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God is Like a Ride Sharing App (How God Challenges the Past)

July 1, 2015 by Patrick Beaulier

Shefa_Tal

In his book The God of Old, author James Kugel makes a surprising observation about how the ancient Israelites saw God in their lives. God, it turns out, was something like an obvious, tangible presence. God wasn’t an abstract concept that one had theological debates over. God just was. And sometimes this God was in our space, and in our faces, in the form of miracles, prophets, angels (who were really just flesh and blood people), architecture, the weather and all sorts of things.

As the author states on his website:

The God of Old was not invisible or abstract. He appeared to people – usually unexpectedly; He was not sought out. Often, He was not even recognized. Many biblical stories thus center on a “moment of confusion,” in which an encounter with god is at first mistaken for an ordinary, human meeting. In the biblical world, Kugel shows, the spiritual and the material overlapped: everyday perception was in constant danger of sliding into something else, stark but oddly familiar. God was always standing just behind the curtain of ordinary reality.

Side note: I’ll never get over the fact that one of my favorite Bible scholars has a last name that translates to a casserole often made with noodles or potatoes. The fact that there is a genius in this world running around with a pot luck dish for a last name gives me a joy that is indescribable.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Community Member Blogs, Jewish Media Reviews Tagged With: god disruption, god interruption, rabbi patrick, rabbi patrick aleph, ridesharing, silicon valley, song of moses, uber

Bible stories about 2Pac, mall water fountains, and what happens when we lose the point

June 23, 2015 by Patrick Beaulier

pouring one out

Gather around as we tell the ancient story of 2Pac, toss coins into mall water fountains and try to figure out why we keep doing the same pointless stuff over and over again. (And some Bible just for fun.)

Mall Water Fountains

Like many of you, I remember my mother taking me to the mall and letting me toss a penny into the fountain. “Make a wish”, she said, and toss the coin. In a flash I would ask myself if I wanted to try to hit the top of the fountain, and watch my coin disappear as water gushed down the tiered sculpture. That was fun — but it was just as fun to toss it in the bottom of the fountain, hear a big gulping sound as the fountain swallowed my coin, and seeing it waft to the bottom of the fountain to forever rest with the coins of other kids.

Man, that sounds so awesome!

Throwing a coin in a water fountain is fun. But I’m not sure why.

Perhaps it’s the reckless abandon of destroying money like it’s nothing.
Perhaps it’s a way of being included in the artistic dance of water over stone.
Or maybe tossing a coin into a fountain is part of something bigger.

It’s that “bigger” thing that always interests me.

[Read more…]

Filed Under: Jewish Media Reviews Tagged With: 2pac, beth el, libations, pouring one out for the homies, tupac shakur, why do we throw coins in fountains, wine ceremony

The Garden of Eden and Why Lotto Winners Go Bankrupt (With Something About Mike Rowe From Dirty Jobs)

June 17, 2015 by Patrick Beaulier

Dirty Jobs #150

Let’s talk about the Garden of Eden, why lotto winners almost always go bankrupt, the Near Eastern concept of heaven, and why Mike Rowe from Dirty Jobs is an accidental theologian.

Heaven

In the book Heaven: Our Enduring Fascination with the Afterlife, author Lisa Miller writes:

Gardens…were the best kind of place a poor desert farmer could imagine. Indeed, a verdant and protected garden was almost beyond imagining. Garden walls are crucial to Biblical imagination.

The word paradise, in fact, comes from the Persian word pairidaeza, which means, “walled garden”. The famed psychologist and philosopher Carl Jung had a near death experience in which he found himself in such a garden, surrounded by pomegranates, which are rooted in Middle Eastern symbolism and in the Bible especially as a symbol of fertility.

Or he may have been high. Freud did a lot of coke. Who knows what Jung might have been into.

Regardless…

Edenic imagery has found its way into all kinds of creative expression. In films such as What Dreams May Come, Just Like Heaven, and the silent film Modern Times, visions of gardens where peace and love permeate all aspects of life envelop us in rapture.

So Eden equals Heaven. Got it.

Or maybe not.

Is the film interpretation of the Garden of Eden, a carefree world, really what Eden was like? I suggest no. While Eden was magnificent, it was not the spa-­like vacation that later artists and theologians made it out to be. It wasn’t like winning the lotto.

Let’s talk about that for a moment.

Lotto Bankruptcy

Most lotto winners end up declaring bankruptcy.

Odd, huh? How could winning a multimillion dollar jackpot put you in the poor house?

Marketwatch has a few theories, but the one that interests me the most is the idea of mental accounting, that lotto winners go broke through a process of “treating their winnings less cautiously than they would their earnings.” The money from the lotto is somehow less important, less valuable, less tangible, than money you earned from your work. Lotto winners take their money for granted until it’s gone, because it’s a different category of money than anything they had ever experienced before.

Bottom line: there is something profoundly important about a hard day’s work.

And it turns out, Adam and Eve knew something about that.

God, we are told, put Adam in the garden to “work it and to guard it” (Genesis 2:15). When God tells Adam, “I have given you all the herbage bearing seed” God is not saying that Adam will sit and relax as all the work of the garden is done for him. Rather, Adam is to work with what God has given him in order to feed himself and Eve, just as the animals are given the same herbage to eat. In fact, it could be argued that connecting “to every beast…to every bird…green herb is for food” (Genesis 2:18) is a way of telling mankind that their responsibility is to literally guard (shamrah) the land from the animals that will eat the same food as them!

All this begs the question: what kind of lazy place requires you to guard plants in a field, which you cultivate? How lazy of a life can one really have, while at the same time having dominion over everything on Earth (Genesis 1:26)?

The answer is simple: Eden is something created, not something consumed. And if we want to live in Eden, we have to actually make it happen.

Which brings me to the show Dirty Jobs and its host, Mike Rowe.

Dirty Jobs

Mike Rowe is on a mission to repair what he calls a profoundly disconnected economy. Millions of dollars in student loan debt, high unemployment, a crumbling infrastructure…all these things put together are an economic disaster.

For Rowe, the solution is oddly simple: reward honest, hard work.

Rowe’s non-profit, mikeroweWorks, gives scholarships to men and women who are interested in taking up trades that benefit our economy. His message of closing the skills gap in America resonates with people who have gone to four year universities, and come out unable to do anything productive.

But underlying Rowe’s charitable work is actually something spiritual; Mike Rowe’s outreach is about the peace that comes from separating what you are passionate about, from what earns you a living.

“When you put passion first, you erect a gigantic wall…don’t follow your passion, but bring it with you.”

I have had this discussion with many, many people. The theory is that if we work hard at preparing to be whatever it is that we are going to be, that the payday will come and we will be happy.

That may be true for many people. But not everyone. And I suspect a great amount of emotional turmoil comes from a crisis where the idealized self that we want to be never comes through. The world, we feel, conspires against us to prevent us from living the dream. So we suck it up and do something we are not passionate about, while feeling like a cog in some great machine.

What Rowe is saying is fantastic. Forget about the magical life you think you want, and instead focus on doing what it is that you’ve got to do to make a buck, and at the end of the day, relax and enjoy that other thing that truly matters to you.

Earning a Living vs. Earning a Life

Another way of putting all of this: there is a difference between earning a living, and earning a life.

Adam had to earn a living. That living was cultivating Eden. But the life that he would earn at the end of that hard workday was Heaven.

We all want Heaven. But we are not always willing to cultivate Eden.

God put Adam in Eden without asking him what his true passion was. God did not ask Adam if he had always wanted to be a priest, or a lute player, or whatever else one could do. God said, “this is it, pal. Go work this garden. And when you complete your work, have fun with Eve. Welcome to heaven.”

In case you think I’m being a hypocrite, because I love PunkTorah and being a rabbi is what I get to do, I’d just like to say that secretly, I still want to be a rockstar. I’ll never get to have that dream. It makes me profoundly sad.

But I get heaven instead. So I’m cool with that.

Written by Rabbi Patrick

Filed Under: Jewish Media Reviews Tagged With: dirty jobs, gan eden, garden of eden, jewish heaven, judaism heaven, mike rowe

Make Your Own Haggadah For Kids

March 31, 2015 by Patrick Beaulier

Screen Shot 2013-03-08 at 12.02.10 PM
Please give a suggested $10.00 donation to PunkTorah for downloading this free Make It Yourself Haggadah.
Download the MAKE IT YOURSELF HAGGADAH by clicking this link.
There is a lot of stuff in Judaism. Wine cups, challah covers, mezzuzot, Torah scrolls, tallitot, tallitot k’tanot, books, and more books. Which makes it easy for us to teach the lofty ideas of theology and culture and the weight of 5773 years of history to children who have been alive for a second of that history. On Passover, by studying the haggadah, we can learn about the story, liberation theory, historical context, political realities, and family traditions by going through a pre-set order established by the haggadah.

There is magic in a Passover seder. For those of us who attended seders as children, there may be magic coating the memories of the Passovers of our youth. In settling down for a long marathon of talking, arguing, sneaking [Read more…]

Filed Under: Jewish Kids, Jewish Media Reviews, Passover Tagged With: childrens haggadah, convert to judaism, convert to judaism online, darshan yeshiva, diy haggadah, jewish children, kids haggadah, kids passover, make your own haggadah, online conversion, patrick "aleph" beaulier, patrick aleph, punktorah, rabbi beaulier, rabbi patrick aleph beaulier

Vegetarian and Vegan Passover Recipes

March 31, 2015 by Patrick Beaulier

NK CORRECTED

If you’re looking for animal friendly Passover alternatives, look no further than the NewKosher vegan cookbook. Chock full of Passover recipes, as well as delicious recipes for the entire Jewish year, this book is holy in more ways than one. Of course, who wouldn’t love Matzo-Potato Ball Soup, Salad of Romaine Hearts, Eggplant “Cookies” with Roasted Tomato Sauce, Oven-Roasted Baby Beets and Chocolate-Caramel-Almond Matzo?

To download this free eBook, just click this link.

In addition, check out some of our other great Passover recipes throughout the PunkTorah blog. We’ve made substitution recommendations for vegans:

Vegan Mushroom “Chopped Liver”

Vegan Truffle Chocolate Pie

Jewsy Boozy Potato Vodka Exodus Lemonade

Moroccan Orange Carrot Salad (omit the yogurt and substitute agave nectar for honey)

Nigella’s Butternut Squash With Pecan (omit the blue cheese)

Vegetarian Gefilte Fish (contains eggs)

Filed Under: Jewish Media Reviews, Passover Tagged With: eating animals, jewish vegetarian, jewish vegetarianism, jewish vegetarians, kosher vegan, newkosher, punktorah, vegan passover

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