re: #288 Fozzie Bear

Don’t you ever just want to throw your hands up and say “fuck it, too many weird rules”?

I mean, doesn’t it all get a bit silly, and you kind of come to the conclusion that much of it is extrapolation based on extrapolation?

I’m really not trying to poop on the faith at all, but it seems that (orthodox) Judaism is uniquely… what’s the word… bound by very specific and particular rules.

Well it depends on what the rules are and what they mean to you personally.

There is much psychologically in Judaism that revolves around “we are doing something odd now - why?”

The answers to those whys always revolve around creating a certain awareness of spirituality and a certain lesson. If Shabbos is about sacred time, for example, then an eruv is about creating a sacred space.

Let me tell you a story I once heard.

You may know that we say blessings before eating things - and indeed there are several different blessings for different things to eat. But there are also blessings for hearing terrible news or seeing a rainbow or even a very strange looking person. There are blessings for realizing you are safe from calamity and blessings for figuring something out.

So what is a blessing and how is it different from a prayer?

A prayer isn attempt to communicate with the transcendant. A blessing is a statement of amazement ant the existense of and working of God in the world and your life at the two times you are most likely to need them the most - i.e. when you are doing something utterly familiar and might not notice the miracle of it like eating or waking up, or when something really intense has happened and you might be so into that, that you forget the source.

So here is the story.

A rabbi once went to an even greater rabbi for advice on how to be more spiritually connected. The great rabbi pointed out the apple tree in his yard.

He said to the other rabbi:

“The difference between you and me is that you might get hungry and say a blessing before you ate one of those apples. I might pick an apple for the chance to say the blessing.”

This is all a long way of saying that the individual parts of Jewish observance may or may not make sense in of themselves and they may seem very intrusive to one’s life. However, they are by design intrusive because we strive (and often fail, I certainly do) to have a certain awareness 24/7.