Raw Shabbat. Taco Truck Shabbat. Brown Bag Shabbat. Everyone is trying to re-invent the wheel, myself included.

I never really got the whole Shabbat thing until my cousin went to the Wailing Wall and decided he wanted to become a Rabbi. When he got back to the states he started having all his friends, Jewish or not, over for a Shabbat dinner each month.  Being the close knit fam we are, we got the invite too. I mean, it makes total sense. Our moms are sisters, Polish shtetl Jews, Auschwitz, keep the family close ... you've heard it all before, so of course we made the short list.

This is my older cousin, the one I've always looked up to but never really knew. He was the one that would hit these monstrous home runs every time I saw him play baseball. The one that saved me from the worst bad trip on mushrooms one Christmas Eve when his brother and I ate them so we could look at all the Christmas lights but decided to watch stand up comedy on tv instead. "Comedy is the good trip" I said as the shrooms kicked in but as the half hour ended and all turned to bad, I dropped to my knees and began to swim in the carpet. "We've been neglecting the carpet," I said as his friend screamed "Red, Blue, Orange" at the top of his lungs and the TV flickered on the ceiling of the room.  My older cousin came home some hours later while I was naked and curled up under a blanket, coming up for air to occasionally shout at the cop show we were watching "Why is it always the black guy?!"

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Organized religion is full of contradictions-for example, could God create a boulder so heavy that He cannot lift it, and then create a heavier boulder that would outweigh the combined bloat of Michael Moore and Rush Limbaugh?-and here is one of them:

"God will accept repentance for all sins except one: giving another man a bad name."

-The Zohar

 "It is a wise man that admits the truth."

-The Mishnah

 

What if admitting the truth means giving someone a bad name? Should we apologize for hurting others' feelings after exposing their malevolence and hypocrisy? Is it better to speak charitably or honestly? And why do these questions keep me awake at night?

I am a professional asshole. My job (nay, my purpose on earth) is to mercilessly pierce the bullshit-ridden exoskeleton of society with my blazing katana of unfiltered rhetorical justice, decapitate the scum-sucking charlatans of this planet and make sweet, sweet love to their cleanly severed skulls. Somebody has to do it, and yet I feel bad whenever I make somebody else feel bad; the Katana of Truth is a double-edged sword.

I've previously detailed my social ineptitude here on Jewcy, and I haven't changed much with a couple years of age (except that I'm way hotter now whereas you are uglier). Consider my behavior last weekend at a party with law school students whom I'd never met:

• Mocked two brothers because they failed to make it into Harvard like their father

• Told a disheveled guy that he looked like future divorce attorney and his first client would be himself

• Informed a dude that the band on his t-shirt sucks, always a classy and well-liked move

• Laughed in a Texan's face because Alaska, my homeland, is more than twice the size of her shitty redneck state

• To blonde couple: "You look like master race Aryans straight out of a Swiss Miss commercial, did you know that?"

• To Catholic chick: "So you fuck like crazy but don't use condoms because Jesus would send you to hell, right?"

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On Friday I got a beat down from our friendly Annie Anonymous because I dared to use the words shit and pussy. Apparently, using bad words makes it difficult to distinguish between me and “illiterates collecting cardboard from dumpsters.”
Don't Be Mine: I prefer "Fuck Off" but I still think these are brilliant
I think Ms. (or Mr.) Anonymous needs to take a serious chill pill, but this gives me an opportunity to discuss something I’ve thought about a lot, actually. When is it okay to swear? Where can you drop the f-bomb, and when is a simple “damn” going to get you in trouble?*

First let’s take note of the word “swear” itself. There is, of course, a prohibition against swearing, that is, taking an oath, when doing so is unnecessary. The idea here is that you don’t want to take a vow in the name of God and then later forget about it or be unable to fulfill the vow, thus desecrating God’s name. Jews often get around this by saying “bli neder,” meaning, “but I’m not swearing to it,” when pledging to do something. This is also the reason we have Kol Nidre on Yom Kippur; it absolves us from any oaths we may have made and not fulfilled in relation to God.

That’s all well and good, but when I say shit I’m not invoking God, I’m just expressing something. Even when I say “Holy shit!” I’m generally using the holy part to add emphasis, not because I think there’s anything particularly holy about what just happened.

Maybe, like Annie (or Andrew) Anonymous, you’re thinking that someone who claims to be an observant Jew and a struggling writer should come up with a more artistic and oblique way of emphasizing my point. If that’s how you feel, then gosh darnit, you go girl! But me, I like “profanities” and I adore all kinds of colorful language. I’m not offended by the sex or poo they tend to refer to because sex and poo are a normal part of my life. Of course I wouldn’t bring “fuck” to a job interview, but Jewcy isn’t a job interview, it’s a forum for progressive Jewish thinking and debate.

If you’re looking for more discussion of when and where and why it’s okay to swear, check out the insightful post on badchristian.com. If, like me, you have a genuine interest in linguistics and how languages and linguists treat swear words, check out this list of posts on Language Log. If you’ve got a beef with hearing bad words on the radio, head to this brilliant (oh, hell, it’s fucking brilliant) article by Sarah Vowell, which points out, “You can't say "tits" on the radio, but you can say "Pamela Anderson Lee," and what's the difference? A film commentator can't say "shit," so she'll replace it with "Air Force One" instead. Rush Limbaugh can't say "cunt," so he uses "Hillary Rodham Clinton" as a substitute.”

It seems to me that’s the jist of the problem. We can substitute inoffensive words for the four-letter variety, but if I still mean poo when I say shit, what’s the point?

* In high school I once got in trouble for saying something was “screwed up,” a term that I chose simply because it seemed less offensive to me than “fucked up.” It never really occurred to me that screwing something and fucking something are essentially the same thing. My ultra-Orthodox teacher, however, made the connection very quickly, and actually had me wash my mouth out with soap. I can’t imagine what she would have thought if she’d heard me talking dirty to my boyfriend at the time…

Growing up, I was always getting a look from my dad for saying, “Oh my God!” He’s a stickler for the third commandment, which reads, “You shall not swear falsely by the name of the LORD your God; for the LORD will not clear one who swears falsely by his name.”

So, what does that mean? There’s a pretty nice website run by the Orthodox Union that explains what this is all about. Basically, we shouldn’t go around saying “God this” and “God that” because that constitutes an oath, and we shouldn’t swear to things that aren’t worthy of being sworn to, which is pretty much everything. If we don’t pay attention to this rule, God’s apparently going to air our dirty laundry in public.
This book is for people who want to learn to swear:: In the name of God, don't buy it!
Here’s where things get complicated: The Hebrew text doesn’t say “God,” it says this word made up of four vowels that we don’t know how to pronounce anymore. The implication is if you take that word, that name, and you use it willy-nilly you’ll be starting all kinds of trouble. The obvious solution to this problem is to come up with some other word and substitute it for God’s name. That way, we can say that word whenever we want without tempting Divine wrath. In Hebrew we’ve chosen the word Adonai. Usually, when you hear the word Adonai read from the Torah, it’s just the reader substituting that word in for the one we don’t know how to say. But Adonai is a holy word in-and-of itself, so most people don’t want to go bandying that word around, either. And that’s when all the other names come in. Hashem means The Name in Hebrew. The goal is to make a clear reference without using a name. Hashem spawned Adoshem, which is just Adonai with shem, name, substituted for the final syllable.

In English this whole ‘refer to it without actually saying it’ idea is manifested with the Gd or G-d thing. The idea here is that by not writing the entire name we’re ensuring we’re not using it in vain, since it was never there to begin with.

But here’s my beef with G-d: According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word God is derived from the Old Teutonic, and the first reference is circa 825. Old Teutonic is not even in the same language family as Hebrew, which is to say the word God is in no way related to the Hebrew word we don’t know how to pronounce. There’s no connection at all. And if that’s the case, why do we need to be so careful not to say or write this word??

If you’re interested in this whole ‘What’s In A Name?’ issue, check out this page at jewfaq.org, which goes into lots of detail about why the name of God is so important. There’s also this page (be warned, it’s a Christian site) that explores the original name, and goes over all the different ways it might be pronounced.

I don’t get in trouble for saying “Oh my God!” anymore, but I still try to avoid it in front of my dad, because even if the third commandment seems moot, there’s always the seventh commandment, “Honor your father and your mother.”