bigstuffedcat

the continuously transgendering hy libre!

@bigstuffedcat

  • she/her, they/them, sie/sie/ir, ask

dyke, poetess, games writer, &cet.

wow! this lesbian can pierce space and time!

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in reply to @bigstuffedcat's post:

possumskull
@possumskull

I sent this post to my wife because she's frequently explaining to me whatever tidbits she's been studying. Frankly the Talmud is an incredible and misunderstood text and there's so much cool academic work that's been done recently.

I'm struggling to even remember specific things, there's so much wild stuff in there.

  • Rabbi Meir is said to be descended from Emperor Nero, who converted to Judaism at some point.
  • The romance of R. Yochanan and Reish Lakish.
  • The beauty of R. Yochanan: "One who wishes to see something resembling the beauty of Rabbi Yoḥanan should bring a new, shiny silver goblet from the smithy and fill it with red pomegranate seeds [partzidaya] and place a diadem of red roses upon the lip of the goblet, and position it between the sunlight and shade. That luster is a semblance of Rabbi Yoḥanan’s beauty."
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possumskull
@possumskull

Also there's some material in Berakhot 61A which understands Adam (better, "the Human" as it does have a definite article in the Hebrew) as being created both male and female as a single creature (see Bereshit 2:21.

This hinges on the interpretation of the word tzela‘ which can mean "rib" but is also the word used for one the sides of a structure (specifically the Mishkan come up here). This is discussed at one point in the film Yentl.

Also reminds me of how Alcibiades' account of love (I think it's in Plato's Symposium but I might be mis-remembering), where primordial humans were paired, and later separated by Zeus because they were too powerful, and people are always trying to return to their original mate (in this version, there are men paired with men, women with women, and men with women).

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catball
@catball

Do you know if there’s something like the Oxford Annotated Bible but for the Talmud? The footnotes in there are really good and discuss different translations and historic context; I would love to learn about other scriptures with similar commentary!

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