Life is a Sacred Text

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illuminated manuscript depicting four of the plagues

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Whither the Plagues

Four femme presenting people lying around a gigantic seder plate with a galactic background.

Seder Sources and Resources

This is Life as a Sacred Text 🌱, an everybody-celebrating, justice-centered voyage into ancient stories that can illuminate our own lives. It‘s run on a nonprofit, so it’s 100% NAZI FREE. More about the project here, and to subscribe, go here: Subscribe! So, friends. Pesach is here. I can

disgruntled looking cat in a box

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Rabbi x Mailbag Time Again

A bunch of cartoon villains!

The Antisemitism Post (tm)

Gotta get the history to know where the tropes live in the discourse today.

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time away

17th c. people looking at, pointing at the central figure in the painting, a woman whose back is bare, hair down

Whose Truth

Sometimes women with voices are shut out of the camp. But that’s not the end of the story.

Total Eclipse of the 🌞

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Total Eclipse of the 🌞

Illustration of beautiful women with dark Black and lighter Black/Brown skin tones with ancient Egyptian-like styling

16 Takes On the "Kushite Wife" Verse That Have Nothing To Do With White Supremacy

they had other things going on in the ancient world, you know

Two dinosaur statues looking like they're in conversation

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Ask the Rabbi and Each Other!! + POLL!

bench says Museum Visits are Hard on my body rest here if you agree

beyond nostalgia

really, the cucumbers weren't great in Egypt

Fading flower design around the ridges, with Hebrew calligraphy in the center

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Facing the Ending of Esther

Night sky with chaotic swirling galaxies and clouds, kinda

notes towards a theology of prose

Exploding our creative boundaries can help us seek a connection with the divine that is lived, messy, and sublime.

The musician Victoria Hanna looks up at the camera with the letter––well, in our house we're debating if that's a ס or a ט,

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incantation

Blessing. Protection. Amulet.

Blessing. Protection. Amulet.

This is Life as a Sacred Text 🌱, an everybody-celebrating, justice-centered voyage into ancient stories that can illuminate our own lives. It‘s run on a nonprofit, so it’s 100% NAZI FREE. More about the project here, and to subscribe, go here: Subscribe! As it happens, the oldest written versions

Image of Gilgamesh looking giant and muscled and a lion in his arms looking tiny and scared

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Exploring Mythic Tropes

A Black woman with jeans and a tank top and hair in a scarf parts the head of a Black man, whose eyes are closed.

A Defense of Delilah

Let's take a closer look at things from her perspective, shall we?

The band Otyken absolutely in the zone

have some cool stuff

Hey, all-- Have some recommendations of cool things, in anticipation of Shabbat. 1) Yael Kanarek has been heading a "Regendered Torah" project called Toratah for the last few years, basically translating the whole Torah (and other parts of the Hebrew Bible) in Hebrew and English while flipping the

Says "a bintel brief" in yiddish

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The Delightful Radicalism of an early 20th c. Yiddish Advice Column

pen and ink drawing of Samson, with sunburst design behind it

taking a holy time out

When it's time to do some serious spiritual heavy lifting, taking a break from things that make it difficult to hear that still small voice within is sometimes key.

Me replying to Grace's tweet, above, with "Why I quit an MFA program after one semester, basically"

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That MFA story

Earthenware vessel filled with copper ore and mifepristone

ancient abortifacients, reproductive coercion, and bad translations

So... if this this "bitter water" induces pregnancy endings?? How would we understand this whole scenario?

Sheep and chalkboard that says 2+2 = 5

You Asked, I Answered

Two weeks ago, we had an ask the community conversation, with promises that any questions directed at me, specifically, would be addressed in a couple of weeks. It is now a couple of weeks. So! As usual I a lot, so– fewer questions, more text. Your shocked face. Apologies if

Ancient vessels

debunking the conquest narrative

facing one of the hardest narrative arcs in the Bible armed with the truth of what really happened

Desert, with rainbow captured

the desert speaks

It's been a minute since we've had a good old-fashioned juicy text study, and the ideas raised on Monday have lots of friends in the tradition– so I thought I'd bring some of the good stuff. As always: There are a bunch of texts,