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:
First of all, don't forget:
Zoom Salons are back! With a new time, and a new tack.
Starting June 14th (5ET / 2 PT), we’ll be going deeper and stranger into some of our messiest Monday missives.
It's a chance to unpack, to get new midrashic, mystical and scholarly takes, and jam together on the possibilities these essays open up for us.
And yep, June's topic will be Rahab, because this just scratched the surface, let alone addressed how she lingers on in our culture today.
House of Study Members get full access.
If you’re only here for the Monday posts— we’d love to have you join the House and this conversation.
*No background knowledge of any kind needed! Just come!
Secondly:
It's never not a good season to remember how powerful stories are in the hands of the storyteller. Nor is it ever a bad time to honor the redemptive possibilities of the gingers among us.
So sit by the digital campfire, and enjoy this wild tale of the Red Jews: mythical agents of Satan? Bringers of the Messiah? Or...?
“Far, far away from our areas, somewhere beyond the Mountains of Darkness, on the other side of the Sambatyon River…there lives a nation known as the Red Jews.” (The Brief Travels of Benjamin the Third, Mendele Mocher Sforim, 1878)
The idea of a mythical nation of Red Jews began when medieval Christians began from a few directions at once, including reworking an old legend about the Lost Tribes of Israel. As the lore went, the tribes (which probably were actually lost when the Assyrians conquered the Northern Kingdom of Israel in 722 BCE and enslaved and dispossessed much of the local population) had been trapped behind a mysterious river called the Sambatyon all this time.