* In a recent Torah class, the rabbi said: “I’m not saying you should do or not do. I’m just saying that you don’t exist (on one level). Everything is G-d.”
* Why do WASPs not engage in more orgies? Answer: Too many thank-you notes to write.
* Great line from The Sopranos, second season: “I swear you Jews have your own Cosa Nostra in the Ivy League.”
* I told a friend I had been rewatching The Sopranos, and he replied, “You like murder. It relaxes you.”
* When I spot someone praying meticulously in shul, I always assume that they are a professional Jew (get paid to practice Judaism, aka a rabbi) and 90% of the time, I am right.
* An Orthodox Jewish friend the other day told me, “You know Aussies. They hate everyone who isn’t Aussie.” Well, that’s largely how it goes for all strongly identifying in-groups. They tend to have negative feelings about outsiders in proportion to how strongly they identify with their own in-group.
* “Haredi writers of history claim to know better than the great rabbis of the past how the latter should have behaved. Those great rabbis do not serve as models for the present. Instead, the present and its ideology serve as models for the great rabbis. Haredi historiography becomes a tale of what observant Jews, and especially great rabbis, did, but only provided that these actions accord with, or can be made to accord with, current Haredi doctrine. The historians do not try to understand the gedolim; they stand over the gedolim. Haredi ideology of fealty to the great rabbis works at cross purposes with the sanitized history of those rabbis.”
* If Bruce Jenner could become a woman in the eyes of popular tastemakers, why can’t we become black?
* I enjoy listening to women talk about becoming more “available” to the dog, who they’ve taken to a “dog intuitive.”
* You have to go around the false god, not address or reveal it directly. When Abraham smashed the false gods (according to the midrash), he was just a kid, and yet he had to get out of town fast.
* Calling out YKVK explicitly is not advocated by Judaism, it carries a death sentence.
* The need to force our knowledge on others may be a destructive impulse. Israel Salanter’s lesson must be remembered — first fix yourself.
* I just told a young woman, “You are the most chaste girl I know!” High praise indeed.
* Here are my negative feelings about my early exposure to religion: “Overly intrusive, petty, abusive, no fun, fanatical, extreme, insane, losers, poverty, bizarre, focused on leaving this world for the next, humorless, egotistical, showing off, judging, tense.”
Here are my early positive feelings about religion: “A sense of God, holiness, distinct identity, boundaries, good people, community, education, inspiration, health, healing, purpose, a guide map to life.”
