Interesting Links for 15-04-2022

[andrewducker]

1. Important things to understand about the Christian festival of Easter

(tags:Easter Christianity Jews satire funny )

2. The UK isn't moving asylum seeker processing to Rwanda, it's dumping refugees there.

(tags:UK Rwanda OhForFucksSake asylum refugee )

3. 12 best ways to get cars out of cities - ranked by new research

(tags:cars transport viaDanielDWilliam )

Comments

[bens_dad]

2. Why can't we process asylum seekers (and economic migrants) in our embassies and consulates - I have heard that we are the only country that does not do this ? If word got out that we did this, far fewer would risk their lives attempting to get here, which appears to be the justification in today's papers.

The minister-with-the-short-straw on Radio 4 yesterday seemed determined to lump asylum seekers, refugees and economic migrants together ...

[andrewducker]

Because the Tories are awful human beings.

[calimac]

1. It's not a satire, nor even funny, except insofar as it assumes that the observant Jewish reader is not so steeped in the default-Christian culture that pervades our society so as not to know already about Easter. It does touch on some of the minor ways in which Christian observance seems very strange to Jews (even non-observant ones such as myself).

At this point, also, I am willing to give mighty credit points to anyone who writes out their tweetstorm before beginning to post it and is thus able to say accurately from the beginning how many tweets the storm will consist of. That doesn't seem to happen very often any more.

[andrewducker]

I've been assuming there are tools out there to help with that kind of thing, although I might be wrong.

And yes, I assumed it was satirising the "And this is what Passover is like" articles you get for Christians. And played it pretty straight. Although I'm not culturally Jewish enough to tell how straight they're playing it.

[wildeabandon]

One thing I thought was quite odd is that whereas the terrible "This is what Passover is like" articles have a tendency to present Passover as "the Jewish Easter", which is both offensive and backwards, this thread didn't present Easter as a Christianized version of Passover (which, to some extent, it is).

[calimac]

Historically, that's true, but from a Jewish perspective, the way that went down is that Christians have appropriated our scripture and our religion and then transformed them into something theologically unrecognizably different, while claiming that this is the fulfillment of what our religion is for. So we'd rather take the perspective that they have nothing to do with each other.

It's kind of like Tolkien purists considering the Jackson movies.

[wildeabandon]

I can appreciate that to some extent. Supercessionism is a stain on the church, and certainly over the years there are many things that we can be said to have appropriated from Judaism. (I will rant at length about Maundy Thursday seders or covers of Hallelujah with resurrection motifs.)

But I don't think that can apply to the scriptures because the earliest Christians were Jewish, and had none of the social and political dominance that developed after Constantine's conversion. There has of course been significant theological and cultic divergence in both Christianity and rabbinic Judaism from Second Temple Judaism, which itself was a)hardly monolithic, and b)a significant shift from pre-exilic Israelite religion. (Although identifying which parts of the Tanakh, especially the Torah, are pre- vs post- exilic is obviously still very much an open question.)

[andrewducker]

I think we can all agree that this kind of thing is bad, at least
https://twitter.com/Michal_Rose/status/1514643740966547458

[calimac]

In my religious school years we went through a fit of ecumenism and attended several Christian religious services as guests. If you've gotten the impression that 1970s liberal worship consisted of everybody sitting in a circle and singing "kum-ba-yah", you would not be entirely mistaken.

Anyway, there were one communion service at which the ministers went down the aisle handing out the wafers. They were given to us, which they should not have been, and we were amused to discover that they were bits of matzo.

[calimac]

Oh, it applies to the scriptures, all right. The earliest Christians being Jewish only explains why they hooked on to them. The important part is that they then ceased being Jewish and became a new religion, and part of what made them so was the identification of Jesus with the Messiah. Whatever the Christ (as a concept) is, it is not the same thing as the Jewish Messiah, but an entirely new dispensation. The Christians can do that if they want, but by doing so they are appropriating somebody else's scriptures and using it for their own purposes.

I hope I would be misreading you if I thought you implied that, rabbinic Judaism and Christianity both being different from earlier forms of Judaism, they have equal claims to be considered legitimate straight-line descendants of it. I really hope that would be misreading you.

[wildeabandon]

They certainly didn't consider themselves as ceasing to be Jewish. Sure, they were in conflict with both the religious authorities at the time, but so were the Essenes, the Zealots, and the Sadducees; so were the Hasmoneans before they became the religious authorities, and we don't suggest that any of those groups stopped being Jewish. At some point Christianity as a whole, by accepting gentiles who hadn't converted, became a new religion rather than a Jewish sect, but that isn't the same thing as the Jewish Christians apostatizing. They were in a liminal space.

The concept of Christ that we have today is, I agree, not exactly the same as any of the various concepts of Jewish Messiah that were current in say 3rdC BCE-1stC CE, but the concept(s) set out in the Pauline and Johannine corpuses and the letter to the Hebrews are responding the events surrounding the death of Jesus of Nazareth from within a fundamentally Jewish perspective. The G-d denoted by the tetragram is a G-d who acts in history and makes things new, and when that happens our understanding of the scriptures changes and they get reinterpreted. Jeremiah re-interprets Amos and proto-Isaiah and his own earlier writings when King Josiah is killed. Ezekiel reinterprets Jeremiah as he experiences life in exile. Ezra and Nehemiah and the Chronicler reinterpret pretty much everything that comes before in the light of Cyrus's decree. We can of course disagree about both the veracity of the historical events that are being interpreted, and the interpretations being made, but that doesn't mean that the other perspective is illegitimate, merely mistaken.

I'm certainly not saying that rabbinic Judaism and Christianity are equally closely descended from Second Temple Judaism. As you might expect, my knowledge of the development of Jewish thought is a lot more extensive up to about 30CE than later, but my impression is that the shift that happened within Judaism after 70CE whilst significant was not as radical a change as the development of Christianity, but it's not obvious to me that a radical change is inherently delegitimising. I suspect that the change from pre-exilic Israelite religion to post-exilic Judaism was on a similar order of magnitude to the introduction of Christianity, but as there are no extant followers of that religion, the question of appropriation seems less relevant.

[calimac]

What you're saying is so slippery I can't figure out how to relate it to what I'm saying. I mean, I said that the earliest Christians considered themselves to be Jewish, so why are you arguing that they were Jewish? I said that they then ceased to be Jewish, so why are you arguing that Christianity became a new religion? That's what I was saying. That the concept of the Christ derived from the Jewish Messiah is true enough, but that doesn't mean it was the Jewish Messiah. And now you seem to be saying that Christianity and rabbinic Judaism are equally significant changes from earlier Judaism (even if "not as radical" a change) either because 1) you don't know enough to say otherwise, or 2) there aren't any followers of earlier Judaism still around to complain about it. (Actually, that last is not true: there are still followers of pre-rabbinic Judaism around.)

I either can't say anything in response to this, or what I would say would be so angry and abusive that our host would disapprove. And I don't have time for that anyway.

[wildeabandon]

Let me start by apologising for the lack of clarity and for offending you.

I would like to answer your questions in the hope that if I can manage to express myself more clearly then you might find my position more understandable. But I am conscious that this is a fraught subject and don't want to risk compounding my offense if you'd rather just let the subject drop.

[calimac]

No, I think it's better to drop it. I don't have the mental stamina to pursue this very far, and I fear that you're starting from premises I can't accept, the one I've alluded to twice now being the big one. Thanks for being considerate.

[wildeabandon]

Understood, and thank you for being gracious in the face of my clumsiness.

[andrewducker]

Can I just say that I appreciate how this conversation was handled.

[calimac]

You mean a tool that goes back and modifies your earlier tweets to provide an accurate number of the ones in the series? That'd be pretty cool.

[andrewducker]

I more meant one that allows you to write the whole set as one piece, divides it up for you, let's you edit the divisions, and then numbers it.

[calimac]

OK, but then you're still writing the whole thing before you post any of it, which is what I initially specified. People who mark their tweets "1/?" or who change the denominator as they go along, suggesting that they've thought of more they want to say while they're posting, are evidently not planning ahead in any way.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, people writing directly on Twitter are going to end up like that, with it being rather a mess. More common than not in my experience.

[andrewducker]

Twitter have stayed away from edit functionality so far.

[channelpenguin]

Unless the Twitter API has changed / been crippled since I last automated things, that would be trivial to write...

Plus there's oodles of marketing xposting/scheduling tools - surely several of them can do this?

[andrewducker]

The edit functionality would be easy to write?

Or did you reply to the wrong comment?

[channelpenguin]

Sorry if it wasn't clear - what I meant would be easy is a tool where you could write the whole thing and it would then get split up and posted as seperate tweets with the correct n/x numbering.

I think Twitter does not and most likely will never allow retrospective editing for reasons both technical and intentional. (I'm sure you can imagine the whys of both)

[andrewducker]

Yeah. The closest I can see them getting is some kind of thing where you delete and repost and they ask everyone if they want to transfer their likes, retweets, and comments to the new tweet.

And that also seems like a faff!

[calimac]

does that explain "covfefe"?

[andrewducker]

It certainly explains it *staying* that way and not being changed later!

[adrian_turtle]

It is a satire. Obviously, not everyone will find it funny. I didn't find it nearly as funny as their series of tweets about Yom St Patrick Ha-Kodesh. ("Ha-Kodosh" means literally "the holy.") They explained that the holiday moves around the calendar and this year it fell on the 14th of Adar. Sure, some Jews are sufficiently isolated from Christian culture to be oblivious to St. Patrick's Day. But NOBODY could fail to notice when it was March 17, and jwhia assumes their readers are unfamiliar with the month of "March" and need a special calendar website to look it up.

The jwhia tweets are coming from an alternate universe where Judaism is taken for granted as much as Christianity is taken for granted here. Where "secular" means not davening, rather than not going to church. Some of the posts are notionally from the principal of a public school, letters to parents about the Purim Carnival (no religious costumes, please.) Other series of posts are notionally written to teachers, about the need to be understanding if one kid needs to miss class for a Christian holiday. It's hard to keep track of when they are, especially with different Christian groups having different practices and celebrating on different dates.

They try to be careful not to mock anyone's theology, and there is a separate account jewwhoknowsitall where they explain the context and jargon. Last month I was really surprised I could understand the tweet about Christian shuls that daven according to nusach Irelandi having a minhag about parading in the street after shacharit on Yom St Patrick Ha-Kodesh, so some Christian children may be late for school. There are a LOT of specialized Jewish terms in that sentence. Not everyone is going to enjoy this kind of elaborate satire.

[calimac]

I said "except insofar as ..." and you're elaborating on the exception. Yeah, OK, thanks.

[zz]

the religious history discussion is reminding me of when lucas made the star wars "expanded universe" of dozens of books i'd read non-canon, and started again with the sequel trilogy.

[andrewducker]

I understand that didn't go down very well with many fans!