Earning Heaven

“Judaism is about relationships,” sayeth the narrative. “It’s about aligning yourself with truth. It’s about becoming more like God, so that you can connect with God (how that doesn’t work is the subject of a separate article).”

Furthermore, “Only dim witted people, like women and children (a pretty direct paraphrase from Maimonides), follow the Torah for the sake of reward.”

Oh really?

Then what is the reason behind the obsession with consequences that permeates every level of Jewish thought, from the Bible to Halacha to Mussar to Prayer?

Some choice nuggets:

• The Torah spends almost TWO entire Parshas going into excruciating (literally) detail about the rewards and punishments – but mostly punishments – that happen if you don’t follow the Torah. It then spends a significant part of Prophets proving the point that when the Jews listened to God, their neighboring enemies stopped fucking with them.
• My current favorite retarded law: if you forget to pray one of the daily prayers, you can make up for it by praying the following prayer TWICE. If the laws are about relationships, how in the hell does that work? You think you can miss a date with your partner and just make next week’s date twice as long to make up for it?
• “To help you avoid sin,” recommend some prominent thinkers in Mussar movement, “might we suggest imagining intensely the types of punishment that will befall you if you transgress a law?” Like, how about having your soul catapulted from one end of the earth to the other by Angels of Terror™? Or if you ever burn yourself, just remind yourself that hell will burn so much more.
• To really get behind the spirit of the uplifting High Holidays, the focal point for many people is the prayer during which you’re reminded that this is the time when God decides who wins another year at life, and who gets to die: by earthquake, by starvation, by plague, by suffocation; remember the Almighty has an almighty amount of ways He could benevolently smote you.

—

“Aha,” says Kiruv Rabbi you. “Thus is the nature of reality. Stray from God, you get further away from His light, and naturally bad shit will befall you. It’s not reward and punishment. It’s the natural order of things when you stray from under God’s protective shadow.”

To which I reply with two things:

Are you ready to empirically prove it? Because they’ve done studies and people who were prayed for were LESS likely to recover. It seems, if you look around, that bad things happen to good people just as often as good things happen to bad people.

More personally, I once tried proving, (while I was still religious and wanted the results to support the premise) that there were more Terrorist attacks in Israel during Bein Hazmanim when there was less protective Torah learning going on. I could find no correlation.

Because if you can’t prove it, I may just accuse you of using the universe’s chaotic ways to manipulate people to act and believe as you want. Pretty shitty of you, no?

Here’s a gem of an email I just found online, written by a principal to his post-high school seminary in Israel for 19 year old women:

“When most girls were wearing skirts above their knees you made a kinnus (assembly) to teach the world that it’s assur. While the kdoshim (“martyrs”, referring to three Israeli boys who were kidnapped and killed) were missing, I kept asking myself, where is my army? We saved Gilad (Shalit, a kidnapped Israeli soldier, through their spiritual actions), we can save them as well. I have no doubt my army was doing their part. This time, Hashem said no… I have a sinking feeling we’re going to bring Mashiach (Messiah). Sources tell us that before Mashiach there will be a big nisayon that will be very hard to pass. Those who do will merit Mashiach. Those who don’t… (trails off ominously)”

So many threats and massive assumptions, so much guilt and manipulation, in just on excerpt.

More importantly though. Even if bad things and good things, heaven and hell, do occur to people as a byproduct of this whole relationship with God thing, shouldn’t that be the focus? Do I really need to read between the lines, wait until Luzzato’s books 200 years ago, piece together a narrative, where it’s all about relationship?

At face value, Judaism is yet another dogma that controls the masses, except it comes with relationship-dipped carrots, not just sticks.

Quotes

This being a synagogue bathroom, I suppose it makes sense that one would flush religiously.

Genesis and The Big Bang – Extra NSFW

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. And water. And light. And trees. And all the other stars and the moon and the sun too. Yes, in that order, motherfuckers, it says so right there in the book. And the fishes. And the animals. And the dinosaur bones in the ground that would one day fuck with those idiot scientists, lol.

And God told all the animals “be fruitful and multiply, and keep on fucking like your very existence depends on it. Because surprise, fuckers, it does.” The animals did just that, and the Lord saw that it was gooood, if ya know what I mean. And the animals thought it was a pretty swell arrangement too.

But in his haste to complete the entire world in just six days, God had made everyone a fuck buddy except for Adam. (God is a real overachiever. No one would have complained if it had taken him a month.) He’d forgotten to make a Lady Lover for the Most Important Part of Creation ™, the Reason For All of Existence®.

He sort of wandered The Garden of Eden aimlessly, dick in hand — both metaphorically and physically.

Adam wasn’t very vocal about his issue, he took a more passive aggressive stance. But his confusion was apparent. He sort of wandered The Garden of Eden aimlessly, dick in hand — both metaphorically and physically.

By the time God remembered to check on Adam, it was late afternoon, and He was flooded with the panic of a parent who remembers it’s been too quiet for too long and his child has probably decided to make breakfast for himself using chocolate syrup, an entire stick of butter, and the microwave on high for 15 minutes.

He rushed over to Adam’s corner of the Garden, and founded him forlornly nerking his throbber at the sight of a water buffalo humping his buffalo gal with the focus and determination water buffalo are famous for.

“Stop it! Stop it! You can’t masturbate to other animals humping! That’s just inappropriate! Also, what’s that near the Tree of life, the Tree of Knowledge, the Euphrates estuary, in Gabriel’s pool of ponderation, and on that footpath? Dude, people are walking there!

“How many times today have you done it already? You’ve been alive for all of what… (God glances at Milky Way, which was now a few light years further away from Andromeda) four hours? You’re seriously like a teenager. I thought I’d skip all that shit with you when I formed you as an adult In My Own Image.”

Adam proceeded to throw a fit that further indicated he definitely hadn’t passed puberty by, nor the terrible twos for that matter. The terms “not fair”, “I hate you”, and “you’re the worst Creator in the Entire Universe” were definitely used.

15 minutes later, God had had enough. “GET UP! Get up off the ground, stop flailing around like one-legged dodo, and dust yourself off. It is definitely time for you to take a nap!” At which point God used his Heavenly Unfair Advantage and cast Adam into a deep sleep, which would normally have taken a human parent at least two hours of begging, cajoling, bouncing around like an idiot, frantic rocking, and insomnia.

During that nap, God took one of his Adam’s ribs, and, being a pretty handy fellow, crafted it into an entire motherfucking lady. A pretty impressive feat, especially considering that once He was done endowing her, she had more fat in certain strategic parts than Adam had on his entire chiseled body.

An entire motherfucking lady (illustration)

Adam awoke from his nap to the best surprise he’d ever seen in his entire life, although granted, that was saying very little. Without so much as a thank you, the two of them started bumping like bunnies. God, exasperated, walked off muttering what sounded like “kids these days”.

The irony is that with one rib removed, Adam was halfway to being able to bend forward far enough to actually blow himself. This would have granted him all the benefits of unlimited blowjobs without any of the side effects of having to deal with a woman in your life.

Bible critics consider this one of the biggest plot holes in the entire Genesis narrative, and a key contributor to their consensus that the creation story “totally blows”.

The Smiling Rabbi

Interesting anecdote about this book cover. It’s a composite of two different Rabbi faces, i.e. it’s not any specific Rabbi, so that I wouldn’t poke fun unnecessarily at someone. That’s how much of a tzadik I am.

From the back cover:

Rabbi Shlomo Levi Birenshmaltz (ZATZHA”L: of blessed, blessed memory), like dozens of others, was truly a unique man in our generation, and his death left a gaping void of hyperbole in our hearts.

He was a man of so many opposites. Intelligence and love. Compassion and bravery. Sweeping knowledge and searing insight.

Those who knew him knew that his smile could light up a room. This flies in the face of contemporary assumptions that religious people aren’t happy. Torah invented happiness. Torah invented smiling (As the verse says: “…And Moshe smiled, and thus he spake.” (Leviticus 69:420)). And who should be a better proof of that than a true master of Torah? An absolute embodiment of Simchas Chayim, he taught us all what it means to love life. He truly loved all people – even non-Jews.

Yet he wasn’t afraid to fight. He fought for what he believed in. He fought change. He fought the status quo. He fought the internet. He fought education. He fought women’s elbows. For a man of such gentle disposition, he could surely transform into a raging giant when Truth was on the line.

He wasn’t without his faults, of course, and this book does not gloss over them. It merely paints them in the best possible light. After all, is not imperfection a more believable and relatable form of perfection? Could it not be said that – like the quintessential job interview response – his biggest fault was he had so few faults?

For surely Rabbi Shlomo Levi Birenshmaltz was a God amongst men. Granted superhuman abilities from birth, and raised in an illustrious family with a long lineage of Rabbis, we can only look up to him in awe. Collectively, we are all equal in God’s eyes, each with our own unique challenges and gifts; but he was definitely better than the rest of us.

It is our hope that this biography serves as an inspiration of what you could become if you were born a completely different person.

Hashgacha Pratis

If you believe in God from a philosophical point of view, you shouldn’t need any emotional scaffolding to keep things up.

The absurdity of one-off inspirational stories of any kind should be obvious to even the most casual of contemplators, and yet it forms a huge part of religious culture.

I can respect this need in human nature – if there’s something you believe in, you want to immerse yourself in it! You want to relieve all the excruciating details in all their climactic glory!

If there’s a sportsing team you’re fond of, you’ll talk about all their sportsing successes and regale with your comrades in the specific escapades of specific sportsfull members. You might be so committed that it never really seems to bother you that you’ve been rooting for a losing team. Why are you so willing to stand behind such a lousy track record? Is it because you were born in that team’s city?

It’s one thing to root for your loser team (that’s right, I said it), and it’s quite another to root for a losing life philosophy. To emotionally psych yourself up enough that you ignore the painful emotional and intellectual realities that come with the package.

I myself was guilty of this behavior, inversely expressed. It was not any of the myriad of philosophical questions that already plagued me which actually pushed me over. I only left religion when my emotional world grew too dark to sustain it.

And so, the irony of my own personal story is that I’m grateful to God for what He personally did to me, the asshole, because now I am able to not believe in Him in the first place.

It’s Hashgacha, really.

An Honest Man

Loopholes

Good news: if you have money, even being A Good Jew in The Eyes of God™ is easier.

Instead of slaving away getting your house clean for Passover, just sell your house to a non-Jew (awesome loophole, Rabbis!) and go to the nearest tropical resort you can find. There, you can enjoy a five star experience that is Approved in The Eyes of God and Man while being entertained by the most inspiring Rabbis money can buy. Wouldn’t want any of that inspiration running dry, would you now.

Because sometimes, Judaism is all about the letter of the law.

Do I own any leavened bread today? No, because somehow one sorry Arab bought all of the city’s bread at the same time.

Is this the live hair of a married woman you are seeing? (the horror!) No, I cut it off and made it into a wig, mothefucker.

Am I carrying outside the zone on Shabbat? Nope, because see those telephone poles?

Did I just make an interest payment on a loan? No, because of that sign on that wall.

And other times, it’s all about the spirit.

Can you have all of your lights and TV and coffee maker automated on Shabbat? Nope, because you’d be missing the point.

Can you fuck a married woman using a condom, since condoms are like, totally spilling seed? Nope, because dude, you’re hitting the point.

Can a woman have a slit in her dress if it doesn’t show any prohibited skin? C’mon! It’s all about whether she’s arousing men, not what part of the body is actually showing.

When does the distinction get made? No one knows for sure. Or, more accurately, “the Rabbis are in disagreement on the subject”. In reality? This is just another expression of social norms – some things just made it in, others are still taboo.

Stop pretending this is part of some higher order and admit you’re just a bunch of fucking people trying to make sense out of life by arbitrarily following a certain set of rules – rules that still evolve, just in a different way than anyone else would call normal.

You claim to be resistant to change, preserving the ways of tradition. In reality you look nothing like Jews, or Judaism, or Israel looked like in the past – you just evolve at your own glacial pace, with your own stupid justifications.

You’re at least as dumb as everybody else.

After a certain Rabbi I knew all too well came out publicly as having had an affair with a married woman, while also reassuring people that there was no “actual transgression” involved due to the absence of penis-in-vagina penetration (can’t remember the exact bullshit language), I reposed this book cover with the following divrey chizuk:

Raboisay. In light of recent events, rachmana litzlan, it’s worth bringing up a recent point I’ve made so eloquently and humbly in the past. As we all know, sometimes it’s the most obvious points that need chizuk, especially if you’re delusional.

Religion is used as a supposed framework for morality:
“Who are we to trust ourselves? To know what’s right?

We need guidance! We need direction! We need clarification!

How many grams of cheese can fall into your cholent before you become a morally repugnant person? How many days old does a fetus need to be for it to be called a murderous abortion? Tell us, oh Torah written when we still thought the sun revolves around us. You know best.

In fact, the opposite is true:

When you look to a book to define what is wrong and right, it’s much easier to engage in the mental acrobatics we all do to justify your behaviors. It’s one thing to rationalize your shit, we all do that. It’s another to have God’s book on your side backing up your hair-splitting insights.

Let’s all take it upon ourselves to be mischazek in speaking as yeshivishly as possible and also not being total fucking idiots about what we KNOW is wrong or right, bullshit religious justifications notwithstanding.

V’hameivin yovin.

Chumash as an Instagram Post

I think I was still religious when I made these. The writing was on the wall. Facebook wall, that is.

No Bad Questions

The kiruv world prides itself in its open-mindedness.

“Ask us anything! We will change our views in a heartbeat if you convince us! Sure you can ask about sex, and no, we don’t use a hole in the sheet, we’re super progressive!”

But ask yourself, have any of the really difficult questions that plague you (and you know what they are), been replied to with one or more of the following bullshit textbook answers?

• God knows what’s best for us
• Mashiach will come and we’ll all have clarity
• There’s a Kabbalistic reason for that
• Don’t judge Judaism by the Jews who practice it
• We have a rich tradition of handing down bullshit verbatim from one generation to the next, so it must all be true
• God is true. God wrote a book. Deal with it.
• “You could never lie about a million people being around a mountain if it didn’t actually happen.”
• “The Rabbis knew what was best for us.”
• “People were way smarter back then.” See also: “Our generation sucks.”
• “That’s a very good question you’ve asked! Many smart people have asked that too!”
• Not to be confused with its condescending inverse: “You’re not the first person to ask that question, you know…”
• “We can’t use fallible human logic to understand such profound ideas.”
• Which is the exact opposite of: “Those are just guidelines, you’ve still got to use your head to figure out what’s right”
• “You can’t use your heart, use your mind!” But also: “You can’t use your mind, use your heart!”
• “The truth is, both opinions are correct! Both are the word of a living God!”

And so your questions have gone unanswered, because those weren’t answers.

Those were justifications.

Freidom Fighter – Mockery Will Set you Free

Earning Heaven

Quotes

Genesis and The Big Bang – Extra NSFW

The Smiling Rabbi

Hashgacha Pratis

An Honest Man

Loopholes

No Bad Questions

Current Weather in Hell

Even More Freidom

Sex

Chapter #14: Light

Maybe You’re Extra Delusional

Kriah

God. Night. Moon.