Meli (jewish aspect) @Mxmatched@masto.jews.international

לֹא עָלֶיךָ הַמְּלָאכָה לִגְמֹר, וְלֹא אַתָּה בֶן חוֹרִין

oh jeez I didn't copypaste the whole
thing right. Let's try this again

לֹא עָלֶיךָ הַמְּלָאכָה לִגְמֹר, וְלֹא אַתָּה בֶן חוֹרִין לִבָּטֵל מִמֶּנָּה

לֹא עָלֶיךָ הַמְּלָאכָה לִגְמֹר, וְלֹא אַתָּה בֶן חוֹרִין

i bought this album and so should you https://brivele.bandcamp.com/releases (free to listen though). Yiddish-y mashup-y folk-y stuff from a few people i like.

I've been the sick one responsible for that fear. I've been a community member watching the effects when someone else's illness or injury breeds resentment and social discontent. I don't know how to fix this or heal it, or prevent it. But. I'm gonna move on in the essay because i want to NOT focus on this part right now.

I'm, uh, not in the right place to delve into the side-ramble about the ill spouse and the healthy spouse. I don't know how to deal with that. It's a truth that exists in the world but not the only truth; not everyone starts out healthy; the One Healthy and the One Sick is likewise not always the case.

But also, he recognizes the primal fear of illness and death, and the resentment it builds in relationships and in communities. Which I have also seen.

I'm also thinking about how community-as-autonomous-living-entity is SO DIFFERENT from corporate personhood! but that's a whole-ass essay on its own probably.

"Was the human charisma, the imago dei*, bestowed upon solitary, lonely man or upon man within a social frame of reference? In retreat or in togetherness--where does man find his true self?"

*this is the btzelem elokim i've been talking about in my other thread here. i like it better in hebrew vs latin.

And also why I've been musing about disability and gender so much in that context--they're both at that nexus of individual and social definitions.

If we expand "it is not good that man should be alone" to communities, and we de-heteromonogamy-ify it (..queer it, self, there is a whole field that does this)

if we build families, not couples where He is the Person and she is the helpmeet, or at least not ONLY those families

--then we can have Queer Community, built from families of choice and various relationship structures and deep, abiding friendships. We can, each of us, support and be supported.

Oh! and if you were wondering, here is a pdf of the soloveitchik essay http://traditionarchive.org/news/originals/Volume%2017/No.%202/The%20Community.pdf

What can we do for each other?

What must we do for each other?

Helper/needy is a dichotomy that is pervasive, and it is false.

how. do. we. build. communities.

I read both that essay and this thread (cw: trans suicide) https://twitter.com/shadow/status/1005556436204707847 yesterday and they resonate together, for me, and I am having trouble putting words to how.

Also a friend lent me a book of Soloveitchik essays/sermons yesterday and I'm ruminating on the one on community. It has some Truths in it, or at least pieces that ring true, especially while trying to build and reinforce community structures and supports between and among vulnerable (or, as he puts it, sensitive) people.

but, you know, same question:

is the body being an image/reflection/similarity to G-d about the way we're born, the way we develop naturally, or about the way we inhabit our meat suits, customizing them appropriately to live our own individual truths?

Why is it interpreted as keeping as close as possible to an at-birth natural purity rather than building a path to fully and truly living in harmony with our individual bodies?

I also keep thinking about this from a disability perspective, and a chronic pain perspective. Some of my bodily irregularities I want gone, and some I don't. Some I want changed but wouldn't give up.

Oh heck, my feels. “Naamah was the ancestor of all those who create beautiful things. With wool from the flocks of Jabal, Naamah and her beloved Nogah the daughter of Inanna, spun fiber and wove it into fabric. They made garments and carrying pouches, they made hangings and carpets. They mixed berries, leaves, stems, roots, and ground stones to make dyes. With their dyes they colored the fibers they had spun and wove them into beautiful patterns.”

I’m reading a book by a gay cis Jewish man about and inspired by Jewish texts and I feel seen and not seen simultaneously. This is and isn’t my experience, both; it’s closer and farther at the same time, but different enough from most of what’s out there that I’m transfixed in wonder and fascinated.

Other people have said similar things before, which I know because I’ve read them and drawn inspiration and self-fulfillment from them. Today I feel weird and good and bad about my body all at once, because disability and society and gender, and also that I should be kind to my body and to myself because btzelem elohim.

Davening was good today. I like shacharit. I don’t really believe in G-d so much but i still gain so much comfort from going through the service even (especially?) by myself where nobody can hear but the neighbor birds yelling in the trees. Maybe balcony davening will be a new weekend ritual for me.

We were each of us made in G-d’s image, betzelem elokim. As transition brings our inner and outer selves closer together, as we feel closer to at peace in our bodies, we better approximate G-d’s image.

I don't usually pray much but I find myself missing it today. Unfortunately the shul I go to doesn't have shabbat morning services every week, so I'm going to daven shacharit (the parts you can do without a minyan anyhow) on the balcony with the birds.