This week’s Torah portion is Parashat Vayeshev, as Jacob, now aka Israel, made his home in that place where his fathers had wandered. His sons were very busy boys, and one in particular, Judah, had some unjust dealings with his daughter-in-law, Tamar. Fortunately for her, Tamar both knew her rights, and was daring about defending them. At the risk of getting toasted. That knowledge of legal rights is still more essential in our modern world. Unfortunately, many people do not have the access to many tools that would help them to know, understand, and defend their rights. So, how to we help to change that, Thoughtful Readers?
Action Prompts:
1.) Share your thoughts on the how on-going (free!) financial legal education might help keep all of us safer, please.
2.) Write a book, story, post or tweet that uses these thoughts.
Dear Readers, ideas on learning, especially multiple #LanguageLearning, on-going education and empathy-building, to #EndPoverty, #EndHomelessness, #EndMoneyBail & achieve freedom for All HumanKind?
Support our key #PublicDomainInfrastructure & #StopSmoking for COVID-19:
1. #PublicLibraries,
2. #ProBono legal aid and Education,
3. #UniversalHealthCare, and
4. good #publictransport
-we can learn from the past Stayed on Freedom’s Call for free,
by Teaching and Learning (Lesson Plans offline) in the present, to
help build a kinder future, and Do Better: … a Better World
( Golden 5 month GED lesson 17 of 67 plans),
and Babylon 5 review posts, from a Minbari Ranger’s perspective,
and can historical fiction stories inspires learning and courage, Ann and Willow??
l’Shalom, Peace
Shira Destinie A. Jones, MPhil, MAT, BSCS
Shira
the year, 2021 CE = year 12021 HE
Stayed on Freedom’s Call
(free: https://archive.org/details/StayedOnF…)
includes two ‘imagination-rich’ walking tours, with songs, of Washington, DC. New interviews and research are woven into stories of old struggles shared by both the Jewish and African-American communities in the capital city.
Shared histories are explored from a new perspective of cultural parallels and parallel institution-building which brought the two communities together culturally and historically.
Please leave a review, if you can, on the GoodReads page.
Shira Destinie Jones’ work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Context, Critical Thinking, Continuous Learning: Project Do Better 
In 1996, my father became the pastor of a rural United Methodist congregation (which has since stormed out of that denomination on a homophobic rant) in South Georgia. One of the Sunday School classes was reading the Book of Genesis at the rate of a chapter a week. On my father’s first Sunday, the class read and discussed chapter 39. The teacher announced that the class, having read chapter 37 the previous week, would skip chapter 38 (Judah and Tamar). A story in which a young woman had to defend her rights by seducing her father-in-law, who had declined his duty to impregnate her was too hot a proverbial potato for that Sunday School teacher, apparently.
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Apparently. That’s impressive selective teaching.
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Alternatively, interestingly, I read Torah one day in a Masorti synaguge (the Conservative movement here in the US, mostly mid-way between the Reform movement and the Orthodox…). Reading this portion in the Hebrew out loud, audibly, and correctly in every sense (pronunciation, punctuation, and melody) is obligatory, but whispering is also allowed (and in fact is customary in certain sections), so, I took advantage of the fact that this congregation used a microphone (many do not) to drop down to a whisper for the word that means ‘let her be burned’ -fully expecting to take flak for it. No correction could be given, but a comment was made later. After that, a man brought his seven year old to me, during lunch, to ask me to explain to her why I had whispered that word. When I told her that we were required to read every word, even those words we do not like, he said that this was an important facet of Judaism: the Rabbis require us to face that which we do not like in the Torah, head on. But sometimes, maybe, quietly.
🙂
Then he thanked me for setting an example of competence in women Torah readers: his daughter’s name is also Shira.
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Reblogged this on Ned Hamson's Second Line View of the News.
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Thank you, Ned.
Shira
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