Archive for the 'Judaism' Category

R2-D2 + Divinity = Win


This cute blasphemy courtesy of the awesome web comic of math, nerdom and romance xkcd.com. Hat tip to the Google Buzz feeds of David A.M. Wilensky and Drew Cohen.


Tefillah punctuation experiments: the Shma


The Torah scroll contains no punctuation marks, not even periods. There are no lower case letters. Or are there no capital letters? Ostensibly, the entire Five Books of Moses is one single sentence. A single period or comma alters the flow and intent. What are we actually saying when when we speak Judaism’s most central [...]


Mercaz Harav’s rules of just war: you can kill anyone


I’m a student of just war theories. They fascinate me. World War II and the Holocaust altered international law and consciousness on huge scales. The foundation of what is acceptable and what it not in warfare today is an attempt to prevent a World War III that would again kill countless civilians or fail to [...]


A Blogger’s “Al Chet”


(The Al Chet prayer is a litany of offenses read during the Yom Kippur services. It has become common for people to customize the prayer to express their own sins and repentance. This is mine.)
Through writing I have committed many a wrong, but unlike those whose faces I see, I will likely never know the [...]


Jew Jitsu Swag, Tradition & Jewish Fighting


The folks at ShalomShirts.com offer a shirt that I bought on the spot for very obvious and slightly narcicistic reasons: Jew Jitsu!
But there’s another reason this shirt should be worn by yours truly than my moniker: What I’m not sure ShalomShirts is even aware of is that the original image of this design is a [...]


Rise to kill them first


Oft is the anecdote that every Israeli child can recite the Talmudic instruction “If a man comes to kill you, rise to kill him first.”
Of course it’s also remarked that too few know the second part of that edict, saying that if you must kill a third person to prevent a second person from killing [...]


Circumcision


It’s when you make a tike into a kyke.
Mazel tov, Miki.


A tatoo to seduce this superjew


Allow me to use the abbreviations of my younger American compatriots: OMG. Yes, this wins my hottest tatoo of the year award also. This is the Sh’ma prayer — the six words every Jew should know. “Hear, O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is One!”


Transdenom Tales, Part One


My parents consider themselves Conservative, aspire to orthodoxy, practice closer to Reform, their favorite rabbi was a Reconstructionist, and most of their children’s upbringing was spent in places with zero institutional Jewish presence…
Which makes me a nothing, an everything, a trans- or post-denominational defiant mess.
So transport yours truly’s transdenominational mess to Jew York City, where [...]


Help my friends Jew-peddle for a healthier and more sustainable world


My favorite mezuzah-waving treehumpers are doing the Hazon Jewish Environmental Bike Ride this weekend and you can join me in supporting their cause by reading about their fun and even donating to their fundraising here:

Josh Frankel
Leah Koenig & Yoshie Fruchter
David Rendsburg
Ben Rosenthal
Tiferet Zimmern-Kahan

The ride proceeds support a great many awesome projects, such as The Jew [...]