lavendersparkle

I'm getting rather annoyed by the insidious assumption that seems to have infiltrated most people's subconscious that frum = politically right wing. I think a large part of it is that English doesn't really have an equivalent of frum so we end up using left/right language to describe religious attitudes and practice which leads to the assumption that being theologically conservative is associated with being politically conservative.

I was reminded of this when I was bored and got Alec to take the What kind of Christian are you? test on beliefnet.com. The quiz is very silly as the majority of the questions are "Do you think [insert miraculous event] a) happened as it is described in the Bible? b) didn't happen at all and is just a symbolic story? c) happened as described in The DaVinci Code? d) some other far fetched non-miraculous explanation you've come up with (volcano/mass hallucination/it was so cold the water was frozen)? Oddly enough, Alec, who self defines as theologically conservative, gave the a) answer to most of the questions giving the quiz result that he was like Rush Limbaugh and probably read the Left Behind books (because everyone who believes the Bible is true wants to read a badly written series of novels based on bizarre interpretations of the craziest bits).

Now the quiz was deeply silly but I think it hits on a worrying common perception that anyone who thinks that the Israelites really were led through the desert by a pillar of fire or that Jesus really did miraculously walk on water must also believe that public spending is bad and gay people should be shot. This perception is beneficial to two groups of people neither of whom I particularly like. Firstly, it plays into the hands of self-righteous atheists who are deluded enough to believe that if it weren't for Big Bad Religion everyone would be a left-wing hippy who spends all day holding hands in a circle singing 'Good morning starshine'. Even more worryingly it plays into the hands of the religious right, who quite happily rest assured that the only reason people might think that tax should be more progressive or there should be less war is because they don't really believe in the Bible.

The best rebuffing of an American Conservative Christian I ever heard was a journalist asking him whether he thought Leviticus 18:22 was true and relevant today. The man answered yes and happily talked about it's importance. The journalist then asked the man, who had earlier spoken about how the right to private property ownership was a Christian value, whether Leviticus 25 was true and relevant today. Oddly enough, for some reason, in his opinion 'G@d hates fags' was still a relevant message today but 'severely constrain capitalism within a system that ensures that no individual's mistakes will affect the material welfare of him and his descendants for more than 50 years' was a historically and culturally specific instruction. It beautifully demonstrated that a politically conservative reading of the Bible is no less selective and interpretive than a politically left-wing reading of the Bible.

Anyway, I suppose the message of this is to be aware of when we are falling into the trap of accepting and perpetuating this meme rather than challenging it to promote the reality of the politically progressive potential of religious belief.

I first saw this icon months ago and ever since I got a paid account have been looking for it so that I could snitch it. Finally I have found it. I don't know who made it because I got it from someone who hadn't credited it. Anyway KITTEN!

Look at the kitten! Look at the kitten! Look at the kitten! Look at the kitten! Look at the kitten! Look at the kitten! Look at the kitten! Look at the kitten! Look at the kitten! Look at the kitten! Look at the kitten! Look at the kitten! Look at the kitten!

[Recovers composure slightly]

Anyway, the point of this post was supposed to be that yesterday I leyned Torah for the first time. I was still a bit worried on Friday morning because I still hadn't got the last two lines sorted but I went over it for about an hour on Friday afternoon and got it sorted. I wanted an early night on Friday so I went to Alec's for dinner rather than Chabad or J Soc. I also wanted to be able to go over the leyning of Shabbat morning before shul so I wore an amusing CD shabbos belt made of string.

On my way to the Friday evening service I went to watch I soc doing the sunset prayer outside of Kings as the start of Experience Islam Week. I saw a few people I knew from MoJoW, our Muslim Jewish women's dialogue group. I was struck by how much more photogenic Muslim prayer is compared to Jewish prayer.

I was very nervous on Saturday and turned up 45 minutes before the service to check what I was supposed to be doing and maybe have a peek at the Torah scroll. I didn't get to see the Torah scroll but I did go over with Shoshannah, who was leading the service, what was going to happen. Alec and chemchik can along with most of the progressives as it was student shabbat. At the point when the ark was opened Shoshannah announced that one of the students was going to read from the Torah for the first time this week and called me up to read the ten commandments like the b'nei mitsvah do. She then called me up for the first aliyah and I read the the English from the Hertz but inserted tachash skins rather than the Hertz translation of sealskins. I then fluffed the bracha for before the reading as I was nervous and had been so busy learning the leyning to think about looking over the blessings. I was fine leyning except at one point I had to pause for a few seconds to remember the tune for the next word.

I liked the way it was low key. In fact the service leader didn't mention that I had converted but in a congregation as small as Beth Shalom people tend to know and a few people asked me during kiddush when I had been to the mikvah. I felt natural to take my rightful place on the bimah of the congregation I have become a part of, with my friends watching. I was complemented on my leyning. Shoshannah asked whether I'd been using a Sephardi trope when I had been attempting British Ashkenasi trope.

Interesting addition of 'Law in Action' about the use of religious courts to augment the secular courts in the UK

It avoids the 'Argh, they'll introduce sharia law and you won't be able to go outside without a burka!' hysteria that tend to infect discussion of this and instead looks at it within the perspective that religious courts can be used as arbitrators within civil cases. I can't really see good reason for not allowing people to use a religious court for arbitration in a civil case if all parties agree to it. There's the argument that there will be communal pressure for people to use the religious courts even when it's against their best interest but I think it's a bit of an authoritarian stretch to not allow people resolve their disputes outside of the court system in a way they both agree to to protect against this. By that logic one might start declaring contracts invalid because they don't think that the original contract was in the best interest of one of the parties in the eyes of the judge.

I have lost my voice. That's not the point of this post but I thought I'd share.

Anyway, to the point of this post. latteliberal is having a birthday party in a couple of weeks. The theme of the party is 'POWER CORRUPTS: Emperors, Empresses, Concubines and Eunuchs'. Fancy dress in strongly encouraged. As a mentioned at elise's party months ago, I have a strong urge to buy a niqab and other Muslim garb as a fancy dress costume. This costume would be a good in that it would be tznius and relatively cheap to put together (particularly as I already have an arab style dress from when El Al left my clothes in London). It would also be particularly suitable for this party. On top of all this, I think a niqab would be quite a cool thing to own. However, I have a niggling feeling that wearing a niqab as fancy dress would be VERY VERY BAD AND WRONG. I'm not sure exactly why but it might have something to do with Edward Said. On the other hand, if I dressed as a nun to go to a party (or indeed Sing-Along-A-Sound-of-Music) I wouldn't feel that I was being offensive or derogatory to real nuns.

Nothing else to do than to ask for the guidance of the masses with the help of ticky boxes.

[Poll #861525]

This post and the comments on it are very funny. They're a bunch of morons*.
http://community.livejournal.com/anti_porn/532091.html

The site they're talking about is very funny, particularly the readers questions. Water of life anyone?

*The OP's icon is particularly apt.

A while ago the_alchemist's mentioned a community called naarmamo on her journal. I quite liked the idea as well so last Sunday I bought a little cheap sketch pad with at least 31 pages and some cheap watercolours in preparation.

Yesterday was the first day so I painted a watercolour of my big rainbow coloured mug. The mug had several attractions as a subject in that:
a) it is rainbow coloured so I got to use all the pretty colours in my new watercolour set
b) it gave me an opportunity to practice the art class staple of drawing a curved object
c) it as made up of bold blocks of colour so required minimal mixing of colours together.

Predictably as I have not picked up a paint brush since GCSE art* it looked like a 8-10 year old had painted it. It was fun to paint. I'm going to try to keep up with it every day (on Saturday I'll have to do it after shabbat goes out). I might do some religiousy themed stuff and maybe even make a challah cloth from some calico Alec was left over from making a pocket.

*Except to run the really soft artist brushes in art shops over my skin because it feels nice.

I thought I would write about intercessionary prayer, partly inspired by the_alchemist writing about it on her blog.

At first I disliked the idea of intercessionary prayer because it seemed to go against my understanding of G-d. It was as if people were expecting G-d to listen to their prayers and think "You know I'd never thought of that but now you mention it maybe I will do X." and this did not sit well with my idea that:
a) G-d is omniscient
b) G-d does what is for the best anyway.

Then I adopted an approach that prayer was good but only because it changed the person praying. If one prays earnestly for peace one is more likely to act in a way that will bring this about and so prayer can be justified as a method of internal transformation.

Then at our weekly Torah study group we read about the golden calf and how Moses persuaded G-d not to kill the Israelites as punishment. This is in Ki Tissa, which is Exodus 30:11 to 34:35. This passage appears to be problematic because in it G-d seems to change his mind in response to Moses' arguments. But how can G-d change his mind if G-d is constant? How can G-d be convinced by Moses' arguments when G-d knew and understood of those arguments before the world was even created? Does G-d change?

Chloe came up with a wonderful explanation of these passages. The words of Moses did not change G-d as that is impossible. The words of Moses changed Moses and the Israelites and this is why the way that G-d responded to them before and after was different whilst G-d remained the same.

This is how I have come to understand intercessionary prayer. By praying we transform ourselves and G-d's reaction to our transformed selves will be different and may allow miracles that would not otherwise have happened.

Maybe I just like this idea because it reminds me of the line from 'A Picture of Dorian Grey': "The world has changed because you are made of ivory and gold; the curves of your lips rewrite history."

Last weekend:

Friday night went to Chabad with Alec. Chatted to Pete most of the evening about many interesting things such as Freud and Sade.

Saturday went to shul which was a bat mitzvah for an old lady who was raised Othodox. Afterwards we attempted Rashi study in punts but as there were too many people for the punt we spent a lot of time trying to work out where we could moor so that some people could sit on the shore so that the punt didn't sink. We did have the amusing experience of Sarah readind out a passage on discharges and ejaculation just as a punt of South Asian muslims went past. I don't think that we improved their view of Jews. As soon as I got home I rushed to Rich's house for a barbeque followed by watching Serenity and Police Squad.

Sunday was Alec's confirmation (I nearly typed bar mitvzah). His parents came up for the service and my parents came up to visit me so we all went to lunch together at the Castle.

Monday tidied and did laundry.

This weekend:

Friday went to J soc but not to the Oneg as I was tired.

Saturday shul then Rashi. The most amusing part was Rashi's comment on the infamous 'man shall not lay with a man as he lies with a woman..' which was (according to my imperfect memory) 'Like an applicator in a bottle of cosmetics'. Oddly enough every girl in the room thought of mascara. In the evening I met lots of lovely people at ateic's wedding ceilidh. I can't remember any of their names but lots of them were on LJ so some of them might remember my LJ name and read this. I met cathedral_life for the first time and was quite amused by people having to introduce themselves and each other by their LJ names.

Today I have been tidying and doing laundry and plan to fill in forms.

This weeks J prep class was a discussion about G-d. Actually it made me feel a lot more spiritual than I have been mainly because I disagreed with all of them of them and it made me realise how passionate I felt about the topic.

Some of you may know that some of my views of G-d come across as a bit odd. I think some of my ideas of G-d are influenced a lot by certain Midrashim and parts of the Bible, especially Job, post-Shoa theology, medieval Hebrew poetry, the question of how an omnipotent G-d allows suffering to happen and my interest in BDSM.

Basically my view on G-d and suffering can be summarised thus:
Axioms: G-d is good. G-d is omnipotent. G-d is omniscient.
Observation: Bad things happen.

How do we reconcile the axioms and the observation. Well some people claim that only good stuff comes from G-d and the bad stuff comes from people/the devil/whatever. However, G-d is omnipotent so G-d could stop the bad if G-d wanted to.

Some people claim that G-d doesn't stop us doing bad stuff because of free will. For a start this isn't a very good explanation of the bad stuff which isn't anyones fault. Most bad stuff at least to some extent can be blamed on people: you should have built a tsunami early warning system, you should have had safe sex, you should have evacuated those people, you should have exercised more etc. but even then there have been times in history when genuinely no one could have averted disaster. I also object on a more subtle point. Before G-d began creation there was nothing, so all of creation, including the rules of the game, were purposely created by G-d. So even when we act in free will, because we are influence of the way creation was created on our desires, G-d made the world in the way which led to us doing what we are doing, knowing what the consequences would be. For instance, if the sky weren't blue (or grey a lot of the time but anyway) the world would be slightly different and we would act in slightly different ways. We don't know what the world would be like if the sky were pink but you can reason that it wouldn't be as good as if the sky were blue because G-d made the sky blue so that must have been the best choice of sky colour. When you take into account that there are an incomprehensible number of decisions G-d made in creation you see that free will doesn't really get G-d off the hook for suffering.

So how do I explain it? Put simply, everything is for the good in a way we are far too tiny and stupid to understand. If this is G-d's plan, and G-d is good, it must be good. We don't know how it all fits together, all we can do is trust that it does, taking into account that this life and the world we see is probably not all there is.

I like to use the analogy of a sick pet. The animal knows that its owner loves it so it can't comprehend why, at the moment that it is feeling weakest, it gets taken to the place it fears most The Vets. How could a loving owner do this to it? I just doesn't understand enough to see why.

A week or so ago, on a Live Journal community called mock_the_stupid, someone posted an entry quoting the reply of someone on a different message board to the idea of separation of church and state. This explained, using lots of expletives and spelling mistakes, that there was no reason for a separation of church and state because G-d created the church and the state and he was going to laugh when we baby aborting, heathen sodomites all burnt in hell. It would be easy to dismiss his comments as the ranting of a religious fanatic and refuse to engage with him. To be honest, looking at the tone of his post, maybe nothing could get through to him but I decided a better intellectual exercise would be to explain the reasons for a separation of church and state from within his world view. This also led me to examine for a belief in the separation of church and state within my world view.

( “Theocracy” )