em | שמחהZohar teacher just casually dropped the hint of an idea that blew my mind. Maybe it's super common, but I've never heard it before:
Eating from the tree of knowledge of good and bad was the start of reifying dualism.
Running with that idea in my own words: by starting to categorize things as tov and ra, we create a differentiation - which becomes a difference/distance between ourselves and g-d. Similarly, death enters the picture the moment we begin engaging in the dualistic point of view (eating the fruit of knowledge of good and bad -> certain death). We begin to sort, "this is good, that is bad, god is here, god is not there, this is lively, that is dead", and we begin to see our own perceptions of things rather than existence as it is. (Only a sith deals in absolutes.)
Jewish practice makes things sacred and holy by honoring and making them different. It's "performative" in the Butlerian sense. We dance with the tension בֵּין קֹדֶשׁ לְחֹל as we strive to recognize that creation is still unfolding, there is no "tov", nor "ra", and we're still in the presence of the holy one.
arch-packetmancer@em “The best songs are about love or death. Goth songs are about both at the same time.” — Lol Tolhurst. My brain tried to parse Butlerian in the context of Dune for way too long.
@sng ha, i know nothing about "butlerian" in the sense of dune, but i think allllll the time about performativity a la judith butler.
my partner and i sometimes talk about it as doing "proof of work". why is $THING sacred or holy? why do i "feel it" over at place A and not at place B?
bc we did proof of work to make it happen. you're not a man or a woman or whatever bc of your biology or how you feel inside, but because you do gender. not because you "act like $GENDER", but because when you do things, you do them as $GENDER.
@em Oh. It’s just my brain is trained over many decades on that word. But, yeah, Judith Butler is great.