Random things. And then a humdinger at the end.

I was inspired by Xander's hair (which I still don't like), and by my friend Yael's new short hair (which I think is adorable). So I cut all of mine off. It's now about to my chin. I think the sides are still too poofy though, so I'm going in again on Tuesday to get it redone. I'll post pictures then. The stylist asked me how long it had been since I'd had short-to-medium hair. "Um, since the end of high school?" I said. "That makes it... oh my god, that makes it twelve years." And then I felt old.

In a rather inspired attempt at finals procrastination, I read two books I've been wanting to get into for a long time. One I started in Israel, since it was on Savta's bookshelf: Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance. My Idaho cousins can ignore this paragraph, but... I really liked it! It made me want to vote for him all over again. I got a sense of a man who is deeply passionate about the welfare of people in the world, who honestly wants to do the best he can for the common good, and who is constantly struggling with how to define himself racially. I like identity confusion. That said, he seemed to come to some cohesiveness at the end of the book, plus he wrote it over 15 years ago, so I'm sure he's figured it out by now. The book was written in three basic parts - childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia, community organizing in Chicago, and his trip to Kenya - and I did skim over some of the Chicago parts. It made me feel very small, in a way: I'm interested in my own little community, my family and friends and the religious communities I will come into contact with. But I'm not particularly interested in organizing for the greater good on a large political scale. I'm glad there are people out there who are... it just makes me feel sad sometimes that I don't have such large vision.

The other book I read inspired completely different emotions: laughter, empathy, and even astonishment. If you want a fun but educational read, I recommend The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible by A. J. Jacobs. He tries to... well, follow the Bible (Hebrew and Christian) literally. His sections about how hard it is not to tell white lies are hilarious, as is his description of his wife's response when he tells her about all the purity laws he intends to follow regarding her menstrual cycle. I didn't learn that many new things about Judaism - which I think is probably good, considering my current education - but I was very intrigued by his opinions on snake-handling Christian fundamentalists, Karaites, Creation Museum founders, the conflation of political and religious right-wingers, Samaritans, Amish, and even a group of gay Christian evangelists. I also especially liked his description of "reverent agnosticism": there may or may not be a god, but life and rituals can still be sacred. Go and read, lest you be smited!

And since we're on the topic of Christianity (albeit loosely), let me end by sharing something I learned in my Commentaries class that I should have realized before now but didn't, and think is fascinating: the theology of Judeo-Christian transcendence is really Platonic in origin.

There is a midrash from the fourth century about how Abraham followed all the rules in the Torah (found in Genesis Rabbah, if it matters). This is because the Torah existed before Abraham (silly people, to think that the Torah must have been written after Abraham, because he's in it... don't use logic. It's a midrash). Anyway, this midrash existed for years before it was written down. According to scholars, it was most likely from the first century. And it says that the Torah existed before everything, even before the creation of the world. The Torah was a blueprint of the world.

Now, the first words of the Book of John, according to most translations, are "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." This means that the Word existed before the world. In both Judaism and Christianity, then, God existed before anything else. THIS IS PLATO ON PRE-EXISTING FORMS.

What's even cooler if you think about it is that in Judaism, the Word became text. In Christianity, the Word became flesh. So... in a way, Torah and Jesus serve the same purpose, religiously.

Now that's controversial. Flame away. :)