December 2005 Archives
But the wireless is here... and juicy... and and... ugh, I'm a junkie. At least I'm only plugged in for a small amount of time after everyone else is asleep.
Anyhow, directly related to this subject is this blog entry:
Doesn't this sound all-too-familiar? How many of us suffer?
Okay, by popular demand, I've started a separate blog that I'm labelling 'Joshua's Links', which will feature all the weird and cool links on the web that I often post in my main blog content. This serves two goals -- one, it makes my main content more about my writing and observations and less about 'what kind of geek am I?', and two it allows you to see all the cool shit in one place, for those 30-minute brain reset sessions each work day. :)
check it out: Joshua's Links
I have all sorts of fun blog posts going on in my head, so many reflections on the holiday and on religion, family, mirth, tradition, etc... but you'll have to wait until after the 3rd to hear any of them. I'm disconnecting from the web from today until next Tuesday, as my family and I spend the week at the beach with absolutely no internet (unless, of course, I can steal wi-fi from the neighbors, but I'm not counting on that and I'll probably just ignore it even if I can get connectivity). I'm going to read, play games, have fun with real people and unplug for as much time as I can. I'll also probably do some writing, and that includes some off-line blog posts that I'll send to the server as soon as I get back in January. Have a great rest of your year, I'll see you in 2006!
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...damn you Trey.
Isn't amazing/annoying/ridiculous how you can have an idea for a blog post that is so pervasive in your mind that if you don't have time to write it up and do it justice, it can prevent you from blogging anything else? I'm afraid that's what happened with this one, which is over a week old in its inception, but I hope to finish it now. It's more of an essay than a blog post, and perhaps I should delegate longer articles such as this to a special 'essays' blog, but then... then I have two blogs to take care of. That's dumb. I'll just try to not let the more complicated/deep posts keep me from the shorter/more mundane info. I'll shut up now and present you with the blog post I started last weekend, and just add to it without changing any of the tenses, etc. I've done some research on the subject since then, so I have included information not only from the talk I attended, but from other sources as well. This is by no means a full exegesis of the subject, and I don't quote my sources -- if you're at all interested, I'll point you in the right direction. Mostly this is just about my exploration.
This morning our temple (it feels weird that I can even say that) had a lecture in their ongoing lecture series given by the rabbi of the temple on the historical and current views of the messiah in Judaism, and on a whim I decided to attend. Being a recovering Christian, my relationship to Judaism has been interesting in its precarious ambivalence. On the one hand, everything that I have experienced about Reform Judaism (and Jewish Renewal, a more liberal offshoot) has been a positive, with themes of living in the now instead of worrying about the hereafter, and topics of social justice and personal responsibility dominating over issues of sovereign divinity -- and yet, there is a tradition in Christianity that it is the fulfillment of scores of ancient biblical prophesy, and it is undeniable that there is messianic content all over modern Judaism. References to the messiah are prevalent in its prayers, referenced in its holiday rituals... and so, for one who is considering (and re-considering) the meaning of faith and organized religion in his own life, the issue has been one that's been a sticky one for me. Am I exploring an ancient predecessor to Christianity, or am I looking at an entirely new religion that shares nothing with Christianity other than the race of their founders.
So, I attended in hope of answering some of these questions for myself, or at least get a better idea of what I might be dealing with, since I am (with my family) on the path of a Jewish life. What I discovered both about Judaism and about myself was illuminating. Firstly, I discovered that the subject isn't a simple one, and it merits a more complete investigation for a full understanding of all the nuances. The discussion can be broken into several parts: 1) What is the Messiah (and what is it not)?, 2) What is expected of the Messiah?, and 3) What is the value of the Messiah to Judaism and Jewish thought?
As it turns out (very much in conflict with the traditional Christian teachings), there are very few references to what could be construed as the messiah in the Torah, and only a few more when you consider the whole Tanahk (the equivalent of the 'old testament', or the Hebrew Bible). It turns out that messianic thinking is post-bibical, and doesn't really take off in earnest until a hundred years or so after the death of Jesus, during what is referred to as the 'Rabbinic' period, after the destruction of the temple of Jerusalem. Obviously there were those who had ideas of a savior, and it was active in the Jewish imagination, and bolstered by some oblique references to a descendant of David rescuing the Jews and during the time of Roman oppression, otherwise the cult of Jesus wouldn't have arisen when it did. That being said, it seems that the cult of Jesus arose out of a misunderstanding in translation of the meaning of certain phrases in the Tanahk which refer to 'the son of god', which evidently is not to be taken literally, but is a mark of piety used to describe the favored of god, either marking the Jewish people, or its leaders. The attribution of divinity to Jesus is completely outside of the traditional jewish messianic tradition, which marks the messiah not as a literal son of God, but as the mortal leader of the Jews who would deliver the Jewish people from persecution, and in some traditions lead them to redemption (as in the End of Days). I have to say, this information was enlightening to someone that's been told the stories from a very young age that Jesus was the fulfillment of thousands of years of irrefutable prophecy and yearnings of the Jews. In the light of this new information of such a fundamental misunderstanding, it's now comprehensible how a people could turn their back on their savior in the way that is described in the gospel. Even if you take the report of the gospel as literally historically accurate (with or without the accounts of miracles), you must account that the Jews of Jesus' time were not looking for a literal avatar or incarnation of God in their messiah. Rather, they were looking for a mortal leader who was a descendant of the line of David, who would lead them out of oppression on the physical plane.
So, as the idea of the messiah developed over the time between the destruction of the temple and more-or-less modern times, there have been several postulations of the meaning of the messiah, and there have been multiple claims to the Messiah title by would-be saviors over that same period. Each story is interesting and unique, and each had its effects on the Jewish people, but I won't go into that here as it is unimportant to my personal exploration (though I must say each story fascinates me and I'm liable to do some more reading on the subject) -- what is interesting is that there have evolved several differing ideas of what the coming of the messiah actually means. From the first century up through the 11th or 12 century, the idea of the messiah was the arrival of an actual individual who would assume the mantle of leader for the Jewish people, and deliver them from their woes. In specific, these are the expectations of the messiah from the perspective of the traditional view, pulled from wikipedia entry on Jewish Eschatology:
The Hebrew word Mashiach (or Moshiach) means anointed one, and refers to a mortal human being. Within Judaism, the Mashiach is a human being who will be a descendant of King David continuing the Davidic line, and who will usher in a messianic era of peace and prosperity for Israel and all the nations of the world. The job description, as such, is this:
- All of the people of Israel will come back to Torah
- The people of Israel will be gathered back to the land of Israel.
- The Holy Temple in Jerusalem will be rebuilt.
- 4. Israel will live superior among the nations, and will have no need to defend herself.
- 5. War and famine will end, and an era of peace and prosperity will come upon the Earth.
Pretty basic, nice idea -- not sure I buy into it, but nowhere is there mention of being God. The second idea of the messiah comes out of the Kabbalah (Jewish Mysticism, born out of 13th century Spain), which is the idea not of an individual human who comes as the savior, but of the ushering in of a messianic age in which all the happy things about what the messiah would do would just 'happen'.
This is all a gross oversimplification, and there are many nuances around modern belief of the messiah, but what strikes me as interesting are the questions of the value of messianic thinking in modern Judaism, as that is what particularly pertains to my own experience. What's interesting to note is, at least in Reform Judaism (which I am learning more and more about every day), talk of the messiah is pretty much missing from the average person's minds and perspectives as the religion tends to focus on the social activism work of the day-to-day. The idea of the messiah remains in the background, in the prayers and in the rituals for reasons I see as more practical than spiritual. For the messiah to appear, it is postulated by the rabbis and philosophers that either the Jews will be in a really really bad place, or in a really really good place (there are details to those qualitative states, but I'll spare you and tell you that either condition is asymptotical and not really a possibility) -- so I see these possibilities as incentives towards good works and an evolutionary mechanism to hold together a group in despair through the hardest of times with the carrot of divine intervention. The Jewish faith, at base, is a method for 'the good life', meaning life here and now, not after death. The questions of the afterlife are relatively unimportant to the common practitioner. Starting to sound a bit like secular humanism? I thought so too.
In doing this exploration, all sorts of other interesting information came up for me such as the nonexistence of Hell for the Jews (beyond a pergatory-like place called 'Gehenna' which the max time you can stay there is one year, and is there to help purify the soul), the non-focus on an afterlife (this is also underdescribed in the religion in practice and in text), as well as what it means to the Jews to be 'chosen' (this is a misreading -- they are not THE chosen people, but instead are A chosen people FOR a specific purpose, not precluding other chosen peoples). I'm sure I'll be filling you all in later in future blog posts, but this one has gotten too long already. I'm finding it all very fascinating, and very comforting. This is not Christian-lite, but really an entirely different animal altogether. I am down with that.
Just a few moments ago the last of the guests left from our annual holiday party, 'Black Turkey', and I feel both exhausted and satisfied with the event. I often do not get a chance to hang out with everyone on Black Turkey (so named for the recipe used to cook one of the two traditional birds, the other being a brined and weber'd bird we affectionately called 'The Drunken Squab') because I'm slaving over the birds, and usually I'm frantic to get everything carved and out on the table to feed the guests, but this year, everything seemed to go pretty smoothly. I have to give a HUGE shout-out to Julie for everything she did today -- though I did most of the cooking and a good deal of the prep-work, she not only did an amazing amount of the decorating, but also was juggling both boys which had to be exhausting. She allowed me the freedom to fully engage in the cooking, which pretty much took all day long. Both birds pretty much went in on time, and came out perfectly and early enough that I could get them carved and out on the table for the guests well before freak-out level hit. I didn't get to hang out with a lot of folk at the party, but I did engage with a few friends and some stayed after the first wave exodus and hung out well into the evening, which was pretty rad. What was also incredibly awesome is that Julie spent a good deal of the post-party time cleaning up most of the crazy mess which was the house. I owe her big-time.
It's hard to believe we've been throwing this silly party for nine years now, and though some faces come and go, and others are constants through the history of the event, it's become something that we know how to do. We've worked out most of the kinks, and things pretty much just happen according to plan. Tomorrow we'll do a debrief and see if we can refine it a bit more, take notes and be that much more ready for next year. I fully expect we'll be throwing this party for the next thirty years, and that's just a trip to think about. It's not often that you get to create a ritual that a large portion of your friends share with you, year after year after year. It's also a trip to think my boys will grow up with this event in their life, and maybe even taking it forward into their own lives after my cooking days are over. And to think, this all was born from my surfing the alt.recipe usenet board and discovering this wacky recipe that I just had to try, and had no excuse to try without creating a spectacle party out of it. What started out as somewhat of a joke has now become firm tradition. To me, it's a pulse in the year's heartbeat, a touchstone of the season -- a winter without Black Turkey would feel incomplete. Every year, we stuff the house with more and more people, and yet we always seem to make it work. This year the invite list was over a hundred people, which freaked us out a bit, but as it turned out, due to obligations of the season by many usual attendees, we had the right amount (about 30-35 people) and were saved the embarrassment of having overbooked our event. We joke that someday we might have to rent the community center just to accommodate the crowd -- which we certainly could and would do if necessary, but there is something about having everyone in our house which is special and comforting. The only other party every year that has this same sort of import to me is my birthday party in August, which for the first time in years I did not have here at the house but had out at a club (put together by my good friend Jason) which was fantastic, but it definitely reminded me how much I like to have a large crowd in my house, sharing my space, talking and living and loving where I do my own talking and living and loving.
I think a part of me really like to think of myself as some sort of tribal leader, bringing together the disparate members of my circles of friends, but at base I'm just happy they're all willing to share the time with me and enjoy what they give me the opportunity to create. There's a moment at every one of my parties where I look around the house, and see so many different conversations happening, so many people enjoying themselves, chatting with others, and though I'm not a central part of their evening, I helped make it all happen in some small way. They'll go home and think "I had a really great time tonight hanging out with so-and-so" or "I really enjoyed that conversation with such-and-such", and I have a small participation in that. My house is warmed by their presence both figuratively and literally, and I am left to enjoy the glow after they all pack up and head their way home... as I am doing just even now. Thank you, everyone, for attending. I really mean that. Without you, I wouldn't get to enjoy this group ritual. As much as I help create it for you, you help create it for me. It is indeed a group effort. I'm glad you all like it as much as I do.
Happy Black Turkey!
PS: the title of this blog message comes, of course, from my son Eli who was discussing 'Turkey Lasers' with us today, out of confusion around how to pronounce 'turkey lacers', much the same way he used to call lightsabers 'light savers'. My boys are so wonderful, I love them with the complete depth of my heart. They entertain me every single day of my life.
Currently playing in iTunes: Goodnight Lovers by Depeche Mode
(t d)(explicit language)
This is F*cking funny, if you can get into the absurd...
http://occultdesign.blogspot.com/2005/12/30-chuck-norris-facts.html
...but personally, I don't get it.
take the WHAT INTENTIONAL TORT ARE YOU test.
and go to mewing.net. because law school made laura do this.
