Category Archives: News

Rabbi David Wolpe, Being Awesome

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Because Conservative Judaism know which millennium it is, Rabbi David Wolpe, of the prestigious 107-year-old Sinai Temple in California, announced this week he’ll allow same-sex marriages to be performed at his temple now that it’s finally legal again out there.

Not everyone at Sinai Temple is embracing this move. A congregant named M. Michael Naim took issue with the fact that, you know, man-on-man action is forbidden in the Torah:

“Homosexuality is explicitly condemned in Scripture and has been categorically and passionately rejected by all classical Jewish legal and ethical thinkers as a cardinal vice in the same category as incest, murder and idolatry.”

Yikes.

The Times article goes on for a bit about the culture clash between slightly-more homophobic Persian Jews and the other congregants at Sinai Temple. But here’s the money quote from Rabbi Wolpe’s original statement:

“Our clergy believe that this decision is in the best tradition of the Conservative movement which views the Torah as a living document that allows room for new understandings and approaches. As we have modernized the role of women and many other practices, the demand on the part of our brothers and sisters who are gay to be able to live in a sanctified relationship is a call to our conscience and our responsibility as Jews.”

Word.

OMGWTFBIBLE Episode 9

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Episode 9!Behold! Episode 9 of OMGWTFBIBLE with A Mysterious Stranger is now available!!

This episode is the first I’m doing in the new format (explained here) so I don’t have a pithy In which for you!

Double Wide Bar was gracious enough to host us this month, and I am forever grateful to them. The people there are endlessly helpful. I cannot say enough about how kind they were. Please, if you’re in New York, pay them a visit and sample their incredible whiskey collection or their delicious menu.

There are so many ways to listen to Episode 9!

Direct link is here.

You can also: subscribe in iTunes, subscribe via RSS, or listen via Stitcher!

“The Fat Jew” Helps Slim Down the Homeless

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There is a guy who calls himself “The Fat Jew.” Apparently, he has been using New York’s ubiquitous CitiBike racks (which I love, by the way) to offer free cardio classes to homeless folks. Ok! Here is a video:

Is this insulting? I don’t know, maybe a little.

<h/t: Jewcy>

Pray the Ex-Gay Away

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Maybe there is a God after all!

Exodus International, a leading “ex-gay” organization (you know, those lovely groups that think if gay guys pray hard enough, they won’t like dudes anymore), is shutting its doors.

And this except from an apology from Alan Chambers, Exodus’ president, is just–wow. Read it for yourself:

Please know that I am deeply sorry. I am sorry for the pain and hurt many of you have experienced. I am sorry that some of you spent years working through the shame and guilt you felt when your attractions didn’t change. I am sorry we promoted sexual orientation change efforts and reparative theories about sexual orientation that stigmatized parents. I am sorry that there were times I didn’t stand up to people publicly “on my side” who called you names like sodomite—or worse. I am sorry that I, knowing some of you so well, failed to share publicly that the gay and lesbian people I know were every bit as capable of being amazing parents as the straight people that I know. I am sorry that when I celebrated a person coming to Christ and surrendering their sexuality to Him that I callously celebrated the end of relationships that broke your heart. I am sorry that I have communicated that you and your families are less than me and mine.

See Episode 9 Live!

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chapter9

Episode 9 Live!

New venue! New time! New David!

Episode 9 is almost here and it’s happening on my birthday! Come be a part of OMGWTFBIBLE’s live audience as we record our next episode!

Episode 9

Double Wide Bar

505 E. 12th Street

6:30 PM

 

And afterward, help me celebrate my 28th birthday! RSVP here!

The End of the Beginning

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Wow.

OMGWTFBIBLE is a project I started a little over a year ago. On a bit of an insane whim, I decided to write my own translation of the Hebrew Bible. The podcast I do each month, where a friend reads a chapter or so of my translation while I provide commentary, is a fun way to showcase the work I’m doing, but the core of the project is just to create this thing: a complete, relatively accurate, and interesting translation of the entire Old Testament. In what little free time I have.

Very often, this has seemed like an impossible task. The book is just so massive, not to mention rife with words with ambiguous or unknown meanings, that in the back of my mind, there’s always been a little nagging voicing saying, “do you really think you can pull this off?”

Maybe I can. I’m happy to announce that, as of this weekend, I’ve finished my initial translation of Genesis. Or, as I’m calling it, “In the Beginning.” I still have to revise it and edit it and make sure the jokes are actually funny, but the words are all there. It’s done. I’ve translated the first book of the Bible.

Therefore: thank you everyone who’s been coming to shows or supporting this thing online or given me reviews on iTunes or helped with promotion or been a guest on the show or have simply let me know how much they’ve enjoyed it. So much of the reason I’ve kept pushing forward to finish the first book is because of the feedback I’ve got. Thank you for reminding me that, even when I’m searching through concordances for hours to figure out what obscure ancient words mean, this is a thing worth making.

Retranslating the Bible, One Word at a Time

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The Texas Bible in action.

Or, Just retranslating one word.

Jon Dyer had a problem. There was no word in standard English translations of the book that accurately capture plural form of “you” in the original text. In his words:

[Just] about any time I teach from the Scriptures I have to point out a place where the English Bible says “you,” but the original Hebrew or Greek indicates you plural rather than you singular. This means the original author was addressing to a group of people, but a modern English reader can’t detect this because in common English we use “you” for both singular (“you are awesome”) and plural (“you are a team”). This often leads modern readers to think “you” refers to him or her as an individual, when in fact it refers to the community of faith.

Here in Texas (and in the Southern US more generally), I tell my audience that we have a perfect equivalent to the original Greek/Hebrew second person plural: “y’all” the contraction of “you all.” This of course always gets me a good laugh. And this is not unique to the Southern US – many other areas of the English speaking world also have spoken forms of you plural such as “you guys,” “yinz,” and “you lot.”

So, like any other enterprising web developer/former youth pastor, he created a Chrome plugin to fix the problem. With the Texas Bible, Chrome will automatically retranslate appropriate “you”s on a bunch of Bible websites to “y’all,” “yinz,” or “you guys.”

 

 

http://donteatthefruit.com/2013/05/texas-bible-second-person-plural-chrome-extension/

<h/t: First Things>

Today in Jewish Food News

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Have you heard? A 13 year-old kid from Queens won the Scripps National Spelling Bee today on the word “knaidel!” You know, a matzoh ball!

Wait a minute. Something smells fishy. And it’s not the fish balls. You’ll never see one of those near my chicken soup.

After spending most of yesterday trying to figure out the most clear transliterations of Jacob’s grandsons, I can assure you: there’s more than one way to spell “knaidel.” Or is it “knaidel”? “Kneydel”? “K’naydell”?

Have a good shabbos, I guess! Er, I mean, shabbot shalom!