Oh, what a great question! For those of you that don’t know, this is one of the roughest parts of the Gospel. This is the story where a non-Jewish woman, “of Syro-Phonecian origin,” comes to Jesus and asks him to heal her daughter, and Jesus says “It is not right to take the children’s food and throw it to the dogs.” And then the woman says “Yes, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from the master’s table.” And then Jesus says either “Woman! Great is your faith! It will be done for you as you wish!” (Matthew) or, ‘For saying that, you may go – the demon has left your daughter” (Mark).
This is super controversial because Jesus is clearly being very rude with the “dogs” comment to this woman. He is essentially calling her a dog. He does, of course, heal her daughter, but only after she does what appears like groveling. What’s the deal here?
Well, some context here. Everything this woman does would have been considered extremely “unpure” in ancient Judea. She is a non-Jewish woman, with a demoniac daughter, approaching a Jewish man and speaking with him without a male companion. She also tugs on his robes, which would have made Jesus “ritually impure.” Jesus is also clearly in the place where he is because he wants to escape the crowds who are following him around. Both Matthew and Mark speak of his attempts to escape to somewhere he can be alone. So Jesus is likely already grumpy because this woman is interrupting his one moment of what he hopes is solitude.
In addition to all this, she is of “Syro-Phonecian” origin. This is the word used for basically Hellenic and Roman people who live in what were ancient Jewish lands. Ancient Judea is currently under severe Roman occupation. She is what we might call a colonizer.
Okay, so add all this up, and what Jesus says is still wrong, but understandable. He thinks he is doing one of his trademark flips on this woman. She is asking for his help? Well, why does her and her people treat the Jewish people like dogs? Why is she interrupting him and doing things that would make him impure according to his own culture? Jesus is calling HER the dog, instead, as he often does in situations like this. He flips the script.
But, he was totally wrong. The woman flips it right back at him, and Jesus realizes his mistake. He heals her daughter. And even more important, after this encounter, he ventures even further into Roman territory and heals many many more people just like her. He realizes his mistake and immediately corrects it to a breathtaking degree. In Mark, the story directly following this is a story about a deaf and dumb man being healed by Jesus. That man was also deeply in “Syro-Phonecian” territory, but this never comes up. Jesus tells the man to “be opened,” according to the story, and I think this part of the complete lesson. Jesus had to be opened as well.
So, according to Christology, how is this possible? Isn’t Jesus supposed to be perfect? Well, Jesus is supposed to be “without sin.” But does he commit a sin here? I don’t think so. He speaks out of ignorance not malice, and he completely changes everything about his understanding of the world as soon as he knows better. He was also fully human. Being human MUST mean that he made mistakes. He just never did anything drawn out of evil. He was never filled with malevolent intention. And I don’t think he was here, either.
The lessons I think you can learn here are 2-fold. One: Leftists shouldn’t treat ignorance as malice. Two: If you make a mistake, like Jesus does here, you should immediately correct it in the best way you can. Jesus doesn’t just heal the woman’s daughter. He also completely changes the way he treats every person like her.
If you make a mistake, in modern parlance, like misgendering someone or making a racist joke, you didn’t sin. You just made a mistake. Correct yourself, and commit yourself to being much better afterward. Just like Jesus does here.
An old fashion pie recipe that’s super simple to make and a great Ostara/Spring Dessert! I’m making one for this Easter with my family.
Honey, Eggs, Cream are all Spring Foods. Honey symbolizes sweetness and the rewards of hardwork just like the little bees that work so hard to make it! 🐝
And Salt banishes negativity and is purifying!
This dessert is perfect for getting rid of the stress or worry of Winter and welcoming any sweet rewards from your hardwork in the future this Spring!
Ingredients:
One 9 inch Pie Crust (Store bought or one of your favorite crust recipes)
½ Cup of Melted Butter
¾ Cup of White Sugar
2 Tbs of Cornmeal
¼ tsp of Salt
¾ Cup of Honey
2 Eggs + 1 Egg Yolk
½ Cup of Cream
2 tsp White Vinegar
1 tsp of Vanilla Extract
Salt Flakes for Garnish
Preheat your oven to 350. In a large bowl, mix together your dry ingredients before slowly mixing in your wet ingredients one at a time…. (I never do this and just mix it all together randomly as I go, but it’s up to you.)
Feel free to add a sigil to the base of the pie crust. This is mine –
Pour mixture into your pie crust, it will be liquid and thin; that’s okay!
Cook for 45 to 60 minutes or until the top is golden brown and it starts to bubble.(I recommend 60 minutes on the middle rack. Mine didn’t burn at all!)
Take it out of the oven and let it cool for One hour or more to let it solidify. This step is very important to make sure it isn’t too liquidy. The consitancy should be like Pecan Pie Filling.
Garnish with Sea Salt or Himalayan Salt; any big salt flakes. But regular table salt will do just fine if the others aren’t available.
so exodus says that aaron stretched out his hand over the waters and the frog came up and covered the land of egypt and while english translators usually render “frog” as “frogs,” today at shul the rabbi challenged us to consider whether it could in fact have been one giant frog so we spent literally forty-five minutes arguing about whether there were swarms of frogs from the beginning or rather a single monstrous godzilla frog that split into multiple frogs once people started trying to destroy it and the congregation got so worked up that even after we’d sung aleinu and were heading out of the sanctuary people were still excitedly debating the moral implications of one frog versus many so what i’m trying to say is @judaism never change
I’d never heard of this before, so I looked it up.
The reason we’re certain it says “frogs” singular rather than just being an irregular noun (which was my first thought, especially since my dad was just lecturing me a few weeks ago on how Biblical Hebrew plurals aren’t nearly as regular as Modern Hebrew plurals because Modern Hebrew is more or less a conlang) is because in the first part of the passage God commands Aaron to call forth frogs, plural, but then the passage ends with Aaron calling forth frog, singular. So both forms are right there, they both exist.
The authority is considered to be Rashi (an 11th century French rabbi). He gives two explanations. 1) That a giant frog was called forth that covered all of the land of Egypt, and whenever the Egyptians struck it, it split into multiple frogs. 2) In some languages, some animals have both a regular plural form and a plural that’s the same as the singular (e.g. “fish” in English), so maybe that was the case for frogs in Biblical Hebrew.
The counter-argument to (2) is that the regular plural was used in the very same passage, which is why we need both explanations.
Rashi apparently gets this argument from the following Midrash (Biblical quotation in all-caps, Midrash in regular text)
AND THE FROG(S) CAME UP, AND COVERED THE
LAND OF EGYPT. Rabbi Akiva said: It was only one frog, but this bred so
rapidly that it filled the land of Egypt. Rabbi Elazar Ben Azariah said
to him: ‘Akiva! What business have you with Haggadah? Leave homiletical
interpretations and turn to Neg’aim and Ohalot! Indeed, there was one
frog at first, but it croaked to the others and they came.’
The upshot of all of these interpretations is Aaron summoned one frog, but God provided many.
[I got so into reading about this I forgot I had water boiling on the stove, and it all boiled off and I didn’t notice until I smelled the pan burning. I feel like this might be one of the most Jewish moments of my life.]
I love that this is basically the equivalent of the “would you rather fight 100 duck-sized horses or one horse-sized duck” debate.
Love the idea that Aaron was told to summon a plague of frogs but he either 1) accidentally summoned a single frog instead due to mishearing or misspeaking or better yet 2) thought to himself, you know what would be really great though, is just one GIANT FROG PIÑATA
bennu rising 