The Evolving Jew

Interesting post from 2013. I had even forgotten some of this stuff myself: V'ten Tal U'matar, Thanksgivikkah, and the slippage of the Hebrew calendar http://evolvingjew.blogspot.com/2013/12/vten-tal-umatar-thanksgivikkah-and.html

I've been looking through some of the saved drafts of posts imported from my old blog that I never published here, or never finished writing, so never published at all. Here's one from 2008: Title: I want to raise kids far away from NY Even Modern Orthodox institutions in the NY area have elements like this: Racial Comments ‘Shock’ Principals Do I really want my kids hearing this racism from their classmates? In "out of town" schools, this is far less common. Fast-forward 14 years, I am raising my kids "out of town" and the Modern Orthodox community here is by-and-large free of racism :-)

Translation of every front page newspaper headline in America today: "We still don't know anything because no votes have been counted, but here's yet another bunch of inane articles about the election to keep you reading and cover the fact that there won't be any real news till tomorrow"

Or more accurately, it was the 15th anniversary last month of the various iterations of my blog. I started out as the blogger "Yehudi Hilchati" just over 15 years ago - my first post was on February 28, 2007. Though along with the rest of the JBlogosphere, my blog is mostly silent these days, I happened to notice that I missed the anniversary and decided to mark it.

 Originally posted in 2017: A friend wrote a piece about how Orthodox Jewry often has problems discussing God. My thoughts? The Torah says that Hashem created us in his image, and there's been a lot of philosophical musings about the various meanings of that. Ultimately, I think it's more accurate to say that we create God in our image. Not that God isn't real - I may doubt much of Jewish dogma, but I believe in Hashem. But part of what makes it difficult to speak about God communally in the Jewish community is that there are many Gods - or rather, many different perceptions of God. Hashem is an emotional concept. We each find our own path to him (or her) by perceiving God in a way that each of us can relate to - in our own image. For some that's a grand king, though that concept is more difficult to relate to in a democratic age where people have the right of self-determination. For others it's a parent, sometimes loving, sometimes stern. For others Hashem is a fri