Band: Sufjan Stevens
Album: Carrie & Lowell Live
Best song: “Fourth of July” is perfect, but “Should Have Known Better” is a close second.
Worst song:I guess I originally said “Drawn to the Blood” is the least strong song on the record, but I now think it to be “No Shade in the Shadow of the Cross”
A lot of modern non-fundamentalist rabbis treat Jewish liturgy as self help tracts and eschew the strict reading of liturgy or scripture or the mountains of text from centuries of Jewish sages to produce something about the internal broken nature of humanity and of each of us (
Sophia Zohar did it beautifully recently). Most progressive rabbis use liturgy as metaphorical toward politics or news or something; last year’s Tisha B’Av service I attended used the burning of the Temple as a metaphor for climate change (the earth is our metaphorical temple and we burned it). I don’t say that to criticize these readings, but rather to point out that these are the tacts du jour for modern American Judaism. Spinoza, arguably, got
kicked the fuck out for less.
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