Rev. Strangelove?

Table Talk from the desk of Rabbi Alexander Seinfeld

March 31, 2023 • 9 Nissan 5783 • Parshas Tzav (Lev 6-8)

The purpose of this blog is to challenge assumptions at the Shabbat table. Please share.

How much time until Pesach? Check our Pesach countdown clock. 

Try asking this one at your Shabbat table:

What do you think of the idea of Christians having a Seder? I don't mean Christians attending our Seder; I mean Christians holding their own Seder in their own homes or churches?

Sound far-fetched?

It's more common than you might think. 

And it has some Jews steaming mad.

One person writes:

Doing it “because Jesus did it” isn’t a good excuse. It’s supercessionist and appropriative. Also it’s not done now how Jesus potentially would have, and ignores the oppression Jews have faced from Christians specifically around Pesach.

Another:

They hate us, they want to be us. It never ends.

 

And another:

The whole concept of messianic Judaism and the appropriation of signifiers of Jewishness but evangelical Protestants would be so funny if it weren’t so insidious. It’s so tempting to just laugh off some Texan going around talking about “Yeshua HaMoschiach” or some nonsense but these people take up the aesthetics of Judaism — in what amounts to mockery of us — to do real harm to our people in several ways.

And:

Any Christian who has a Seder, including those who do it without knowing better, are participating in antisemitism
 
For your table: Why do some Jews take offense when Christians hold a Seder? Is their righteous indignation right? 

(FYI, some Christians (such as Catholics and Church of Englanders) oppose this trend on theological grounds.)

Shabbat Shalom

and wishing you a

Happy, healthy and holy Pesach!


PS - Are you running a Seder this year and looking for ideas on how to raise the bar? Reply to this email, I'll send you this year's JSLI Seder Kit.

PPS - Both today and in last week's email, the image above links to some new Seder ideas for you...


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The mission of Jewish Spiritual Literacy, Inc. (JSLI) is to foster a paradigm-shift in spiritual and moral education in general, including but not limited to Jewish education, towards an experiential pedagogy that transforms students with its spiritual vision and relevance to their daily lives.

 

We envision a future when every human being can access and enjoy the incredible database of 3,000 years of Jewish wisdom.
 

If you'd like to join a special Torah Health and Fitness mailing list for updates on the forthcoming book, podcasts and other events, please visit the Torah Health and Fitness landing page.

How Many Callings Do You Have?

Table Talk from the desk of Rabbi Alexander Seinfeld
March 24, 2023 • 2 Nissan 5783 • Parshas Vayikra (Lev 1-5)
The purpose of this email is to create a call of duty at the Shabbat table. Please share.

 

Let's hit the ground running this week.... First question for your table: Do you have a calling?

(Based on last week's architecture theme, I suppose we could ask you if your calling is curved or straight....)

In the Torah, Moshe (Moses) is called three times:

1. At the Burning Bush - call to duty to lead the Jewish People.
2. At Mount Sinai - call to come up the mountain and receive the Torah.
3. At the Tabernacle - call to initiate the sacrificial service.

In certain ways, Moshe is our greatest role model.

            Each person is fit to be as righteous as Moshe, our teacher.
                                                                                   – Rambam, Hil. Teshuva 5:2

We're meant to compare our path to his, and to strive to follow in his footsteps. 

Perhaps like Moshe we each have three callings that we should be mindful of:

1. What's your calling vis-a-vis others (including family, city, society, globe)? How can you uniquely impact them?

2. What's your calling in the pursuit of Wisdom? Between your ears you have the most complex thing in the universe, vastly more powerful than the most powerful computers. What's your potential to develop it? You have a beautiful mind - are you deliberately learning something every day?

3. What's your calling vis-a-vis spirituality/prayer/meditation - are you exercising that muscle? How much could you achieve in a lifetime if you took a baby step every day?

Question for your table: Did I miss anything? Or do these three callings encompass every call worth answering?

Shabbat Shalom


Enjoyed this Table Talk? Vote with your fingers! Like it, tweet it, forward it....  

The mission of Jewish Spiritual Literacy, Inc. (JSLI) is to foster a paradigm-shift in spiritual and moral education in general, including but not limited to Jewish education, towards an experiential pedagogy that transforms students with its spiritual vision and relevance to their daily lives.

 

We envision a future when every human being can access and enjoy the incredible database of 3,000 years of Jewish wisdom.
 

See our Pesach countdown clock at the JSLI homepage....
If you'd like to join a special Torah Health and Fitness mailing list for updates on the forthcoming book, podcasts and other events, please visit the Torah Health and Fitness landing page.

Are You Straight?

Table Talk from the desk of Rabbi Alexander Seinfeld

March 17, 2023 • 25 Adar 5783 • Parshas Vayakeil (Ex 35-end)

The purpose of this email is to straighten things out at the Shabbat table. Please share.

First question for your table: Do you like to have your furniture arranged parallel to the walls or rather askew? Why is that?

Last week's solar system theme reminded me of this perhaps somewhat cliché observation:

If you think about it, you might notice that nature tends towards curves while we humans seem to prefer straight lines? Why is that?

Why do so few people live in yurts or Hobbit homes?

Not just our homes - the objects we build tend toward straight lines. When you walk through an art museum, 99 percent of the paintings are rectangular. Our phones - even with rounded edges, are rectangular. Even though an ergonomic keyboard is healthier and more sensible, you never see a computer sold with one.

Actually, there are surely scientific explanations why natural things tend toward roundness and manufactured things tend toward straightness. But that's not really the point. The point is that they do. 

This bias is so burned into our subconscious that when we see something not perfectly straight it often causes us to wince - it just doesn't look right. It can be unsettling.

By the way, this distinction can be found in the different approach of Judaism v. Hellenism when building a temple. In a Hellenistic temple - such as the Parthenon - the foundation is built with curves in order to conform to the shape of the earth on which it stands. (If fact, these curves are considered fundamental to its ingenuity.)

In our Temple, the foundation is perfectly level and the walls are perfectly straight.

Thus we have an interesting question for your table: What does that distinction imply about the values or goals of Judaism v. Hellenism?
 

Shabbat Shalom


Enjoyed this Table Talk? Vote with your fingers! Like it, tweet it, forward it....

The mission of Jewish Spiritual Literacy, Inc. (JSLI) is to foster a paradigm-shift in spiritual and moral education in general, including but not limited to Jewish education, towards an experiential pedagogy that transforms students with its spiritual vision and relevance to their daily lives.

We envision a future when every human being can access and enjoy the incredible database of 3,000 years of Jewish wisdom.

See our Pesach countdown clock at the JSLI homepage.... If you'd like to join a special Torah Health and Fitness mailing list for updates on the forthcoming book, podcasts and other events, please visit the Torah Health and Fitness landing page.

Scale Balance?

Table Talk from the desk of Rabbi Alexander Seinfeld
March 10, 2023 •  18 Adar 5783 • Parshas Ki Sisa (Ex 30-35)
The purpose of this email is to create some balance at the Shabbat table. Please share.
Happy Birthday shout-out to Brandon W - somewhere in Maryland....
In memory of my friend and colleague Rabbi David Geffen z'l who passed away suddenly this week.

A new scientific discovery was announced this week. I'll share it below. But let's get there via a question for the table:

Do you consider Planet Earth to be big or small? That is, how do you relate to it?

Personally, with news and cameras all over the world, I tend to think of it as pretty small. I can picture it in my mind. I own a globe that gives me the feeling of holding the whole world in my hands. 

Moreover, when we look into space, the Earth looks even smaller. 

Ask: How many Earths would fit inside Jupiter?

Answer: 1,000.

How many Earths would fit inside the Sun?

Answer: 1,000,000.

How many suns are in our galaxy?

Answer: 500,000,000,000.

Are they packed together or separated by vast regions of empty space?

Answer: that was a rhetorical question.

OK, we're getting beyond imagination now. So let's bring it back to a scale we can comprehend. 

Ask: If we made a scale model of our Solar System, with a basketball for the sun, how far away should we place our Earth and how far away should we place our Jupiter?

Answer: Earth would be the size of a pumpkin seed, about a foot away, and Jupiter maybe a ping pong ball about five feet away. And Saturn and the other gas giants would be many times farther than that.

Jupiter is so far away that when you see it, you're looking a light from the sun that bounced off it forty minutes ago.

OK, that's the review for this week's science lesson. 

University of California Riverside astrophysicist Stephen Kane ran computer simulations of an hypothetical planet in that vast gap between Mars and Jupiter with a range of different masses, and then observed the effects on the orbits of all other planets.

We knew that Jupiter is so massively massive that despite its distance its gravitational influence keeps the whole Solar System in balance. What we didn't know is how delicate that balance is.

An additional planet in that gap could - depending on its size - either destabilize Earth's orbit (and that of Mercury, Venus, and even Uranus and Neptune), ejecting it from the Solar System, or change the shape of our orbit, making it less habitable if not inhabitable.

Question for your table: How does this info impact you and me?

Two thoughts:

1. In all of the other solar systems that have been discovered, the possibility of life may be much lower than many people have believed.

2. We should appreciate our own perfect Solar System even more. In Kane's words, "Our solar system is more finely tuned than I appreciated before. It all works like intricate clock gears. Throw more gears into the mix and it all breaks."

Shabbat Shalom

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Who Is Like You?

Table Talk from the desk of Rabbi Alexander Seinfeld

March 3, 2023 •  11 Adar 5783 • Parshat Titzaveh/Zachor (Ex 27-29)
The purpose of this blog is to mix things up at the Shabbat table. Please share.
NEWS FLASH - The Torah Health and Fitness book went to the publisher this week... stay tuned...

 

Did anyone have more success than I last week with the AI Rebbe? 

In response, someone told me that the standard chatGPT could be used to craft a credible (i.e., cliché) bar mitzvah speech. I tried it: "Write a 1,000-word father's bar mitzvah speech." Indeed!

Speaking of futuristic technology, in this week's news, the BBC ran an off-beat story about a retired physicist whose career was inspired by the desire to figure out time-travel in order to save his dear father who died in 1955.

That's an interesting story in its own right. But the reason I'm bringing it to your attention is because of a minor Jewish detail of the article:
 

One day, as Mallett and his brothers were walking around their new neighbourhood to meet friends, they saw four white boys playing nearby and approached them to say hello. When they got closer, one of the kids spat the N-word at them. No one had ever called Mallett that before. Something in him snapped and he punched the boy until he apologised. “I was in the dark already. And that just added to that, I think. I was becoming unravelled because I was in a very deep depression after he died,” says Mallett.

Mallett never had cause to contemplate his race in the Bronx. “The neighbourhood that we lived in was predominantly a white Jewish neighbourhood. And I’d never experienced any feeling of prejudice. I was actually the only African American in the predominantly white Jewish Boy Scout troop, and I felt I was not treated any differently from any of the others,” he says.

Question for your table - Mark Twain said it, Winston Churchill said it, Louis Armstrong said it, but what do you say - does the above anecdote reflect something special about Jewish people?


Shabbat Shalom and

¡ɯᴉɹnԀ ʎddɐɥ ∀


Enjoyed this Table Talk? Vote with your fingers! Like it, tweet it, forward it....  

The mission of Jewish Spiritual Literacy, Inc. (JSLI) is to foster a paradigm-shift in spiritual and moral education in general, including but not limited to Jewish education, towards an experiential pedagogy that transforms students with its spiritual vision and relevance to their daily lives.

 

We envision a future when every human being can access and enjoy the incredible database of 3,000 years of Jewish wisdom.