By the description of him driving the moneylenders from the temple, we can also tell that he fit inside the temple, which gives us an upper bound as well as a lower bound on his size.
It’s been said that Jesus Christ was larger than a baby but smaller than a temple
I just heard my mom tell my brother, “when you die, you will go outside and garden until your father says you’re done” and it took me a second to realize that my brother was playing a videogame and this was not a theological discussion.
My boss once texted me “Find Jesus. He’ll open the door.”
It took me half an hour before I remembered that the head groundskeeper was named Jesus (Spanish pronunciation) & he had keys to our room. I honestly thought that it was a religious text.
Jesus Christ was a brown Jew in the Middle East, conceived out of wedlock in an arguably interracial if not interspecies (deity and human) relationship, raised by his mother and stepfather in place of his absent father. He may not have had a Y chromosome. He spent his early youth as a refugee in Egypt, where his family no doubt survived initially on handouts from the wealthy (You think they kept that gold, frankincense, and myrrh from the wise men? Hell no, they sold that stuff for food and lodging). He later returned with his parents to their occupied homeland and lived in poverty.
Trump and his administration are xenophobic, misogynistic, racist, fear-mongering, warmongering, tax-dodging, anti-Semitic, anti-choice, anti-welfare, anti-equal pay, anti-LGBTQIA+, anti-immigration, support tax cuts for the rich, support Citizen’s United, want to keep refugees out of this country, want to limit our ability to speak against the government, plan to abolish the Affordable Care Act, and they wrap all of that up behind a banner of “Christian family values.” If you support them, you have no right to call yourself a follower of Christ.
it’s so rare, yet so fulfilling, to see the J-man on my dash
One of my friends is literally the most religious Christian I have ever met. What does that mean in regards to her lifestyle and outlook? She loves everyone. EVERYONE. Unconditionally. And she supports healthcare and education and birth control and everything that’s necessary to have a healthy, stable society.
Irish catholics: filled with shame always, are guilt singularities, deeply fearful of their mam’s finding out they didn’t go to mass.
Scottish catholics: healthy amount of guilt and shame, usually chill, same as the irish re: the mammy thing though.
French catholics: no shame, some guilt, guilt coped with by smoking.
Italian catholics: a bit of guilt, lots of fucking, lots of shame about said fucking.
Eastern eauropean catholics: not quite guilt or shame, more an all encompassing sense of dread. Unparalleled art and architecture though. Like honestly, amazing.
English catholics: fake and do not know god, most likely to burn on holy ground, most likely to commit arson.
specifically polish catholics: no guilt, no shame, lots of pent-up anger, will probably crucify you in the name of jesus, would spit at actual jesus and call him a filthy rat.
Mexican Catholics: guilt, self sacrifice, don’t have sex or you’ll die (but everyone does it anyway), pray to very specific saints to help with very particular issues, Virgin Mary is the real boss here, also death cult but in a happy way.
so exodus says that aaron stretched out his hand over the waters and the frog came up and covered the land of egypt and while english translators usually render “frog” as “frogs,” today at shul the rabbi challenged us to consider whether it could in fact have been one giant frog so we spent literally forty-five minutes arguing about whether there were swarms of frogs from the beginning or rather a single monstrous godzilla frog that split into multiple frogs once people started trying to destroy it and the congregation got so worked up that even after we’d sung aleinu and were heading out of the sanctuary people were still excitedly debating the moral implications of one frog versus many so what i’m trying to say is @judaism never change
I’d never heard of this before, so I looked it up.
The reason we’re certain it says “frogs” singular rather than just being an irregular noun (which was my first thought, especially since my dad was just lecturing me a few weeks ago on how Biblical Hebrew plurals aren’t nearly as regular as Modern Hebrew plurals because Modern Hebrew is more or less a conlang) is because in the first part of the passage God commands Aaron to call forth frogs, plural, but then the passage ends with Aaron calling forth frog, singular. So both forms are right there, they both exist.
The authority is considered to be Rashi (an 11th century French rabbi). He gives two explanations. 1) That a giant frog was called forth that covered all of the land of Egypt, and whenever the Egyptians struck it, it split into multiple frogs. 2) In some languages, some animals have both a regular plural form and a plural that’s the same as the singular (e.g. “fish” in English), so maybe that was the case for frogs in Biblical Hebrew.
The counter-argument to (2) is that the regular plural was used in the very same passage, which is why we need both explanations.
Rashi apparently gets this argument from the following Midrash (Biblical quotation in all-caps, Midrash in regular text)
AND THE FROG(S) CAME UP, AND COVERED THE
LAND OF EGYPT. Rabbi Akiva said: It was only one frog, but this bred so
rapidly that it filled the land of Egypt. Rabbi Elazar Ben Azariah said
to him: ‘Akiva! What business have you with Haggadah? Leave homiletical
interpretations and turn to Neg’aim and Ohalot! Indeed, there was one
frog at first, but it croaked to the others and they came.’
The upshot of all of these interpretations is Aaron summoned one frog, but God provided many.
[I got so into reading about this I forgot I had water boiling on the stove, and it all boiled off and I didn’t notice until I smelled the pan burning. I feel like this might be one of the most Jewish moments of my life.]
I love that this is basically the equivalent of the “would you rather fight 100 duck-sized horses or one horse-sized duck” debate.
Love the idea that Aaron was told to summon a plague of frogs but he either 1) accidentally summoned a single frog instead due to mishearing or misspeaking or better yet 2) thought to himself, you know what would be really great though, is just one GIANT FROG PIÑATA
Hands up if you’re still mad that Christianity took over most of the world, displacing the ancient local religions and destroying records of them so we’ll never know the details about them
wupacing 