Don’t let them block our #indyref #mandate - Believe in #Scotland
- The people have spoken - The #Parliament has voted.
- Now Is The Time to put Scotland’s future in Scotland’s hands.
- The #Celtic Exit has begun: Scotland, #Wales and #NorthernIreland are now all governed by parties with the goal of leaving the #UK.
Sign:
https://www.believeinscotland.org/indyref_petition?utm_source=mastodon_fediverse
wie #nachhaltig ist das #finanzsystem keiner stellt die #systemfrage ?
#Oeconomia legt episodisch die Spielregeln des #Kapitalismus offen ein Aufklärungsfilm über den Zusammenhang zwischen #Wirtschaftswachstum #Verschuldung ( #staatschulden ) und #Vermögenskonzentration. Produktionsland und -jahr: ZDF Deutschland 2020 Datum: 17.01.2023
the #unsustainable #madness of #centralbank #debt #monopoly #capitalism #finance #economy #money #geld #euro #eur #growth https://www.3sat.de/film/dokumentarfilm/oeconomia-100.html
INVEST IN YOUR #INDEPENDENCE #FOOD #WATER #ENERGY
🦇 Franklin Cemetery: Faint lights appear during certain phases of the moon. They float from NE side of grounds and follow a certain path to the western gate. 🦉🌑🕯️🧟👁️
https://hauntedlineage.com/directory/franklin-cemetery/
#FranklinCemeterySpirits #Cemetery #GhostLight #Independence #Missouri
the systemic and fatal mistake of modern day #monopoly #capitalism = modern day #feudalism not #education or #intelligence earns most #money, no whoever owns #assets everyone else is dependant on = #exploitation = will ultimately lead to less #innovation + destruction of #mankind,, #rich vs #poor #inequality growing rapidly = #collapse of #society thank you
= no matter how #smart #people or #government are or act: will lose game to whoever prints #money and buys + owns the #assets (#bank, #centralbank)
the #solution: every Dollar or Euro or Pesos invested in your own #INDEPENDENCE from the #financesystem is well invested. #water, #food, #energy, DO IT NOW!
What kind of Jew?
The journey
A much larger Jewish world
By the time I graduated high school, I had fallen in love with being Jewish.
My parents had given me a strong Jewish identity, but we remained largely outside the communal networks that many American Jews take for granted. I knew being Jewish mattered and wanted to learn more. What I had never experienced was life inside a Jewish community.
That began to change when I arrived at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio.
Case Western was not a large school. At the time, it had roughly 3,600 undergraduates. About 10 percent were Jewish, which meant there were perhaps 360 Jewish students on paper. Yet only a small fraction seemed actively involved in Jewish life.
My estimate was always thirty-six, though the exact number hardly matters. What mattered was that Jewish life felt small enough that every person counted.
Unlike at many larger universities, there was no sense that Jewish life would simply happen on its own. The same faces appeared at Shabbat services, holiday celebrations, Hillel events, and student leadership meetings. If people did not show up, things often did not happen.
Something about that environment spoke to me immediately. In retrospect, it appealed to the same part of me that stayed in Hebrew High School after my bar mitzvah, continued on to Prozdor, and joined the rabbi’s class during my senior year. I never wanted the minimum. I always wanted to know what came next.
At Case Western, I found a Jewish world that felt both larger and more fragile than anything I had known before. For the first time, Jewish life was not something being provided by parents, teachers, rabbis, and institutions. It was being created by students.
I wanted to be part of it.
Building Jewish community
Early in my freshman year, I joined Alpha Epsilon Pi (AEPi), the Jewish fraternity.
At most universities, a fraternity is simply one student organization among many. At Case Western, AEPi occupied a unique place within the Jewish community. With perhaps thirty-six students actively involved in Jewish life, our chapter of roughly twenty members represented more than half of that community.
As a result, the boundaries between AEPi, Hillel1, and Jewish life on campus often felt blurry. Many of the same people moved between all three.
We built the sukkah2 each year outside Hillel. We organized events, volunteered for the Cleveland Jewish Federation’s annual Super Sunday campaign, and helped run the Matzah Ball, a large dance sponsored by the Jewish student community.
I also became involved with Hillel and eventually served as a student representative on its Board of Trustees. None of this felt like an obligation. I wanted to be there. For the first time in my life, I was helping create a Jewish community rather than simply participating in one.
The more involved I became, the more I wanted to do.
In retrospect, I probably cared more about Jewish life on campus than almost anything else in college—certainly more than my grades. I did not want to stand on the sidelines and watch it happen.
I wanted to help build it.
The kippah
My growing involvement in Jewish life affected me in another way as well.
Case Western was not a place where Jewish presence was especially visible. There were relatively few Jews involved in Jewish life on campus, and most Jewish students did not wear anything that distinguished them from anyone else.
Increasingly, I felt the smallness of Jewish life around me. During my first semester, I began wearing a kippah, the small head covering traditionally worn by many Jewish men, which I had always worn at Hebrew school.
I did not start wearing it because I had become Orthodox. I was not Orthodox and knew nothing about Jewish religious law. Nor did I begin wearing it because I had reached any theological conclusions.
The impulse was simpler than that.
I wanted to look Jewish.
That desire may sound strange to people who did not grow up the way I did. Yet after spending much of my childhood feeling disconnected from various communities, I had finally found a Jewish community. Because that community was so small, I wanted to represent it in the only way I knew how.
The kippah gave me a way to do that, though at the time I had no idea how much that small piece of cloth would shape the years that followed.
Adam
One of the consequences of wearing a kippah was that other people began making assumptions about me.
Most of those assumptions were harmless. The kippah signaled that I was Jewish, which was exactly what I wanted it to do. Yet on a campus where relatively few Jewish students wore one, it also led many people to assume that I was Orthodox.
At first, I found that assumption amusing because it was so obviously untrue. I knew very little about Jewish religious practice. I had been a public-school kid. I had never attended a yeshiva. I did not keep kosher. I did not observe Shabbat according to traditional Jewish law. Beyond wearing a kippah, there was very little about my life that could reasonably be described as Orthodox.
One person who did not make that assumption was a student named Adam. In fact, I was the one who approached him. Early in my freshman year, I noticed another student wearing a kippah in the massive chemistry lecture hall. I plopped down beside him and said, “Hi! My name is David! I’m also Jewish!”
He would become my first Orthodox Jewish friend.
Unlike many of the Jewish students I had encountered growing up, Adam organized his life around Judaism. He prayed regularly, observed Shabbat, kept kosher, and approached Jewish learning with a seriousness that I found both unfamiliar and intriguing.
What struck me most, however, was his family. Over time, I began spending Shabbat meals with them. They welcomed me into their Cleveland home with a warmth and generosity that made a deep impression on me. Until then, Orthodoxy had largely been an abstraction. I had encountered Orthodox Jews before, but only from a distance.
Adam’s family gave me my first close-up view of Orthodox Jewish life.
Serious Judaism
As I spent more time with Adam and his family, I became increasingly curious about Orthodox Judaism.
Part of that curiosity came from the simple fact that Orthodoxy was largely unfamiliar to me. Growing up, I had encountered very few Orthodox Jews. Most of my Jewish experiences had taken place within Conservative Judaism, and even there I had rarely met people who structured their lives around Jewish practice.
College changed that. In addition to Adam, several Orthodox rabbis regularly visited campus through Hillel and AEPi. They taught classes, led discussions, answered questions, and made themselves available to students interested in learning more.
What attracted me was not theology, at least not at first.
What attracted me was seriousness.
The Orthodox Jews I encountered seemed to approach Judaism as a complete way of life rather than an occasional activity. Judaism shaped how they spent their time, celebrated holidays, what they ate, what they studied, and how they understood their obligations to one another.
Looking back, I think I was responding to something more specific than Orthodoxy itself. Throughout my childhood, I had often encountered forms of Judaism that felt inconsistent to me. Many people identified strongly as Jewish while observing relatively little Jewish practice. Others participated in Jewish institutions without allowing Judaism to play a major role in their daily lives.
The Orthodox world appeared different to me. It seemed coherent. Judaism was not merely something people believed or inherited; it was something they lived.
At the time, I began drawing a conclusion that would shape the next several years of my life: If Judaism was important enough to organize one’s entire life around, perhaps Orthodoxy had gotten something right.
Jerusalem
By the end of my sophomore year, I wanted to see that world for myself.
The opportunity came during the summer of 2000, when I enrolled in a summer program at Ohr Somayach, an Orthodox yeshiva in Jerusalem.
Although I had visited Israel many times growing up, those trips had always revolved around family. My mother’s relatives lived in Israel. We stayed with family, visited family, and experienced the country largely through family.
This trip was different. I was traveling to Israel because of questions that belonged to me.
Israel had always occupied an unusual place in my life. It was the country where I had been born, the country my parents still thought of as home, and the place where much of my extended family lived. Yet until that summer, my relationship with Israel had largely been an inherited one.
There was another irony as well. My parents had spent part of their young adulthood in Jerusalem as secular university students. They studied at Hebrew University, learned Hebrew, built friendships, and became Israelis there.
I arrived in Jerusalem on a very different journey. I was an American college student trying to understand Judaism not as an identity, but as a religion.
In the classrooms of Ohr Somayach, I encountered things that were entirely new to me. I attended classes on Jewish thought, Jewish law, and traditional texts. Most significantly, I encountered the world of Talmud.
I was not yet studying it independently. The summer program was not designed for that. But one of our teachers would read passages aloud, explain the arguments, and guide us through the discussions.
I was fascinated.
The Jewish world that had seemed so vast when I was in Prozdor3 suddenly appeared larger still.
If anything, I now realized that I had only begun to glimpse its size.
The question
When the summer ended, I returned to Case Western more convinced than ever that Judaism deserved to be taken seriously. Yet I also found myself wrestling with a question that I could not shake: How did I know that I was pursuing Orthodoxy because I believed it was true?
I had spent two years becoming increasingly interested in Orthodox Judaism. I had formed friendships with Orthodox Jews. I had studied at Ohr Somayach. The trajectory appeared straightforward.
Yet the more I thought about it, the less certain I became. What troubled me was not whether Orthodoxy possessed depth, wisdom, or seriousness. I had seen enough to know that it did. The question was whether those qualities were the reason I found it compelling.
Even then, I think I sensed that other factors were influencing me as well. I admired the consistency I saw among many Orthodox Jews. I admired their sense of purpose. I admired the way Judaism appeared woven into daily life. I admired the intellectual seriousness with which many approached Jewish learning.
But admiration and truth are not the same thing.
I began asking myself a different question: If I had grown up around equally serious forms of Judaism that were not Orthodox, would I have reached the same conclusions?
At the time, I had no way to answer that question, but I wanted to answer it honestly.
Stepping back
Looking back, I think that question changed the course of my life more than I realized at the time.
The simplest way to describe what happened next is that I stopped wearing a kippah and ceased being religious.
Those two decisions were closely connected. For the previous two years, I had been moving steadily toward greater religious observance. The kippah had catalyzed that journey. It had introduced me to Adam, shaped how other people understood me, and helped open the door to the Orthodox world.
Yet I had become increasingly uncomfortable with the possibility that I was moving in that direction because of momentum and expectation rather than because I had concluded it was true.
Taking off the kippah was one way of stripping away those expectations.
This was not drift or indifference. It was a deliberate reset. I did not become anti-religious. I did not reject Judaism. I did not conclude that Orthodoxy was false. I simply recognized that I was not yet confident enough to reorganize my life around beliefs that I had not fully examined.
If I was going to become religious, I wanted it to be because I believed it was true. Until I knew that, I was unwilling to take the next step. The question remained unresolved, but I stopped moving toward an answer until I felt confident I was pursuing it for the right reasons.
I continued participating in Jewish life at Case Western. I remained involved with AEPi and the Jewish community that had become so important to me. Yet my religious exploration largely entered a period of suspension.
The waiting years
After graduation, I moved back home to New Jersey.
What I expected to be a temporary arrangement lasted four years: two years in AmeriCorps4 followed by two years of graduate school at Rutgers.
During those years, I occupied an unusual position. I had stepped away from religious observance, yet still assumed that Orthodoxy was probably correct.
I now know that conclusion rested on a very limited sample of Jewish life. At the time, however, I knew very few Jews outside the Orthodox world who seemed to organize their lives seriously around Judaism. The question I was trying to answer was not whether Orthodoxy was true. It was whether I was pursuing it for the right reasons.
When I moved back home, I stopped eating meat. My mother’s kitchen was not kosher, and I did not want her to think I was rejecting her cooking. Becoming pescatarian seemed easier than creating tension over a question I had not yet resolved.
It captured the strange middle ground I inhabited. I was neither fully religious nor fully secular. I had not abandoned the possibility of becoming Orthodox, yet I was unwilling to move further in that direction until I could determine whether it was actually true.
Judaism continued to matter deeply to me. During graduate school, I taught at the Hebrew school I had attended as a child. Even while distancing myself from religious practice, I remained committed to Jewish education and Jewish community.
Many of my fraternity brothers moved on with their lives after college. They began careers, established independence, and entered adulthood in ways that seemed entirely normal. I was happy for them, but I also felt something that I only understand clearly in retrospect.
For four years, we had worked together to build a Jewish community.
I was not ready to leave it behind.
More than anything else, I still wanted to understand what kind of Jew I was going to become.
Independence
In 2006, I completed my master’s degree at Rutgers University and accepted a job in Washington, DC.
The four-year period of waiting was over. For years, I had postponed a question that first emerged after Ohr Somayach. Now I finally had the freedom to explore it on my own terms.
I still did not know what kind of Jewish life I wanted to build. I still did not know whether Orthodoxy was true for me. I still did not know what role religion would ultimately play in my life.
What I did know was that the question would no longer remain suspended indefinitely. The next chapter of my Jewish journey was about to begin.
Footnotes
The journey
#Belonging #College #Community #Identity #Independence #Israel #Jewish #Judaism #PersonalGrowth #Transition
Heute ist #diday
Ich empfehle allen meinen Freunden WERO als Alternative zu Paypal
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I should get some of these stickers, as I want a Free Scotland, too. 😃
#diday #opensource #bigtech #europe #independence #AI #freedom
Get on the list! 
in #monopoly #capitalism = modern day #feudalism not #education or #intelligence earns most #money, no whoever owns #assets everyone else is dependant on = #exploitation = will ultimately lead to less #innovation + destruction of #mankind,, #rich vs #poor #inequality growing rapidly = #collapse of #society thank you
= no matter how #smart #people or #government are or act: will lose game to whoever prints #money and buys + owns the #assets (#bank, #centralbank)
the #solution: every Dollar or Euro or Pesos invested in your own #INDEPENDENCE from the #financesystem is well invested. #water, #food, #energy, DO IT NOW!
#taxdodgers like #apple #google #amazon + those that enable it #corrupt #governments #politicians that do nothing #jpmorgan + #centralbanks #bank #banks that do not finance #innovation #usa #china #germany #india #australia #france
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#conspiracy ??? #jpmorgan #titanic #fed #centralbank #fiat #currency #money #fascism
in #monopoly #capitalism = modern day #feudalism not #education or #intelligence earns most #money, no whoever owns #assets everyone else is dependant on = #exploitation = will ultimately lead to less #innovation + destruction of #mankind,, #rich vs #poor #inequality growing rapidly = #collapse of #society thank you
= no matter how #smart #people or #government are or act: will lose game to whoever prints #money and buys + owns the #assets (#bank, #centralbank)
the #solution: every Dollar or Euro or Pesos invested in your own #INDEPENDENCE from the #financesystem is well invested. #water, #food, #energy, DO IT NOW!
Mark
Wordmark
Haunted Lineage
The Skeptic's Kaddish
Enno
Fitheach
Frank Loock