I think this is my first trip through this world as a human.
I got such a long way to go.
Sometimes I think my memory of past lives only goes back to being a happy little monkey hanging by my tail and enjoying a banana. Then the branch broke and I fell into this life.
Reincarnation is a comfort to many people. Who am I to deny them that? Spiderwoman the beautiful Jewess whose life I came into like a shit storm found comfort in reincarnation. I hope it is true, for her sake.
I know nothing about Judaism. I was not schooled in it. I suppose I am grateful to Crazy Mike for that. I never even had a Bar Mitzvah. Not sure if I am even considered a Jew anymore by Jews since I joined that Quaker meeting.
I picked up a book called Basic Judaism The chapter that interested me most was called Jesus and the Jews. The author expressed much admiration for Jesus but points out somethings that made Jesus seem less than perfect.
The incident with the fig tree for example. He cursed a fig tree? I love fig trees. My grandmother used to have an outhouse in her yard. This was in Baltimore during the 1940's. When she finally got indoor plumbing she planted a fig tree where the outhouse was. That tree grew like Jack's bean stalk. I still love figs to this day and I have never met a fig tree I did not like..
I used to have a pretty good memory. I cannot remember one adult in my family promising me a reward in heaven or a punishment in hell. It was all here, right now.
The closest my family came to believing in reincarnation was to name children after the dead.
He is my name sake:
RE: Milton Steinberg Basic Judaism
Chapter VI
Israel and The Nations
Judaism on Jesus
To Jews, that Jesus appears as an extraordinary beautiful and noble spirit, aglow with love and pity for men, especially for the unfortunate and lost, deep in piety, of keen insight into human nature, endowed with a brilliant gift of parable and epigram, an ardent Jew moreover, a firm believer in the faith of his people; all in all a dedicated teacher of the principles, religious and ethical of Judaism…….
His was an unexcelled gift for allegory, a genius for incisive utterance, a skill for bringing into sharp focus that which is perceived, but as through a glass darkly. He had great talents as a synthesizer, a collector into organic unity of the disjointed members of a truth. And always there is his own personality, a superb achievement in its own right…..
Jesus was not a Christian he was a Jew. He did not preach a new faith.
But Steinberg goes on…
He was capable of bursts of ill-temper, as when he cursed the towns of Capernaum, Chozazin and Beth Saida, or when he denounces a fig tree for not yielding fruit to appease his hunger, though it was not the fruit-bearing season.
There are at least traces of Chauvinism in him. When a Canaanite woman pleads with him to heal her daughter, he responds: “It is wrong to take the children’s bread and throw it to the little dogs,” He declares explicitly: ‘I am not sent except to the lost sheep of Israel,” To him “Gentile” and “publican are equally terms of opprobrium. And he plainly instructs the Apostles not to bear his message to non-Jews.
Being a Jew for me is about my family not the religion.
It gives me the hebegebees how some Rabbis here are playing up to the Christian Zionists like Hagee, Falwell, Robertson and the like. Apparently they have made a deal not to proselytize Jews in exchange for getting that Hebrew Godd on their side.
Damn damn me, I think I have drifted way off topic here.
Crazy Mike was too cheap to spring for Hebrew school. No not true, he spared me the indoctrination. I owe him a lot. But I wish they had taught me Yiddish, I used to understand it but never could write it. 
