Maybe you need to do a bit of yoga. Just a few stretches every day can be really effective for back pain.
I'm not doing dry January but I'm not going to the bar because this would be a bad time to get covid.
Hurts how? I fucked up my back some years ago and I have to do press-ups, cat/cow, and back bridges a few times a day to keep things relatively pain-free. There are also positions I have to avoid sitting in, including the otherwise super inviting half-slouch/half-recline.
Lower back, especially upon waking up. On Tuesday I hypothesized that it was from sleeping on my stomach. So Tuesday night I scientifically slept the whole night on my back. That was a disaster!! Yesterday I was in a lot of pain. Last night I side-slept, and woke up in a low-to-medium degree of pain. But after posting, I laid down to side-watch the last three episodes of Only Murders In the Building, and somehow ta-da! I feel great! I did feel something un-hink itself in the side position just now. Backs are so weird.
Deadlifts make my back feel better than anything else, but you already do those, right?
Can someone link an explainer about the tunnels? WTF is going on?
Back issues outside of injury are almost always due to needing more core strength, which isn't helpful, but ogged's routine probably is.
This thread gives most of the overall backstory of the tunnels. This article gives more of the specifics.
South Africa did a bang on job at the ICJ today. Kudos.
This isn't complete, but (1) the building itself is hugely important to the Lubavitchers, and it's wildly overcrowded for the number of people who crowd into it for services. (2) The shul (one of the shuls) in the building is in the basement. (3) Members of one subsect (the ones who think the old Rebbe who died a while back was the Messiah and is still alive someplace) were tunneling next to, rather than below, the shul in an apparent effort to informally expand it -- the pictures of breaking through paneling were showing that attempted expansion.
That's all I understand about the situation, and any of it could be wrong.
Reminds me of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.
Teo's first link gets most of it -- the subsect I'm referring to are the tzfatim. I wouldn't swear I'm not mischaracterizing their beliefs about Rebbe Schneerson, but it's something like that.
6: I do, but I don't think they've come up in the past week or so. This spasmy-thing is about two weeks old.
This spasmy-thing is about two weeks old.
Did you get a puppy?
11, 13: And Teo's second link covers the rest of it, now that I read it. There's just so much context that it's all hard to follow.
11.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06618-z
The discussion of migrating populations into Europe in "Who we are and how we got here" by David Reich is fantastic, extended review article in book for m= basically with detail for further reading, covers how these folks blended with Anatolian origin farmers.
The detailed explanations of the tunnel thing have mostly come from people generally sympathetic to Chabad (von wafer posted another good one in the other thread), which makes sense because those are the people who know the most about it, but it's worth mentioning that many, perhaps most, other Jews think it's a bizarre messianic cult.
There's a lot of bizarre messianic cults in the news these days.
I thought "You never hear about Hasidim in Israel" and it took me a second to figure out that in Israel, they're a subset of Haredim. (Technically they are here too, but you don't hear about Haredim in the US.)
That would be a bizarre messianic cult that brightens up the streets of NYC by playing klezmer music from the Mitzvah Tanks. I like klezmer music, so I'm vaguely pleased about them.
How common is a charismatic leader who is personally revered in contemporary Judaism, leaving these particular people and the question of a messiah's identity aside? Saparately, are there people who take seriously the idea of a hidden or unknowable messiah?
A charismatic leader who is personally revered is pretty fundamental to Hasidism, and not at all special to Chabad.
I remember some Hasidic-looking caricature of a rabbi with Hebrew text on a little flyer on a street pole last time I visited NY. Thought I took a picture, can't find it. I wonder if that that was Schneerson or someone like him.
22, 23: Yes, this sort of leader-veneration is characteristic of hasidism and not generally typical of other varieties of modern Judaism (though charismatic rabbis with devoted personal followings do occur occasionally elsewhere).
A hidden or unknowable messiah is really more of the standard Jewish attitude. The idea of it being a specific named person is definitely out of the mainstream.
That's what they mean by "non-observant."
The second Twitter link cleared it up: no one's exactly sure what the tunnel is for.
23,26 thank you. The whole topic is really interesting, just back from a wikipedia dive.
"still alive someplace"
Are there any explainers about what specifically people believe about the sense in which he is still alive? Mostly curious as a comparison to viewpoints in early Christianity, but everything I've seen is very vague on this point.
Yeah, I've also only seen vague references.
28: clearly the Chabad have a much more proactive attitude than the Twelver Shia. If your venerated leader disappears down a well, you don't just sit round waiting for him to pop back out, you get a shovel and start digging for him, damn it.
But, alas, the bocherim delved too greedily and too deep, and awoke an ancient evil.
There is definitely a game waiting to happen where each player is a different lunatic faction trying to build its own tunnel network beneath the streets of New York. The Chabad, the MTA, the C.H.U.D., the Gozer worshippers, the USPS. The object is to build as extensive a network as you can, take over bits of other people's networks, link up various key points, and avoid collapsing the buildings overhead. A cross between Railroad Tycoon, Go, Lemmings and Jenga.
21: The Chabad Lubavitchers in Stamford Hill have a big ugly motor caravan they've painted up with slogans like "Mitzvah Tank: We Want Mosiasch!" but sadly they don't actually blast klezmer, or at least they've never done it where I can hear them. At least now I know what it is they're campaigning for.
"Mitzvah Tank: We Want Mosiasch!"
Don't you hear Messiah coming in his tank, in his tank?
Messiah in an armor-metalled tank?
I can see the pillared fire, speeding on the metal tire
Over muck and out of mire
And the seraphim a-shooting from its flank!
O Messiah, he stands grimy in his tank!
36: The klezmer isn't universal -- I've only noticed it in the Financial District, I think, so it could be one particular Mitzvah Tank team. But it definitely brightens my lunch hour.
And if the mosiach is supposed to appear in the darkest of times Georghi Zhukov is the leading contender, amirite?