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judío por elección (part 1)

(TW: aging, death, brief description of dead body and the effects of death)

We were stopped on the street two years ago by a small gray-haired lady who was thrilled to hear us speaking English. She herself was a Londoner who transplanted to our small Andalusian village with her husband almost twenty years ago. She was thrilled to hear people speaking in her mother tongue and invited my wife and I in for coffee anytime.

We started taking her up on it. The pandemic was still On, but not Lockdown On. We wore masks, sat on their broad terrace over six feet apart, and shouted conversation at each other. She always gave us tons of cookies and coffee from her once-white, now-brown-from-use plastic electric kettle. I get nervous about plastic kettles, but drank it anyway. And here was where we met her husband, E.

E was stooped and frail where his wife, S, was merely beginning to run down a little. When you get to E's age, the skeleton starts to come out in your features. Even then, we had no idea how old E really was until he casually mentioned that he remembered his father coming back from the war.

The War, he said, and I told my wife afterwards this must be WW2, and later, we asked enough questions to validate that guess. So in his 80s.

E forgot a lot of things. He acting like being Jewish was a secret because he'd forgotten how he'd hung up a Passover plate on one wall, and how he'd marked the eastern wall of the house with a plaque of the Tablets of the Law. We decided to make him feel safer by talking about my Jewish stepfamily and my wife's experiences of being mistaken for Jewish. He talked about learning Hebrew before he learned English, a little about growing up Orthodox in England in the fifties. Then he made us swear we'd never tell anyone in the village that he was Jewish.

We swore.

He wasn't an easy person to be around. Part of aging sometimes is feeling the weight of all your seemingly-innocent choices along the way dragging your body down into oblivion. Throughout his life, E smoked and E was a jeweler who did woodworking and home repair and almost never wore a mask. E when I knew him was tied to an oxygen tank and sounded like he breathed underwater. Throughout his life, E was strong and able to exert gentle control over others; when I knew him, his reedy voice rose to sharply criticize anyone around him.

He complained of how things were different now in the village; I saw his fear of the last great big change behind his words.

That was how my wife and I treated these visits: we were seeing an old man at the end of his life far away from his family trying to cope. He told the same set of stories over and over again; we took it as him needing certainty that somebody would know and tell those stories. (One of them: E worked on set design for the show "Merlin", kept the molds, and utilized them in his home design... so some of his walls had little archways with Merlin's star or the throne's symbol impressed upon them.) He went back and forth between taxing S with unreasonable requests and trying to ratchet them back when he saw he went too far.

Early in the summer of 2023, E started repainting and cleaning off his terrace and rooftop. S would cry and beg and plead for him not to, it was too hot, he'd go without oxygen too long (she was right). E ignored her. I drank my coffee and thought about how he must know the end was near and how he wanted to leave the house in a nice condition for S to live in, or sell, afterward.

The last thing he tried to do was repaint part of the ceiling which had collapsed and decorate it with stars, galaxies, and black holes. "It takes a great deal of time to reproduce the universe," he'd say, and my wife would laugh and say "Of course, it took G-d six days but we're not G-d", and then E'd laugh, every time.

Toward the end of an obscenely hot June, S called me in shrieking tears and told me "I think E has died!"

I was in the middle of six chores when I got that phone call, none of which were done that day. My wife and I ran for S's house. E had been mostly bed-bound for the past two weeks. He had gotten out of bed, walked into the foyer, and collapsed. He was almost certainly dead immediately. S had to do CPR on him while weeping and talking to the emergency workers in broken Spanish.

Never seen a dead body before.

After the workers finally arrived, it went more quickly. They picked his body up and wrapped him in a sheet and laid him on the marital bed. My wife, who speaks Spanish natively, spoke to all the different workers. I didn't, so I ended up finding a mop and cleaning up the urine that coated the entire foyer. (The next day I'd bring by a steam cleaner, run it through the whole foyer, and then I steam cleaned her kitchen so we could all pretend I hadn't brought it over to cleanse the last of E from the house.)

(When I learned that you kasher a microwave by steaming water in it, I immediately thought of that day.)

I led S into the room where E's body lay. I pulled out my phone while she cried. I didn't yet understand how an ethnoreligion worked, but I still had a sense that while E wasn't passionately religious, he would want certain things for himself. If he didn't, then S needed something that would help her move into grief. And I knew that it'd help me. So I pulled up an English language version of a mourning prayer and guided S through it.

This calmed her a little, and after touching his outline, she left the room. Alone, not sure if he said it or if I believed it, I recited the Shema on his behalf. (Which I had learned, to my goyim embarrassment, from "The Sandman".)

After E's passing, none of his remaining family were Jewish, and nobody wanted his Judaica. Once S started cleaning all the remnants out of her house, she went hard on purging the Judaica. I don't blame her for this, exactly. She was grieving and she had no concept of how important some of those objects could be. My wife told her to give us any books or items that were about Judaism instead of throwing them away. When she did, S lit up and immediately gave us his mezuzahs. One was empty. One had a tatty old prayer sheet inside it.

My wife and I looked for hours on how to dispose of the prayer (we still haven't, we're working on it). I looked up whether or not it was okay for non-Jews to hang mezuzah. As I shared the results, my wife laughed and said they'd feel weird about it, like they were cosplaying Judaism.

"I'd like to be Jewish," they said, as they had for the past fifteen years on and off, "only I can't."

This time, for the first time, I said: "Why not?"

When I was last on tumblr, it was ten years ago and one of the biggest faux pas you could commit was incorrect tagging.

It was Literally Colonialism to use a tag that was For Certain Oppressed Groups. The actually-autistic tag was created because allistics "took over" the autism tag, and this/other tags became heavily policed by users to make sure they remained a "safe space".

I remember seeing countless posts about how autistics would never be safe if we didn't have a bubble to protect us from interacting with allistics. The same went for tags about transliness and queerness. The going approach used militarized and hyperbolic language to characterize and other folks who weren't in the community: autistics (the group I had the most direct experience with) were attacked by allistic invaders who violated and conquered autistic tagging systems.

The "Literally Colonialism" isn't a joke. I saw plenty of suggestions that to even use a tag which was perceived as being "not yours" was colonization of ideas and thoughts. To be allistic, have an opinion on autism, and tag it as "autism" was held up as being exactly the same as the behavior of empires and nation-states.

Obviously, I don't entirely agree, and don't think this particular hyperbolization is helpful for advocacy or for dialogue. But I do find it interesting how, in the decade since I was last here, it seems to (mostly) still be true that you should only use certain tags if you have a particular identity...

... unless you're not Jewish, in which case feel free to use any and all Judaism-related tags and break the system's meager functionality for Jewish people.

As someone who is using Tumblr to connect to online Judaism, it's daunting to see how many posts under "judaism" are by non-Jews screeching about Israel. Seeing non-Jews openly talk about they tag their posts with gore, rape denial, Holocaust denial, October 7 denial, and other deliberately-triggering material with Jewish-themed tags specifically to make Jewish users of Tumblr feel unsafe. Reading them telling each other about how this is advocacy, this will absolutely win the war for Gazans, and how anybody who blocks them (in order to make sure the tags can actually work as intended) is a genocidal coward. Using that self-same militaristic language to describe their activities, only instead of criticizing, they're bragging.

It's, uh, kind of fucked up.

Imagine going to the actually-autistic tag and finding nothing but a wall of allistics claiming that they've victoriously conquered the tag from those inhuman monsters pretending to have problems when other Real People are the ones who are suffering. I think we would all intuitively understand that this would be Wrong. Even if there was some supposed outward justification for being mad at certain autistics, we would understand that holding all autistics everywhere responsible for it is wrong. That breaking a community's ability to talk to each other is wrong. That trying to trigger people and then telling them to commit suicide is wrong.

And we'd also understand, or come to, that the very action of going "This community I'm not part of doesn't deserve to have this tag, I'mma take it back, or at least ruin it so no one else can have it" is an expression of privilege. It is wrong, and it is immature, and it is cowardice.

These smug, self-involved, active attempts at causing harm make no sense at all if seen as advocacy; they help no one, advance no cause, stop no Zionists (whatever that means) from expressing themselves online.

They only make sense when seen as Jew-hate.

judío por elección (part 2)

(part 1.)

My wife and I started searching for a community after a lot of talking. But, technically, we were already looking.

After E died, S gave us charge over a specific set of books. He had told her that it was vital these books go to a synagogue. He preferred it to be a London synagogue. We had no clue which one.

Shoved in with all the different books he had, and we inherited, was ephemera from different synagogues--pamphlets from the 1980s and 1990s, booklets from the '40s and '50s. We started calling and emailing them about these books, because they were pretty important.

They're chumash with a publication date of 1898.

Problem was, we couldn't get any synagogues to respond. The one who finally did said that they had too many books and could not accept any more. They suggested that E might still be honored if the chumash went to a Spanish synagogue.

The community here, as you can imagine, is struggling. Spain has done a real good job at keeping Jews out since the expulsion of 1492. Most groups operate in half-secret: no website, or a website that hasn't been updated in years; no phone numbers. Half of the people we tried to contact never responded. Most of the rest couldn't support our conversion.

One rabbi from Madrid answered us. She made it clear that we'd have to move if we wanted to attend her group. This was expected and crushing. We're poor, disabled, and pretty well stuck where we are. But then she said that there was a brand-new community in a city closer to us, one we visit with some frequency. She introduced us to their leader.

I have the impression that A would be considered a cantor. He is not a rabbi, but he can lead services. He had a few questions about my wife and I's histories and experiences with Judaism. (Those experiences I'll talk about somewhat, but it's difficult to talk about meaningfully while also maintaining privacy, so it'll have to wait.) He wanted to know if and what we were reading. Then he invited us to Shabbat, which they conduct through videocalls.

This group does not have a rabbi, much less a synagogue. Several of the folks who call in for our Shabbat meeting live in a different city entirely. That person talks about experiences with Mossad. I want to get better at Spanish so that I can learn from her.

There's singing (as someone who's seen Ashkenazi services, the Sephardi tradition sounds amazing), of course, and because there's so few of us, A has my wife and I read sometimes for services. The very first thing I got to read was Psalm 23, which has always been one of my favorite works of art... which A couldn't know when he asked me to read it.

I said I'd stumble at lot. He told me to read it slowly in Spanish, that it's better to read slow and correctly than quickly and clumsily. He seemed pleased with my effort.

I was raised Mormon, and the entire approach to worship was very different, in a way I found appealing. My wife said it wasn't that different for them--they were raised mainstream Protestant, so singing and standing/sitting a lot were normal for them.

When we were asked to raise a glass of alcohol, we asked if it had to be wine. (We're bad Spaniards. Neither of us likes the stuff.) A said that as long as it was fermented, it was fine. One attendant had a gin and tonic.

The last time we celebrated Shabbat, we used gay-pride themed glasses and filled them with beer. "¿Qué tenéis?" we were asked.

"¡Cerveza!", which cracked them all up, and the ex-Mossad member talked about how the Orthodox she used to worship with would drink whiskey.

Setting aside the Shabbat has been, overall, easier than I thought it would be. I check HebCal to make sure when the candles should be lit. I do all my household chores throughout Thursday and Friday-daytime. My wife tries to cook as much as possible before the candles are lit, and we eat, talk, and do our video-call service with the community.

Saturday I set aside. I have to keep reminding myself not to work, to consider things done even if they look like they're not.

But onward.

Our little community is fantastic, particularly A. He found out I'm having problems with some of my IDs. He told us not to worry. He knows a lot of people who work immigration and he can help us go to the right office and navigate the Spanish bureaucracy. ("Byzantine" should be replaced with "Spanish".) He's answered all our questions and invited us to events about the Shoah and personally introduced us to people.

They were so welcoming, so open, so not-rejecting-us-three-times (but if you count all the rabbis who told us no, technically, that's more than three) that it shocked my wife and I. We talked beforehand about how the community might want to withdraw, and not trust new converts, given October 7. We found the opposite. Our local Jews seem to feel that our willingness to look at how the world is behaving right now and still say "Your people will be my people" demonstrates our sincerity in and of itself.

On the other hand, when we first met A in person, my wife made a comment regarding his personal safety. He admitted that there was a man in the room with us who's his armed bodyguard. He and his wife do not leave home on business related to the community without their bodyguard.

My wife felt a cold hand creep up their back when they heard that. I was not nearby--I was checking all the exits of the auditorium and calculating where we'd need to sit if we had to flee. There were "pro-Palestinian" protests going on that day and the odds were there wouldn't be any danger near us, but... but...

Several of A's family members are also converting. We will have to travel halfway across the country to a mikveh. There are many medieval mikvehs in Spain, but to my knowledge, there are only two which are actually in use. My wife says we'll have to do a road trip. I immediately think about how "one Sephardi and four converts go road tripping across a country where one of its favorite dishes was designed as a Fuck You to Jews and Muslims" would be a fucking great novel.

Would be? Will be. And completing this branch of the journey with a journey feels right.

Oh, and my favorite A story: he invited us to spend some time with him and his wife after a community meal. We agreed to attend the meal, but had to leave after. "We have a lot of dogs and cats," my wife said, "we have to return and care for them."

"We'd love to have you," he said, "but it's a mitzvah, taking care of animals. Do that instead."

Afterward, my wife stared at me in wonderment and said: "I don't think I ever heard that once in church."

These tags from @falconwhitaker were too good to leave behind.

If your praxis involves 4chan-tier behavior, maybe it's not praxis.

Also from @transmascpetewentz:

This was precisely my intent.

Like @kick-a-long pointed out, the Israel tag is completely unusable. I checked that tag. It's got nothing but Palestine-related content. You can't find anything about Israel. This does not feel like a coincidence, considering how most of these slacktivists do not believe Israel should exist.

Here is a thing: I looked at the USA tag here on Tumblr. Considering that the USA, according to these slacktivists, is the number one source of imperialism and colonialism and General Badness in the world today, you'd expect that tag to be equally broken. You'd expect it to be wall-to-wall photos of people killed by US bombs and weapons, homes and nations ruined by US wars, calls for USians to be very, very ashamed and guilty all of the time for all of the horrible things they've done, and Good USians promising they hate themselves and their nation. Right?

But wrong! There are several political videos and comments, both about the wars in Gaza and Ukraine and about social issues. There's also photography of American landscapes. Discussions of American musical bands and performers. Funny graffiti. Video games. People trying iced tea for the first time.

It seems like USians are permitted to have a tag where they can interact with all aspects of their country, good and bad, cultural and political, despite the many, many, many actions the US government has taken which Tumblr users would rightly find objectionable.

But Israelis are not.

I wonder if there's some qualitative difference between most Israelis and the rest of the world that makes Tumblr users okay with doing this. It can't be wars or perceived genocide; by their definition of genocide, the USA has committed genocide every single day of their lives.

Hmmm. Curious. What could it be?

When I was last on tumblr, it was ten years ago and one of the biggest faux pas you could commit was incorrect tagging.

It was Literally Colonialism to use a tag that was For Certain Oppressed Groups. The actually-autistic tag was created because allistics "took over" the autism tag, and this/other tags became heavily policed by users to make sure they remained a "safe space".

I remember seeing countless posts about how autistics would never be safe if we didn't have a bubble to protect us from interacting with allistics. The same went for tags about transliness and queerness. The going approach used militarized and hyperbolic language to characterize and other folks who weren't in the community: autistics (the group I had the most direct experience with) were attacked by allistic invaders who violated and conquered autistic tagging systems.

The "Literally Colonialism" isn't a joke. I saw plenty of suggestions that to even use a tag which was perceived as being "not yours" was colonization of ideas and thoughts. To be allistic, have an opinion on autism, and tag it as "autism" was held up as being exactly the same as the behavior of empires and nation-states.

Obviously, I don't entirely agree, and don't think this particular hyperbolization is helpful for advocacy or for dialogue. But I do find it interesting how, in the decade since I was last here, it seems to (mostly) still be true that you should only use certain tags if you have a particular identity...

... unless you're not Jewish, in which case feel free to use any and all Judaism-related tags and break the system's meager functionality for Jewish people.

As someone who is using Tumblr to connect to online Judaism, it's daunting to see how many posts under "judaism" are by non-Jews screeching about Israel. Seeing non-Jews openly talk about they tag their posts with gore, rape denial, Holocaust denial, October 7 denial, and other deliberately-triggering material with Jewish-themed tags specifically to make Jewish users of Tumblr feel unsafe. Reading them telling each other about how this is advocacy, this will absolutely win the war for Gazans, and how anybody who blocks them (in order to make sure the tags can actually work as intended) is a genocidal coward. Using that self-same militaristic language to describe their activities, only instead of criticizing, they're bragging.

It's, uh, kind of fucked up.

Imagine going to the actually-autistic tag and finding nothing but a wall of allistics claiming that they've victoriously conquered the tag from those inhuman monsters pretending to have problems when other Real People are the ones who are suffering. I think we would all intuitively understand that this would be Wrong. Even if there was some supposed outward justification for being mad at certain autistics, we would understand that holding all autistics everywhere responsible for it is wrong. That breaking a community's ability to talk to each other is wrong. That trying to trigger people and then telling them to commit suicide is wrong.

And we'd also understand, or come to, that the very action of going "This community I'm not part of doesn't deserve to have this tag, I'mma take it back, or at least ruin it so no one else can have it" is an expression of privilege. It is wrong, and it is immature, and it is cowardice.

These smug, self-involved, active attempts at causing harm make no sense at all if seen as advocacy; they help no one, advance no cause, stop no Zionists (whatever that means) from expressing themselves online.

They only make sense when seen as Jew-hate.

judío por elección (part 2.5)

(part 1. part 2.)

We got ourselves a rabbi!

Most in our community are Sephardim, except for an Ashkenazim family who just joined us, and the new Rabbi is also Ashkenazi. That's how it is in most of Spain, though. Newer Jewish communities have folks from all types of practices. The struggle to rebuild what was destroyed in Sepharad is real, ongoing, and valuable.

Dunno when, but he wants to interview the wife and I over the phone. I could be mistaken, but I think he's Conservative, which is way closer to how we wanted to practice Judaism than I'd expected when we started this journey.

Not a giant essay this time; just some Good News.

Whither the pro-Pals a year from now?

I feel that "fandom as politics" most adequately covers the behavior of pro-Palestinians on Tumblr, and being an Old Hand At Fandom, this gives me some impressions on what the future holds. I know this is a matter of great concern for those of us on Tumblr who are their favorite targets.

My estimates are not scientific, and are based on experience in seeing the rise and fall of many fandoms. I am not psychic and make no guarantees.

The Old Guard: The smallest contingent of pro-Palestinian activists will be permanently, irrevocably radicalized by propaganda, and they will not go back. Truthfully, there is nowhere for them to go. They have burned all of their online goodwill invested in this fandom, and as the rest fall away, they will rage at their own allies, burning those bridges as well. These people are just as hateful and insufferable IRL as they are online, so they will know nobody who isn't also pro-Pal. They will remain behind in the fandom. When it later repopularizes as Tumblr rediscovers the fandom due to future content being released in the form of another war, the Old Guard will snark and brag about how they carried the torch while everybody else abandoned the fandom of The Great Cause. The Old Guard will constitute the BNFs of the pro-Pal fandom and their closest friends, at most 10% of the current fandom.

The Fond Recollectors: A lack of new, shiny, emotionally-evocative content for the pro-Pal fandom will drop it, the same as how many fandom members abandon a fandom once it is cancelled or after endless delays for new material. These folks will not think of their time in the pro-Pal fandom as wasted. They will look back on this time of trauma, war, and upheaval as one of the most exhilarating and joyful times of their lives. They will generally act as though they weren't part of the fandom, but when they find people who used to be in the fandom, it will be like finding somebody who shares a fandom you used to adore. They will whisper, with smirking conspiratorialism, of how one time they got a Jewish--uh, Zionist--person to deactivate their Tumblr account. They will confess among one another how many times they sent "kys" messages to Zionists, and giggle. It will be like ex-Johnlockers lol'ing among themselves about having stalked the actors IRL. If the fandom gets new content in the form of a war, then the Fond Recollectors will rejoin with glee. They will accept the Old Guard's hostility ("Where were you all this time?") as their just punishment. Otherwise, Fond Recollectors will be mid-grade antisemitic in whatever new political or media fandoms they join. They will constitute roughly 30% of the current pro-Pal fandom, and will mostly be composed of folks who post extremely prolifically but are not currently BNFs.

The Shamefaced Ex-Fans: Whether we like it or not, most folks get caught up in a fandom cycle due to hype from friends and socmed pressure. This creates a peak of interest which is followed by burnout. A person in this category engaged constantly and thoughtlessly with pro-Palestinian fandom content for hours every day, yet never engaged with purpose or by creating transformative works. Once the fandom fails to produce enough new content, they will look around, dazed, and wonder what the hell they even liked about it in the first place. Now out of the hype cycle, Ex-Fans will be able to look more critically at their behavior. They will not recognize their Jew-hate, but they will recognize the silliness of a lot of their behavior. "Gosh, I can't believe I thought reblogging on Tumblr would end a war" will take the place of phrases like "... would make that ship become canon" in their lexicon. They will look back at this time with embarrassment; again, not because they understand the harm they have done, but because they understand it's "cringe" to care about stuff that's not pluperfect and doesn't achieve the stated goal. They will be the least apparently-antisemitic and the most likely to make friends with Jewish people online, because they will change their names and will not admit what they were doing during the Hamas/Israel war. If the pro-Pal fandom gets new content in the future--again, in the form of a new war--the Ex-Fans will primarily fall silent. They will be overwhelmed by shame (not guilt, and not responsibility). They will not rejoin unless dragged into it, but they will not speak out to support Jewish people. They will constitute roughly 60% of the current fandom.

These are bleak estimates, because a newly revitalized pro-Pal fandom will not need the Shamefaced Ex-Fans. The core of the fandom, the Old Guard and the Fond Recollectors, will do what all passionate cores of fandoms do in these situations: recruit. And while most of these recruits are destined to become Ex-Fans in the far future, many will join the other two categories, being partially or permanently radicalized into a movement of antisemitism.

In a sense, what we are seeing is what Tumblr would have been like if Moffat had said "Johnlock will never be canon, and it's all because of the Jews".

judío por elección (part 3)

(part 1. part 2. part 2.5.)

"I think," I told my wife the other day, "we're gonna have to use the mikvehs for women."

They made a face--a nose-wrinkly sneer, equal parts anger and tired.

"It's about what I expected," I said.

"Yeah," they said, "but still."

One of the reasons my wife and I chose to convert at this moment is because we want children, and we're about to take that step. As adults, we have both been far too smart for church. They were mainstream Protestant, I was Mormon. They stopped attending. I got my baptism revoked (a real thing that really happened, I have the paperwork and everything).

The one community we've had for the past couple of decades has been the LGBTQ community. We both assumed that queers meant it when they talked about protecting queer and trans children, as well as the children of queers and transes. So we ignored all the microaggressions, hints, signs and omens that we weren't welcome. We told people how impossible it was for us to have kids. They'd cluck their tongues and offer sympathy and support, but only so long as our problems were structured in a way they cared about. In a way that theoretically reflected their own oppression.

Our tales of how we couldn't adopt, do IVF, or "simply" have unprotected sex with a total stranger who wanted no parental rights were restructured as being about institutional homo/transphobia. A cautionary tale. Proof that the listener's antinatalism was justified, for see what befalls those foolish fags who actually, ew!, WANT to breed!

"You guys are dinks! That must be nice," said an asexual friend of mine. She had to explain to me what dink meant. I was privately appalled that someone who knew for a fact we desperately wanted children would talk about how great it was that we were double income... no kids.

No kids.

There's nothing you can tell me about human reproduction that I haven't thought of. My wife and I have put more thought into this than any hundred couples you can name. We have both done therapy, research, and soulful self-examination in the name of Not Passing On The Trauma. I was girled as a child, and so I know all the work necessary for being a parent. We've tested each other for years with "What if the kid's a jock? What if they really like Marvel movies? What if they want to go to church?" kind of questions, and all of the answers we give amount to something like this:

Parentage is the only relationship where the other person in the relationship is supposed to move away from you. Always, they're moving away, and that's how you know you've done it right. The child begins inside someone's body, and they end up their own human person, and that's as it should be. If you perceive being a parent as having a relationship with a really cool person, then you're going to have a good relationship with them. If you want an adorable creature to pour all your unmet needs into, get a fish tank.

Anyway. In the last year, my wife and I have started letting folks know we are taking serious steps to have a child. I'm not getting specific on the details online, because my child will deserve to have their privacy and I don't want to divulge their journey as though it's mine.

But slowly, one by one, as they were told of this intent, all the queer and trans folks we know withdrew from our social circle.

"I'll just pick up a trans kid from the adoption agency if I want one." "I've always thought of fostering queer kids." "Why can't you just custom-build a child genetically with IVF?" "Won't you be angry if the child isn't really, y'know, YOURS?"

As though having a child is a matter of indulging my own selfish whims. As though any fostering or adoption agency has ever been open and happy to let queer or trans folks walk right in and customize who they're willing to foster or adopt. These reactions are, to be frank, cruel and brutal, and they center what should be good news on the recipient's own anger at their own parents. I don't mind providing you support, but it's fucked up how my sharing good news keeps turning into other people demanding support.

It leaves my wife and I feeling like maybe this whole Friendship and Community thing is actually one-way.

"Maybe you keep running into people who are toxic or self-centered," one might suggest, "and that's not the whole community!" And... sure, that's possible. It's possible that the dozens of queer and trans folks I've met are not representative of the community to which they belong. But it's also possible that this hypothetical one is demanding that I offer compassion and understanding to folks who completely refuse to offer it in return, who will argue that expecting them to be compassionate or kind makes relationships "transactional" and something-something capitalist pigs.

The only people we've met who were queers and who were also enthusiastic for us to have children are, like us, rural folks who are not exactly Part Of The Community. They don't go to clubs or surf the internet--there's no signal at their house, and anyway, they're too tired after breaking their backs doing farm labor (or being disabled) to drive for two hours to drink with strangers.

Anyhow. This response has thrown a lot of things in relief for me. I don't want to be around people who despise my child in advance, or me for having them, and I don't care if those who despise me are right or left, cishet or in the community. I don't have time for people who hate me.

I want my child to feel welcome among a community, a group who will embrace them and teach them and make them feel like they're a part of a greater story than one I can tell them by myself.

When we told A we would have to skip a Jewish community event because we were getting IVF, he called us almost in tears. He was happy. He talked about how a community without children is dead. He reassured us that while our children won't be born Jewish, given when we'll get dunked, they will be as soon as possible. That our children will be adored and taught to be sephardim from the beginning. And he insisted that he would pay for the bris, if the child needs one.

This guy I've known less than six months did more to make us feel welcome and safe than folks I've known for decades.

But. But.

The Spanish Jewish community has not recovered from the expulsion in 1492. Then, it's estimated that despite multiple massacres wrought by both Muslims and Christians, the Jewish population was at 100,000. Nowadays, it's somewhere between 13,000 to 50,000, depending on how you count. Accordingly, there are, to my knowledge, three mikvehs in the entirety of Spain.

The one we will have to use is operated by an Orthodox community. I am still pre-everything and my wife does not think medical transition will help them. Hence my telling my wife we'll have to use the women's mikveh. And I've come to slowly realize that in all likelihood no one will give me a bris or a substitute shedding of blood.

And... well. I get it. I'm coming into someone else's house. I need to follow their rules. I am not in a position to shop around. It's not like there's a surfeit of choice for either of us.

So I tell myself this is necessary as a sacrifice for the child. And I tell myself I won't ever tell them about this.

But it would be nice if there were a community where I could tell somebody.

Did we really just spend the last few months seeing people scream about bloodthirsty Jews Zionists who crave mass murder and genocide and steal Palestinian babies and eat the skins of corpses which they also steal?

Because now I see every single Jewish person I know on Tumblr spending all day begging people not to kill themselves while the pro-Palis are drawing fanart of self-immolation.

Do you want death cults? Because that's how you get death cults.

Anybody who has ever questioned Stephen King's Peculiar Little Town has never lived in one

"Okay, so a guy we know murdered someone with a pitchfork and made someone else take the fall for it. On the other hand, he helps us with our trees when no one else will. So maybe we just stay out of the reach of your average pitchfork while we're working with him? And be very very nice? Oh and don't tell him his son tried to steal a chainsaw today, or he'll be embarrassed and then murder his son too. Or us, for suggesting his son would be a thief. It may depend on how his day has gone. But I do need his help with my trees."

These are real thoughts I really had to think this evening and I am so tired.

y'all are sleeping on the meme potential here

Anybody who has ever questioned Stephen King's Peculiar Little Town has never lived in one

"Okay, so a guy we know murdered someone with a pitchfork and made someone else take the fall for it. On the other hand, he helps us with our trees when no one else will. So maybe we just stay out of the reach of your average pitchfork while we're working with him? And be very very nice? Oh and don't tell him his son tried to steal a chainsaw today, or he'll be embarrassed and then murder his son too. Or us, for suggesting his son would be a thief. It may depend on how his day has gone. But I do need his help with my trees."

These are real thoughts I really had to think this evening and I am so tired.

I used to think growing up Mormon had no utility once I got my baptism revoked

Then covid-19 hit and it turned out that knowing without research how to create a 3-month emergency hoard of food and medicine was extremely useful

And since October 7, knowing how to recognize apocalyptic recruit-driven high-control cults is also extremely useful

So, uh, this has been a weird few years for me

Rural problems

The internet and mobile networks for the entire village were out for the past 12 hours.

This is less dramatic than Pitchfork Guy but somehow WAY more frustrating

Another bit on the pro-Pal fandom, this one axiomatic

Being a good person is not the same thing as pretending as though you believe you are a good person.

Being a good person takes work. You have to do stuff. Doing stuff is hard. Doing good stuff is harder, because you have to put thought into determining what you think is good beforehand. That requires self-reflection, honesty, a willingness to challenge oneself, and taking in information from other people to verify that your concept of "good" is, well, good.

The nice part is that once you evaluate what is good and start doing good things, it becomes easier. You gain inner calm, peace, and even joy.

("Good" is not always the same as "necessary". Necessary work can be a slog, or it can be horrific. But there can still be a calming satisfaction at the core, the security that this is necessary and therefore worthwhile.)

Pretending to believe you are a good person takes less immediate work. You don't have to do anything that positively impacts the real world, and you don't have to do any of that annoying, time-consuming self examination. But in the long run, it's more exhausting. By far.

You are insecure about whether or not you are a good person. You're pretending to believe you are good. You can't feel secure in something you pretend to believe. That insecurity gnaws at you, especially when you engage in bad behavior--harassment, doxxing, posting gore, swarming tags, encouraging and promoting suicide among your fellow "activists", telling your opponents to kill themselves, stalking, spamming unrelated content with literal Nazi propaganda.

None of those are good things good people do. And you understand that. You would think someone was bad if they did those things to you. The cognitive dissonance between who you want to be and who you really are, as determined by your actions, is scary. It's painful. It rears up every time someone you have labeled a Zio colonizer scumbag asks you to please just stop and you remember a time when you begged someone--an abuser, a troll online, a 4channer, your parents--to just stop please just leave me alone.

That must feel terrifying, and again, it makes you insecure. It makes you question if you're doing the right thing.

So you do the work to pretend to believe you are good. And that's far more work than goes into being good.

You recruit others, and all of you agree that you will pretend together. Tabletop gaming has taught us how powerful this imaginative play can be. You all reassure each other that you are good and you are right. But since you're all lying to each other, that means you must spend more, and more, and more time every day telling each other that you are good, chasing that high, that feeling that you are a good person and your actions are justified.

You tell each other that your "opponents" in this "battle" are not people, so anything you say or do to and about them is okay. You look at lists of "dehumanizing tactics" and instead of internalizing what those lists are teaching you, you go: "Ah, so if I don't use the word 'vermin', anything I say should be fine!" And then you say it.

You do not smile over good news. You only smile when one of your opponents logs off Tumblr because you made the site unusable and unsafe for them. (The expression you make there isn't really a smile, but we'll call it that, since the corners of your mouth do turn upward.) You tell yourself you're just attacking Zionists and pretend you do not see how you're really going after Jews.

No self-examination; that would mean admitting that you're lying to yourself and others. Instead, you traumatize and exhaust yourself until you're psychologically incapable of self-examination. You watch snuff films. You stare at mangled bodies until you're weeping and physically ill (certainly, you're too ill to check whether the video is real, or if it was taken from this conflict).

You force your beliefs into your fandom spaces so that others, the bad people, cannot escape their complicity in genocide.

But more importantly, you do that so you can't escape.

You cannot engage in any fandom but the pro-Pal fandom because that takes imaginative energy away from your biggest pretense--that you're a good person.

You are NOT hurting people because you are striking a blow for Palestinians. You are hurting people, including yourself, because you do not want to do the work of becoming a good person. You are afraid that self examination, at this point, will reveal to you that you are exactly the sort of person you believe you are fighting.

That fear, that insecurity, that dread, that restless sense that if you ever rest or stop or think for just a moment, you'll discover something awful? That's your conscience.

I do not ask you to change your mind about your political opponents. Your defenses are already on your lips and in your mind; a thousand How Dare Yous for me hinting that you look at other people as people. What I will ask you is to consider this.

I came to young adulthood just as Bush was elected, and the Iraq War post-9/11 was the first war I really followed as an adult. I did what you're doing now. I forced myself to look at photographs of destroyed bodies. I looked at photographs of torture perpetrated by US soldiers. I blogged about it obsessively.

I told myself that I was Doing My Part to end the war. But really, it's that the anxiety of being an American during the war made me insecure over whether or not I was responsible for all of this, and therefore, a bad person. If I pretended my looking at snuff photos was activism, and that it was good, then I could pretend to believe I was good and shout "Not in my name" at protests. I could deny my responsibility.

What I really did was traumatize myself. It's been almost twenty years. I can still see some of those torture pictures in my head. In the end, that is the extent of the impact of my online activism. The blogs are all long deleted, and nobody remembers them.

Only my trauma remains.

I do not want this for you. I want you to be wiser. There is still time. You can stop.

Stop hurting yourself and other people. Do the hard work. Examine yourself and your actions. Consider what your own heart is trying to tell you whenever you start to get the shakes and your throat gets tight. Do not take that feeling out on random people online because they have a Magen David in their pfp.

Once you have done the hard work, it gets easier. You will be able to advocate and work for whatever causes you believe in because you know they are good, not because you're joining your friends in cosplaying goodness. You will still be traumatized, and you will still be sad, and you'll definitely still get angry. You will have to face how you've acted exactly like your own past abusers, and that's a real tough row to hoe.

But at the end, you will be able to advocate and work because you want to, instead of feeling as though you must in order to keep up the masquerade.

Among the books my wife and I inherited from E was this set of four instruction manuals. Titled "The Amateur Mechanic, vols. I-IV", they are among my favorite additions to my collection.

Y'all, these books have instructions on how to build the following:

A printing press

Induction coils

Greenhouses

Riveted boots

A wood harp

Taxidermied animals

Artificial marble

Model "flying machines"

A "Cartesian diver or bottle-imp"

A machine for stoning raisins

An orange-cutting machine for marmalade

An "magneto-electric machine" (????)

To say nothing of all the repair tips and advice it offers.

Based on their contents and the spines, I have to assume that these are the alternate universe versions of the three journals from Gravity Falls.

Taking Intro to Judaism is wild when you're converting to a Sephardic community.

We've had two classes in a row about kashrut. The Rabbi is Ashkenazi. He is also trying to teach us all the of the rules so we'll do fine before the biet din. So he's going down the list of stuff like "Probably no turkey, definitely no Fanta Naranja, no food from restaurants that aren't kashrut, milk and meat plates", etc. And again, I get it. He doesn't expect us to follow all of these rules all at once, we're just being educated.

But one thing I'm finding about Spanish Sephardim is that it's an even harder-core kind of diaspora. There's a broad tolerance for, or lack of observance of, food-related rules that I find fascinating.

Kitniyot are something we're expected to know about, but around here, you can have beans and rice during Pesach. During kabbalat shabbat, we were complaining about how it's impossible--not tricky, impossible--to get Passover wine while drinking plain old normal red wine the day after the Rabbi laid down all the rules about handling grapes.

The Rabbi was like "here look I carry a card with all the banned substances listed on it so when I shop I won't buy something with an insect- or blood-based preservative". Which is cool! But meanwhile, the cantor was like "holy shit, bro, how are you and your wife avoiding eating pork and shellfish IN SOUTHERN SPAIN, you are very serious about being Jews aren't you".

It just seems very Spanish to me (affectionate) to learn the rules and then shrug in their general direction because whatyagonnado?

Anyhow, I howled in agony over Fanta Naranja, but I think giving it up would be best anyway. Probably keeping turkey on the menu, though.

Literally nothing has helped me further in my conversion journey than reading an article which asserted that "The Princess Bride" is a Jewish fantasy film and then rewatching the film with that context in mind.

(I lie, I kid, other stuff has been more helpful. But I'm definitely one of those olds for whom watching "The Princess Bride" on VHS until the tape wore out was a meaningful core memory, so this new understanding of the film kicked me right in the feels.)

Agreed, OP, and a gigantic rant incoming:

Traditionally, you receive personal information about someone which could be used to ruin their social or psychological well-being by--and I know this is difficult to process, but please try--building a relationship with them first.

Why do you feel entitled to the personal information of total strangers? Do you demand to know the phobias of your cashiers? Do you pester your Uber driver or whatever about their triggers? Do you scream "I'M X YEARS OLD, HOW OLD ARE YOU???" to every person you pass on the street? Do you not speak to the delivery person for your Amazon order unless they hand over their driver's license, so you can be sure they're of a Safe Age and possess the Safe Gender Marker?

The concept people are struggling with here is "right relationship". As a total stranger, you do not have right relationship with me--you have no relationship! If you want to know more about me, you can read my blog posts where I discuss certain personal subjects I'm comfortable with being online, or you can talk to me personally, build a relationship, and then ask.

If you don't like that this process takes work on your part, well, you're not ready for friendships that aren't surface-level echo chambers, so we were destined to never get along.

If you're afraid you will learn something that will make you angry and upset and not want to be friends anymore, then you are seriously not ready for friendships of any kind. Your current friend group is either just as defensively cruel and untrusting as you are, or else too afraid to confront you about your bad behavior. In other words, not really friends at all.

And maybe you should work on that.

"Not having a carrd is a red flag!" No a red flag is you thinking you're entitled to a little pamphlet full of someone else's information.

So I wrote an addition to a post recently talking about punitive justice on Tumblr.

Someone reblogged it, then deleted their reblog and went with reblogging the original post.

I had gone to their blog to see if I'd be interested in following them, so I noticed this when I wouldn't have otherwise.

I wish I could believe they'd disagreed with my point overall. It happens.

But I don't. I believe they reblogged me, then noticed my final point about how Tumblr folks have redefined "Nazi" to be synonymous with "Zionist" and "Zionist" to mean "Jew".

And, based on their other posts on the current war, they realized they'd be ejected from the terrorism fandom if they publicly agreed that Jews have been badly treated on Tumblr in the last year.