Josh Pollock 🌱☀️🌲

Screenshot of WhatsApp chat with Meta AI that I accidentally texted “mom” to and the stupid fucking bot no one asked for replies “Heyyy Mom!!! 🤗 What's up? Need some help or just wanna chat?” A completely useless response. Like, I’m a software engineer and if I shipped a search engine to production this bad I would literally die of embarrassment.

You can’t just change what the search bar is for!
I tried to search WhatsApp for the chat with my mom because I wanted to text my mom, a normal thing people use WhatsApp for, but instead I texted “mom” to a MetaAI, which is completely useless.

people who complain about those of us who are anti-climate doom fail to ever mention that we have been trying their approach for decades and we have lost

people cannot be scared into change. the proof that it doesn’t work is that it fucking hasn’t

Big yellow flowers, kinda falling apart

Two yellow flowers, Willy

Good morning 🌱🌼🌝

Right wing scardee-cat ignorant Hebrews:

“I’m afraid of Zohran Mamdani.”

Rabbis with a firm believe in God, human rights, and social progress:

“Wu-tang / Mamdani is for the children.”

www.instagram.com/reel/DMghy-p...

It’s like they believe in capitalism so hard you want less money.

Pink hibiscus flower

Pink gladiolus flower, last one on stem, others are wilted

Good morning 🌱🌸🌺

“Sleve: There are three different times “Steve” is replaced by “Sleve”. The T and the L keys are nowhere close to each other on the keyboard. Similarly, “Kirk” is always replaced by “Krik”. I don’t know why. But it’s funny. I plan to name my firstborn child Krik McBain.”

Yes. I paid 1600/month for a fourth floor walk up in Astoria more than 10 years ago. Prices have gone way, way up since.

The time jump in the King of the Hill reboot makes perfect sense if you assume the original series featured characters stuck in a loop (hence no one aging ever) which was destroyed by Kahn’s Grill Stravaganza entry rupturing the time-space continuum. 1/

Mex Mico is my favorite state.

Very big pink flower

Good morning 🌱🌸🌺

I like going to the game, but I’m not sitting through it in the snow

Let history remember that this loathsome monster was inciting Rabin’s murder back in the day for trying to make peace.

Nobody can say they didn’t know, didn’t see, couldn’t have imagined.

This was as inevitable as all the steps that preceded it when he’s left unchecked.

No conscience.

I can’t say it enough: U.S. culture is scam culture. It pervades everything we do. We don’t notice it because it’s the water we swim in. A party would do well to remind everybody how awful this is and propose to fix it.

Good morning 🌱🌸🌺

Page 294 of Judaism is about Love by Rabbi Shai Held Remarkably, as the Bible progresses the figure of Joshua all but com- pletely fades away. After the opening chapters of the book of Judges, Joshua is mentioned only three times in the entire rest of the Bible, 133 Several recountings of Israel's early history completely ignore the con- quest, while others contain broad and fairly vague statements about how God "drove out" the Canaanites or brought Israel to the land; 134 accord- ing to the Bible scholar Robert Hubbard, only three later biblical texts describe Israel violently dispossessing the nations in war. 135 The Hebrew Bible "rarely recalls the violent conquest, never glories in its goriness, and never promotes it as policy for the future."136 We are left to consider the possibility that Joshua's eclipse reflects later biblical writers' desire "to move beyond the violent era of Joshua or the fact that they already had, "137 Yet I began with a more radical claim, that the God of the Bible does not actually command the genocide of the Canaanites. What do I mean by that? THE BOOK OF JOSHUA: A BOOK THAT SUBVERTS ITSELF Strikingly, the book of Joshua consistently subverts and undermines its own claims. It boldly makes one claim, only to deconstruct it just a few verses later. Consider: Joshua 11 ends with an announcement that Joshua suc- cessfully conquered the whole land of Israel: "Thus Joshua conquered the whole country, just as the Lord had promised Moses; and Joshua assigned it to Israel to share according to their tribal divisions. And the land had rest from war" (11:23). Yet just two chapters later, the narrator tells us that "Joshua was now old, advanced in years. The Lord said to him, 'You have grown old, you are advanced in years; and very much

Page 296 of Judaism is about Love by Rabbi Shai Held WHAT IS COMMANDED IN DEUTERONOMY? When the people enter the land and conquer it, they are told, they should doom the nations they find there to destruction. Wolterstorff wisely suggests that the way we've interpreted Joshua "forces a back-interpretation of Deuteronomy."45 Just as the fulfillment in Joshua is to be understood in hyperbolic terms, so too should the original command in Deuteronomy. The text of Deuteronomy may well contain an internal hint of this. Right after they are ostensibly commanded to wipe out the inhabitants of the land, the people are instructed, oddly: "You shall not intermarry with them: do not give your daughters to their sons or take their daughters for your sons" (Deuteronomy 7:3). Presumably, if you kill people, you will not intermarry with them; if you've already commanded the former, the latter seems gratuitous at best. It's possible to understand the prohibition on intermarriage as a rationale for the mandate to wipe out the land's inhabitants: kill them, lest you intermarry with them and become corrupted by their worship of other gods (7:1-5),146 but I am skeptical that this is the correct explanation of the flow of these verses. More likely, I think, the warning about intermarriage serves as a kind of wink: of course you aren't literally going to kill every last one of them, so be careful not to intermarry with them. In other words, like much of what we've seen in Joshua, the command in Deuteronomy to doom every last inhabitant of the seven nations to destruction is hyperbolic, not meant to be taken literally.*)

In Judaism Is About Love, Rabbi Shai Held wrestles with how a religion about justice and love can condone genocide. His answer is it doesn’t, God did not command it and he uses the Book of Joshua to make the case.

Yellow flowers blooming, with a bee on them

Yellow flowers blooming, some in ball form, some open with orange center

Yellow flowers blooming, some in ball form, some open with orange center

Good morning 🌱🐝🌲

Screenshot from A JEW WITHOUT SINAI by Rabbi Tali Adler on Hadar.org These is the line of Aharon and Moshe, the text begins. As readers, we expect to see the names of both Moshe and Aharon’s sons: Gershom and Eliezer, Moshe’s sons, and Nadav, Avihu, Eleazar, and Itamar, Aharon’s. Instead, the text names only Aharon’s sons, leaving a gap where Moshe’s sons should be. In some ways, this absence is not surprising. While Moshe does technically have children, their most remarkable characteristic in the Torah is their absence from Moshe’s life. We first learn that Moshe has been separated from his children since his departure from Midian when Yitro comes to meet Moshe, bringing Moshe’s wife and children with him:

Screenshot from A JEW WITHOUT SINAI by Rabbi Tali Adler on Hadar.org It is a devastating end to the story of Moshe’s children. Having missed both slavery and salvation, Gershom’s descendants never quite manage to rejoin the covenant. They are disaffected, so much so that Gershom’s son, Moshe’s grandson, eventually becomes an idolatrous priest. Moshe’s name is written with a suspended nun, the Gemara states, because Yehonatan behaves more like someone who would be associated with the idolatrous king Menashe than with Yehonatan’s actual grandfather, Moshe. In this reading, it only takes three generations for the family that never experienced God’s revelation firsthand to fall out of Jewish practice. For contemporary Jews who may feel that they too have missed out on revelation, this is terrifying. If we, like Gershom, missed Sinai, what chances do we have of maintaining our tradition?

This parsha tells the line of Moses and Aaron and does not mention Moses sons. Some use this as proof Moses’ sons were not at Sinai and did not enter the land. This can be a reminder how fast we can go from direct connection with God to totally lost.

www.hadar.org/torah-tefill...

Tzedek: Justice and Compassion | Devarim | Covenant & Conversation | The Rabbi Sacks Legacy Read Rabbi Jonathan Sacks' Torah reflections on Devarim Tzedek: Justice and Compassion in Covenant and Conversation.

I have sat through several “we all need to be kind and get along right now” sermons recently that annoyed me. I like that this focuses on justice
It is “you have to judge everyone fairly” which is such a better message then “let’s be kind to everyone.”

Rashi on Deuteronomy 1:1 אלה הדברים THESE ARE THE WORDS — Because these are words of reproof and he is enumerating here all the places where they provoked God to anger, therefore he...

Rashi says all this extra language is to avoid calling anyone out in specific. It is important to rebuke people without embarrassing them is the lesson here.

www.sefaria.org/Rashi_on_Deu...

Deuteronomy 1:31-33 and in the wilderness, where you saw how your God יהוה carried you, as a householder*householder Typically, a man. Lit. “participant whose involvement defines...

This parsha reads like Moses is just completely over all of this.

www.sefaria.org/Deuteronomy....

Screenshot from Victim and Perpetrator - Reflecting on Our Role Judaism has evolved and for many centuries has minimized the applicability of violence to solve problems, or to glorify God or our own selves. Yet how are we to understand these and other verses from our most sacred texts that seem to teach the opposite? Our ancient Sages often ignored violent verses; some later commentators sought to represent the violence metaphorically. The Chasidic Rabbi Aryeh Leib Alter, known as the S'fat Emet, for example, made the evil kings Sihon and Og into abstract impediments to prayer that had to be destroyed in order to get past the obstacles keeping us from the spiritual world. And the Slonimer Rebbe, Sholom Noach Berezovsky, noted that Moses began to elucidate the teachings of the Book of Deuteronomy only after the destruction of these two communities. For the Slonimer Rebbe, then, the two kingdoms and their inhabitants represent the encumbering shell of evil that must be removed in order to reach the inner level of holiness in the instruction of Torah. These efforts are all well and good, but the biblical narrative seems too real and the details too vivid to be easily made into metaphors. And even more disturbing, there are among our people today some communities that have begun to read such verses literally as providing authority to commit horrific violence against a people who believe they have a right to live in the same land as our brethren in the State of Israel. Whether or not we agree with their position or their tactics, we know that claims of divinely ordained brutality solve no problems but only complicate and worsen them.

Screenshot from Victim and Perpetrator - Reflecting on Our Role So what is the meaning of the strange juxtaposition between ancient tales about our own acts of genocide on the one hand, and the commemoration of our victimhood through genocide on the other? I believe it teaches us to take heed, to beware of our own tendency to try solving problems through violence. We first learn of the genocidal cherem in Deuteronomy just as we ourselves engage once again in the sacred annual period of mourning as victims on Tishah B'Av. It can be easy to ignore the plight of other victims if we become fixated on identifying as victims ourselves. But today we must acknowledge that we can be both victim and perpetrator. That should be a somber warning.

Parsha Devarim, first part of Moses’ final sermon. He recounts God commanding the total anhilate — cḥerem — which is a challenge for folks like me who believe Genocide is bad. We have to use this as warning to never avoid the victim.

reformjudaism.org/learning/tor...

Close up of orange flower from the side

Close up of orange flower from the side

Good morning 🌱🟠🌲

Thank you!

Add Violence by Nine Inch Nails on Apple Music Album · 2017 · 5 Songs

Reading directive twelve like👇

music.apple.com/us/album/add...

Ever believe so hard in the power of the free market you stop believing that businesses have a profit motive?

Good morning 🌱💮🌿

Either the storyline about the woman bringing her niece from out of state for an abortion or how they make that one racist dude who punched the nurse look like a racist asshole probably upset them.

Reverse John Wick