Co-signed by many of the mainstream U.S. Jewish organizations, clearly harder to roust up the fatigued rank-and-file. Even with a free meal voucher, only 2000 show up to a stadium with capacity for 40,000.

“Yom Kippur,” the day of ritual and moral cleanness and self‐denial, has become the climax of the Jewish High Holy Days. This day is the hope for freshness and new beginning for individuals and for the collective. Once a year, on the tenth of the seventh month (Tishre), the high priest atones (כפר) for impurities of the Temple and the altar, and at the same time also for sins of all the people: himself, his close family, his priestly clan, and all Israel (Lev 16:10–11, 16–19, 21–22, 24, 29–33; 23:27; Num 29:7; Exod 30:10). In fact, atonement of the people is the core of the Yom Kippur ritual (Lev 16:6–11, 15, 17, 21–24, 30–32), while the atonement of the Temple and the altar is mentioned only secondarily (Lev 16:16, 18–20, 33).

The biblical text states: “For on that day [shall the priest] make an atonement for you, to cleanse you, that you may be clean from all your sins before the Lord” (Lev 16:30).[1] Despite the evident meaning of the term “all your sins,” the rabbis learn from the phrase “before the Lord” that Yom Kippur atones for sins “between man and God” (בין אדם למקום) only, and this too, only under certain conditions.[2] For the sins “between man and his fellow” (בין אדם לחברו), one must appease his fellow and request forgiveness. In case he or she harmed another, he or she must pay compensation or return the stolen goods.[3]

I wish that others would forgive me for my sins and transgressions.

Gaza is a concentration camp and rapidly becoming a death camp. Gas chambers and firing lines have been replaced with bombs, tanks, and white phosphorous. We say never again for anyone. Talli Gotliv, an Israeli lawmaker, demanded that Israel “Shoot powerful missiles without limit. Not flattening a neighborhood. Crushing and flattening Gaza," she continued… "Otherwise, we would have done nothing. Not with passwords, with penetrating bombs. Without mercy! Without mercy!" A wish Netanyahu is fulfilling.

Israel is bombing neighborhoods, hospitals, schools, places of worship, tunnels through which people are trying to escape, without regard for civilian life. Half of Gaza is children. The intention is clear. The intention is genocide. Depriving people of food, water, electricity and basic needs, is not just collective punishment, it is an act of genocide.

As we offer solidarity with Palestinian resistance, we are reminded of the Warsaw and Vilna Ghetto and concentration camp uprisings against the Nazis. Both are acts of resistance against fascist régimes. In both cases, there is a struggle for freedom from genocide and ethnic cleansing and the right to exist as a free people.

Since 1948, Palestinians have had to flee while resisting so that they could stay as much as possible in their own homes on their own land, and for their own self-determination. Dr. Meyer called for a return of Palestine to Palestinians and a return of Judaism to the ethics of “do unto others.” We stand on the history of Jewish participation in struggles for our collective liberation. We stand with the right of Palestinians to their collective self-defense.

We stand against genocide, whether the genocide that killed many of our families, or the genocide we are witnessing. The majority of the world is against this genocide. Internationally, many are showing up and protesting, calling out the US, UK, and EU, who are backing Israel’s genocidal plan with their arms, propaganda, and censorship. We stand with the majority. No genocide in our name. We say never again for anyone.We invite other Jews of Conscience to join us in demanding an immediate end to the escalating genocide in Palestine.

To show your support for this statement, please sign here.

With the exceptions of alcohol (and the occasional locust), nearly everything that is kosher is also halal. It is normal for Muslims to seek kosher cuisine whenever Islamic grocers or restaurants are difficult to access. Quoting Ethan B. Katz’s The Burdens of Brotherhood: Jews and Muslims from North Africa to France, page 52:

Illustrating the potential for interaction, Muslims looking for halal meat regularly entered kosher butchers’ shops. Given that many Muslims have long considered kosher meat permissible under Islamic law, since the nineteenth century, a number of North African Muslim travelers had sought out kosher butchers when visiting Europe. In war time France, many observant Muslims naturally turned to Jewish slaughter houses for their meat.¹¹⁶

Page 66:

During the 1930 celebrations of the centenary of the Algerian conquest, one Jewish observer spotted groups of visiting Muslim notables in traditional attire entering the kosher restaurants of the 9th arrondissement, drawn by both the compatibility of Jewish ritual slaughter practices with Muslim rules of halal and the familiar menu.²⁰

Indeed, the daily experience of the city was changing: Parisians out walking in certain quarters might regularly pass by a restaurant with North African or Balkan cuisine and smell the wafting scent of couscous, merguez, baklava, or other traditional “Oriental” or “Arabic” foods; see Jews or Muslims dressed in “North African” garb going about their daily lives in the city; or hear previously unfamiliar Arabic musical modes and instruments emanating from cafés, restaurants, and concert halls.

Page 227:

Until halal shops became widespread in Marseille in the mid to late 1960s, many newly arrived Muslims went to kosher butcheries here and elsewhere in the city to buy their meat.¹¹³

Page 234:

Not far from Cronenbourg, the Bagouchas, an Algerian Jewish family, opened the city’s first “Oriental” grocery store, with products from North Africa. “All the Muslims,” remembers Dahan, “went to this épicerie, because they found there someone who spoke Arabic, who dressed like them, who served the great sacks of spices to which they were accustomed in North Africa.” For many years before Strasbourg had halal shops, religious Muslims purchased their meat at kosher butcheries.¹³⁸

Page 240:

Jews’ and Muslims’ mutual familiarity, common customs and language, and physical proximity gave way to social, economic, cultural, and even religious relations. In many North African cafés, Jews and Muslims played cards and listened to Arabic music together.¹⁶⁰ Mediterranean grocery stores regularly featured mixed Jewish and Muslim clienteles. Many Jews and Muslims lived in the same apartment building.¹⁶¹ A number of Tunisian Muslims who found their way to Belleville took jobs in the quarter working for Jewish‐owned food establishments.¹⁶²

North African Jews in Belleville often had greater resources than their Muslim counter parts and reached out to them. As an organizer for Logique, a Jewish voluntary association helping underprivileged children in Belleville, Patricia Jaïs remembers working with both Jewish and Muslim families in need. She recalls as well a Jewish friend whose father kept his neighborhood North African café open after hours each night to allow Muslims who came with no money to eat for free.¹⁶³

Community boundaries were at once porous and fixed. With fifteen kosher and twelve halal butcheries in the short stretch between the Ménilmontant and Belleville Metro stops, Jews and Muslims generally purchased ritually slaughtered meat that accorded precisely with their own, rather than each other’s comparable, traditions.¹⁶⁴

Reviving customs popular in North Africa, Jews and Muslims also exchanged foods around the Muslim holiday of Ramadan. During the fast month itself, Jewish grocers often offered fruits, vegetables, and fresh herbs that Muslims used to prepare their evening meals. On Aïd el‐Fitr, the feast that concludes the holiday, Muslims would bring pastries and grilled mutton to their Jewish neighbors. As in North Africa, these exchanges highlighted a sense of community.

By their festive, occasional nature, though, they underscored the way that many Jewish and Muslim neighbors, while speaking in the street and remaining amicable, stayed at arm’s length.¹⁶⁵ The mixing of Jews and Muslims was accepted here, but it occurred in a precise, controlled context and thus relied on understood boundaries.

Quoting Aviva A. Orenstein’s Once We Were Slaves, Now We are Free: Legal, Administrative, and Social Issues Raised by Passover Celebrations in Prison:

Interestingly, one cause of the increased cost of kosher meals in some prisons is the request by devout Muslims for kosher foods, which satisfy the Muslim requirements of halal.¹⁵⁷

I’m kind of embarrassed that we’re going to end up celebrating the New Year thirteen weeks late again! Oh well. We’ll beat you to the punch one of these days, as soon as we catch you off guard!

Anyway, here is some history that someone may find interesting: Rosh Hashanah with the Early Israelites. Quote:

Part of the new year celebration ritual in ancient Near Eastern cultures was the solemn procession of the god, whose image would be removed from the temple precinct, paraded, and then returned to it. This ritual served a practical function, since the god’s quarters needed to be purified—a practice referred to in the Bible with the verbs kappēr and ṭahēr, and associated with Yom Kippur, also part of the New Year season.[28]

In addition, it gave the god’s many non-priestly and non-royal worshipers direct access to the deity, unavailable to them during the year. In the Babylonian New Year festival, the king is reported to have taken the god Marduk “by the hand,” leading the image back into the temple.

In Israel and Judah, a similar ritual appears to have taken place with the portable shrine in which YHWH was mysteriously present.[29] The Ark proceeded amid acclamation (tĕrûᴄâ) and blasts of the horn (qôl šōpār, 2 Samuel 6:15). In the premonarchic period, this would have been led by the priests, while in the monarchic period, the king would have taken a leading rôle in these proceedings.

A fine illustration of the king’s rôle is preserved in the narrative about David’s transfer of the Ark to Jerusalem (2 Samuel 6). Donned like a priest in a linen ephod, David led the Ark to its resting-place. Although the story narrates a one-time event, it is modeled after the annual procession of the Ark.[30] In a similar manner, the Judean kings would have taken the lead in the procession of the Ark.

The participation of the king was a powerful means to consolidate the position of the human king, with rather obvious political implications: G‐d was king on high, and the monarch was his deputy on earth. The few psalms that celebrate the human ruler as G‐d’s son on earth (such as Psalms 2 and 110) likely originated in the context of the New Year celebration. Certainly, the presentation of the king as a priestly figure (Psalm 110:4) is entirely in keeping with his rôle in the procession.

to jewish comrades

critique of leiffer (dissent magazine editor btw) book. Rather interesting idiosyncrasies of zionist liberal (shooting and crying variety)

Psychic identification with the Nazis or European colonialists is socially unacceptable, and so such identification takes place via a negative formation: we are not the “Jew with trembling knees” exterminated in the Shoah, we are not the “backwards” Jew of the shtetl or the naively idealistic Jew of the Bund, we are not the “backwards” colonized Palestinian or Arab living under foreign rule.

With each new murder, each new expulsion, Zionists further cast their ballot on the side of the antisemites: they reaffirm particularity against the universal, they transform the world into, per Adorno and Horkheimer again, “the hell they have always taken it to be.” This negation voids Judaism’s historical content—the construction of the law against power, homeland without nation, messianism which reconciles past wrongs.

In a similar vein, that Hasbara has become more untethered from rational argumentation since this intensification of the genocide of the Palestinians reveals Hasbara’s libidinal core: blind domination, even on the field of reason. As the physical domination of the Palestinians reverts once again to the murderous blindness of its origin, so too does the propaganda which justifies it. The façade of lies and innuendos which the Zionist has constructed—Israel as a liberal-democratic nation, as a bastion of tolerance in a sea of hatred, as the most “moral army” in the world, Palestine as backwards, fundamentalist, incapable of peace—collapses under the weight of its actually existing actions. The performance of a false unity and its derivative power must be emphasized all the more.

​

cross‐posted (heh) from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/4960299

It was only one century ago that many would have been shocked to hear the phrase ‘Jesus was a Jew’, as it simply wasn’t something that ordinary churches enjoyed teaching. While a few premodern Christians (including the infamous Protestant pioneer Martin Luther, who responded with a massive wall of text after Jews kept telling him ‘nah, I’m good’) were aware of this knowledge, evidently nobody was really in the habit of emphasizing it either — quite the opposite of the current situation, where the phrase ‘Jesus was a Jew’ has become a cliché.

Since many churches considered anti‐Judaism part of their job, it made sense that they would have wanted to keep quiet about J.C.’s Jewish background, as it would have inevitably raised all sorts of awkward questions, e.g. ‘If Jesus was Jewish, why don’t we all convert to Judaism?’ However, since some Christians feel guilty about nearly two millennia of violent Christian anti‐Judaism, including the Shoah, and many other Christians want to show their support for Zionism, the teaching that J.C. was Jewish has switched from being an arcane detail to basic knowledge.

Now, certainly not all who repeat this trivia are directing it to Jews. In fact, a decade ago I usually saw it directed at blatantly antisemitic Christians, though I doubt that it was always persuasive (as one ‘political pastor’ painfully learned in 1939). This counterargument is also a little irksome in its own way, as J.C.’s Jewish background should not be the only, or even the main, reason why somebody should respect contemporary Jewish people. The paradox of Jews inspiring two overwhelmingly gentile faiths does fascinate me, but Jewish people have worth aside from that.

In any case, if you have been lurking Jewish communities for a while then you have likely noticed that when Jews mention this phrase, they tend to mention it unhappily. It isn’t just that the phrase has become cliché and pedantic, but mainly because the intentions behind it are almost always misguided. At best, telling Jews that J.C. was Jewish is only a quite minor, woefully inadequate way of expressing solidarity. At worst, it is an evasive rhetorical trick, basically the Christian equivalent to saying ‘I’m not racist, I have a black friend!’ or ‘I’m part Cherokee!’, hence why somebody deemed the phrase antisemitic. I find both of those authors harsh, personally, so this is my attempt at putting it more gently if anybody finds their tones too off‐putting.

While it delights me to see Christians who are sincerely interested in demonstrating solidarity with Jewish people, I suspect that all Jews would agree (for once) if I said that reminding others of J.C.’s Jewish background isn’t enough. Maybe better than nothing, but it still isn’t enough. How, then, should one go about it? Click here for my suggestions, zero of which involve supporting an antidemocratic régime! Evangelicals, take note! And if you want to discuss Christianity’s Jewish roots in a way that actually sounds sophisticated and interesting, Torah Praxis after 70 C.E.: Reading Matthew and Luke–Acts as Jewish Texts is arguably the way to get serious about understanding them. See? Christianity’s Jewish origins don’t have to sound like boring trivia!

If you tell a Jewish person that J.C. was a Jew, the politest response that you’ll get is simply ‘good for him’. Few people want to bluntly tell you ‘I don’t care’, let alone patiently and respectfully explain to a stranger why they find this knowledge irrelevant, so this my contribution for anybody who needed help. Hopefully I articulated this well!

it seems ordinary israelis really do be living in the alternative realm

kinda meandering family- and self-exploration piece, but i think its nice

Quoting Katherine Aron‐Beller’s Christian Images and Their Jewish Desecrators: The History of an Allegation, 400–1700, chapter 4:

A longer polemical folktale seems even more relevant for our purposes. Referring again to the thorn/burning bush, which here “radiated God’s presence,” Joseph describes his father, Rabbi Nathan, actually committing image desecration. He openly urinates on a cross in front of a Christian bishop, denying its sanctity and arguing that it should be considered putrid because it was the instrument that had caused the torture and death of Jesus:

Once my lord and father, Rabbi Nathan, may he rest in Paradise, was riding alongside the bishop of Sens.¹²⁰ The bishop got off his horse opposite a bush in order to urinate. My lord and father saw this, and he got off his horse opposite an abomination [a cross] and urinated on it. The bishop saw this and was angry. He said to him, it is not proper to do that, to make the cross smell bad. My father replied, “On the contrary, it was a foolish thing for you to do [Gen. 31:28]. You urinated on a bush, on which the Holy One, blessed be He, radiated His presence in order to bring salvation [that is, at the burning bush, Exod. 3:1–3]. But this [cross], on which you [Christians] say that [the god] you fear was defeated, stank, and rotted, it is right that you should expose yourself and urinate all over it!”¹²¹

The Jew holds the trump cards. It would, Rabbi Nathan argues, make more sense for the Christian to desecrate the cross himself rather than venerate it. He first criticizes the bishop for urinating on a bush when, according to the Christian argument, Christ revealed himself in one. Second, he contends that it makes no sense for the bishop to venerate an object that caused the death of his savior. If the bishop saw the bush as a place of Christian divinity, the Jew argues, then he (the Jew) has shown more respect for Christ by not urinating on the bush than the bishop who did! It might well be argued then, that Joseph the Official was responding to the spreading allegations of Jews violating Christian images and offered in this polemic an allegorical retort.¹²²

(Emphasis added.)

cross‐posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/4654542

In July 1939, a group of Palestine‐born Jews, including key public figures and communal leaders, gathered in Jerusalem for the first meeting of the Natives of the Yishuv Federation (NYF; in Hebrew, Hitahadut Bney ha‐Yishuv). NYF was a political movement that sought to represent Jews of the “Old Yishuv” as an increasingly marginalized population in Palestine.^1^

In contrast to other movements and civil associations with similar aims, the NYF was not ethnically defined (e.g., Sephardi or Yemenite). Rather, it brought together a number of Palestine’s established Jewish communities under the category of “natives” (bney ha‐arets or ha‐Yishuv), clearly positioning themselves against European Zionist élites while relying on Ottoman practices of communal political organization that were viewed by the Zionist leadership as a direct threat to its authority.^2^

The NYF’s core members belonged to the pre‐Zionist Ashkenazi communities of Jerusalem. Joined by leading Sephardi figures, they also sought to draw closer the Yemenite, Georgian, and other communities. The federation claimed the independent status of a recognized political actor with its own social, economic, and cultural institutions, tied to a specific constituency.

This rather radical position combined the struggle for native Jews’ political power with views of a shared Arab Jewish existence in Palestine, which were often expressed by the NYF founder and leader, Dr. Israel Ben‐Zeʾev, in meetings and in correspondence with high Zionist officials.

[…]

In addition to this large variety of private papers, I follow the official paper trail documenting the looting of Palestinian books during the 1948 war, focusing on Ben‐Zeʾev’s struggle against the Hebrew University and the Ministry of Education over the fate of these books that he had partly collected and assembled in Jaffa.

This conflict formed part of an older, fierce debate concerning the politics of (specifically Orientalist) knowledge, that is, who gets to hold, manage, produce, and disseminate knowledge, and which types of Orientalist knowledge should be promoted.

Ben‐Zeʾev opposed the treatment of the looted Palestinian books as dead cultural artifacts in the published work of a closed professional milieu at the university, struggling to keep them for use in his public educational projects and as part of a local, living Arab culture—albeit that by this point the books’ original owners were being displaced from their land and homes and this very culture was undergoing massive destruction.

[…]

Ben‐Zeʾev had a special relationship with A. S. Yahuda, an Orientalist trained in Germany (under the famous philologist Theodor Noeldeke) who spent most of his life as an academic in Europe and the U.S. and yet maintained a deep and ongoing interest in political and academic matters in Palestine.

A lengthy correspondence between them from the 1940s (when Yahuda lived in New York and Ben‐Zeʾev in Jerusalem) reveals the fierce criticism they shared of the Zionist leadership and the Hebrew University’s Institute of Oriental Studies (IOS) for marginalizing native Jews, and particularly the milieu of native scholars and their political and cultural views that stood in opposition to the Zionist colonial‐separatist agenda.^29^

Ben‐Zeʾev admired Yahuda and hoped to gain his support in his political and cultural projects, including the opening of a New York branch of his political movement of native Jews as well as a research institute on Arabic Jewish literature in pre‐Islamic times and in Muslim Spain, on which I elaborate in the next sections.

[…]

The collection of books in Jaffa by Ben‐Zeʾev was met with growing resentment by the university’s Orientalists and librarians, who were determined to bring the Palestinian books to the only place they deemed proper for them, the university library. Within a few years they managed to bring about the demise of Ben‐Zeʾev’s library, obtaining some seven thousand books from its collections.

They were assisted in this process by several government ministries and officials (in addition to Palmon), especially Ben‐Zion Dinur (Dinaburg) and Eliezer Rieger, who had served as senior professors at the university until their appointments as heads of the education ministry in 1951.^80^ With the latter’s authorization, university professors and librarians made frequent visits to Ben‐Zeʾev’s library, screening it for “important” books they wished to have at their disposal.

One year later, in late 1952, the Arab Library in Jaffa was finally closed down, despite Ben‐Zeʾev’s protests, without ever being opened to the public.

I am practically in shock right now. I know that there isn’t anything especially disturbing about this report, but the fact that Zionists can successfully hide Jewish history like this from the general public almost enrages me.

Alav hashalom.

Rabbinical students clutch pearls over the existence of anti Zionists in their class; complain about “communist literature.”

A new Jewish tradition is growing in those places where solidarity flourishes. Amid the ugliness and death, and as our institutions cleave to the mistaken idea that our safety comes from ever more brutal applications of state power, the future of our people is being written on campuses and in the streets. Thousands of Jews of all ages are creating something better than what we inherited. Our new Jewish tradition prioritizes truth-telling and justice, and in this way it is actually the old Jewish tradition, which has given us all the tools we’re using.

Ivisited the UCLA encampment on Wednesday night last week, hours before the police closed in. The mood was anxious—large formations of officers were stationed just outside as helicopters circled noisily overhead—but there were dozens of tents packed closely together and hundreds of people hanging out or doing various jobs, including distributing snacks, ferrying supplies, fortifying the perimeter, and shining a strobe light at the cops peering down at us from the windows of Royce Hall.

Your level of comfort in such a space might have depended on your level of comfort with duct tape and no official bathrooms; with chants ringing out over a snare-drum beat; with leftist graffiti scrawled on a stately Romanesque façade. The camp required an ethos of trust and mutual care. It also required bravery, given the way that counterprotesters had kept up a stream of hateful intimidation unimpeded by the university.

As it grew over the course of its week-long occupation of the normally brochure-gracing quad, the camp included a people’s library, teach-ins, art projects, and a screening of The Battle of Algiers. There was a Passover Seder (with olives, strawberries, and watermelon added to the ritual to symbolize solidarity with Palestine and Gaza) and a Kabbalat Shabbat service, which is Shabbat’s mystical, emotional, Hebrew-heavy expression.

Aliyah, a medical administrator at [the] UCLA Medical Center who asked that I not use her last name—she is Muslim and fears harassment—told me that the Kabbalat Shabbat service was her first-ever experience of Friday-evening Shabbat. (The Shabbat downtown, where we met a week later, was her second.) “There were Muslims sitting down with Jews. There were Christians sitting down. We were just learning about it,” Aliyah recalled. “And at the same time, Muslims had their prayers.” (The daily prayers of Islam appeared alongside Jewish ritual on the agenda.) “It was beautiful.”

Many experienced a kind of mourning after the camp was destroyed. Two UCLA students I met Thursday afternoon outside the Twin Towers jail—they had driven there to support those who’d been arrested earlier that day—seemed overcome by sorrow and anger, sometimes collapsing into each other’s arms. They seemed like longtime friends, but they told me they’d barely known each other before spending the previous day building wooden fortifications in the aftermath of the pro-[Zionist] mob attack.

The cooperative spirit of the camp was “one of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen,” one of them, Isabelle, told me. “And simultaneously, there were some of the most horrific things I’ve ever seen. I think that was probably the hardest part, just the whiplash.”

In Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, Robin D.G. Kelley writes that the best social movements “do what great poetry always does: transport us to another place, compel us to relive horrors and, more importantly, enable us to imagine a new society.” Kelley is a professor of US history at UCLA and a founding member of its Faculty for Justice in Palestine chapter; he described the student encampment as a “huge success” when I spoke to him by phone after the police raid.

“I was involved in the anti-apartheid movement back in the ’80s at UCLA,” he said, “and that kind of solidarity, that kind of cocreation of community—we didn’t have it like that. These students were far more advanced.”

[…]

We said the blessing over the challah in honor of those who are starving in Gaza. We pinched off pieces of the passed loaves and sang “Ceasefire Now” as the daylight faded. It got chilly, all of a sudden, after sundown.

Quoting Katherine Aron‐Beller’s Christian Images and Their Jewish Desecrators: The History of an Allegation, 400–1700, page 143:

This fight against idolatry, which was a central issue in biblical religion, lost importance as a national concern during the period of the Second Temple.⁹ Only a few cases are described by Titus Flavius Josephus (37–100 CE), born Yoseph Ben Matitiyahu, in his works. In 5 BCE Judas, son of Saripheus, and Matthias, son of Margalothus, attempted to remove King Herod’s golden eagle, which had graced the great gate of the Temple for some time.¹⁰

Both Philo and Josephus described how, when serving as prefect or governor of Judea (26–36 CE), Pontius Pilate sent images of Caesar, known as “standards,” into the city of Jerusalem at night.¹¹

Josephus reports: “This excited a great disturbance among the Jews when it was day; for those that were near them were astonished at the sight of them, as indications that their laws were trodden under foot, for those laws do not permit any sort of image to be brought into the city.”¹²

Josephus reported how Jews gathered from all over the countryside outside Pilate’s headquarters in Caesarea, staging a passive demonstration by lying down on the ground for five days and nights.

When Pilate finally agreed to hear their complaint in the marketplace, he took precautions and surrounded the protesters with armed soldiers: “Pilate also said to them that they would be cut into pieces, unless they would admit of Caesar’s image, and gave instruction to the soldiers to draw their naked swords. Hereupon the Jews, as it were at one signal, fell down in vast numbers together, and exposed their necks bare, and cried out that they were sooner ready to be slain than that their law should be transgressed. Hereupon Pilate was greatly surprised at their prodigious superstition, and gave order that the ensigns should be presently carried out of Jerusalem.”¹³

(Emphasis added.)

cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/2436007

I don't normally like Vox.

But this was a good article, if a bit liberal.

I'm reading Levy's The Dawn of Agriculture and the Earliest States in Genesis 1-11 and thought I'd share this screenshot. Really well written and researched book. Levy cites the midrash (fn77) from:

Pirqe Rebbe Eliezer, 24. [Heb], editio princeps, Constantinople, 1514. folio 16b. Digitized Copy, Hebrew Union College, Klau Library, in the Pirqe Rabbi Eliezer Manuscript Database.

One of the symbols on the Passover Seder plate is “karpas”- a spring vegetable. (Parsley, celery, or boiled potato) which is dipped into salt water.

One explanation for “Karpas” כרפּס is the the first three letters spelled backwards are פּרך, Parekh, or harsh labor which is the term for how the Israelites were overworked in Egypt.

After reading Kapital part 1, I’ve been thinking of how capitalism necessitates Parekh: unnatural labor, labor without limit, labor without purpose, labor without regard for the humans doing it, labor that only exists to be stolen. And I fervently hope for a future where Parekh is abolished and obsolete.

Happy Passover comrades!