Sherlock Holmes fans have been playing something they call “The Great Game” since the 19th century. They pretend that Holmes and Watson were real people; that the stories really were written by Watson, and Arthur Conan Doyle was Watson’s literary agent.  In reality, the stories originally appeared episodically in a magazine, and Doyle wrote them for a paycheck on a tight deadline. He considered them throwaway work, something he was doing to support himself while he pursued his more literary aspirations. Consequently, the Holmes stories are full of inconsistencies and plot holes. Fo ..read more

 It's deeply ironic that Chanukah, which ostensibly celebrates the victory of Jewish fundamentalists, Started as a Hellenistic-style military victory commemoration holiday. Incorporated pagan solstice light-kindling which was meant to bring back the sun through sympathetic magic. Has dreidel as one of its iconic celebratory activities, which was adopted whole from the popular Christmastime game T-totum (the story of the Jews playing dreidel while hiding from the Yevanim first shows up in writing in 1898!). Adopted gift-giving from the American version of Christmas in the '50s. And most ..read more

 Something interesting I just discovered. "Why is a Victorian carriage door prominently displayed on a wall at Hughenden, the country home of Queen Victoria’s friend and Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli? The Prime Minister himself removed it from the carriage and preserved it as a tribute to his wife, Mary Anne. One evening the ambitious politician and his doting wife set off from his London house to Parliament, where he was to deliver a very important speech.  When the carriage door was closed, it slammed shut on Mary Anne’s thumb. What did she do? She suffered in silence, all the ..read more

  There’s an old joke about a rabbi who meets a maskil that ends with the rabbi saying, “You're not an apikores, you’re an am ha’aretz!” [You can find my take on that joke here.] We (by which I mean people who are no longer frum) hear this sort of thing a lot. If only we knew more, we’d recognize that frumkeitis the truth.   A couple of weeks ago my daughter showed me a siddur she had gotten as a prize for coming on time to daveningall year. It’s meant for teens, and has notes in the margins and appendices in the back that are supposed to answer questions that the author says he’s fr ..read more

 Something that bugs me is when I see people decry “today's” degenerate culture, and wax nostalgic about how much more moral the world used to be. In the frum world, this often manifests as rhetoric along the lines of, “In the alte heim, even the goyim were tznius!” Whereas now, boys have to leave the city during the summer, because there’s pritzus everywhere you look.   Oddly, when people talk about “morality” and how terrible the world is “these days,” they’re always only talking about sex. Specifically, how much easier it is now than in the past to see things they find erotic, and ..read more

Here's something fun. Well, something I find fun. Professor of Rabbinics Dr. candice levy gives a description of Zoroastrian beliefs about the afterlife that, by changing a few words, could be a description of current Jewish beliefs. To make the point about how closely Jewish beliefs about the afterlife align with Zoroastrian beliefs of antiquity, let's do exactly that.  First, Dr. levy’s description of Zoroastrian beliefs.    Zoroastrianism includes a belief in the afterlife, where the person survives death and transforms into the urvan (soul or self) to be judged and recompens ..read more

This is a stream-of-consciousness line-by-line response to a “letter” that appeared here and has been floating around the frum/ex-frum internet for the last day or two. The letter is in italics. Credit for the post title goes to someone on facebook (whose name I’m not including because it was in the private OTD group.)   An Open Letter to the Wicked Son Dear Son,   Your mother and I are so glad that you’ll be with us for Seder again. I know that you don’t believe the same as we do and I know you don’t typically observe the way that we do, but every year you come home for Seder. I wan ..read more

The following is an excerpt from my current work-in-progress, a book that examines the claims that Orthodoxy makes about itself. This is a section from a chapter about Orthodoxy’s claim to be essentially synonymous with the way that pious Jews have practiced in all times and places. I was proofreading it today, and decided to post it because it’s topical. ===========   The crisp matzah that Ashkenazim eat on Pesach is another example of a change to how we experience one of the shalosh regalim. Our ancestors from most times and places would not recognize as “matzah” the cracker-like food w ..read more

 I made a bas mitzvah for my daughter this past weekend - the same daughter whose birth I wrote about here. The following is the speech I gave at the event. I don't know if he was right, but a friend of mine told me afterwards that if my yeshivish family had any idea what I was talking about, they would have been upset. Which is, among other things, an indicator of how far I've come from where I was as a teen and young adult. --- Thank you everyone for being here to celebrate with us. A bas mitzvahis, among other things, a celebration of the continuation of Judaism. It marks the transiti ..read more

The following is a lightly edited and updated version of a bio I first wrote in 2018. I’m posting it now because I thought it would be useful to have it to link to. It has a narrow focus, and is a narrative of my "OTDness." With the caveat that it probably wasn't as coherent a story as it looks in hindsight. --- I took Yiddishkeitvery seriously, right up to the point that I stopped believing in it. That's not quite right. I take Judaism very seriously. Before I stopped believing in it, I thought it was an accurate description of the world. Now I don't. I remember sitting at my desk in first gr ..read more