@WadCheber hmm. I wonder if "you can see your deleted answers" only applies if the question is still visible, then. I've copied the question and your answer (markdown) here: gist.github.com/cellio/…
@MonicaCellio - I'm glad you're here. I just posted a new question, and I'm a little worried that I might have inadvertently said something that could be taken the wrong way and cause offense. I would be forever indebted to you if you could take a peek and tell me if I should change anything.
I don't see anything that could cause offense there. Thank you for your sensitivity. You might also look at the mishkan in the wilderness that preceded the Temple; somewhere toward the end of Exodus God tells Moshe "make me a mishkan ("sanctuary") so that I may dwell among you" and at the very end when they set it up it says God's presence dwelt there. (This is from memory, so no citations.) So it's not just the Temple.
@MonicaCellio Yes, which is the part that confuses me.
He is everywhere and everything, basically, so I have trouble understanding the idea of Him having a specific home.
I think part of my problem is my upbringing in Christianity. The Christians don't have anything like this concept, so I have no context for understanding it.
This is just my own thinking here (no sources), but imagine you were a king who had a vast kingdom and you could live anywhere. But you have a special affection for this place, one that was built by your treasured people that you have a special relationship with. If that doesn't work out you can go elsewhere and you're not limited in any case, but maybe you have an attachment that's at least sentimental or maybe stronger?
And also, maybe you want your special people to have ready access to you?
This is probably my new favorite part of the SE community. I'm really enjoying the opportunity to learn about Judaism. Everyone has been very patient and helpful to me, especially yourself. :)
Don't worry about that. And don't think of it as paying it back so much as paying it forward -- you're contributing, and you'll contribute on other sites where maybe you give more than you get, and it all works out.
And if you learn something that helps you respond to others' misunderstandings of Judaism, that's a win.
@MonicaCellio Yes, my usual response to anti-Semitism is to go on the attack. I usually point out the fact that Christianity has had an appalling record of brutality and oppression of the Jews, which is literally the last thing that a Jewish man such as Jesus would have wanted. I don't think this approach is likely to win anyone over, but it feels good.
@WadCheber the ones who've already settled into their anti-semitism usually can't be helped, but occasionally you run across somebody who responds with "I never thought about it that way" or the like, and you feel like you've actually cracked open a brain a little. But yeah, most of the time you're probably not going to get through to them.
I also try to point out that pretty much every single example of brutality towards the Jews can be traced back to the Christian church. The Holocaust would have been impossible if not for the millennia of anti-Semitism promoted by the church.
I met someone online who was from Texas. He was accusing Elie Wiesel of being a liar regarding his time in Auschwitz, and insisting that Elie doesn't have a tattoo on his arm.
As it happens, Elie's son was the best man at my sister's wedding. Elie was there, and during the reception, he rolled up his sleeves. I saw the tattoo with my own eyes.
The anti-Semite admitted that he had never met a Jewish person in his entire life.
I turned him on to some books about the early relationship between Judaism and Christianity. I like to think that I changed his outlook.
Fun fact of the day: For an old man, Elie Weisel can dance like a champ.
@MonicaCellio I only met him very briefly. I didn't want to bring up the worst memories anyone has ever had, so I didn't mention Night. I just shook his hand and said "It's an honor to meet you."
If I recall correctly, his son's name is Elisha. I don't think I spoke to the son.
@WadCheber I hope my reaction would be similar. Especially at a celebration! I mean, if he were giving a talk about those events that would be different, but he's had a whole lifetime since then full of other things to talk about.
@MonicaCellio Yeah, I might have been more talkative if the situation was different, but a wedding isn't the right place for discussions of genocide.
On a less depressing note, I lived in Ireland for a year or so, and one time my parents came over to visit me. They offered to take me to London for the weekend, but it was St. Patrick's Day weekend, and even though the Irish don't really celebrate it much, I wanted to spend at least one St. Pats there.
They went to London, and one night they went to get a drink in the hotel bar. There was only one other couple in the bar. They said hello, then sat down across the room. My dad said "do you know who you just said hello to?" My mom said "a man and a woman." My dad said "look again". My mom didn't notice anything unusual. My dad said "That's Paul McCartney".
I worship the Beatles.
I missed the only chance ai would ever have to meet Paul McCartney.
i regret it, but I'm also kind of glad, because I would have ruined his night.
On the other hand, you got to spend the holiday in Ireland. It's disappointing to miss out on a chance meeting you couldn't have known about in advance, but you work with the information you have.
There is no possible way that I could have resisted the urge to pester him with questions and fawning admiration all night long.
@MonicaCellio Yeah, I loved every minute of living in Ireland. And a few years later, I took my dad to see McCartney playing the first concert ever at the new Shea Stadium.
The weird thing about living in Ireland was that I realized that I missed being around people who weren't white. The only time I ever saw minorities was in Dublin.
@MonicaCellio No, they are too respectful to bother someone who is out for a quiet night with his wife.
If it was George Harrison, on the other hand, my mom probably wouldn't have been able to resist talking to him. She was a George girl when the Beatles came out.
@MonicaCellio Oh yes, Ireland is the whitest place in the world outside of Scandinavia.
They're so white they're almost transparent.
If an Irish person is exposed to direct sunlight, they don't just tan, or even burn - they immediately burst into flames.
It's also a very small country with a very small population. I think the current population is a bit less than 7 million people. The population has actually never fully recovered from the Potato Famine.
The whole island is about the size of West Virginia.
You could walk across it from east to west in a few days, and from north to south in a week or so.
The odd thing is that the accents are very diverse, considering how small it is.
Accents can be diverse even in a small place if there are separate communities.
I grew up in a very white neighborhood -- not upper-class (lower middle, probably). I didn't have my first meaningful interactions with blacks until I went off to college; we just didn't have any. And nobody would have expected other ethnicities, like Asians. My how times have changed; now I have trouble imagining not being in a diverse place -- ethnicity, economics, education, culture, etc.
@MonicaCellio Exactly! I grew up in what might be called a lily white suburb, but my town as a whole was somewhat diverse. When I moved out of my parents house, I went to a neighborhood where I was one of the only English speaking households. I loved it. Now I live in the town with the second highest percentage of Asians in the country. I'm actually a minority here.
@MonicaCellio My dad grew up in the first integrated tenement building in the country. The apartment was so terrible that if you wanted to turn the lights on, you had to put a nickel in a slot in the wall.
He went to college in a remote area of western Virginia, and the first week he was there, an old black lady got on the bus. He is a gentleman, so he naturally stood up to offer her his seat. His friend grabbed his arm and tried to pull him down. He didn't understand the problem, so his friend explained that he was in the south now.
My dad got offended, and insisted on giving up his seat, but his friend said that my dad was putting himself at risk of a beating, but the black lady was in danger of something much worse.
He came to understand it a bit better as he spent more time there, and the people in the area were horribly poor. These were not the kind of people who used to own slaves. They were ignorant and uneducated, and they had no opportunity to learn why their racism was wrong.
And probably the last person they're going to listen to is an outsider who wants to teach them a new approach. So all he can do in that situation is to keep behaving the way he understands to be right.
My grandmother, an immigrant, routinely used the N-word, which my parents stressed we do not do. When I was old enough to ask about it I learned that she wasn't actually a racist, but "that's what people say" and she hadn't shaken it. I saw her working on it as I grew up, though; maybe concern for her grandkids provided the motivation she needed.
@MonicaCellio Yes, exactly. I think the most confusing part of the situation was the idea that his actions, however benevolent they might have been, and however right and well intentioned they were, would have terrible consequences for the black lady.
@MonicaCellio Yeah, it is easy to be tolerant and loving when you grew up being taught that this is the right thing to do, but it is much more impressive if you grew up not knowing that racism is wrong, and you manage to improve yourself anyway.
This is one more area in which the Jews have generally been a few steps ahead of the Christians.
When you look at old footage of the freedom riders on buses across the south during the Civil Rights Movement, it is quite obvious that the number of Jewish Rabbis is disproportionately high in relation to the number of Christian clergy.
@WadCheber yeah, I give her a lot of credit for that. This was my father's mother; he was the first one in his family to go to college and come back with new, city ideas. And at the time there were two competing memes: the man is in charge of the house (meaning our house), and you owe honor to your elders. So watching him handle his mother while still teaching us kids proper values was interesting.
@MonicaCellio My parents are extremely kind and loving, and they always taught us to treat everyone the same way, but they didn't have much experience with homosexuality. They certainly didn't think badly of the LGBTQ community, but they just didn't have personal experience of them. My family had the good fortune to meet my sister's best friend from college, who is gay.
He is from Alabama, so you can imagine what he had to deal with growing up. He would come to our house for Thanksgiving, because home wasn't a friendly place for him. My nana and grandpa fell in love with him, and they were extremely devout Catholics with very old fashioned views. He taught all of us a lot about acceptance.
My nana never got over the idea of "maybe he'll change his mind and marry Kristy" (my sister), but it was remarkable to see how much my grandparents were changed by knowing Jeffrey (Kristy's gay friend).
I can't imagine how hard it must be for the older generation to understand and absorb all the changes society is going through.
It seems like there's disruptive change in every generation; homosexuality was new to your parents' generation, relations with other races was new to your grandparents', and who knows what will be new to us when the next generation surprises you.
@MonicaCellio I'm a little worried about it. The only thing that could take me by surprise would probably be an alien invasion. I have already reached the age where I find myself complaining about the crappy music kids are listening to. :)
@WadCheber For ease of reading, click the "raw" link, then copy and paste the result into try.commonmark.org.
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@WadCheber How long ago were you in Ireland? We have a fair few African (particularly Nigerian, for some reason) immigrants these days, and not just in Dublin.
@WadCheber I don't know @MonicaCellio 's grandmother's story, but it needn't necessarily have been "not knowing that racism is wrong, and you manage to improve yourself anyway" that caused her to say "nigger" and then work on not saying it. It may have been not knowing that "nigger" is racism -- i.e., thinking that that's just the right word to use and not being racist at all
@MonicaCellio Yeah... IIRC the "too broad" wording, it's, well, too broad, not specifying what's wrong with the question. So I figured I'd custom-close it, and my custom reason would show up in the closure box and I could avoid the need to also comment. Of course, that's not what happened (as I should have remembered would be true): my custom reason showed up in a comment and the closure box said "not about Judaism", which is just silly. So I had to retain and even edit my comment, after all.
@msh210 I think there was some of both. As a young immigrant coming to a country with a new language and new cultural norms, she probably picked up both the word and ideas about how different segments of society interact. It's been a long time and I was a child at the time, so my memories are vague.
But yes, I think a big part of it was just thinking that was the correct word. I suspect that until her son left the rural midwest to go to university the topic probably just never came up.
