Torah

Minute Mitzvah: Free At Last

FOR THOSE INTERESTED, WE AT Metaphorager.Net present another Monday Mitzvah (and its backstory).

Today: Tell the Exodus story on Passover.

“Remember that you were slaves in the Land of Egypt” is Torah’s most-repeated commandment. But if we get hung up on speculation (Did the Exodus “really happen?” Were the plagues natural disasters? If God saved us then, why not now?) we might miss a key point of the story: a people’s journey from slavery to freedom regained. This makes the Exodus less about miracles and more about common roots — both ancestral and mythic — and compassion: for the poor, for the oppressed, for those who don’t know their own freedom. The Exodus is our root metaphor. To quote a favorite teacher, “These are our stories. They tell us who we are.” What we can become after that is up to us.

Exercise: What tells you who you are? Why?

Life

Pithyism #10

CIVILIZATION IS NOT BASED ON agriculture, technology or finance — but solely on its members’ unspoken agreement to behave sensibly. Take that away …

Torah

Minute Mitzvah: You Are How You Eat

TUESDAY’S NOT TOO LATE FOR a Monday Mitzvah, unless you’d rather read something else.

Today: Don’t eat what’s not kosher (literally, “proper, fit”).

Let’s correct two misconceptions:

1. Kosher is hygenic.
2. Kosher is rational.

The basic rules from Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14 are to eat nothing from the sea without fins and scales, nothing from the land that’s not a split-hoofed ruminant, and no avian predators or bats. From a particular perspective, they are both arbitrary and culturally specific as Western mores against dog or (mostly) horse. The only real reason for a Jew to “do” it, simply and honestly, is that it’s a Jewish thing to do — either as a mandate from God or cultural co-creation. Most Jews I know keep kosher to some degree (some through active opposition), and one consequence of its intentional practice is to reveal the tangible connection between you, the food, the people who grew it, the way it came to you and the world of which we’re all a part. And that’s not arbitrary at all.

Exercise: Look at what you eat today, and why.

Crit, Writ

Journalism As Art Imitating Life

CAN WRITERS REPORT? THAT QUESTION nets a “yes” according to Daniel Elstrin in the June 19 Forward, reporting on the day Haaretz (think Israeli NYT) swapped its staff for 31 leading authors and poets:

“Among those articles were gems like the stock market summary, by author Avri Herling. It went like this: ‘Everything’s okay. Everything’s like usual. Yesterday trading ended. Everything’s okay. The economists went to their homes, the laundry is drying on the lines, dinners are waiting in place… Dow Jones traded steadily and closed with 8,761 points, Nasdaq added 0.9% to a level of 1,860 points…. The guy from the shakshuka [an Israeli egg-and-tomato dish] shop raised his prices again….’ […]

“News junkies might call this a postmodern farce, but considering that the stock market won’t be soaring anytime soon, and that ‘hot’ is really the only weather forecast there is during Israeli summers, who’s to say these articles aren’t factual?”

This is also the sort of newspaper dreamed of by most, if not all, of my reporterly colleagues, at least at some time or other (usually on deadline day of a slow week). But that’s true in another, non-ironic way: Elstrin also cites a couple of features whose subtle depth make a nice model for would-be human chroniclers.

Peruse:
– Daniel Elstrin’s article
– Ha’aretz Archives; select “10 jun” from the “Previous Edition” menu at lower left.

Torah

Minute Mitzvah: Watch Your Tongue

It’s Monday Mitzvah! If you’re not hip to Jewish ethnospirituality, feel free to pass.

Today: Don’t oppress anyone with words.

Like many of the mannerly mitzvot, this one seems easy — until you begin to ponder the meaning of “oppress.” Obviously, trash talk and insensitivity are out — but what about asking the price of something you’re not interested in buying? Trotting out that cute but embarrassing childhood story? Being rude to the help because you’ve had a bad day? Torah posits that the Universe was created through speech; is it any wonder that it also considers shaming akin to murder?

Exercise: Listen to yourself through the other person’s ears.

?

… And It’s Still Unbroken

WEDNESDAY NIGHT WAS SAN FRANCISCO and the Jellyfish Gallery, a cozy industrial space where 50 or so practical idealists gathered to talk about saving the world one action at a time.

The event was a local “spore” of the international Evolver.Net launch (which seems to be the latest public project by the millennia-old and occasionally secret Happy Mutant conspiracy, whose unspoken ideals include fierce creativity, kindness, neophilia, competency with tools and a compulsion to answer every “No” with a “Why not?”).

My friends at Conscious Consignment had heard about Evolver.Net at the recent Harmony Festival and were impressed by its founder, Daniel Pinchbeck. (Disclaimer: I haven’t yet read Mr. Pinchbeck’s works in depth, but he seems in the vein of meta-agnostic and polymath Robert Anton Wilson‘s Cosmic Trigger sans Wilson’s humor and “don’t believe everything you think” attitude.) As an old-school Happy Mutant who was 15 when Cosmic Trigger and Star Wars debuted, here’s what I saw:

1. Same energy, different faces.
A dizzying feeling of bilocation: people as young now as I was then, like looking back at the starting line of an endless race — spooky and cool at the same time, with a happy undertone of “And some day, their kids …”

2. Better tools and competency.
Organizing and voice-projecting are cheap-to-free these days, as opposed to the limited resources back when websites were called zines. Evolver.Net is one such: it’s a social network (a la Facebook) specific to organizing projects that may be too big for one person alone. (Tangential thought — the scene feels more … stratified than that o’ me youth; perhaps the difference between discovering potential and implementing it.)

3. Alas, another deadline.
If you also have lived through one Harmonic Convergence, two Grand Planetary Alignments and the turn of one millennium, after each of which historical moments life was expected to be completely groovy forever, you will understand my skepticism (see sense 2a) regarding the whole 2012 thing; saving the world (i.e., restructuring the human experiment to maximize all the good parts) works better as an ongoing process than something with a sell-by date.

Bottom line: Some very good and good-hearted people are doing some amazing and important things, and they’re using Evolver.Net to do it. Come join the fun — and be the world you want to live in..