creator God. The Jews had retained their original belief in creation, handed down from Noah, while the other nations had all allowed their original monotheistic creationism to degenerate into a wide variety of religions, all basically equivalent to the polytheistic evolutionism of the early Sumerians at Babel.

But along with its strong assertion of monotheism, there is also a very real suggestion that this declaration, with its thrice-named subject, is also setting forth the triune God. The name “LORD,” of course, is Yahweh, or Jehovah, the self-existing One who reveals Himself, while “God” is Elohim, the powerful Creator/Ruler. “Jehovah our Elohim is one Jehovah” is the proclamation. A number of respected Jewish commentators have acknowledged that the verse spoke of a “unified oneness” rather than an “absolute oneness.” The revered book called the Zohar, for example, even said that the first mention was of the Father, the second one the Messiah, and the third the Holy Spirit.

The key word “one” (Hebrew achad) is often used to denote unity in diversity. For example, when Eve was united to Adam in marriage, they were said to be “one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). Similarly, on the third day of creation, the waters were “gathered together unto one place,” yet this gathering together was called “Seas” (i.e., more than one sea, Genesis 1:9-10).

Thus, Israel’s great declaration should really be understood as saying, in effect: “The eternally omnipresent Father, also Creator and Sustainer of all things, is our unified self-revealing Lord.” HMM

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blogcwgsu · 5 years

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You can't be found unless you know you're lost

You can't be found unless you know you're lost. At first this seems obvious. Or maybe at first it makes so sense at all. Either way, if you think about it, it could be either obvious or nonsensical. Or just plain weird to even think about. And yet, it's true.

I remember one time, years ago, before Google Maps. Even before Garmin and Tom Tom. I was driving out in the desert. At some point, I realized I was driving too long and hadn't reached my destination yet. Yes - I was lost. Really lost. There was nothing for miles in every direction. Nothing visible except sand and scrub brush as far as the eye could see. Cell phones were, at best, a vision in someone's mind. But there certainly wasn't one in my car. Next thing I know, there's a Highway Patrol car behind me. I lowered the window, reached out, and signaled for him to pull over. Back then it was still an OK thing to get out of the car, so I did. These days - I'd be waiting with my hands on the steering wheel until he had a chance to finish running the background check on my license plate. You can't be found unless you know you're lost I was no longer lost. I still had no clue where I was. But at least I had new directions to turn around and get back on track. But if I hadn't yet realized that I was lost, I would have let him pass me and drive into the distance. Eventually, I would have wished I had realized my situation in time to have stopped him. Of course, eventually there would have been another Highway Patrol car, a small town, something ahead where I could have gotten back on track. As long as I had enough gas. As long as nothing else happened. Out in the desert, you just don't know. It's not like it was on the way to Las Vegas or something like that. I actually have no idea where it would have led to. There weren't any cars except that one. Even then, I'm not sure I would have signaled for someone to pull over. And judging by my appearance at the time, I'm pretty sure no one I wanted to talk to would have stopped anyway. And isn't life like that? You can't be found unless you know you're lost - why it came to mind The "verse of the day" from biblegateway.com is Lk 19:10 For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost. Even though Jesus came to save all of us, if we don't know we're lost, we won't be found. Even if Jesus is looking for us, if we don't know we're lost, we won't pay any mind to Him. You can't be found unless you know you're lost. Now it sounds really weird, doesn't it? I mean, how can it be that Jesus - the Son of God - can't find us? But let's look at the context for that verse from Luke. Zacchaeus the Tax Collector

Lk 19:1 Jesus entered Jericho and was passing through. 2 A man was there by the name of Zacchaeus; he was a chief tax collector and was wealthy. 3 He wanted to see who Jesus was, but being a short man he could not, because of the crowd. 4 So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore-fig tree to see him, since Jesus was coming that way. There are a couple things to keep in mind here. First, climbing up a tree is going to draw attention. Of course, from Jesus. But that's OK, since it was a prerequisite to being able to see Jesus. As a short man, he'd either have to push his way to the front or somehow get higher than everyone else. He chose to go higher. Second, as a tax collector, he had to know that the Jews in the crowd hated him. And by climbing that tree, they'd all know he was there. Apparently, Zacchaeus decided this was an acceptable price to pay, just to be able to see Jesus. I wonder, how many of us today would do that kind of thing? Lk 19:5 When Jesus reached the spot, he looked up and said to him, “Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today.” 6 So he came down at once and welcomed him gladly. So much for even the slimmest hope of not drawing attention to himself. Not only does Zacchaeus see Jesus, Jesus sees him. And calls him down out of the tree. But Jesus didn't stop there. Jesus invited Himself to Zacchaeus' house! This was a potential cause for alarm on at least a couple counts. First, all those people in the crowd who hated Zacchaeus may very well have added jealousy to the list of things they had against Zacchaeus. Remember, people didn't turn against Jesus yet. He was very popular. To receive a request like this was a great honor. On the other hand though, the Jewish leaders now had more reason to hate both Zacchaeus and Jesus. Staying, including eating, at the house of such a horrible sinner - a tax collector - was scandalous. As we see in the very next verse. Lk 19:7 All the people saw this and began to mutter, “He has gone to be the guest of a ‘sinner.’ ” Lk 19:8 But Zacchaeus stood up and said to the Lord, “Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.” Zacchaeus was so touched, just from Jesus' request, that he is having a change of heart right then and there. Lk 19:9 Jesus said to him, “Today salvation has come to this house, because this man, too, is a son of Abraham. 10 For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost.” Realizing that change of heart, Jesus proclaims salvation for Zacchaeus and his family. Jesus calls him a son of Abraham. Remember that in other passages, like the one below, Jesus told the Jewish leaders that they were children of the devil - not sons of Abraham. The Children of Abraham Jn 8:31 To the Jews who had believed him, Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. 32 Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” We see here that bring s disciple, following Jesus, requires more than just head-knowledge. It requires faith, of course. But it requires a faith strong enough that action follows as a result of that faith and belief. Please see Are we supposed to Believe God, Believe in God or Follow God? for more on that. Jn 8:33 They answered him, “We are Abraham’s descendants and have never been slaves of anyone. How can you say that we shall be set free?” As often happens, even with us today, the people completely miss the point Jesus was making. They focused on the simple meaning of something He said. In so doing, they missed the deeper meaning underlying being a child of Abraham. The one about faith. They are lost, and don't know it. Jn 8:34 Jesus replied, “I tell you the truth, everyone who sins is a slave to sin. 35 Now a slave has no permanent place in the family, but a son belongs to it forever. 36 So if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed. 37 I know you are Abraham’s descendants. Yet you are ready to kill me, because you have no room for my word. 38 I am telling you what I have seen in the Father’s presence, and you do what you have heard from your father.’” Jesus now expands on what it means to be a child of Abraham. Or not. Jn 8:39 “Abraham is our father,” they answered. But the people stubbornly hold onto the thinking that as descendants o Abraham, they are children of Abraham. That's the Jewish view on genealogy. However, it's not Jesus' point. They are still lost, and still don't know it. “If you were Abraham’s children,” said Jesus, “then you would do the things Abraham did. 40 As it is, you are determined to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God. Abraham did not do such things. 41 You are doing the things your own father does.” Here,s Jesus' point about You are doing the things your own father does is completely missed. They are even more lost. “We are not illegitimate children,” they protested. “The only Father we have is God himself.” There's a subtle hint as to what's going on here. One that's not in the Greek text from which this is translated. We can see the difference between father and Father. Lower versus upper case. We assume father is a person - Abraham. And we assume Father is God. It's interesting, although maybe not obvious, that Jesus uses a word translated as father in You are doing the things your own father does. Question - is Jesus talking about Abraham here? Answer: to be revealed soon. But when the Jewish people reply, they use the same Greek word Jesus used. However, it gets translated as Father. They mean God. Let's see what comes next. The Children of the Devil Jn 8:42 Jesus said to them, “If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and now am here. OK - so Jesus makes it clear He's not talking about their father being God. It's about to be made crystal clear - with the lower case father in English. But still the same Greek word: 3962 προπάτωρ, πατήρ n m. Apparently a root word; TDNT 5:945; TDNTA 805; GK 4635 and 4252; 419 occurrences; AV translates as “Father” 268 times, and “father” 150 times. 1 generator or male ancestor. 1A either the nearest ancestor: father of the corporeal nature, natural fathers, both parents. 1B a more remote ancestor, the founder of a race or tribe, progenitor of a people, forefather: so Abraham is called, Jacob and David. 1B1 fathers i.e. ancestors, forefathers, founders of a race. 1C one advanced in years, a senior. 2 metaph. 2A the originator and transmitter of anything. 2A1 the authors of a family or society of persons animated by the same spirit as himself. 2A2 one who has infused his own spirit into others, who actuates and governs their minds. 2B one who stands in a father’s place and looks after another in a paternal way. 2C a title of honour. 2C1 teachers, as those to whom pupils trace back the knowledge and training they have received. 2C2 the members of the Sanhedrin, whose prerogative it was by virtue of the wisdom and experience in which they excelled, to take charge of the interests of others. 3 God is called the Father. 3A of the stars, the heavenly luminaries, because he is their creator, upholder, ruler. 3B of all rational and intelligent beings, whether angels or men, because he is their creator, preserver, guardian and protector. 3B1 of spiritual beings and of all men. 3C of Christians, as those who through Christ have been exalted to a specially close and intimate relationship with God, and who no longer dread him as a stern judge of sinners, but revere him as their reconciled and loving Father. 3D the Father of Jesus Christ, as one whom God has united to himself in the closest bond of love and intimacy, made acquainted with his purposes, appointed to explain and carry out among men the plan of salvation, and made to share also in his own divine nature. 3D1 by Jesus Christ himself. 3D2 by the apostles. Strong, J. (1995). Enhanced Strong’s Lexicon. Woodside Bible Fellowship. I have not come on my own; but he sent me. 43 Why is my language not clear to you? Because you are unable to hear what I say. 44 You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desire. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies. 45 Yet because I tell the truth, you do not believe me! 46 Can any of you prove me guilty of sin? If I am telling the truth, why don’t you believe me? 47 He who belongs to God hears what God says. The reason you do not hear is that you do not belong to God.” These people are completely lost. And clueless. Therefore, they cannot be found. Even though they are right there talking to Jesus in person. So - with that in mind, here's some background on Zacchaeus in particular, and sinners in general. ZACCHAEUS . A.D. 30. A wealthy but dishonest tax collector in Jericho who became a follower of Jesus. Luke 19:1–10. Richards, L. (1999). Every man in the Bible (p. 215). Nashville: T. Nelson. TAX COLLECTORS AND SINNERS When we consider men who were friends of Jesus, we need to remember that Jesus was especially close to ordinary persons and that He had great affection for “tax collectors and sinners.” Most of the population despised tax collectors as collaborators with oppressive foreign or local governments. “Sinners” was a term broadly applied in New Testament times by the religious elite. It included such persons as prostitutes, but at times was applied to the mass of ordinary people who were not as rigorous in keeping the rulings of the rabbis. Jesus, who attended parties given by the tax collectors Matthew and Zacchaeus for their friends (Matt. 9:10–13; Mark 2:15–17; Luke 5:30–32; 19:1–10), was strongly criticized for being a “friend of tax collectors and sinners” (Matt. 11:19; Luke 7:34). Yet, it was sinners Jesus had come to save, and those who knew they were sinners were most responsive to Christ. Jesus not only felt comfortable with them; they felt comfortable with Him. What a challenge for us today to be as loving and accepting as Christ was so we can communicate love for sinners while in no way countenancing their sin. Richards, L. (1999). Every man in the Bible (p. 197). Nashville: T. Nelson. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost Zacchaeus knew he was lost. And he also knew he could be "found" - saved - by Jesus. So he embarrassed the heck out of himself by climbing up a tree - in full view of people he had cheated - so Jesus could "find" him. And Jesus certainly found Zacchaeus. And potentially added to the embarrassment by calling him down from the tree. Truth is - the embarrassment could have been on both of them. On Zacchaeus, because if he had any hope at all of quietly seeing Jesus, that hope was totally gone. On Jesus, because here He was getting together with yet another of the people despised by the Jewish leaders. But neither was embarrassed. Both were overjoyed at the encounter. The found and the finder. The sinner who was saved - and the one who came to save the sinner. You can't be found unless you know you're lost. You can't be found unless you know you're lost. And unless you want to be found. And you won't want to be found unless you're also willing to potentially be embarrassed. Maybe by your own family. I've been there. And lived through it. Maybe by your friends. Been there too. And lived through that was well. But when you're found, you have a new "family". And real friends. We are / were all lost There are two more things to realize. First - we are all sinners. And, at some point, we were all lost. Righteousness Through Faith Ro 3:21 But now a righteousness from God, apart from law, has been made known, to which the Law and the Prophets testify. 22 This righteousness from God comes through faith in Jesus Christ to all who believe. There is no difference, 23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus. But just before that is something Paul wrote that explains the significance of this passage. No One Is Righteous Ro 3:9 What shall we conclude then? Are we any better? Not at all! We have already made the charge that Jews and Gentiles alike are all under sin. 10 As it is written: “There is no one righteous, not even one; This verse, and what follows is all bad news. It sounds completely hopeless. The lost can never be found. But there is a way. Jesus. And that's why the Romans 3:21 passage above is so important. Ro 3:11 there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. Ro 3:12 All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one.” Ro 3:13 “Their throats are open graves; their tongues practice deceit.” “The poison of vipers is on their lips.” Ro 3:14 “Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.” Ro 3:15 “Their feet are swift to shed blood; Ro 3:16 ruin and misery mark their ways, Ro 3:17 and the way of peace they do not know.” Ro 3:18 “There is no fear of God before their eyes.” Ro 3:19 Now we know that whatever the law says, it says to those who are under the law, so that every mouth may be silenced and the whole world held accountable to God. 20 Therefore no one will be declared righteous in his sight by observing the law; rather, through the law we become conscious of sin. So we see - we really are lost. We really all need to be found. But only after we want to be found. As long as we insist we aren't lost - we really never can be found. So as long as we insist we aren't lost, neither can we be saved. Because - as Jesus said - For the Son of Man came to seek and to save what was lost. Being saved is a gift. A gift that must be accepted. But also a gift that cannot be accepted until we admit we need it. Until we admit we're lost. Conclusion - You can't be found unless you know you're lost. What about you? Have you been found? Or are you still lost? Image by Johannes Plenio from Pixabay Read the full article

#Abraham #Bible #Christ #Christian #Christianity #God #Jesus #salvation

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eretzyisrael · 7 years

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In Israel, we are officially in the chagim, that time from Rosh Hashanah to Simchat Torah, which, for parents, comes too soon after summer vacation, and, during which, in the business world, nothing gets done until acharai hachagim — after the holidays.

This year, Rosh Hashanah fell on a Wednesday night, leading directly into Shabbat — causing that rare thing in Israel, the three-day holiday. This generally sends observant Jews into a panic of shopping, cooking, freezing, and planning meals and gives the less observant among us a three- day vacation.

Before the calendar was set, holidays were declared by the Jerusalem court based on eyewitness testimony of the new moon, with the holiday being a week or two later based on the biblical command.

The message confirming the new month took time to reach the far ends of the realm, so the diaspora would observe two days to be sure. Since Rosh Hashanah falls on the new moon itself, the holiday was kept for two days in Israel as well, since no one could confirm the new moon until it was upon them.

Ritually observant or not, most Israelis spend the holiday with family and friends, dipping apples into honey, and eating other simanim, or symbolic foods, asking God to increase our merits and vanquish our enemies.

Yom Kippur followed Rosh Hashanah, of course, and for the first time, I heard the radio fall silent for Yom Kippur. I had known that, on Yom Kippur, Israeli radio stations cease their broadcast. Television stations, too. I knew that Israeli air-space closed and that all stores and non-essential services shut down. I knew that Tel Aviv streets and cross-country highways were devoid of traffic and full of kids on bikes. But hearing the announcer sign off in honour of Yom Kippur a few hours before it began, and then “hearing” dead silence on every station we checked was deeply moving. That radio silence was as stark as the shofar’s blasts — just as deep and resonant.

It hit me in that moment that no matter how we feel about these days — the Days of Awe — whether we feast, fast and pray or bike, hike, and chill, the Jewish People are one.

We are one in our fate and destiny as a nation, and according to Jewish tradition, we are judged, on a national level, as one for the coming year.

Our prayers are in the plural, “we” and “us” instead of “I” and “me”, perhaps out of poetry, but also because the Jewish nation does see itself as a collective whole — one nation.

Of course, one can — and some do — choose to see things differently, to claim that ritual is silly, archaic and for the simple-minded. Indeed, some expressed this idea to me in a conversation the day after Yom Kippur.

I couldn’t help but wonder if these people would have scoffed at a day of no electronics, travel or work, of denial of the physical in elevation of the spiritual, were it held to bring world peace, honour the environment, or raise awareness for a humanitarian cause.

Yet Yom Kippur is all of these things. During the Yom Kippur service, we read how God states this explicitly: “Is this the fast I desire, a day for men to starve their bodies lying in sackcloth and ashes? No, this is the fast I desire: To unlock the fetters of wickedness and untie the cords of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free… to share your bread with the hungry, and to take the wretched poor into your home; when you see the naked, clothe him, and do not ignore your own kin.” (Isaiah: 58: 3-7)

Yom Kippur is about being better, doing better, of ending injustice and seeing the other’s pain. It reminds us of our responsibilities, to man and nature. With no traffic on the streets, pollution levels drop dramatically, the frenetic pace of life slows, and we can take stock. Away from food and electronics, people reflect on what is important, what less so, and how to keep these in mind.

On the heels of Yom Kippur comes Succot, where we abandon our sturdy air-conditioned homes to build flimsy huts with tree-branch roofs, walls filled with child-created art and dripping with paper chains. We grab citrus fruits and palm fronds and shake them in all directions, careful not to drop them lest we render them unusable.

We eat in our huts and invite long dead ancestors to join us for our meals. Silly rituals indeed… or, perhaps they are reminders that, no matter where we go, no matter how far our exile, we are still connected to that nation that left Egypt on a hope and a dream of a better life, one of freedom to do the rituals that keep our people connected over thousands of years and thousands of miles…

Shoshanna Keats Jaskoll is a writer and activist

#Israel #Rosh Hashanah #Yom Kippur #Sukkot #Simchat Torah #Unity #Jumblr

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theresgloryforyou · 7 years

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It's mine. We can put the question to rest. Israel belongs to me. Or so I was raised to believe. I've been planting trees there since I can remember. I have memories of my mother's breast--of hunger (she was sick and weak); of having my tonsils out when I was two and a half--of the fear and the wallpaper in the hospital; of infantile bad dreams; of early childhood abandonment; of planting trees in Israel. Understand: I've been planting trees in Israel since before I actually could recognize a real tree from life. In Camden where I grew up we had cement. I thought the huge and splendid telephone pole across the street from our brick row house was one--a tree; it just didn't have leaves. I wasn't deprived: the wires were awesome. If I think of "tree" now, I see that splintery dead piece of lumber stained an uneven brown with its wild black wires stretched out across the sky. I have to force myself to remember that a tree is frailer and greener, at least prototypically, at least in temperate zones. It takes an act of adult will to remember that a tree grows up into the sky, down into the ground, and a telephone pole, even a magnificent one, does not.

Israel, like Camden, didn't have any trees. We were cement; Israel was desert. They needed trees, we didn't. The logic was that we lived in the United States where there was an abundance of everything, even trees; in Israel there was nothing. So we had to get them trees. In synagogue we would be given folders: white paper, heavy, thick; blue ink, light, reminiscent of green but not green. White and blue were the colors of Israel. You opened the folder and inside there was a tree printed in light blue. The tree was full, round, almost swollen, a great arc, lush, branches coming from branches, each branch growing clusters of leaves. In each cluster of leaves, we had to put a dime. We could use our own dimes from lunch money or allowances, but they only went so far; so we had to ask relatives, strangers, the policeman at the school crossing, the janitor at school--anyone who might spare a dime, because you had to fill your folder and then you had to start another one and fill that too. Each dime was inserted into a little slit in the folder right in the cluster of leaves so each branch ended up being weighed down with shining dimes. When you had enough dimes, the tree on the folder looked as if it was growing dimes. This meant you had collected enough money to plant a tree in Israel, your own tree. You put your name on the folder and in Israel they would plant your tree and put your name on it. You also put another name on the folder. You dedicated the tree to someone who had died. This tree is dedicated to the memory of Jewish families were never short on dead people but in the years after my birth, after 1946, the dead overwhelmed the living. You touched the dead wherever you turned. You rubbed up against them; it didn't matter how young you were. Mass graves; bones; ash; ovens; numbers on forearms. If you were Jewish and alive, you were--well, almost--rare. You had a solitary feeling even as a child. Being alive felt wrong. Are you tired of hearing about it? Don't be tired of it in front of me. It was new then and I was a child. The adults wanted to keep us from becoming morbid, or anxious, or afraid, or different from other children. They told us and they didn't tell us. They told us and then they took it back. They whispered and let you overhear, then they denied it. Nothing's wrong. You're safe here, in the United States. Being a Jew is, well, like being an American: the best. It was a great secret they tried to keep and tried to tell at the same time. They were adults--they still didn't believe it really. You were a child; you did.

My Hebrew School teachers were of two kinds: bright-eyed Jewish men from New Jersey, the suburbs mostly, and Philadelphia, a center of culture--mediocre men, poor teachers, their aspirations more bourgeois than Talmudic; and survivors from ancient European ghettos by way of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen--multi-lingual, learned, spectral, walleyed. None, of course, could speak Hebrew. It was a dead language, like Latin. The new Israeli project of speaking Hebrew was regarded as an experiment that could only fail. English would be the language of Israel. It was only a matter of time. Israel was the size of New Jersey. Israel was a miracle, a great adventure, but it was also absolutely familiar.

The trick in dedicating your tree was to have an actual name to write on your folder and know who the person was to you. It was important to American Jews to seem normal and other people knew the names of their dead. We had too many dead to know their names; mass murder was erasure. Immigrants to the United States had left sisters, brothers, mothers, aunts, uncles, cousins behind, and they had been slaughtered. Where? When? It was all blank. My father's parents were Russian immigrants. My mother's were Hungarian. My grandparents always refused to talk about Europe. "Garbage," my father's father said to me, "they're all garbage." He meant all Europeans. He had run away from Russia at l5--from the Czar. He had brothers and sisters, seven; I never could find out anything else. They were dead, from pogroms, the Russian Revolution, Nazis; they were gone. My grandparents on each side ran away for their own reasons and came here. They didn't look back. Then there was this new genocide, new even to Jews, and they couldn't look back. There was no recovering what had been lost, or who. There couldn't be reconciliation with what couldn't be faced. They were alive because they were here; the rest were dead because they were there: who could face that? As a child I observed that Christian children had lots of relatives unfamiliar to me, very old, with honorifics unknown to me--great-aunt, great-great-grandmother. Our family began with my grandparents. No one came before them; no one stood next to them. It's an incomprehensible and disquieting amnesia. There was Eve; then there is a harrowing blank space, a tunnel of time and nothing with enormous murder; then there's us. We had whoever was in the room. Everyone who wasn't in the room was dead. All my mourning was for them--all my trees in the desert--but who were they? My ancestors aren't individual to me: I'm pulled into the mass grave for any sense of identity or sense of self. In the small world I lived in as a child, the consciousness was in three parts: (1) in Europe with those left behind, the dead, and how could one live with how they had died, even if why was old and familiar; (2) in the United States, the best of all possible worlds--being more-American-than-thou, more middle class however poor and struggling, more suburban however urban in origins, more normal, more conventional, more conformist; and (3) in Israel, in the desert, with the Jews who had been ash and now were planting trees. I never planted a tree in Camden or anywhere else for that matter. All my trees are in Israel. I was taught that they had my name on them and that they were dedicated to the memory of my dead.

One day in Hebrew School I argued in front of the whole class with the principal; a teacher, a scholar, a survivor, he spoke seven languages and I don't know which camps he was in. In private, he would talk to me, answer my questions, unlike the others. I would see him shaking, alone; I'd ask why; he would say sometimes he couldn't speak, there were no words, he couldn't say words, even though he spoke seven languages; he would say he had seen things; he would say he couldn't sleep, he hadn't slept for nights or weeks. I knew he knew important things. I respected him. Usually I didn't respect my teachers. In front of the whole class, he told us that in life we had the obligation to be first a Jew, second an American, third a human being, a citizen of the world. I was outraged. I said it was the opposite. I said everyone was first a human being, a citizen of the world--otherwise there would never be peace, never an end to nationalist conflicts and racial persecutions. Maybe I was 11. He said that Jews had been killed throughout history precisely because they thought the way I did, because they put being Jews last; because they didn't understand that one was always first a Jew--in history, in the eyes of the world, in the eyes of God. I said it was the opposite: only when everyone was human first would Jews be safe. He said Jews like me had had the blood of other Jews on their hands throughout history; that had there been an Israel, Jews would not have been slaughtered throughout Europe; that the Jewish homeland was the only hope for Jewish freedom. I said that was why one had an obligation to be an American second, after being a human being, a citizen of the world: because only in a democracy without a state religion could religious minorities have rights or be safe or not be persecuted or discriminated against. I said that if there was a Jewish state, anyone who wasn't Jewish would be second-class by definition. I said we didn't have a right to do to other people what had been done to us. More than anyone, we knew the bitterness of religious persecution, the stigma that went with being a minority. We should be able to see in advance the inevitable consequences of having a state that put us first; because then others were second and third and fourth. A theocratic state, I said, could never be a fair state--and didn't Jews need a fair state? If Jews had had a fair state wouldn't Jews have been safe from slaughter? Israel could be a beginning: a fair state. But then it couldn't be a Jewish state. The blood of Jews, he said, would be on my hands. He walked out. I don't think he ever spoke to me again.

You might wonder if this story is apocryphal or how I remember it or how someone so young made such arguments. The last is simple: the beauty of a Jewish education is that you learn how to argue if you pay attention. I remember because I was so distressed by what he said to me: the blood of Jews will be on your hands. I remember because he meant what he said. Part of my education was in having teachers who had seen too much death to argue for the fun of it. I could see the blood on my hands if I was wrong; Jews would have nowhere; Jews would die. I could see that if I or anyone made it harder for Israel to exist, Jews might die. I knew that Israel had to succeed, had to work out. Every single adult Jew I knew wanted it, needed it: the distraught ones with the numbers on their arms; the immigrant ones who had been here, not there; the cheerful more-American-than-thou ones who wanted ranch houses for themselves, an army for Israel. Israel was the answer to near extinction in a real world that had been demonstrably indifferent to the mass murder of the Jews. It was also the only way living Jews could survive having survived. Those who had been here, not there, by immigration or birth, would create another here, a different here, a purposeful sanctuary, not one stumbled on by random good luck. Those who were alive had to find a way to deal with the monumental guilt of not being dead: being the chosen this time for real. The building of Israel was a bridge over bones; a commitment to life against the suicidal pull of the past. How can I live with having lived? I will make a place for Jews to live.

I knew from my own urgent effort to try to understand racism--from the Nazis to the situation I lived in, hatred of black people in the United States, the existence of legal segregation in the South--that Israel was impossible: fundamentally wrong, organized to betray egalitarian aspirations--because it was built from the ground up on a racial definition of its desired citizen; because it was built from the ground up on exclusion, necessarily stigmatizing those who were not Jews. Social equality was impossible unless only Jews lived there. With hostile neighbors and a racial paradigm for the state's identity, Israel had to become either a fortress or a tomb. I didn't think it made Jews safer. I did understand that it made Jews different: different from the pathetic creatures on the trains, the skeletons in the camps; different; indelibly different. It was a great relief--to me too--to be different from the Jews in the cattle cars. Different mattered. As long as it lasted, I would take it. And if Israel ended up being a tomb, a tomb was better than unmarked mass graves for millions all over Europe--different and better. I made my peace with different; which meant I made my peace with the State of Israel. I would not have the blood of Jews on my hands. I wouldn't help those who wanted Israel to be a place where more Jews died by saying what I thought about the implicit racism. It was shameful, really: distance me, Lord, from those pitiful Jews; make me new. But it was real and even I at 10, 11, 12, needed it.

You might notice that all of this had nothing to do with Palestinians. I didn't know there were any. Also, I haven't mentioned women. I knew they existed, formally speaking; Mrs. So-and-So was everywhere, of course--peculiar, all held in, reticent and dutiful in public. I never saw one I wanted to become. Nevertheless, adults kept threatening that one day I had to be one. Apparently it was destiny and also hard work; you were born one but you also had to become one. Either you mastered exceptionally difficult and obscure rules too numerous and onerous to reveal to a child, even a child studying Leviticus; or you made one mistake, the nature of which was never specified. But politically speaking, women didn't exist, and frankly, as human beings women didn't exist either. You could live your whole life among them and never know who they were.

I was taught about fedayeen: Arabs who crossed the border into Israel to kill Jews. In the years after Hitler, this was monstrous. Only someone devoid of any humanity, any conscience, any sense of decency or justice, could kill Jews. They didn't live there, they came from somewhere else. They killed civilians by sneak attack; they didn't care who they killed just so they killed Jews.

I realized only as a middle-aged adult that I was raised to have prejudice against Arabs and that the prejudice wasn't trivial. My parents were exceptionally conscious and conscientious about racism and religious bigotry--all the homegrown kinds--hatred of blacks or Catholics, for instance. Their pedagogy was very brave. They took a social stance against racism, for civil rights, that put them in opposition to many neighbors and members of our family. My mother put me in a car and showed me black poverty. However poor I thought we were, I was to remember that being black in the United States made you poorer. I still remember a conversation with my father in which he told me he had racist feelings against blacks. I said that was impossible because he was for civil rights. He explained the kinds of feelings he had and why they were wrong. He also explained that as a teacher and then later a guidance counselor he worked with black children and he had to make sure his racist feelings didn't harm them. From my father I learned that having these feelings didn't justify them; that "good" people had bad feelings and that didn't make the feelings any less bad; that dealing with racism was a process, something a person tangled with actively. The feelings were wrong and a "good" person took responsibility for facing them down. I was also taught that just because you feel something doesn't make it true. My parents went out of their way to say "some Arabs," to emphasize that there were good and bad people in every group; but in fact my education in the Jewish community made that caveat fairly meaningless. Arabs were primitive, uncivilized, violent. (My parents would never have accepted such characterizations of blacks.) Arabs hated and killed Jews. Really, I learned that Arabs were irredeemably evil. In all my travels through life, which were extensive, I never knew any Arabs: and ignorance is the best friend of prejudice.

In my mid-thirties I started reading books by Palestinians. These books made me understand that I was misinformed. I had had a fine enough position on the Palestinians--or perhaps I should say "the Palestinian question" to convey the right ring of condescension--once I knew they existed; long after I was 11. Maybe 20 years ago, I knew they existed. I knew they were being wronged. I was for a two-state solution. Over the years, I learned about Israeli torture of Palestinian prisoners; I knew Jewish journalists who purposefully suppressed the information so as not to "hurt" the Jewish state. I knew the human rights of Palestinians in ordinary life were being violated. Like my daddy, on social issues, the policy questions, I was fine for my kind. These opinions put me into constant friction with the Jewish community, including my family, many friends, and many Jewish feminists. As far as I know, from my own experience, the Jewish community has just recently--like last Tuesday-- really faced the facts--the current facts. I will not argue about the twisted history, who did what to whom when. I will not argue about Zionism except to say that it is apparent that I am not a Zionist and never was. The argument is the same one I had with my Hebrew School principal; my position is the same--either we get a fair world or we keep getting killed. (I have also noticed, in the interim, that the Cambodians had Cambodia and it didn't help them much. Social sadism takes many forms. What can't be imagined happens.) But there are social policy questions and then there is the racism that lives in individual hearts and minds as a prejudgment on a whole people. You believe the stereotypes; you believe the worst; you accept a caricature such that members of the group are comic or menacing, always contemptible. I don't believe that American Jews raised as I was are free of this prejudice. We were taught it as children and it has helped the Israeli government justify in our eyes what they have done to the Palestinians. We've been blinded, not just by our need for Israel or our loyalty to Jews but by a deep and real prejudice against Palestinians that amounts to race-hate.

The land wasn't empty, as I was taught: oh yes, there are a few nomadic tribes but they don't have homes in the normal sense--not like we do in New Jersey; there are just a few uneducated, primitive, dirty people there now who don't even want a state. There were people and there were even trees--trees destroyed by Israeli soldiers. The Palestinians are right when they say the Jews regarded them as nothing. I was taught they were nothing in the most literal sense. Taking the country and turning it into Israel, the Jewish state, was an imperialist act. Jews find any such statement incomprehensible. How could the near-dead, the nearly extinguished, a people who were ash, have imperialized anyone, anything? Well Israel is rare: Jews, nearly annihilated, took the land and forced a very hostile world to legitimize the theft. I think American Jews cannot face the fact that this is one act--the one act--of imperialism, of conquest that has support. We helped; we're proud of it; here we stand. This is a contradiction of every idea we have about who we are and what being a Jew means. It is also true. We took a country from the people who lived there; we the dispossessed finally did it to someone else; we said, They're Arabs, let them go somewhere Arab. When Israelis say they want to be judged by the same standards applied to the rest of the world, not by a special standard for Jews, in part they mean that this is the way of the world. It may be a first for Jews, but everyone else has been doing it throughout recorded history. It is recorded history. I grew up in New Jersey, the size of Israel; not so long ago, it belonged to Indians. Because American Jews refuse to face precisely this one fact--we took the land--American Jews cannot afford to know or face Palestinians: initially, even that they existed.

As for the Palestinians, I can only imagine the humiliation of losing to, being conquered by, the weakest, most despised, most castrated people on the face of the earth. This is a feminist point about manhood.

When I was growing up, the only time I heard about equality of the sexes was when I was taught to love and have fidelity to the new State of Israel. This new state was being built on the premise that men and women were equal in all ways. According to my teachers, servility was inappropriate for the new Jew, male or female. In the new state, there was no strong or weak or more or less valuable according to sex. Everyone did the work: physical labor, menial labor, cooking--there was no, as we say now, sex-role stereotyping. Because everyone worked, everyone had an equal responsibility and an equal say. Especially, women were citizens, not mothers.

Strangely, this was the most foreign aspect of Israel. In New Jersey, we didn't have equality of the sexes. In New Jersey, no one thought about it or needed it or wanted it. We didn't have equality of the sexes in Hebrew School. It didn't matter how smart or devout you were: if you were a girl, you weren't allowed to do anything important. You weren't allowed to want anything except marriage, even if you were a talented scholar. Equality of the sexes was something they were going to have in the desert with the trees; we couldn't send them any because we didn't have any. It was a new principle for a new land and it helped to make a new people; in New Jersey, we didn't have to be quite that new.

When I was growing up, Israel was also basically socialist. The kibbutzim, voluntary collectives, were egalitarian communities by design. The kibbutzim were going to replace the traditional nuclear family as the basic social unit in the new society. Children would be raised by the whole community--they wouldn't "belong" to their parents. The communal vision was the cornerstone of the new country.

Here, women were pretty invisible, and material greed, a desire for middle class goods and status, animated the Jewish community. Israel really repudiated the values of American Jews--somehow the adults managed to venerate Israel while in their own lives transgressing every radical value the new state was espousing. But the influence on the children was probably very great. I don't think it is an accident that Jewish children my age grew up wanting to make communal living a reality or believing that it could be done; or that the girls did eventually determine, in such great numbers, to make equality of the sexes the dynamic basis of our political lives.

While women in the United States were living in a twilight world, appendages to men, housewives, still the strongest women I knew when I was a child worked for the establishment, well-being, and preservation of the State of Israel. It was perhaps the only socially sanctioned field of engagement. My Aunt Helen, for instance, the only unmarried, working woman I knew as a child, made Israel her life's cause. Not only did the strong women work for Israel, but women who weren't visibly strong--who were conformist--showed some real backbone when they were active on behalf of Israel. The equality of the sexes may have had a resonance for them as adults that it couldn't have had for me as a child. Later, Golda Meir's long tenure as prime minister made it seem as if the promise of equality was being delivered on. She was new, all right; forged from the old, visibly so, but herself made new by an act of will; public; a leader of a country in crisis. My Aunt Helen and Golda Meir were a lot alike: not defined in terms of men; straightforward when other women were coy; tough; resourceful; formidable. The only formidable women I saw were associated with and committed to Israel, except for Anna Magnani. But that's another story.

Finally in 1988, at 42, on Thanksgiving, the day we celebrate having successfully taken this land from the Indians, I went to Israel for the first time.

I went to a conference billed as the First International Jewish Feminist Conference. Its theme was the empowerment of Jewish women. Its sponsors were the American Jewish Congress, the World Jewish Congress, and the Israel Women's Network, and it was being organized with a middle-class agenda by middle-class women, primarily American, who were themselves beholden to the male leadership of the sponsoring groups. So the conference looked to secular Israeli feminists organizing at the grass-roots level--and so it was. Initially, the secular Israeli feminists intended to organize an alternate feminist conference to repudiate the establishment feminist conference, but they decided instead to have their own conference, one that included Palestinian women, the day after the establishment conference ended.

I went because of grass-roots Israeli feminists: the opportunity to meet with them in Haifa, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem; to talk with those organizing against violence against women on all fronts; to learn more about the situation of women in Israel. I planned to stay on--if I had, I also would have spoken at and for the rape crisis center in Jerusalem. In Haifa, where both Phyllis Chesler and I spoke to a packed room (which included Palestinian women and some young Arab men) on child custody and pornography in the United States, women were angry about the establishment conference--its tepid feminist agenda, its exclusion of the poor and of Palestinian feminists. One woman, maybe in her sixties, with an accent from Eastern Europe, maybe Poland, finally stood up and said approximately the following: "Look, it's just another conference put on by the Americans like all the others. They have them like clockwork. They use innocents like these"--pointing to Phyllis and me--"who don't know any better." Everyone laughed, especially us. I hadn't been called an innocent in a long time, or been perceived as one either. But she was right. Israel brought me to my knees. Innocent was right. Here's what compromised my innocence, such as it was.

#andrea dworkin #israel #zionism #palestine #colonization #p #L

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muckinnons-blog · 7 years

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HEYYY it’s Jinx back at it again with another character, this is Marlene McKinnon and I’m happy to play her here!!

SOFIA BLACK D'ELIA? No, that’s actually MARLENE MCKINNON from the MARAUDERS ERA. You know, the child of STEVEN MCKINNON and ARIELLA SELWYN? About to begin SEVENTH YEAR, this RAVENCLAW student is sided with THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX. SHE identifies as CIS-FEMALE and is a PUREBLOOD who is known to be DOGMATIC, ARGUMENTATIVE, and STUBBORN but also ADROIT, PROGRESSIVE, and LOYAL. — &&. ( JINX, PST, SHE/HER, 22 )

MORE PERSONALITY TRAITS

+ curious, confident, stable, strategic

- loud, pompous, brash, domineering

Growing up the youngest out of three, the only girl, in a conservative Jewish Pureblood family was what Marlene knew. She had a happy childhood, easily, but one that was extremely sheltered. So much so, she wasn’t aware that muggles really existed ( despite having a few in her family tree – which is why she’s Jewish ). Having a family that was perfectly nice, perfectly happy with each other and encouraging of Marlene’s curiosity to an extent was perfectly nice. She read every book she could get her hands on in their cottage by the sea in Eastborn. She explored the beaches, the grounds, people watched from afar. She dressed up for Pureblood parties and fucked around with James Potter at them, already over everyone being so cordial and prim. Her brothers and her loved each other, Andrew the oldest was Quidditch obsessed and Michael the middle boy was an artist. Her life before Hogwarts was like clockwork, the cogs in the machine were moving perfectly and Marlene grew tired of it. She made trouble by asking question after question, none of which were really answered by her parents. The books weren’t enough, she’d read them a few times over. The countryside was beautiful but she wondered was was beyond the sea line. Infinitely curious, Marlene wanted to know more, craved to know more and when getting to Hogwarts – she was sorted into Ravenclaw for this very reason.

Marlene was angry when she realized how much her parents had hid from her. How much they’d neglected to tell her. How much they had limited her. If there was anything she realized she hated, it was not knowing, so she absorbed all the information she could from possibly everyone she could. After she saw the prejudice towards muggles, muggleborns & halfbloods a fury was born. How could they not tell her what the world was actually like, warts and all? How could they not tell her the world was not just friday night dinners, books, neutrality and quietness? Marlene, who came to Hogwarts questioning, loud, and observant went home questioning, loud and furious. How could you! How could you not do something about what was happening in the world! How could you not tell me how fantastic muggles were! Her parents had no answers simply because they were just ignorant. Marlene refused to act like things were okay when they weren’t, she refused to stand still look pretty for her parents at pureblood events, to be anything but a storm when there were women & people around her she saw were so oppressed – that became her rebellion. Her disconnect from them. She took it too far, it was an extreme but she needed to be what she was to pave a path. It was something she knew she had to do and it was how Marlene McKinnon, the BURNING comet kerosene sapphire girl was born.

There was so much she had to make up for, and so much she was willing to learn. Her muggleborn friends were promptly questioned about their lives, her halfblood ones too. Anyone who dared to hurt them or hurl insults at them – Marlene didn’t allow. She shot off at the mouth, easy, at the bigots she seemed to find so many of. BLOOD TRAITOR, she wore the label proud because she was standing up for what she believed in. Marlene would spend time learning how to duel, perfecting her technique, doing her schoolwork and receiving near perfect grades, drinking copious amounts of coffee because she loved it but also because it helped her to keep on going. Marlene was rude, but fun, and sometimes you had to tip toe around her. Mold to HER. She demanded presence, and that’s what was rebellious about her – she was a different kind of woman than the one she should’ve become based how she was raised, a huge feminist, she made people apologize to her first and she wouldn’t dare swallow her pride. Marlene was determined, would go around picking fights because she could and thought that pureblood bigots in particular needed to be knocked off their pedestal ( maybe just so she could stand on it – or help other women, other oppressed people do so ), she never hid that she loved girls and boys be damned what anyone else thought. That’s why she was rebellious, not because she partied, did drugs ( which, was limited to pot due to Qudditch and now underground rebel group ), and other various other things. She chained smoked off the ledge of the Astronomy Tower when she needed to stop and gain some clarity.

While some of her housemates lived in shades of grey, she didn’t, in fact, she quite resented it having the sort of black and white mentality she has. But, she could enjoy the challenge because she always needs a challenge. Marlene feels the only way she’ll learn, truly learn and at all understand this war is if she makes things harder on herself. She wants to see the grey, but there isn’t time for it when there’s a war based on blood status brewing around her. Even if she neglects to make proper boundaries, even if she neglects so much, this is who she is, it’s who she has to be. It’s the only way she feels she can make up for her own blood in a sense, for her own privilege as well as protect her friends – by making herself a target of sorts. It’s odd because with this combination you’d think that she would be somewhat lost in the world, it seems like she gives so much to her friends but really, she’s not at all lost in it which is something a lot of people her age can’t say. With this, Marlene has cultivated a strong sense of self – she is true. You can never say that you do not know who Marlene McKinnon is, but more importantly, she never strays from being herself.

OTHER IMPORTANT POINTS:

marlene is a little shit, sarcastic, loud, an excellent dueler but more likely to punch you in the face first than hex you.

CHARACTER INSPO: Ben Wyatt from Parks and Rec, Dee from IASIP, Alexander Hamilton from Hamilton the Musical, Veronica Mars from Veronica Mars, House from House.

is in love with muggle shit. muggle EVERYTHING. muggle ANYTHING. MUGGLES.

is not one too ever apologize really, and if she does it’s because she knows she’s fucked up

honestly will fight you and your ignorant ass mother and denounce your entire family & their ancestors and will not hesitate to insult bc NO CHILL

a big fan of the holyhead harpies

beater for ravenclaw ( i hc the captain too ) and honestly loves quidditch

loves languages and wishes she could travel the fucking world

tbh even tho she’ll physically fight you she’s pretty bad at it SO she’s probs had her ASS BEAT LOL

is a big big ass nerd i s2g, loves the hobbit, her brother calls her a hobbit

her middle brother is gay, her oldest is straight and they’ve jokes that marlene is RIGHT in the middle

got more into judaism from other muggle jewish students, another reason she’s so !!!!! about fighting because this is very much reminding her of the holocaust bc it is genocide what voldy is advocating and she is ready to fight. never again. never again.

though she is jewish she’s been breaking so many rules while at hogwarts but definitely keeps kosher at home.

in the future in the order, i see marlene being a strategist, she is observant and able to read people well if she tries and she’s able to assess strengths and weaknesses. her brain moves a million miles a minute and she’s able to see ninety scenarios before they happen, so it makes her a good strategist. she’s a very good dueler too but she’s got an excellent brain that’s often overshadowed by her ….. fucking loud ass mouth

oh yeah SHES GOT A FUCKING LOUD ASS MOUTH I SWEAR TO GDOjgfihowg

also, marlene is on the asexual spectrum?? i would say she’s demisexual tbh, but she’s very sex positive. she’s just not obsessed with sex or trying to get laid or anything.

#eras intro #this is marlene!!!#( about. )#im not in the greatest mood so im going but here <3 #ill answer messages soon and try to do some replies

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dailyaudiobible · 7 years

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11/14/2017 DAB Transcript

Ezekiel 29:1-30:26, Hebrews 11:32-12:13, Psalms 112:1-10, Proverbs 27:17

Today is the 14th day of November. Welcome to the Daily Audio Bible. I’m Brian. We’re probably far enough in the year for you to know that, but I’m Brian. It’s good to be here with you today. And I'm excited to take the next step forward. We’ll move into Ezekiel and then into Hebrews, where we will talk about faith. But first, Ezekiel chapter 29 verse one through 30, verse 26. And we’re reading from the Common English Bible this week.

Commentary:

Alright. So, in Hebrews, as I’ve been saying most every day, Hebrews was written to Hebrews, which is not me saying, because it was written to Hebrews it has no meaning for us, it's to say, that's the context and context is important in the Bible. These are early Jewish believers in Jesus and they are declaring that God is doing a new thing among the Hebrew people, that Jesus is a part of the Hebrew story and that God is doing a new thing among the Hebrew people. The old covenant is accomplished and a new covenant is instituted. Well, this is not widely accepted at the time or now among the Hebrew people. And so, this letter is to restate what is believed about Jesus in a Hebrew context among the early believers in Jesus because they are on the margins. At best, these early Hebrew believers in Jesus were thought to be just a part of another Jewish sect, sort of like a weird new denomination of Judaism, who are following a rabbi named Jesus, who happened to be executed by the Romans. So, these guys are being marginalized, sidelined, cast out, mistreated, even persecuted. And if we remember the story of the apostle Paul, he was one of the persecutors. This is who he was after, Jewish, Hebrew people who were converting to following Jesus. So, they had they had considerable opposition. So, on the one hand they were adopting this way of Jesus and following Jesus teachings and believing that this rewired and reframed things that God was doing something new in the world and this would lead them to eternal life. But on the other hand, it had only made their human physical lives much more difficult to navigate. So, we can begin to see how this all fits together - a lengthy explanation of how Jesus connects to the Hebrew story and fulfills so many prophecies and brings to an end an era and begins a new one that follows in a tradition of faith in what can’t be seen but is hoped for and in. And then we walked through all of the examples, Hebrew examples by the way, of people who are deeply respected by all Hebrew, all practicing Jewish people. And, so, now the writer of Hebrews is saying look, those guys believed in a promise and hoped in it and moved forward and they moved the world and our culture forward in the process, but it was very difficult for them. So, we shouldn't be surprised that moving this forward, that our place in this story is difficult. And, so, right now we can't just disappear into the scenery. We can't just fade. We have to follow our ancestors example and move this forward. And, so, the conclusion, not of the book of Hebrews, but the conclusion of this thought – ‘so then, let's also run the race that is laid out in front of us since we have such a great cloud of witnesses surrounding us. And that great cloud of witnesses, being all of the examples of the ancestors that had gone before them’. This hall of faith that we walked down over the last couple of days. ‘Let's throw off any extra baggage and get rid of the sin that trips us up and fix our eyes on Jesus, faith's pioneer and perfecter. He endured the cross, ignoring the shame for the sake of the joy that was laid out in front of Him and sat down at the right side of God's throne’. We should take great encouragement in that because it gives the lay of the land for our own lives. It's not always going to be easy. This isn't even about making things easy, which is one of the great misconceptions about this journey of faith that we’re on. And one of the things that deeply estranges us from God because for some reason, we think that everything is supposed to be unopposed and without challenge and easy and when it’s not we blame God for it. And we can see clues that this is somewhat happening in this time because the writer of Hebrews then begins to talk about discipline. And the way that it's brought out is, look, a parent who doesn't discipline their children and shape them and guide them doesn't love them. And if that's not happening to a child then the child's in his legitimate child. So, they are basically saying, look, we have to endure this, we have to move through this and get everything that God has for us that's in it into our lives. We’re being shaped. We’re being remade new for this new covenant. Things have changed and we are carrying it forward. And, so, we too, can take council found in the last verses that we read today – ‘so strengthen your drooping hands and weak knees. Make straight paths for your feet so that if any part is lame it will be healed rather than injured more seriously.

Prayer:

Father, we have to reframe some things. We actually have to keep reframing them, that the obstacles that we face and the challenges that come our way aren't purposeless. They are an invitation to grow strong in our faith, which we need to be. And they are assisting us with stripping away all of the things that are going nowhere in our lives. So, come Holy Spirit, strengthen our faith. We embrace You, and we cling to You in all things. You are the Author and Perfecter of our faith. So, come Holy Spirit. We pray in Jesus’ name. Amen.

Announcements:

dailyaudiobible.com is the website. It’s home base. It’s where you find out what's going on around here.

Looking at the calendar, just a few days from now, this coming Sunday the 19th of November, we’ll be back out on the road bringing the Sneezing Jesus message at River Valley church in Bossier City, Louisiana. So, this will be last time we’ll be out on the road this year. Looking forward to seeing you. Come say hello. You can get all the details at dailyaudiobible.com in the events section. And we’ll look forward to that in a few days.

If you want to partner with the Daily Audio Bible, you can do that at dailyaudiobible.com. There's a link, it's on the homepage. And I can't thank you enough for those of you who have clicked that link. Thank you. If you prefer, the mailing address is PO Box 1996 Spring Hill, TN 37174.

And as always, if you have a prayer request or comment 877-942-4253 is the number to dial.

And that's it for today. I'm Brian I love you and I'll be waiting for you here tomorrow.

Community Prayers and Praise Reports

Hi Family. This is His Little Sheri from Canada. And I finished listening to the community prayer for November 4th and doodling my prayers for all of you. I have quite a long list of people I will be praying for. And just to mention a few, Kristi in Kentucky, your dad passed away on October 21st. That was my birthday. And my heart goes out to you. I'm very close to my parents. And, so, I can imagine the grief you’re feeling after losing both your mom and now your dad. I’m praying for you Kristi. A man called in, didn’t leave his name, but you were saying that you were really needing companionship, that you are feeling lonely, and I’m praying for you. I'm praying for Julie from Maryland. Thank you so much Julie, for your message to me. That made my day. And you had mentioned that you’re praying for your parents and your brother for their salvation. I'm going to join you in praying for them. Miguel, you called you in and sang Victory in Jesus. Thank you, I was singing with you at the top of my lungs…because there was nobody home. So, thank you of reminding me of that wonderful old hymn. And Lisa the Encourager, you called in and talked about the miracle of our eyes. Thank you for that. That was so fascinating. And I just felt worship rise up in my hear as you were talking about the miraculous design of our eyes. And Candice from Oregon. You called in mentioning that you're going to be meeting with your sister. I’m wondering how that went, so please call in and update us. There’s so many more here on my list. I love you family. I’m praying for so many of you and I’ll talk to you again soon. Bye for now.

Hello my darling family. This is Janice in Goodyear Arizona calling. I send greetings to all of you and my love. And I have a special request for my brother-in-law. His name is Tim. And Tim has been through a rough time, to say the least. He lost his beautiful 35 year old daughter a couple months ago in a car accident and now the doctors have discovered internal bleeding but they don't know where it’s coming from. So, he’s got to go through a bunch of tests and we all know how those are. Please pray that the Lord will direct these doctors to find the cause of his bleeding and stop it. And please pray, most of all, that Tim will come to a knowledge of Jesus as his Lord and Savior. And I thank you all so very much. I still keep a book, I wish I could show you all my books, it’s full of with prayers and answers from my DAB family. God bless you all. Thanks again.

Good morning everyone, this is Mike from Washington state. I’m calling on 11/11. I’d just been listening to the community prayer line today and I just wanted to say thank you to all my Daily Audio Bible family and all the prayer requesters and everything for the beautiful podcast. I’ve been listening since 2009, full time listening since 2010. And felt compelled to call today to thank Tony for his great poem about the three trees. It just really turned something in me and made me want to call in for the first time. Everybody have a great day. And love you all.

Hi. Kristi from Kentucky, this is Valerie calling from Michigan. I heard your prayer request a few days ago about the loss of your mom and dad so close together and I totally feel for you. Feel my hugs right now for you. I understand. My mom and dad died 8 months apart. And my dad died middle of August. And, so, I’ve had a little time to reflect on their lives and their presence in my life and how much I miss them. And I know you’re probably…in the beginning…your heart just hurts…you actually feel pain in your heart because you miss them so much. And that will get a little easier. God is good. Rest in Him and feel the tears…let the tears flow…let the blankets of sorrow just come upon you. It’s OK. It will get easier. God is good. He is our eternal Father and our parents are home, which is our goal, is to one day go home. And this is a hard time of year to be at a loss, to be grieving. So, I’ll be praying for you Kristi and for you too Brian, for the loss of your mom, and for all out there who are missing loved ones. Remember that we are children to our parents, parents to our children. Some day we will be parents to our parents and children to our children - circle of life. And there’s a lesson there. God bless you. Love you Kristi. Bye-bye.

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half-sassed · 7 years

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It’s that time again.

Springtime. The Paschal season. Aviv.

The season of rebirth, renewal, and too much bleeping rain.

The time of flowers blooming, bears waking, trees budding, eggs hatching, and Jews frantically cleaning their homes and screaming this crucial message into the void:

No, Christians, you should not have Passover seders.

"But why?” comes the eternal reply. “The Old Testament is part of our tradition too! Jesus celebrated Passover! Why can’t we?”

Read on, and I’ll tell you.

Well, for starters, there was no such thing as a seder in Jesus’s day, because the Second Temple was still standing. In those days, Jewish Passovers followed the guidelines set forth in the “Old Testament”, which mostly focused on 1) avoiding leavened foods for seven days, 2) slaughtering, roasting, and eating a sacrificial lamb at a first-night-of-Passover ceremonial meal that also included bitter herbs and unleavened matzah bread, and 3) seven days of additional animal sacrifices. That’s it. No fancy prayer service around the family table. No seder plate. No Four Questions, four cups, four sons, or...well, anything with the number four, actually. Rabbi Hillel liked to make his ceremonial lamb dinner into pita wraps, because he was generally full of great ideas, but that was the closest to the modern-day seder anybody got back then. For Jesus and his buddies, Passover was just flat bread, bitter herbs, and a literal heap of dead animals--with the dead animals being the primary focus of ritual and prayer.

So why did those customs change?

Necessity. The only place those sacrifices (or any sacrifices) were allowed to take place was at the Temple in Jerusalem, which worked out great while there was a Temple in Jerusalem. It did, however, pose a slight problem to Jews trying to follow God’s commandments after the Romans destroyed that Temple and kicked almost all the Jews out of their homeland in 70 C.E., about forty years after they crucified Jesus. (Long story short, the Zealots launched a military revolt that failed so hard, it’s still screwing the Jews over two millennia later. And then we tried to fight the Romans two other times, and failed even harder. Good times.) Most of the major sects of Judaism that existed at the time were completely centered on Temple sacrifices and Temple worship, and they died out fairly quickly. The exception was a certain sect mentioned repeatedly in the New Testament, which not only survived but blossomed, becoming the root of the Rabbinic Judaism practiced by more than 99% of Jews today:

The Pharisees.

That’s right: the recurring villains of the New Testament, the very Jewish group Christians usually deride as an obsolete example of inflexible religiosity disconnected from true faith, were in fact the group that managed to adapt to a Temple-less existence by shifting the focus from sacrificial rituals to prayer and study. (Admittedly, the Jews had already done this once during their 70-year exile to Babylonia following the destruction of the First Temple in 587 B.C.E., which is how the Pharisee sect came to exist in the first place. This time around, though, the problem was a lot more permanent.) This deviation from the written Law was justified by a belief that, along with the written Law, God had also given Moses an Oral Law, which was passed down, expounded on, and added to by generations of Jewish scholars. Between 200-500 C.E., those centuries of oral tradition and rabbinic rulings were written down, debated, and codified into the Talmud, the basis of most modern-day Jewish rituals. Among the many rituals prescribed by the Talmud was a replacement ritual for the first-night-of-Passover roast lamb sacrifice of old: the unique prayer service/Torah study/ceremonial meal known as the Passover seder.

The budding sect of Christianity, on the other hand, found its own solution to the “no more Temple” problem by claiming that Jesus’s death was the ultimate sacrifice rendering all further sacrifices unnecessary. This solution required Christianity to break completely with Judaism (human sacrifices and God having human avatars are both very big no-nos in Jewish thought), but it freed Christians to develop their own distinct religion with non-Jewish attributes, rituals, and values, rather than remain the minor sect of Judaism they’d begun as. In the decades after the destruction of the Temple, Christian leaders began preaching the doctrine of supersessionism, which claimed that Jesus had rendered Jewish law null and void (and continued Jewish practice, by extension, rebellion against God). That idea became foundational doctrine in both the Western and the Eastern Church, to the point of excommunicating Christians who promoted observance of “Old Testament” festivals and traditions and even going so far as to move the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday to avoid any hint of “Judaizing.”

The Talmud, needless to say, was never part of Christian tradition. In fact, Christian leaders repeatedly censored the Talmud because they considered parts of it to be blasphemous against Jesus and Mary--the earliest known incidence of this being in 521 C.E., only a few decades after the Talmud was finalized, though the heyday of Talmud censorship, bannings, and outright Talmud book-burnings at the hands of the Church was from 1239-1775 C.E.--and claims that the Talmud allowed Jews to treat Christians as subhuman were commonly used to incite Christian populations to attack Jewish communities. (Sadly, this particular antisemitic canard is still around today.) Christian leaders also spread lies about Passover rituals in particular, most notably that the unleavened matzah bread eaten on Passover--the one part of the original tradition Jews could still observe without the Temple--was made by mixing flour with the blood of Christian children the Jews kidnapped and murdered for that purpose. (Yes, that one is still around, too.) Jews in Christian countries managed to uphold their rituals and to preserve copies of the Talmud only at great personal risk and in defiance of Christian persecution.

So, tl;dr, what exactly is the problem with Christian seders?

The seder ritual was a replacement for the rituals of Jesus’s time. It was not part of his religious practice, nor of any of his followers. As such, the common claim by Christians that they hold Passover seders because “the Last Supper was a seder” is bogus. If you want to recreate the Last Supper, you’d better start learning how to ritually slaughter sheep.

The rabbis who devised the seder ritual represented the very same sect of Judaism Jesus repeatedly feuded with. Not wanting Jesus’s followers to take part in Pharisaic rituals is probably one of the very few things those rabbis and Jesus would both have agreed on.

Literally the only historical connection Christians have to the seder ritual is that your ancestors repeatedly tried to stamp it out, which is absolutely not grounds for you to claim it as part of your tradition. If it were up to Christianity, the seder tradition wouldn’t have survived long enough for modern-day Christians to appropriate.

The seder ritual is the Jewish solution to a specific theological problem (no Temple = no sacrifices) that Christianity has already solved in an entirely different way. Divorced from that background, the seder has no meaning. Easter is your seder, Christians. Jesus is your seder. That’s why your ancestors stopped celebrating Passover in the first place!

Stripping a Jewish ritual Christians had no part in creating--but a big part in suppressing--of its Jewish content and making it about Jesus instead is outright telling Jews that we’re doing our own religion wrong and our faith has no value beyond being a prelude to yours (even when, as here, the ritual in question DIDN’T PREDATE CHRISTIANITY). Which is something Christianity has been claiming for millennia, true, but taking it to this extreme is blatantly antisemitic and we’re tired of it.

Now that you know better, what can you do?

Reblog this post. Share it on other sites too, if you’d like. It won’t do much good if only Jews ever see it.

If your church, family, or other Christian gathering is hosting a so-called “seder,” don’t go! Better yet, explain to them why what they’re doing is antisemitic and appropriative. Christians who appropriate Jewish rituals are far more likely to listen to other Christian voices than they are to listen to Jews.

However, if a Jew invites you to their Passover seder, go! It’s part of the seder tradition to open your doors to guests, and being invited to take part is an entirely different animal than taking without permission. Plus, legit seders are awesome.

Have a happy Easter!

#christian #passover #pesach #cultural appropriation #antisemitism

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asatrueliberdade · 7 years

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Considerations about being a “mindset focused” Heathen in Brazil

Sonne Heljarskinn

If one wants to understand what it means to be Heathen in South America, specifically in Brazil, it must be important to notice that there are many ways in which people call themselves as Heathens outside our country.

Nevertheless, we will deal here with the idea of reconstructionist Heathenry focused in the revivalism of the worldview, ideology, psychology, cosmology and religious practices of ancient or arch-Heathens, before their conversion to Christianity. It is in this way that the complex word “heathen” will be used in this piece.

So, if we want to analyze our situation here as this kind of heathens, we will have to agree that we have some advantages and some problems. Some of these problems can be found in several other places where Western civilization placed itself, and some of them are most concerned to our own historical development as a so called “third world” country.

As Freud argues in “Totem and Taboo”, “evolution” to (Western) civilization is individualization. Understanding the way in which tribal peoples, no matter if they are Tupi, Guarani, African or Germanic, place themselves to perceive and relate to the world “outside” of what modern Westerns call “Self” is an superhuman effort. Recognizing thought patterns and the subtle shadings which guide(d) tribal peoples is very satisfying though.

But most people became satisfied with taking points that they could easily recognize and reinterpret through modern (post-Christian, post-cartesian and post-illuminist) Western lens. It is the rule, and we even cannot blame them for doing so. After five centuries of Christianization in Brazil we are apparently somewhat far from our pre-Christian past than some other cultures around the world, and even our neighbors who were colonized by Spain. But that seems not to be the case maybe in Pará and Amazônia, as well some of other regions where people were not so culturally influenced by the states of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro (which hold, in spite their industrialization, most people who call themselves as Norse pagans or Heathens).

We are not saying that people who do not seek for the application of the whole heathen worldview’s content that is still available to us “are doing it wrong” at all. But, if we look to the arch-Heathens, approaching them to learn and live their mindset(s) today (what is NOT the aim of all those which call themselves as Heathens), there are several many ways in which pre-Christian peoples did not act, think, live, nor worship as well as there is no single “right way” for many of these points. Cyclical time, hearth cult, ancestors’ worship, heroes’ worship, animism (or the belief in a supernatural reality interwoven to ours in the way that the arch-Heathens probably understood), active fate (wyrd and ørlög), world acceptance and the gifting cycle are roughly understood and agreed as “core points” of a Heathen worldview in Brazil, where “orthodoxy” (which here means nothing but a religious empathy to the Æsir and in some cases the Vanir) absolutely reigns over the orthopraxy common to ancient and living indigenous, pagan or pre-Christian peoples around the world. If one tries to point out that any Heathen should act aiming to reach these heathen worldview’s elements, he probably will be misinterpreted. Even if we have left alone “the single right way” to approach any of these core points.

If Christianity and Catholicism influence us for the bad, we cannot say it for the good. We have so many troubles to organize ourselves as a community, preferring to act as a bunch of individual mystical or spiritual seekers (in the negative sense), instead of as a community. Valhalla is still our heaven, and alcohol our Holy Communion. We cannot see the earth as our land, and the underworld as the place where our Ancestors live. The wind is still unseen and unheard, and the waters are still a product. The desacralization of both our daily lives and environment, if appointed by someone, is mocked as “new age” attitude. The individual is still their last undivided unity, and the groups can’t live because of their absence of tribal understanding. But I still think that we can, as a “third world” and a bit less individualized society, progress in this point roughly faster than people condensed outside Latin America. We just have to understand that reciprocity is not charity and community and tribe are not “evil communism”.

I think that most of these problems come from the fact that we have hard problems to deal with English – the language which holds the greater part of published books, research and papers concerning to Heathenry. I am quite literally learning English because I research about Heathenry. And I cannot even have done the first step without a friendly pressure of a priceless friend called Andreia. As Luther in the Dark Age, we must to convert Heathenry as a native idea, a folk centered practice, instead of a way to create a cult over our supposed wisdom of heathen subjects. English to us represents what Latin did to Germans in the Middle Ages. We have to get our books in Portuguese, not only Sagas, Eddas and academic papers (even though NEVE (Viking and Scandinavian Studies’ Center) is doing a pretty useful work), but true heathen books and content done by Heathens for Heathens.

Racism – yes, we should to talk about it again – is a large problem. If in United States we have an open hate spreading through culture, the supposed “racial democracy” stated in Brazil we have the exhausting common “I’m not racist but… (insert your bigoted discourse here)”. “I’m not racist but Norse paganism is for white people”, and they just forget that, even if Heathenry was only for those who have white Ancestors, well, they raped our Native and African foremothers and created us. Skin tone does not imply in itself religion, as Jung wrongly said (of course, for lots of white folks, familial heritage or bloodline is directly equal to skin color). Heathenry is the way in which I project myself towards my Ancestors, Nature, and Human Community. It is a way of seeing and relating to the world and judging my own acts. It is a culture. And a culture is acquired through socialization, not by blood. And socialization depends upon geography. A geographical and cultural outsider could understand and adopt a culture if one strove to do so. This is why I reject the poor theology (influenced by Jewish-Christian mindset) of a people chosen by a god, to reign over the world. Also, we are but one of the various silent or visible conscious nature’s beings which populate this world.

Within the large cities where most of Pagans live today we also have to deal with the fact that a mediaeval fair could but should not necessarily be one of the few events to revive heathen religious practices. Heathenry is not just a section in an online or offline market. I think that in this point we are not so different from the rest of the world, but we struggle every day to show newcomers that to be Heathen is far more than tattooing an ancient symbol in his body, or acquiring products made to attract pagan consumers. Heathen is something you are, not something you bought. We also have to deal with people that treat Eddas and Sagas not as tales of the arch-Heathens, but as a species of Sacred Books, teaching the wisdom of the God(s). If you are a mindset focused Heathen it is quite curious that you prefer to buy rather than make something or that you are looking for a Holy Book among peoples who were in their majority illiterate.

There are also some people who do not understand the differences between the meanings of “religion” and “belief” to the arch-Heathens and Christians, and want to see a centralized institution (probably guided by themselves) dictating practices and beliefs to other Heathens. Even if they cannot state clearly which are the differences between Christian and Heathen worldview and practices. Even if they cannot understand religion outside the box of the “pray to gods” Christian custom.

But the most painful point of being a mindset focused Heathen in Brazil is isolation. Heathens are nothing but an inexpressive and almost inexistent minority of our population. If you live in a large city in the Southeast or South, you will probably find more Heathens and Norse Pagans in general to love or to hate (being a Heathen or Norse Pagan almost never makes someone be nicer than he or she would be if he or she were not a Heathen or Norse Pagan). We worship our individual selves in a way in which most of us are not able to build a common religious practice, something that we can give to our sons as a heritage. So, it is hard to mindset focused Heathenry to grow up here since a mindset, to live, must be shared and constantly exercised. If one does not interact with people who share the same culture, values, ideas, understandings, ways of acting, he or she will be incorporated and homogenized within the mainstream (Western, with all its contemporary implications) culture.

Mindset focused Heathenry is not an easy thing. But it fairly rewards those who honestly dare to break new ground. We have, as Brazilians and Heathens, our indigenous peoples to look for wisdom, and help as well as guide us in this ancestral path. We have our green and living land, even if it is not that “cold beauty” of the snowy northern hemisphere. We have our mango trees, so vivid and sacred in our daily lives as the European oaks. We have our own sacred wells, our powerful Ancestors, and primal wights which wander here since forgotten times. Also, Visigoths, Vandals and Suebi provides us with their Germanic cultural influence through Portuguese colonization. The young Brazilian Heathen community has to discover its own surroundings, Ancestral links and way to manifest themselves in the world as Heathens. We have to face our own giants but, as Beowulf did in his tale, I, as a Brazilian Heathen, am ready to fight to protect my kin, my relatives and this heathen culture I learned to love since I first met it.

#asatru #asatrueliberdade #heathenry #brazilian #brazil #animism #tribalism #racism #heathen #pagan #animist #tribal #norse #visigoths #suebi #orthopraxy

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