Monday, July 21, 2008

Once It’s Out There...

Out of my life I fashioned a fistful of words.
When I opened my hand, they flew away.
Hyam Plutzik (1911–1962), American poet

In other words, once you get your text out there, you have precious little control over where it ends up.

Some time ago, I put up a post, together with pictures, about the tzitzit that I made for a friend’s small daughter. Recently, I found a site dedicated to issues of women and tzitzit. On quick investigation, I found that most of my blog post had been copied and pasted there (with proper credit, so I don’t mind on that score). On further investigation, I found that the site is run by so-called Messianics. I won’t even get into the inaccuracies about the wearing of tzitzit that I found there. Suffice it to say: it ain’t the real thing, folks.

I haven’t done anything about it and don’t intend to. People are free to believe what they choose. I just want to make it clear that I have nothing whatsoever to do with that site, nor do I support any so-called Messianic endeavors in any way, since the “Messianic” movement is really nothing more than a thinly-disguised attempt to persuade Jews to convert to Christianity (usually an evangelical branch).

(See Elisson’s excellent comment to this post for more clarification on why so-called Messianism is completely incompatible with Judaism.)

(In reference to the above epigraph: Many years ago, I kept a poster of the poem that contains these words on my wall. Its title is “On Hearing That My Poems Were Being Studied in a Distant Place,” and its full text may be found here.)

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