Mesopotamian and Canaanite cultures also had a priesthood function for people like me, for the girlymen who served the gods and goddesses dressed as women, called kulu'u in Babylonian and k'deshim in Hebrew, which again means "holy ones," but which was translated into the Latin Vulgate by St. Jerome in the 4th Century as effeminati (a term which I must immediately begin using to describe my own tribe).
Read moreBetween Hail and Locusts: Time to Show Up
As I got older, I went to many seders at many houses. There, the plagues were never skipped. Instead they were rattled off in the same disinterested way one might render up the names of Santa's reindeer or the Seven Dwarfs. Blood. Frogs. Lice. Comet. Cupid. Sleepy, Dopey. Doc.
Read moreLong Night of Dreams
Dreams brought me to Germany, and ultimately to a graveyard in Waibstadt, to meet the ancestors. My first reflection on the experience.
Read moreTedX Talk
Love, law, limits and botched sign language. This is the story of my "San Francisco wedding" – and the particular moment in time it inhabited.
Read moreAfter the Disaster
Noah and Na'amah bounced from house to house for some time. They weren't always easy to host. They would wake loudly from bad dreams; they were alternately controlling and passive, overjoyed and immobile. The Urartians didn't know whether they should ask what Noah and family had experienced, or whether they should keep a polite silence. And Noah, after a while, didn't want to tell it. After all, no one could ever really understand what they had been through. It became a story mostly discussed inside the family, and periodically presented as a special event for wide-eyed school children.
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