Around sixth or seventh grade I remember discussing religion with a friend. We were in the backseat of her car and her mother, who was driving, politely asked me if I attended any type of Christian services.
A few weeks ago my friend Demi sat on the floor of my dorm room. She was the first person I had seen from my time studying abroad in Switzerland since I had come back to the U.S. almost two years ago. She hadn’t changed much, though I had, and when she said in the rough Swiss German I had missed so strongly, “er het sich verhängt,”—he had hanged himself— I thought to myself in a language I hadn’t spoken in years — “jetzt gibt’s zwei.” Now there are two.
“Genealogy is an engaging project to undergo because it navigates the…paradoxical relationship between a narrowly defined conception of the self and the larger, more communal one”
Exodus chapter 34, verse 26: “Thou shalt not boil a kid in his mother’s milk.” Some 5,000 (or 2,000, depending on who you think wrote the Torah) years ago, God told the Jewish people not to mix milk and meat. … Read More
