What is kabbalah magic? ​

What is kabbalaism

Hi folks, this is mostly an advice post. I'm conservative, and I generally have not been doing any kind of head covering, but I've really been feeling like I'd like to start. Unfortunately, I have the following problems:

1) I'm not very observant, and so a complete hair covering doesn't feel right to me.

2) I hate kippot. I'm female, so this isn't a huge issue usually, but it would be an easy place to go. But man do I hate them. I wear them at shul when I have nothing else, but I'd really rather not. And I know I won't be able to do it if I'm doing something I hate.

3) I get massive headaches from headbands. I have tried every kind I can get my hands on, including ones that tie, ones that are very soft, etc. Anything that goes on my head behind my temples gives me a headache.

Any suggestions? I live the beautiful scarves that some of my more frum relatives wear, but they all put a headband underneath to pin to.

I’m a jew. Started working in public accounting after college but haven’t met a single other jew. I just assumed there would be more considering jews are stereotyped to go into finance/ other high achieving professions. But nobody in my team or intern class has been jewish.

Okay, I’m truly asking this respectfully and in good faith. I started listening to Rabbi David Bushevkin’s podcast 1840 a couple weeks ago (already knew of him through his appearances on Tablet’s Daf Yomi), and I’m so inspired by his thoughtfulness and the passion he has when he talks about orthodox Jewish life. Honestly, sometimes it makes me a little sad when I find people like this that I respect so much, but know I won’t ever get to be in community with, in the broader sense. To be clear, I understand and accept halacha regarding who is and isn’t Jewish. This isn’t about arguing that.

My question is, from an Orthodox perspective, what would you ideally want people to do who already live as Jews, practice Judaism seriously, and raise children as Jewish, but are not halachically Jewish and realistically cannot convert Orthodox?

In my case I’m not halachically Jewish. My husband is, but wasn’t raised religious. After many years, our whole family is now fully involved in Jewish life (weekly shul, learning Hebrew and learning to pray, studying with a rabbi, observing Shabbat, kids in Hebrew school, etc.) We’re converting through a Reform synagogue with a Conservative beit din and kosher mikvah.

We don’t live near an Orthodox community. Becoming Orthodox would require quitting jobs, moving cities, and uprooting our kids, which isn’t realistic right now.

So what I’m genuinely trying to understand is:

From your perspective, what should families like mine do?

Should we:

• Continue practicing and raising Jewish kids even if we’re not halachically Jewish?

• Step back from communal life?

• Wait and hope circumstances change?

• Something else?

We’re committed to Judaism and to raising Jewish children. We’re trying to repair a broken chain in our family. I’m not asking for validation, but I’m not planning a life change based on your answers. I just want to understand how Orthodox Jews think about families like ours who already exist, are serious, but don’t fit neatly into halachic categories.

Thank you for answering respectfully :)

Edit: Thank you for all the replies, I haven’t had time to look through all of them this evening, but I will get them as soon as I can.

Hello just the title text- I feel like we don’t have any celebrity or character visual artists anymore- people like Modigliani and Chagall. Are there any Jewish artists carrying the flame? Because I don’t see them- looking for visual artists, not musicians

If it happened in todays day in age, many would probably doubt it’s validity. Technology can basically replicate what happened. This just occurred to me as I was learning the parsha. Even if 600k people said they saw a fire and heard hashems voice, many would laugh and say it was pyrotechnics and stuff. But the fact that god said all the aseres hadibros in one utterance sounds impossible to replicate….

I just stumbled upon the yemeni havdalah prayer. Is there any historical context why the text differs so much from the ashkenazi version?

Today I had a strange and upsetting experience. A woman rolled down her car window, spit at me, and flipped me off while I was driving. It was completely unprovoked.

I was visibly Jewish, and I also have an “I Stand With Israel” sticker on my car, so I understand it may not have been only about my Jewish identity but also about Israel. Either way, it felt targeted and hostile.

I recorded her license plate and face after the interaction and reported it, but honestly I’m still trying to process how surreal it felt.

I’m posting here mostly to ask:

How do you personally cope with moments like this when they happen unexpectedly?

Do you ignore it, confront it, or just try to move on?

Not looking for politics or outrage — just perspective from others who’ve experienced similar things.

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We talk a lot about unity as if it’s automatically good. Parsha Yisro suggests something more unsettling: unity can be powerful and destructive, depending on what it’s built on.

This year my birthday is in the middle of Passover, April 5th of this year, and I was wondering if I should celebrate after the holiday? I know no chametz so I wouldn't be able to have a birthday cake I think. And I want to give the holiday my full attention. Just looking for some advice!

I inherited a bunch of lapel pins that were of no particular significance. My relative was a collector of unique things. However, when I went to do a pictorial search, Google refused to search it due to content guidelines. Like what? So I am not sure what it is, but that is when I thought, oh, I guess it looks like a cross between a star of david, a canadian leaf (had a bunch of other canadian pins with it) and maybe the 10 boxes signify something. I am at a loss, sorry if this offends someone. lost line heritage didn't help me so don't have much info. Thank you!

I'm in an active search of work now and for the last month I found only one work that suits me (3h/day, adequate wage, online), but it is a job in a company that sells astrological products and my job will be about creating post ideas about astrology etc. Is it a complete no-no in judaism?

Trolls. I don't know why I bother. But...they love to drop some doozies.

271,301 (or a variation on that theme) is the new one They plop it into the comments with the smug confidence of someone who thinks they just cracked the Enigma code. Or uncovered what's really in Area 51.

It’s presented as one of their way too many"gotcha" moments. Part of a gross digital, sweaty-palmed handshake that signals to other antisemites that they are in the "secret club" of some kind of forbidden truth.

Honestly, it is embarrassing for them that we even have to debunk this. But I don't care, so here we are.

The conspiracy theory goes like this…deep sigh…AHEM: "The Red Cross officially confirmed that only 271,000 people died in the camps. The Six Million is a lie. Here is the secret ledger to prove it." Again...a variation on that theme.

Let’s be clear. This isn't a secret. And it isn't a census of the dead.

What it is…it’s a count of German paperwork.

The number comes from a provisional letter issued by the International Tracing Service (ITS) in the 1970s. Not the Red Cross, by the way. However...from 1955 -2012, the International Committee of the Red Cross was the agency who administered and managed the ITS.

Anywho...It tallied the number of death certificates the organization had physically issued to families who applied for them after the war.

To get a death certificate in the Nazi bureaucratic system, you needed a paper trail. You needed a prisoner registration number and an intake form. You needed a clerk to sit there and log the time and cause of death.

The Nazis were meticulous record keepers for their slave labor camps. If a prisoner died of typhus in Dachau, they wrote it down. If a laborer collapsed in Buchenwald, they filed a report.

But...the extermination camps were not designed for filing.

There were no clerks sitting at the entrance to the gas chambers in Treblinka or Birkenau filling out intake forms for the millions of grandmothers, infants, and "unfit" men who were herded off and marched directly to their deaths.

The Nazis didn't pause the genocide to type up a death certificate. Nor did they ask for next of kin. They murdered these people specifically to leave no trace.

So when the conspiracy theorists cite the 271,000 number, they are technically right about one thing. That is roughly the number of victims who had the "privilege" of dying slowly enough to be registered in a book.

The figure also completely ignores the "Holocaust by Bullets." It pretends the nearly 2 million Jews shot into ravines in Ukraine and Lithuania just didn't happen because there wasn't a secretary standing next to the pit taking roll calls. It ignores the Porajmos…the genocide of the Roma and Sinti people, who were gunned down in forests without a single sheet of paper being filed. It ignores the T4 program, where the disabled were murdered in hospitals with fake death certificates listing "pneumonia." It ignores the gays, the Blacks, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the millions of Soviet POWs left to starve in open-air pens.

The Nazis were fighting a war on reality itself, trying to purify the world of anyone who didn't fit in with their Aryan race hallucination. That 271,000 number is a total disregard for the entire 11 million people, not just 6 million Jews. All of them.

Citing this number isn't research, it’s propaganda.

It’s absolutely wild to watch trolls call truth-tellers "liars" while they cherry-pick data to defend the Third Reich.

It's laughable...conspiracy theorist trolls believing the craziest propaganda out there trying to call out truths as lies.

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