Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg: What's the most incredible obscure-ish thing you've read lately that's vaguely related to religion or spirituality? (Aka not that one thing that went viral or was in the nyt?)

What's the most incredible obscure-ish thing you've read lately that's vaguely related to religion or spirituality? (Aka not that one thing that went viral or was in the nyt?)

I’ve been reading AMERICAN CUISINE AND HOW IT GOT THIS WAY and it has a really interesting section about community cookbooks, specifically for this question church/synagogue/etc collections and it’s really interesting stuff. (Oddly, almost none of them Catholic before the 1920s.)

OMG you have the secret to the why of the sisterhood cookbooks??? PLEASE DISH

Sadly it does not dig into that but it DOES have a fantastic section about how slow cookers were partially made for using for the Sabbath, which I did not know about.

oh hell yes because GOD LOVES CHOLENT

It is established that the Sabbath post-cholent nap is conducive to visions of the Courts That Are Above and the World To Come. [y. t. Midrash Tz'olenteh, 73b-74a]

1/60th of the World To Come indeed

As a former Catholic, I’m just picturing the nap after a corned brisket and cabbage on St Patrick’s Day.

I have never heard of this but just seeing a photo makes me want to make some immediately.

That's the correct move

Once again indebted to the Jewish community for their culinary ingenuity

That is news to me too.

But wow does it not make so much sense?

Absolutely. It is genial.

I’m fascinated by them

I am a big fan of those too!

Not sure if this counts, but it’s from the novel Piranesi. It has me thinking about the ways in which loving people, being in relationship with others, is both incredibly sacred and incredibly painful in its loving vulnerability.

I loved that book SO SO much - in a very deep way that, now that you mention it, is very spiritual. Really spoke to something in me.

I'm reading this now. Very mysterious, I'm excited to see where it goes

I just finished it. It’s so good! There were parts I genuinely could not put the book down

An inscription from a 4th century CE Jewish cemetery in Malta honoring "Eulogia the presbytera," which in comparison to other early references to Jewish women as "presbytera" seems to suggest she was on her synagogue's Council of Elders or otherwise in a leadership role.

jewish meditation by aryeh kaplan

I don’t think of this one as obscure, but that’s probably just the circles I’m in! This book is phenomenal and deserves to be much less obscure

I literally just bought that book this week. I'm so excited to dive in.

I recently finished reading A Passionate Pacifist and it was enlightening, reassuring, and sometimes baffling. www.benyehudapress.com/books/tamares/

A Passionate Pacifist - Ben Yehuda Presswww.benyehudapress.com Rabbi Aaron Samuel Tamares (1869-1931) was a nineteenth century rabbi with twenty-first century vision. To read the work of Rabbi Aaron Samuel Tamares is to step back in time, only to realize how pres...

Oh, this is the dude who ran away to the woods to write!! I read a bit of his Torah recently and thought it was 🔥

yeah that's him!! I am writing an essay about that, being someone else who runs away to the woods (...in a cabin) periodically. It'll be finished someday...

Yeah, I found "rabbi who got irritated with everyone and ran away to the woods to write Political Stuff" to be, uh, relatable Please ping me when said essay is readable-- looking forward

NF about anatomists and solving crimes. The author speaks about how donated bodies are critical to the understanding of human anatomy. What struck me is the respect and appreciation she has for the person whose body she's using to learn things that could help others in the future. Just lovely.

I recently read and reviewed this book: 'Psalms of my people.' itinerantlibrarian.blogspot.com/2024/06/book... #books #reading #HipHop 💙📚

Book Review: <i>Psalms of My People</i>itinerantlibrarian.blogspot.com Lenny Duncan, Psalms of My People: a Story of Black Liberation as Told Through Hip-Hop . Minneapolis, MN: Broadleaf Books, 2024. ISBN: 97815...

OOHHH

Mindfulness push alert from Headspace app

I learned that the chanting of the gospel reading at Catholic services is considered a type of plainchant, and how the chant style has to be adapted for English reading because it developed in Latin, which lacks a lot of phonological features common in English.

I read The World to Come by Dara Horn. Lovely novel that centers a Jewish family who struggle with what to tell/not tell their kids. Has some beautiful spiritual moments.Also, Marc Chagall art.

Just found out Daniel Berrigan and Heschel collaborated on 60s anti war activism and I'm amazed that I could be so impacted by them in very different ways 20 years apart and then discover they were like, hanging out, doing shit together

I read Tolstoy's book on Christian anarchism "The Kingdom of God Is Within You" recently but there's a wiki page on it and everything, so probably not obscure.

Most of my politics are downstream of this book even though I haven't been a Christian in decades. Feel like most people aren't very aware of Tolstoy's late in life anarchist vegetarian era

I'm not a Christian or a pacifist, but I'm an anarchist and it's always good to read about the different forms that anarchism has taken. Things like this make it clear that questions of violence or nonviolence are kind of orthogonal to anarchism, not a defining part of it.

Wikipedia article on the Book of Enoch.

The story where Jeremiah and Ben Sira study the Sefer Yetzirah until they are able to make a golem. The bit where the golem, as soon as it’s animated, demands to be destroyed has been rattling around in my head ever since.

Not really obscure, but I’m currently reading the Guru Granth Sahib

I’m reading a translation of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight,” and the introductory notes mentioned that Bonaventure’s “three stages of illumination” culminate with the “mystic leap” (new to me), and now I’m completely re-evaluating the climax of “Last Crusade” as a body-mind-soul ascent for Indy.

O-Sensei, founder of Aikido, had prophetic visions and performed miracles in front of witnesses! (His whole life was wild, frankly, but this is the stuff most on-prompt)

Eve, its fascinating.

I’ve been reading about 4th and 5th century Christianity, and all sorts of wild stuff was going on. The Second Council of Ephesus in 449 was called the “robber council” (Latrocinium) by Pope Leo I and was basically overturned by the Council of Chalcedon two years later.

The Armenian Church rejected the results of the Council of Chalcedon, however, because the doctrine of Jesus’ “two natures” made no sense in their language. Lots of finicky word choice going on at the time, and much of it didn’t translate well.

And the presiding bishop of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church from around 340 until 1951 was appointed by the Pope of the Coptic Orthodox Church in Alexandria, after they requested Athanasius to send them a bishop.

Their plan for our future: scientificprogress.substack.com/p/the-plan-r...

The PLAN revealedscientificprogress.substack.com They are Social Darwinists: they say we deserve their digi-tatorship because we, the unfittest, are stupid enough to let them, the fittest. Solutions below!

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