I'm A Reform Jew And I'm More Religious Now Than I've Ever Been. I Never Grew Up Marking Tisha B'Av And

via @crysomemore

Nona the Ninth is one of my favorite books of all time. Not just because it's Locked Tomb, but it is the purest form of one of the big messages the series is trying to divulge.

The price of love is grief. We will never be free of it as long as we love anything at all. Our family, friends, our pets, even beloved media. Anything that connects that deeply to us that we love it will leave a gaping hole when it's gone.

But no one rejects loving to avoid grief. Every one of the characters holds on desperately to something they love, to levels that seem unhealthy to us. They want the perks without the cost.

John is holding on to a world and people that died 10k years ago.

The lyctors cling desperately to their cavaliers memories, to the point of being willing to end the 9 houses to honor them.

Cam held on to Pal, Pal held on to Dulcie. Harrow held on to Gideon so hard she disappeared her from her memory to avoid the grief she would pay for the privelege of caring for her.

But Nona loves indiscriminately. She loves the polluted sky, she loves the sad people, she loves the stray dogs and her friends and her teachers and Varun. She loves Pyrrhas lying ass, she loves Camilla and Palemedes, she loves crown and even cares about Judith. Nona isn't afraid of grief, because to her all that love balances it out. Nona is the only one in the end willing to pay the price for that 6 months of unconditional love. She knows from the beginning of the book that her own days are numbered, but she doesn't shy from it and avoid loving.

She loves all that much harder.

"If you could see your whole life, start to finish, would you change anything?" The movie Arrival (2016) approaches this same theme. If you knew what you'd lose, would you go back to avoid it? Would you keep away from the people and things you knew you'd lose? Would you shy away from experiencing love just because it hurts?

"Love and Freedom don't coexist, warden."

Happy tumblr day

just had to take a fucking second and close my eyes because i remembered that on the night of november 5th tumblr had convinced me, an outsider, that this was an actual gif of Castiel Supernatural being sent to mega fruit hell

hey don’t cry. two nice jewish boys falling in love while studying talmud and homoerotically wrapping each other’s tefillin ok?

Bochur fell asleep on his siddurim during shiur :,((

god this scene i haven’t written would be so emotional if it came with 50k words of context i also haven’t written

My Jewish Learning

Where Do the Notes In the Western Wall Go? | My Jewish Learning

Each year, countless notes are stuffed into the cracks of the Western Wall, the last remaining wall of the Temple ...

This is so beautiful I’m gonna cry

the uncanny valley between “this academic article doesn’t make sense because i’m an idiot” and “this academic article doesn’t make sense because the author is an idiot”

something i've noticed while studying jewish history is how immediate it feels. it isn't history, not really—it dwells a half step behind us, an echo that redoubles and visits us again and again, as though it happened mere hours ago and not a thousand years. the collective memory of the jewish people is long, vibrant, and alive, a creature all its own with a deep, abiding loyalty to its people that has been cultivated through thousands of years of dedicated cultural transmission. red ochre handprints on the cave walls that we gently touch up every day with the materials we have nearby, keeping the imprints of our people alive. and i think that's beautiful.