S1E10: Parashat Story of the 50

Still on the Make Hanukkah Golden soapbox, but that's besides the points—this week we have a sacrificial cult waving dinosaur red flags, eating Peeps from Beets and Jelly Fruit Slices, doing the Vulcan salute, smelling goats, and rethinking reinventing oneself.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Grab your sacrificial goat and meet me in the party bus. It's ParaShot Story of the 50 this week on Jew Girl. Hello and welcome to Jew Girl, a New Girl podcast for the Jew Curious, in which I make my brother watch my favorite TV show, New Girl, for the first time, and learn some stuff about Judaism. My name is Robin.

SPEAKER_02 0:31

My name is Jay. And an airport is called an ERP.

SPEAKER_01 0:35

An ERP. Oh, those one-syllable words. We'll do that all episode long, okay? Let's try to Okay.

SPEAKER_02 0:41

Deal.

SPEAKER_01 0:42

Also, also oh can I just say something before we start?

SPEAKER_03 0:47

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 0:47

Lotkas, Jay? Sure. Latka. Where what's that? Oh, I'm back on my soapbox. My my Hanukkah soapbox. It should be gold. I just had a couple more things I need to. Lotkas. Latkas, Jay. Those are golden. Oh. Also, donuts. See, because you because we're always eating all the fried foods because of the golden oil that you fry things in, and then a nice donut. And also, also, thanks to your wife, I remembered, the freaking menorah itself hammered out of a solid piece of literal gold. Okay?

SPEAKER_02 1:27

All good reasons.

SPEAKER_01 1:28

Also, sand. Sand is gold.

SPEAKER_02 1:31

Sand have to do with anything. The desert?

SPEAKER_01 1:34

In the desert. You ever you ever been to Jerusalem? Everything's just beige over there. Gold.

SPEAKER_02 1:42

Alright, point and taken.

SPEAKER_01 1:43

Make Hanukkah golden again. Machga.

SPEAKER_02 1:48

What? I do not know that word.

SPEAKER_01 1:50

I'm not MAGA. I'm Machka. Make Hanukkah golden again. Woof. Machka. No, bad. Alright.

SPEAKER_03 2:00

Yeah, canceled.

SPEAKER_01 2:01

My little heels walking off the soapbox. I just I was like Latkas. I forgot. I think I forgot Latkas. Okay, alright.

unknown 2:09

Sorry.

SPEAKER_01 2:10

Was there anything else you wanted to do?

SPEAKER_02 2:12

Hopefully, whoever's listening to this, listen to the end of the previous episode. Otherwise, they have no idea.

SPEAKER_01 2:17

Make Hanukkah golden again. That's all you need to know. Alright, alright.

SPEAKER_02 2:21

In the description for that episode, I I think I said, as we discuss holiday branding or something like that.

SPEAKER_01 2:28

That's right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 2:30

So we're bringing it back.

SPEAKER_01 2:31

Get at me, PR for Hanukkah. I will help you. Everyone loves gold. It is warm. It's a nice warm, shiny color. Okay, anyway, anyway, anyway.

SPEAKER_02 2:41

I included the soapbox in the description too, because I liked the imagery so much.

SPEAKER_01 2:47

I'm gonna, you know what? I'm gonna take that soapbox. I'm gonna just keep it right in the corner here so that anytime I need to climb up on it and remind people that it should be golden as the color. I'll just be there. It'll be there waiting. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 3:02

I'm gonna have to get a sound effect for stepping up on a soapbox, but I've absolutely no idea what that's just like feet on wood. I don't know.

SPEAKER_01 3:09

Clip-clop, clip, clop. We can pretend I'm wearing tap shoes at all times. And it can be like t- tlimbing.

SPEAKER_02 3:18

It's like a I thought those first noises you made were your were your tap shoes. And I was like, no, those were more like clogs. Clip clop, clip, clop.

SPEAKER_01 3:26

That's the horse. That's the horse that I'm riding up.

SPEAKER_03 3:29

Oh, there you go.

SPEAKER_01 3:30

It's a giant soapbox, by the way. Huge enough for a horse. Alright, alright. We're not here for Hanukkah. Our holiday episode was last week. We are here for the story of the 50. So let me talk about this one. Okay.

SPEAKER_00 3:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:46

Are you ready?

SPEAKER_00 3:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:47

This is the episode in which we spend the whole time, the whole episode, learning why Schmidt has had to put$50 into the douchebag jar. So we're kind of doing just a flashback all leading up to this explanation. Why did he have to put$50 in the douchebag jar?

SPEAKER_02 4:04

A good format, different than what we've had before.

SPEAKER_01 4:07

It is different. It is a little different. Yeah, fun. Keeps you, you know, there's the suspense the whole time. What's it gonna be? What douchey thing could he do? It's a murder mystery. That's a murder mystery. Someone's life was only worth$50. And instead of calling the cops, they are just making him Okay, anyway. Anyway, here we are. The douchey 29th birthday party that Schmidt had planned for himself. 29th?

SPEAKER_02 4:33

29th.

SPEAKER_01 4:34

Complete with a party bus, a stripper pole, and all his douchebag friends. That party falls through. But Jess manages to throw together a party bus of her own to surprise him with. Although her party bus is a decorated school bus. And the stripper that she hires is accidentally a guy. Uh and Benjamin, who is Schmidt's douchebaggy friend. We've encountered him before.

SPEAKER_02 4:59

Benjamin.

SPEAKER_01 5:01

Benjamin! He is at the party and he is being super douchey.

SPEAKER_02 5:06

I hate him.

SPEAKER_01 5:06

He's the worst, right?

SPEAKER_02 5:07

He's the absolute worst. And that actor has such a punchable face. I I don't you know plays the best antagonist. You just hate him.

SPEAKER_01 5:17

I know. Apologies to the actor whose face we just called punchable, but I think it's it's all part of the persona. He makes it punchable with his personality in the show. So it's not inherently his face. He's the absolute worst. And he's at the party, he's being super douchey. And right, among other things, he is still teasing Schmidt for being fat in college. Yeah, it sucks.

SPEAKER_02 5:41

Also, just to clarify, we do not condone punching people in the face normally in most circumstances. Please do not take us, say that as like you should punch this man. Absolutely not. He's a great actor.

SPEAKER_01 5:52

He's a great actor.

SPEAKER_02 5:53

But he's the worst.

SPEAKER_01 5:54

But if you do, if you meet a Benjamin in real life like that, I might look the other way. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Don't punch people in the face. I don't I don't support the violence. It doesn't solve things. But he is Okay, okay, anyway. Um also in attendance is someone who agrees with me about punching Benjamin in the face, actually. It's Nick's new love interest, Julia the lawyer. But Nick is embarrassed by his life and his shared loft and his friends, and the fact that he is the inventor of bro juice that they're drinking at the party. Basically, he's worrying that Julia is too sophisticated for it all. She's a lawyer. But we eventually learn that Julia has her own weird stuff too, including anger issues, which we learn after she punches Benjamin in the face for being a dick. And he was hitting on Jess and he was telling Schmidt his party sucks. And yeah, he got punched in the face.

SPEAKER_02 6:50

I'm gonna be honest, I forgot that he got punched in the face when I said that he had a punchable face. Um, just total coincidence there. The writers also felt it, I guess.

SPEAKER_01 6:59

So funny. The writers agreed, yeah. So after that, the bus crashes, and the episode ends with us learning that the$50 in the douchebag jar is because while waiting for the tow truck, and after he expresses gratitude for the party that she threw him, Schmidt leaned in to try to kiss Jess. But fortunately, is just in an awkward, funny way, and not a way that's hurting the loft dynamic or their friendship. Yay! Fortunately, luckily, yay, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 7:32

She just had fuzz on her cheek.

SPEAKER_01 7:33

Just had fuzz on her cheek. Exactly. Also, Jess's boss, Tanya, was in it too. She was like at the party for some reason. There was like a whole thing about like, is she gonna get them drugs? I don't know. Just thought I would felt bad ignoring Tanya. Tanya was there too. So let's pass around that feeling shtick, Jay. Here, let me let me hand it over to you. How did you feel about this one? And then what'd you like? And hate.

SPEAKER_02 7:57

Yeah. I uh well, I liked that we got like super confirmation that Schmidt was overweight in the past. When we saw him as a little kid, we uh saw that maybe he was a little bit, and whether that like affects his personality now in interesting ways, since we I obviously know now he has lost a lot of weight in his 20s. Uh speaking of which, his 20s, I find it shockingly hard to picture these people as basically being my age. I know. It absolutely threw me for a loop when he said, My 29th birthday is coming up. Meaning he's 28 in that moment. And I'm like, wait, hold on. No, no, no, no, no. You don't really? What? So we looked it up after the episode. Oh, good. They were all, with the exception of Winston, they were all actually like 30, 31, 32. Okay. Maybe 33 with uh Nick. But Winston was, I think, 27 when this show started. So this is the baby? Yeah. And so it's just so shocking to try to like re you know, when I first saw these people, I was like a teenager, I or something, right? And so, like So they were ancient. Right. So now to see them and be like, oh, like I could just like run into this person on screen and we'd be the same age is like absolutely bonkers to me.

SPEAKER_01 9:21

Right, right. That's how I felt watching Friends once I was older. Oh no.

SPEAKER_02 9:27

How old are they supposed to be in Friends?

SPEAKER_01 9:28

I don't know, young enough that it makes you feel old when you watch it, I think. But how old were they actually?

SPEAKER_02 9:34

Oh, see, that's what doesn't sit right with me.

SPEAKER_01 9:36

I'm like That's the crazy thing, right?

SPEAKER_02 9:38

Were they all in their 40s playing like 30-year-olds?

SPEAKER_01 9:41

No, no, no. I think they were young. Anyway, this is not a Friends podcast, I guess. But it's yeah, okay. So I'm glad you looked it up because I hadn't thought to. That's I'm glad that they weren't crazy old compared to by the way. Is this turning into a nobody wants this watchcast? Because same thing with her. She's playing someone much younger than she is. Have you watched it yet? All right, all right, all right.

SPEAKER_02 10:00

Well, you know, you know, uh on the topic of spin-off podcasts, I think maybe we should entertain this idea of a Jewish friends spin-off. Oh. Instead of friends, we'll just call it Jews.

SPEAKER_01 10:14

Yeah. Have a podcast with even worse SEO than Jew Girl. So I'm glad you looked it up. I'm glad they're not too much older. That's the moral of the story. That's great.

SPEAKER_02 10:27

Anyways, other things. Nick not believing in dinosaurs, which he confessed when he was trying to so funny.

SPEAKER_01 10:33

Oh, that's in my favorite moments list. Really?

SPEAKER_02 10:35

Oh, that is a huge red flag. It is funny, but that's a huge red flag. Are you kidding me? I'm like, girl, run away if this is what he actually does. Sure, sure, sure.

SPEAKER_01 10:45

You meet a person in real life who says that, you run the other direction. Sure. Nick Miller, I just laugh at him.

unknown 10:50

Fair enough.

SPEAKER_01 10:51

I've seen these things like old Tumblr posts that were inspirational Nick Miller quotes. And you know, like it's just like quotes like this on top of a sunset backdrop, you know. This is definitely one of them. I didn't I don't believe dinosaurs existed. I've seen the science. I don't believe it.

SPEAKER_02 11:07

All right, go ahead. Sorry. Wild. That said, you know, red flag run away. What what's the girl's name? The woman's name? Julia. Julia. I do really like Julia and Nick's kiss. I kinda shipped it in a way, which is bad if Endgame is Jess and Nick, which I still think it is. But you know, Jess is no longer with Justin Longpaul. So so now they had to throw in a different wrench on the other side of the equation with Nick, I guess.

SPEAKER_01 11:37

So you really think Jess and Nick are are endgame, huh?

SPEAKER_02 11:41

I do. I do. But the way you say that adds a healthy amount of doubt to my mind. Maybe I shouldn't have gone into this podcast assuming that was definitively correct, but No, no, I think it's good.

SPEAKER_01 11:54

You're taking the journey. The audience is taking the journey along with you. This is great.

SPEAKER_02 11:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 11:59

Yeah, Julia. Julia's cool. I like Julia.

SPEAKER_02 12:01

Yeah, Julia was good. I really liked her martial artsing Benjamin in the face. In the face. That was unexpected. I think it was in the face. Was it in the face? I actually don't know. Yeah, it doesn't matter. I don't remember now. Other other things. So, like my favorite moments, just them listing off words that Schmidt's friends have abbreviated, like airport, like I said, airp. That one stood out to me. Because that's ridiculous. I really, really liked when Nick got up and walked away and said, mumble, mumble, mumble.

SPEAKER_01 12:33

Mumble, mumble, mumble. That's also in my favorite moments. Thank you, Jay. You're just hitting them all.

SPEAKER_02 12:37

It was so subtle, I like almost missed it. And I was like, wait, did I hear that right? And that's just so funny. That's probably my favorite moment. And uh I also just liked the joke about the male stripper happening to be a baritone in his first Presbyterian gospel choir.

SPEAKER_01 12:54

Oh my god. Yes, I love it so much.

SPEAKER_02 12:57

Such a nice detail.

SPEAKER_01 12:58

You know, I like a fully fleshed-out character. Oh, I shouldn't have said fleshed. Ugh, because he's a stripper.

SPEAKER_02 13:05

Weird. Well, I wouldn't have a good idea. Uh well.

SPEAKER_01 13:09

I like a well-developed, well-rounded character. I like my strippers to be baritones in their church choirs.

SPEAKER_02 13:15

That's okay. This podcast is technically an explicit podcast on streaming platforms.

SPEAKER_01 13:21

So I can swear. I've wondered, actually, and I probably have already, but great.

SPEAKER_02 13:25

You know, I think I think as a rule, we're not the people to want to swear uh a huge amount, you know. We want to make this podcast mostly welcoming to different ages, but some of the topics and the the episodes of themselves sometimes don't lend themselves to be uh kid friendly. So true. You can swear as much as you want, Robin. Yeah, but what other swears do you got?

SPEAKER_01 13:50

Piernet, peer neuros, puneus, bloody, oi, bloody, bloody L. That's a good one.

SPEAKER_03 13:58

There you go.

SPEAKER_01 13:59

And also, did you know Godzooks? Uh, he was a swear, an old-timey swear, because it came from God's hooks. Because they were talking about Jesus on the cross and the hooks that kept him up, and you weren't allowed to say things like that.

SPEAKER_02 14:16

So Godzooks. Oh wow. That's kind of one too. Never heard that word before.

SPEAKER_01 14:21

Well, great. The only you got all my favorite moments. I'll just other I'll say I love the it's so quotable. 29? Basically, anytime I say the word 29, in my head I have Schmidt going, 29? 29? That's all I want to add.

SPEAKER_02 14:35

Love it. Oh, and you know, sorry, I I forgot this favorite moment. Every Bill Cosby joke that was made in this episode. Oh, yeah. That's a joke.

SPEAKER_01 14:47

Yeah. I know. I was, you know, I did wonder, should I mention him in the next segment that we like to call the douchebag Tedako box? Maybe put a few coins in for Bill Cosby stuff. I don't know how we feel about Bill Cosby. I think pretty poorly. I think we feel pretty bad. Uh and I got some other stuff too that I'm gonna put a few coins in the Tedako box to make up for the douchebaggery. Do you want to start, actually? I'm sure you have stuff too.

SPEAKER_02 15:17

Like uh when he says what up n-word.

SPEAKER_01 15:21

That's the one.

SPEAKER_02 15:22

That's awful.

SPEAKER_01 15:23

That's the one. We don't like that at all. I would like to put a$50 bill in the jar for that alone. Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:33

Frankly. Benjamin sucks.

SPEAKER_01 15:35

He's bad. We do not like. And the other one I had written down is Schmidt saying he could do sex stuff with hip hypnosis. I'm like, oh no, that we make jokes like that, Schmidt.

SPEAKER_02 15:47

I don't know about that. Good catch. Thank you. That's not very consensual. Don't love it. No, not at all. So was Bill Cosby not outed for being a horrible predator when this released?

SPEAKER_00 16:00

Probably not.

SPEAKER_02 16:00

Like, is it really that old?

SPEAKER_00 16:02

Yeah. I think maybe. When did we cancel Bill Cosby? Click, click, click, click, click.

SPEAKER_01 16:09

Uh, late 2014. Yeah. That's when the Bill Cosby stuff went down, says Google AI overview. So yeah.

SPEAKER_02 16:16

So this joke just slipped in before people knew. Yikes.

SPEAKER_01 16:21

I know. Thanks for passing around that feeling shtick with me. Do we have any trivia this week? Did you have any trivia this week?

SPEAKER_02 16:28

I do. Do you have any?

SPEAKER_01 16:30

I've got a couple. A couple things.

SPEAKER_02 16:32

Alright, my quick things are that I think it's Lisa Kaplan. Lizzie Kaplan. Lizzie Kaplan? Maybe I typed her wrong in my notes. She oh she played Julia in this, and she was the goth best friend, the lesbian best friend in Mean Girls.

SPEAKER_01 16:54

Oh my god. Are you serious?

SPEAKER_02 16:58

I know, right? I was like, what?

SPEAKER_01 16:59

Oh. Whoa.

SPEAKER_02 17:02

Did not recognize her at all.

SPEAKER_01 17:04

Girls. Click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click. Oh. That's crazy. Okay, cool. Cool. My trivia is that she's Jewish. That's all.

SPEAKER_02 17:15

Hey, there you go.

SPEAKER_01 17:17

She's her family's reform, Ashkenazi. She had a bot mitzvah, went to Jewish summer camp, the whole thing, the whole nine yards. And she was in Mean Girls. Oh, that's cool.

SPEAKER_02 17:27

That's great. And Rachel Harris, who plays just as Boss Tanya, was in Goosebumps, not goose pimples. Full circle. Throwback the goose pimples. Get out of here. Goosebumps.

SPEAKER_01 17:42

Each one a memory. The other bit of trivia that comes up when you uh research this episode is not actually a very good piece of trivia, but I'll include it anyway. Nick says he doesn't believe in dinosaurs, of course. And I guess Jake Johnson is in the Jurassic World. That's it. That's that's the trivia that the internet wants you to know. So that's great.

SPEAKER_02 18:03

That's great. I hope his character gets eaten by a dinosaur. Just uh repent first.

SPEAKER_01 18:10

Poetic justice. Poetic justice.

SPEAKER_02 18:15

And then and then yeah, I'm just gonna go on and assume that he gets eaten by a dinosaur without checking anything or ever watching it.

SPEAKER_01 18:22

Of course, he and the dinosaur are endgame. Yes.

SPEAKER_02 18:26

Someone should make an edit where it goes from him and Newgirl saying, I don't believe in dinosaurs, I've seen the science, so I don't believe it, to him getting eaten by the dinosaur in said movie. That definitely happens.

SPEAKER_01 18:37

Great idea. I love that. Well, here we go. Put on your keeper, Jay. Your little Yamaka, and your your tallest. Because guess what time it is?

SPEAKER_02 18:49

What time is it?

SPEAKER_01 18:52

It's time for us to be observant Jews! And this is the segment in which we find out. In which we find out if we two Jews observed some stuff. We observed any Jewish jokes this episode? Or if we observed the elusive episode bears. So those are the things we're trying to observe here in this segment we call observant Jews. Let's talk about Jewish jokes or content. Did you catch any?

SPEAKER_02 19:23

No, but they talked about hala a lot, like hala, and it made me think about hala bread, which is kind of Jewish, right? Ooh.

SPEAKER_01 19:34

I like that, yes.

SPEAKER_02 19:36

I actually realized that I don't know a lot about hala bread, and I just like think that it's a Jewish bread, but I don't really know that. Is it just Mediterranean at large? You've made it before, so I figure you know more.

SPEAKER_01 19:48

Yeah, no, I I think it's actually it's uh I think it's traditionally an Ashkenazi thing. But yeah, there is a biblical commandment thing behind it. It is Jewish for sure. We make it for Shabbat, and there's like a little ritual element of it that a lot of people do. So I'll have to do an episode on hala sometime. Oh, nice. But yeah, definitely Jewish. And kosher, I think when people people are always like, what's the difference between hala and brioche? And I believe the answer is that hala does not have any dairy. They're both like enriched doughs or whatever it is, but hala does not have any dairy, which makes it very Jewish because it means you can eat it with a meat dish or a dairy dish. Gotcha. So that's something that makes it Jewish. Anyway, there were two things that I caught, Jay.

SPEAKER_02 20:33

Uh I knew I missed something actual. And it was such a Schmidt-heavy episode. I was like, I'm sure there were Jewish chips in there that I missed. I just focused on the hala wordplay.

SPEAKER_01 20:44

I like Kala. I like that. I like that. So the first one that I caught was on the party bus when she's showing him around and showing him what we have here and here. There was kosher yogurt and honey. And he's like, oh, kosher yogurt. So got some kosher yogurt there for him. And then the other one is I think this is at the end when they're doing sort of a montage of like all the totally douchey things he's said over the past. And he says that he's come up with the best nickname for an uncircumcised penis, a bishop in a turtleneck. I'm counting that. Circumcision.

SPEAKER_02 21:16

Oh, you're right. Yeah, that counts.

SPEAKER_01 21:17

I'm counting that.

SPEAKER_02 21:19

That's good. That's good.

SPEAKER_01 21:20

But as far as the bear goes, did we observe a bear?

SPEAKER_02 21:25

Nah, but technically, Elijah the fridge bear was in the background for all of like 10 pixels, you know. Elijah the fridge bear.

SPEAKER_01 21:33

Yeah. That is what Redditor Obligatory Cow says, apparently, as well. That's what I wrote down for myself. Yeah, just Elijah the fridge bear. We love him. Not very exciting, but we love him anyway.

SPEAKER_02 21:46

Also, at that distance, you could never tell that it was a bear, but you know. We know.

SPEAKER_01 21:52

Could never tell. That's what counts. Should I remove this bit from the podcast? Maybe. Am I gonna? Probably not.

unknown 21:59

Ha ha.

SPEAKER_01 22:01

I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 22:02

No, no, no. We uh we need to see the bear through to the end.

SPEAKER_01 22:05

We need to see the bear through. And you know else we need to see through. That transition didn't make any sense, but it's time for Schmidbitz, the segment in which we learn a little juicy tidbit about Judaism, inspired by something that our canonical Jew of the Loft, Schmidt, said or did this episode. And this episode, I'm taking you back to actually kind of a sad moment when Benjamin the douchebag is uh making fun of Schmidt being fat in college and making him sing that birthday song he used to sing. I built this Schmidty. We built this Schmidty on Tootsie Rolls. Tootsie rolls. Okay? That's what we're talking about. We're talking about candy.

SPEAKER_02 22:52

Exciting.

SPEAKER_01 22:54

Jewish candy connections. Here we go. Tootsie rolls themselves.

SPEAKER_02 22:59

Invented by a Jew.

SPEAKER_01 23:00

Yeah. Did you know this already? Really?

SPEAKER_02 23:03

No, that was just a shot in the dark.

SPEAKER_01 23:06

That's right. An Austrian Jewish immigrant named Leo Hirschfield. And yeah, it was eventually mass marketed after he created it by another candy company that was also run by Jews, Stern and Salberg. And their company also made dots and blow pops and double bubble. And speaking of double bubble, bazooka bubblegum was created to rival double bubble. And four Jewish brothers started the company that launched Bazooka Bubblegum, too. And their names are like they start off really Jewish. And then we got Abram, we've got Ira, Joseph, and Philip. They get progressively less, I don't know where Philip. Poor Philip. They were like, we've exhausted all the Jewish names we know. We gotta go with Philip now. Poor Philip. But yeah, apparently lots of Jews had candy shops at the turn of the century. And also, plot twist, the icon of Easter, because tis the season. Happy Easter, everyone. Peeps were invented by a Russian Jewish immigrant named Bob Bourne, who, this is fun. He started as a rabbinical student before his family fled to Paris and then the US. So he's like legit, you know? Wow. But then he made peeps. And peeps are extremely not kosher, and not because of the Christian associations, um, but because they use pork-derived gelatin. Did you know this? That gelatin, a lot of gelatin comes from pork.

SPEAKER_02 24:35

Okay. I didn't know that, but I guess I'm not surprised.

SPEAKER_01 24:37

Yeah. Um, but his company also did Mike and Ice. So a lot of stuff. I got that um about the peeps. I got that from an article called The Surprising Jewish History of Peeps by Victoria Dozer. Thank you, Vicky. And there is a little bit of context behind some of these Jewish origin stories that I'll give you. And this information, see, I'm citing my sources for once. This one I got from a 2021 article called The Jewish History of Tootsie Rolls and Other Classic American Candy by Joanna O'Leary. But basically, she explains that in the 18th and 19th centuries, Jewish beet farmers in the Russian Empire. I'm gonna say that again. Jewish beet farmers. I think it's funny. I don't know why. Jewish beet farmers in the Russian Empire produced most of Europe's sugar. Isn't that crazy?

SPEAKER_02 25:26

Bears, beets, bet hill.

SPEAKER_01 25:30

I love that. Give me a t-shirt.

SPEAKER_02 25:36

Give me a t-shirt with that slogan on it. It's great with the bears, too. Because the bear.

SPEAKER_01 25:42

It's perfect. You need a bear with a little uh like talis on the shawl, the prayer shawl. Oh, it'd be so cute.

SPEAKER_02 25:49

For anyone who doesn't know what we're talking about, we're referencing an office quote where the character says bears, beats, battlestar galactica. But, you know, adapting it for our purposes.

SPEAKER_01 26:00

Great. So all these beet farmers, when they left the Stedtls, I guess, for the US, a lot of them got jobs in candy factories because they were used to producing sugar. That's great. So there's that. Some other random stuff about Jewish candy before we leave the Schmidbit corner here. Okay, so first thing that comes to mind for me when I think about Jewish candy, actually, let me ask you, do you have something that comes to mind when you think about Judaism and candy? Or Jewish candy, I should say, Jewish candy.

SPEAKER_02 26:24

I think about GET, which are chocolate coins.

SPEAKER_01 26:28

Oh, good point. I forgot about that one. Despite literally getting on my soapbox earlier last week and just yelling about GET and how golden it is. Okay, anyway.

SPEAKER_02 26:40

I don't know if this is if this counts as a Jewish candy, but I feel like at our family Passovers growing up, they would always have these like little candy orange wedges that were like You got it! Multi-flavored. Really?

SPEAKER_01 26:58

Yes, that's exactly what I was hoping you were gonna say, because that's what I think of too.

SPEAKER_02 27:02

Yeah, I don't know what they're called.

SPEAKER_01 27:04

Yes, those jelly fruit slice things on Passover. So interesting fact about those, yeah, these are like a staple of Passover satyrs.

SPEAKER_03 27:14

Okay, it wasn't just our is not just ours.

SPEAKER_01 27:17

If you go to your local grocery store and you find that tiny little end display with mata and manashevets, you will also see, I guarantee it, those jelly fruit slices, which are fantastic. Do you like them? Because I love them.

SPEAKER_02 27:32

I think they grew on me. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:35

Good. But uh interesting fact about those, they are kosher and kosher for Passover, obviously, because their gelling agent is not gelatin, which is often pork, as we've just established. It is agar, agar. I did not look up how to pronounce this word. Agar.

SPEAKER_02 27:54

I think it's probably agar.

SPEAKER_01 27:56

Agar. Uh agar.

SPEAKER_02 27:58

That's like what you feed cells in petri dishes, isn't it?

SPEAKER_01 28:02

Is it really? All I know is that it's derived from seaweed rather than pork. So that's what I wrote down.

SPEAKER_02 28:07

Oh, I did not know that. Good to know.

SPEAKER_01 28:10

It's also always a crossword word. I'm always seeing that on the crossword. Anyway, isn't that cool? That's really cool. Derived from, yeah. Other things about Judaism and candy that I will throw in here before we leave. Mishloach Manote. So we've been talking about Purim a little bit here and there. Purim, you give out little bags of goodies, basically, to your friends called Mishloach Manot. And Purim basically feels, in my experience, like a mixture of Valentine's Day in school because you're like handing out those little candies and Valentines to your friends. Sure. And also Halloween trick-or-treating because you're doing this while you're in costume handing out little kids. So, anyway, that's a lot of fun. But those bags often include a lot of candy, as well as Hamintoshin, of course. You know and love the Homintoshin, the triangle cookies with the fillings.

SPEAKER_02 28:55

I do. I've made Hamintoshin before.

SPEAKER_01 28:57

Nice, good. This year, a lot of our Mishloak Minote bags. Being healthy, these people. They were giving us boxes of raisins. We got an orange. Got bags of trail mix. Come on, guys. No, just kidding. I really appreciate everyone who gave us one. It was really nice. Thanks for thinking of us. It's the thought that counts. It's the thought that counts. This is something I love also about Judaism. This is like my favorite connection. At bar mitzvahs, bot mitzvahs, epine mitzvahs, you could say. People throw candy at the person who is the bar or bot mitzvah. They throw them when they're up on the on the bima, up on the you know, stage in the front. Throw like people are pummeling, like little kids will go around with a basket handing out candy while the person is like finishing up their little, you know, the thing that they're chanting up there in Hebrew, and and everyone's grabbing some candy out of these baskets. And then at least in our congregation, the person like finishes, and then everyone, you know, they're yelling like muzzle top and stuff, but they are just absolutely whipping these candies up there. They are like standing up, everyone stands up, shucking it like they're professional baseball players. The kid, they're like kids scrambling trying to collect the stuff. It's like bedlam, and it is so fun. I mean, because you don't want to like hit poor old Mrs. Edelman in the third row because you didn't throw it hard enough. Do you know what I mean? People are whipping it.

SPEAKER_02 30:25

It's a lot of fun. They have an ambulance on standby.

SPEAKER_01 30:29

Yeah, they really, it gets crazy. Symbolically symbolizes the transition to adulthood. You know, it sweetens that transition. It represents the sweetness of studying Torah, things like that. But it is just really nice. I mean, it's cute symbolically, it's nice symbolically, and also it is just wild to see this whole, you know, a whole audience of people because it's always more packed, too, for these, you know, because people have invited their friends and family. So it's just like a huge audience of people all standing up and chucking tiny pieces of candy just at the front of the room. Oh, it's so fun. That's awesome. That's a lot of fun.

SPEAKER_03 31:05

Great.

SPEAKER_01 31:06

So that was this week's schmid bit. Now I want some candy. How about you? I gotta go out and buy some of those jelly slices.

SPEAKER_02 31:11

Yeah, I'm like, oh god, what do I have in in the house? I don't know. I know. What's your favorite candy?

SPEAKER_01 31:17

Oh, ever?

SPEAKER_02 31:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 31:19

You know, I'm kind of like the worst person ever. People hate my answer. I think it's honestly Hershey's milk chocolate. Does that make me like a monster person? No. People have strong feelings about Hershey.

SPEAKER_02 31:32

Personally, that sounds boring, but I bet that there is a milk chocolate you might like more than Hershey's. Maybe you just haven't had it.

SPEAKER_01 31:41

Uh, notes of cheese. Notes of cheese. Google it. Hershey's notes of cheese. I'm not gonna ask. Just Google it. Just Google it. I actually don't know about it. I'm getting this secondhand from somebody who went to Hershey Park and told me about it. But but yeah, I love it. It's great. But I like a lot of candy. What's your favorite candy?

SPEAKER_02 32:02

Either, and and I don't know if it's cheating to give two answers. Either gummy bears, which are probably up there, or like Starbursts. So that's for candy.

SPEAKER_01 32:15

Well, oh, because I gave a candy bar answer, didn't I? Not a candy answer. That's different.

SPEAKER_02 32:21

I get, yeah, I guess candy bars, either a really good chocolate, maybe a dark chocolate, honestly. I'm a big fan of dark chocolate.

SPEAKER_01 32:30

Fancy and healthy. Why don't you put a box of raisins in your mushlate bag too, while you're at it?

SPEAKER_02 32:36

No, but like a good dark chocolate like Lindor Truffle.

SPEAKER_01 32:40

Oh, those are I'll allow it.

SPEAKER_02 32:43

Or uh Three Musketeers.

SPEAKER_01 32:45

Oh, that's a fun one. I like those too. Yeah, underrated. Nobody's talking about those enough.

SPEAKER_02 32:49

They're fluffy. It's fluffy chocolate.

SPEAKER_01 32:52

But you're right. I gave a candy bar answer. I don't really know what my favorite candy candy is. I do like sour candies though. Sour patch kids. But Starburst are great. Anyway, nobody cares about my favorite candies. Try that. Sour gammy. Ooh, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 33:05

Good. Anyways, do you have a drosh for us this week?

SPEAKER_01 33:09

Well, I'm so glad you asked, Jay, because in fact I do. And this week I am giving a drosh on the theme of reinvention. All right.

SPEAKER_02 33:20

Ooh, okay.

SPEAKER_01 33:21

So in this episode, I see the idea of reinvention coming up in a few different places. I think the big one is Schmidt reinventing himself. Right? We see that he used to be Fat Schmidt, as they called him. And he lost all the weight and reinvented himself, apparently with help from douchebags like Benjamin. He reinvented himself as the sophisticated and chiseled and slightly douchey Schmidt that we know and love today. So that was Schmidt's reinvention of self. I also see Nick reinventing himself for Julia in this episode because their whole plot line is about him, you know, he's distancing himself from his friends, pretending that's not who he is, pretending he doesn't know what bro juice is, right? Right. Because he thinks he has to be somebody new and different for Julia. So he's sort of doing some reinventing there. I'd also say that Jess is doing a reinvention of her own by reinventing the party, because she takes Schmidt's original plan and she reimagines it with her own sparkly, slapped together, adorable little version with the school bus and the makeshift stripper pole.

SPEAKER_02 34:45

She does. And let me just say, they do not deserve Jess. No one deserves Jess. She is such a good friend for putting together this party and getting the school bus.

SPEAKER_01 34:55

That's so true. It is absolutely true.

SPEAKER_02 34:58

It's like wild the amount of effort she puts into this.

SPEAKER_01 35:02

She loves hard, you know? And we love her for it.

SPEAKER_02 35:04

She does.

SPEAKER_01 35:05

And this last one, it is a stretch. But I didn't want to leave the male stripper out, you know? And I said to myself, you know, him inspiring Schmidt to sort of imagine what his stripper persona would be. That's sort of like encouraging him to reinvent himself in his alternate stripper persona reality, you know? So there's he toys with the idea, doesn't he?

SPEAKER_02 35:29

He does. He does. He seems very interested in the idea, which seems like very Schmidt of him.

unknown 35:35

I know.

SPEAKER_01 35:36

It's so true. Reinvention. So those are some ways I see it in the episode. And in Judaism, I'm gonna talk to you today about the reinvention of Temple Judaism to Rabbinic Judaism. Basically the reinvention of Judaism. Okay. It underwent a reinvention. I think it is fair to say. So we've talked a lot about uh the temple, right? Second temple, usually. But we haven't really talked about what that means. And the temple was not like we think of a a temple or synagogue today where they're going and they're listening to a sermon and they're saying some prayers or singing some songs or reading a book or whatever. Not at all. So like many ancient religions, Judaism originally was a sacrificial cult. Like literally a sacrificial cult, just like all those other ancient religions. Judaism was that.

SPEAKER_02 36:35

Gotta sacrifice that goat, right? Gotta sacrifice that goat. Exactly. The paschal lamb. The paschal lamb, that's right.

SPEAKER_01 36:46

It's like an adjective that means Passover.

SPEAKER_02 36:49

Oh, really? Okay.

SPEAKER_01 36:50

Actually, it also means relating to Easter, but also Passover. We had it. We had it first. We did it first. And by we had it first, I mean our holiday came first. That's all I mean. Yeah. Yeah. So ritual sacrifices were the primary mode of worship, of atonement, of communing with the divine. Actually, the word for sacrifice in Hebrew is korban, which comes from the same root as draw near. So this was, they saw themselves as drawing near to the divine through these sacrifices. Very ancient and creepy, right? So this whole sacrificial system was centered exclusively, and this is the important part to remember here, it was centered exclusively around the temple in Jerusalem. That was literally the only shrine that was permissible to use, according to the Torah. Like it's like, this is that one, you get this one, nowhere else, nothing else. Okay. So this was like the epicenter where that whole sacrificial cult was focused. And it was an enormous operation, this whole routine. A whole hereditary cast of priests were the ones who carried this out and their assistants. They were the only ones allowed to carry out the sacrifices, too. That's also in the rules. It's just this cast of priests. And a good chunk of Torah is dedicated to outlining exactly how and when to offer sacrifices.

SPEAKER_03 38:25

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 38:26

If you read some Torah, you'll see a lot of sacrifice chat. Really? Animals. Animals are always being ritually slaughtered in the same very prescribed manner. Sometimes the dead animal is being eaten after the ritual slaughter. Um, sometimes it's being fully burned up in the flames.

SPEAKER_02 38:46

Did any of this carry over into the Christian Bible?

SPEAKER_01 38:50

Oh, yeah, it's all there. It's all there.

SPEAKER_02 38:51

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 38:52

All our books are also their books. They've just added extra ones.

SPEAKER_02 38:57

Gotcha. Are there not famous examples of like things they've removed from the Torah?

SPEAKER_01 39:02

In terms of books, not that's jumping to mind.

SPEAKER_02 39:07

I've never read either, so I don't know. Books, chapters.

SPEAKER_01 39:12

You know, I'm not a Bible scholar. I'll preface this by saying that. But I think more than removing books, the differences that they make are order of books. So they they add books. So we talked about like the Maccabees, which in the Jewish tradition is apocryphal, but Christian traditions have put it, some Christian traditions have put it in their Bibles. Sure. But they have reordered things around. We have it in a different order than they do for some reason. Our like the books of prophets and things like that. They're all just in a different order for some reason. Sure. And I would say translation is probably the big, the big difference. They just like to translate things differently, often in ways that sort of, you know, align with Christian prophecy, you might say a little better. Also, they've added a whole quote New Testament to theirs, in which, you know, part of the theology is that all of this scary sounding stuff from the quote old testament, like sacrifices, has all been conveniently neatly done away with by Jesus, who's like, don't need to do that anymore, guys. You can stop all that. Don't need to keep kosher either. Just throw away the law. I mean, there's people would quibble me on the specifics because he doesn't, in some places, he it doesn't sound like he's saying throw away the law. But anyway, that's a big thing. They have this like addendum that sort of nullifies everything in this. So they still do read the Torah. They read all these old books, they read all the stuff about the sacrifice in the Torah, and then they probably say to themselves, Phew, thank goodness this barbaric, crazy old thing has very little to do with our religion now.

SPEAKER_02 40:44

So now, are you gonna tell me about a reinvention within the Torah to, or maybe not the Torah, but within Judaism to also kind of be like, yeah, don't do that stuff anymore.

SPEAKER_01 40:56

Well, kind of. Yes and no, okay. Probably more no than you'd expect.

SPEAKER_02 41:02

You're twiddling your fingers in a really menacing way.

SPEAKER_01 41:05

That's right. I'm Mr. Burns in my fingertips here. So, all right, wrapping up. We got animals. I mentioned also there are some more normal things like grains and crops and incense and you know, whatever. So there's other stuff that's being sacrificed as well. And there it's for a bunch of different reasons. But this was a whole operation, just to round this out here, so you get the sense. Every single day there were three prescribed offerings. One in the morning that had to happen every day, one every afternoon, and one in the evening. So this was like every single day, whole big operation. They were doing these sacrifices. And then additional ones on holidays. This is all outlined in the Torah, like when you have to do what kind of sacrifice, and when you have to add an extra one. Sometimes people, regular old people came, you know, did a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, brought sacrifices for the priests to sacrifice so that, you know, for Thanksgiving or purification or you know, whatever ancient reasons people wanted to sacrifice stuff for.

SPEAKER_02 42:06

Thanksgiving, giving thanks, not the American holiday of Thanksgiving.

SPEAKER_01 42:10

That's right. They put on their little anachronistic pilgrim's hat, which is anachronistic even now. They are pilgrims. But it was really anachronistic then. They are pilgrims.

SPEAKER_02 42:20

Pilgrimaging to uh the temple.

SPEAKER_01 42:23

And then we have 70 CE, common era. What happens in 70 CE, Jay? Do you remember?

SPEAKER_02 42:32

The second temple is no more.

SPEAKER_01 42:35

That is right. The Romans, they destroy it. So remember, the whole religion was centered around that physical space. This was the only allowable space to use for sacrifices, which were the crux of their religion. So this was the only allowable space to practice the religion. And you know, only those certain people could do that action, the Kohanim, the priests. So that's all destroyed. It's just got like the the whole crux of the religion, the whole thing that underpins the ability to have that religion is destroyed. So this is a huge existential crisis for the Jewish people, right? So what were the Jews to do? Well, I'll tell you. And this is this is where the reinvention comes in, Jay. They, the sages, the guys we call the sages, they reinvent Judaism. And so, you know, to go back to your question earlier, it's not actually like they were reading these crazy barbaric ancient sacrifice instructions and saying, yeah, you know, we don't like that anymore. It's kind of weird. PETA, we we just joined PETA, we're throwing red paint on people's fur coats, we're not so hot about that. No, that's actually not the problem. The problem is they physically could not do the sacrifices anymore. And so they were like, uh-oh, that's what God told us to do. Now what do we do? Now that we can't do the thing that God told us to do. So what they did is they really reinvented Judaism in a way that took those instructions and the commandments laid out in the Torah around sacrifice, and they sort of fit them into and layered them onto other practices that could still be performed. So there were a few things that really took the place of those sacrifice rituals. The big one, of course, is prayer. So instead of three daily sacrifices in the temple, now, like even today, now, there are three daily prayer services. There's a morning service, afternoon, and evening prayers every single day. And those prayers explicitly in them, this is not just like, oh, you go into your bedroom and you say, Hey God, how are you doing?

SPEAKER_02 44:48

It's me, Margaret.

SPEAKER_01 44:49

Hey God, it's me, Margaret. That's the really thinking about that goat. Really thinking about that goat. I can't sacrifice anymore. I'm feeling kind of sad about it, kind of bummed. Uh no, this is like a liturgy, right? This is what the Catholics would call high church. We don't call it high church, but it's it's liturgical. It's you know, these are formalized prayers that we are chanting, singing is what it often sounds like, or you know, doing these really sort of prescribed choreographies in some way. So anyway, these prayers themselves actually ask God to accept our prayers, accept these prayers as a substitute for the other sacrifices. So the words of the prayers are really like it's it's it's all about the sacrifices that we can't do. And it's not all about the sacrifices we can't do anymore. But like it exists in those prayers. It's like, and by the way, God, I hope you accept this. Hope this is cool. We can't actually do all that sacrifice stuff anymore. But look, we are praying three times a day, kind of like that. So hope you feel fine about that. There's lots of other stuff in the prayer too, but that is why there are three services every single day. And then other things that came into play to help sort of um take the place of sacrifices were tdaka, which you know, charity, study, repentance, so things like that. But the liturgy, in addition to the daily prayers, it references the temple and sacrifices a lot, like a lot more than you would expect them to. And I'm gonna give you one example that is really cool, in my opinion. Animal lovers, watch out. But uh on Yom Kippur, the holiday Yom Kippur, there is a really, really dramatic chanted, or like, you know, chanting this thing, reading out this thing in like chant song, right? There's an extremely detailed description of the entire Yom Kippur temple service. So there was a Yom Kippur temple service outlined in the Torah. This was the day that the high priest would enter the really like inner, inner inner sanctuary, the Holy of Holies. He would do this once a year, only on Yom Kippur, and it was a whole production. Like every single thing he did was prescribed. This is what you do a week in advance. So, anyway, this thing we chant at Yom Kippur, it really details in like extreme detail the weeks leading up to it, his preparation, how this guy gets dressed, what he's like exactly what he's wearing. There are some costume changes too, like what he's changing into. It goes into his bathing, you know, ablutions, if we want to use like an old ancient sounding word, how he bathed, how he bowed down. People in in services on these high holy days. It's like the only time that it's customary, usually, for Jews to like actually get on the ground and do it, because it's talking about the temple service in which they did that. And then this is the part that I love. They describe the part of the sacrifice, the animal sacrifice that involved dipping a finger into the sacrificed animal's blood. Okay, you with me? And sprinkling it in this like prescribed manner where you're like sprinkling it up and down and counting while you do it. So it's like one and then one and one, like up and down, and then one and two, flick flick. Can you hear the flick noise of my fingers? One and three, all the way up to like one and seven. And it's just we're just like chanting this, like imagining flicking animal blood with your finger onto the altar in like an ancient every everyone in the temple is doing this? We're not actually like doing it, but we're um it's being chanted, like sung. It's being sung.

SPEAKER_02 48:26

And like you're miming it.

SPEAKER_01 48:27

No, you're not miming it. I guess you could mime it, but no, you're not. But I've it's so vivid in my mind that I'm the rabbi miming it. Actually, now you've got me questioning it. Do I ever actually watch them? Maybe they've mime. I mean, I guess there's nothing stopping somebody from miming it, right? I've only ever experienced a few canters doing this. Yeah, I'll have to look it up and see how how dramatic people get. Because I mean, there is that element, right? They do bow. So I guess what would stop them from also flicking? But it's just so visceral in my mind because I'm imagining the flicking. That's why it feels like I'm there doing it too. It's just so strange. So, anyway, I love it because it's so weird, right? It's so ancient, it's so primal feeling. Like this, this, especially to me, you know I love ancient things, right? This is such a connection. It feels like such a connection to an ancient civilization. The fact that we're really walking through beat by beat, like this is what they did in the ancient days, and it's crazy. And we're like still talking about it and still modeling stuff after it.

SPEAKER_02 49:29

Here's the little jay aside. Did you ever see that interview with the actor who played Spock, the original Spock on Star Trek, who let uh Leonard Leonard Nimoy? Leonard Nimoy. And he's Jewish, uh-huh, and he got the Spock Live Long and Prosper hand symbol, right? Where you have like your index and middle finger together, and then your ring and your pinky finger together spread apart, right? Yeah. He got that supposedly from he was at temple in some scenario where he was supposed to like have his eyes closed or something, and he peeked to see what the rabbi was doing, and the rabbi's hand was making that. That's how he got the live long and prosper sign.

SPEAKER_01 50:12

Okay, I didn't know the detail about the peaking, but I'm so impressed that you know that. That is actually that's the priestly blessing. That's a thing.

SPEAKER_02 50:21

Oh, well, there you go. I guess maybe this isn't a big secret.

SPEAKER_01 50:24

No, I mean, I'm just impressed that you knew it. That's so cool. I was coincidentally recently hearing Leonard Nimoy talk about that, and that's where he got it for Star Trek. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 50:35

That's great. You know, this has me thinking, do you ever think about how rampant OCD probably used to be in the ancient world? Oh, undoubtedly. In the in the way that it it relates to like tradition and making sure everything is done and repeated exactly the same way each time.

SPEAKER_01 50:58

Undoubtedly. And I've actually also heard some people we love the Orthodox. This is not shade on the Orthodox, but I I have heard like people who leave ultra-Orthodox communities, but they, you know, they they talk about how their own journey with OCD compulsions and things like things like that really, you know, was inextricable with because you can get crazy into rules in Judaism. Like if you're ultra-orthodox, there are every single moment of your day can be prescribed and dictated by a rule if you wanted it to. So you can see how that would feed those parts of somebody's minds if you were into that or had problems with that.

SPEAKER_02 51:35

Not to bash tradition.

SPEAKER_01 51:37

Absolutely not. Absolutely. And I mean, and one could argue we're not gonna get into it. We're not gonna get into it, but it's like, is that necessarily more traditional? It was a tradition of a certain group, you know what I mean? These things grow over time. So anyway, it doesn't make them more Jewish. It's just like one way of sure interpreting these rules and applying them can be insane like that. So anyway, all of this that we're talking about, taking the old stuff but putting really in a new template, all of this becomes what we know today as what's called rabbinic Judaism. So that's why when like Christians will read the Old Testament and they'll be like, that looks nothing like what you guys are doing today. What's up with that? It's because we follow rabbinic Judaism, which basically reinvented this ancient sacrificial cult religion into what we practice today and how we now find ways to apply these old, ancient weird things to daily life. And we call it rabbinic because this was the OG rabbis who basically like translated these practices and codified the new equivalents to temple services.

SPEAKER_02 52:34

Gotcha. So were there no rabbis before the destruction of the second temple? Was it just sages?

SPEAKER_01 52:40

So there were rabbis. It's actually right. That's a great question, Jay. So the there were sort of two competing factions, and now I'm going off my notes here. This is off script, so I might be a little bit off here, but there were two main groups of sort of leaders. There were the Sadducees and the Pharisees. These are words that our Christian listeners will know because they love to hate the Pharisees. But twist, the Pharisees are our rabbis, so we like the Pharisees. So the Sadducees, then these were all like teachers, they were leading schools of thought. You got the Hillel and the Shemai, they're they're Pharisees, right? So the Sadducees were really focused on temple stuff. They were like the priest caste, basically. They, everything, all their decisions, everything they were angling for, it was really all about emphasizing the priest caste, these sacrifice services, like very temple-based. And the Pharisees, on the other hand, were a little bit more like, hey, let's study and like apply stuff to our lives. There was, I think, sort of a tradition moving in that direction anyway. Like, this can be a home-based way of living too. You know, it's not all about the sacrifices that go on in the blah, blah, blah. So lucky for them, history played out in such a way that, like, oops, sorry, Sadducees, but your whole thing kind of is gone now. So we have to look to the guys who all along were sort of saying, like, hey, it doesn't have to all be about this, you know.

SPEAKER_02 53:57

Right.

SPEAKER_01 53:57

So yeah, great question. Those were the rabbis, you know, Hillel and Shemai, we talk about them as rabbis. They were second temple before the destruction. So rabbi just means teacher. So it's just people teaching, leading houses of study, things like that. Gotcha. Because they were still, even even though it was sacrificial cult, you know, people were still studying the rules around the sacrificial cults. So they were studying texts and things like that. Gotcha. So, reinvention. If we think back to the episode, do we think are there times when it's right or wrong to reinvent yourself? I guess my question is, should we condemn oh in Judaism, is it is it good or bad? One if you love animals, you probably say, it's great, we had to reinvent that. Let's not ever do that again.

SPEAKER_03 54:41

Sure.

SPEAKER_01 54:41

But in the context of the episode, like, do we condemn Schmidt and Nick for that matter, for trying to reinvent themselves? Do we hold it against them?

SPEAKER_02 54:51

I think we don't hold it against them because I think the deeper meaning, actually, if I can if I can draw your drosh. I think this episode has a lot of reinventing oneself, but taking it back later. Or realizing that what you thought you were overcoming isn't really what you were overcoming. For instance, with Schmidt, he had a big transformation throughout his 20s, losing weight and you know, trying to like reinvent himself to like be this like charismatic, sexy guy, right? Like he he was reinventing himself that way all this time, and he really wanted the approval of those those guys he looked up to, like Benjamin, right? All those douchebags.

SPEAKER_00 55:39

Right.

SPEAKER_02 55:40

But, you know, sort of at the end of this episode, like he's pushing back on the guy. He's like, he doesn't like Benjamin, you know what I mean? And he's standing up for himself a little bit. I mean, Julia is the one who punches him, but Schmidt is standing up for himself, right?

unknown 55:53

Right.

SPEAKER_02 55:53

A little bit, you know, he's confronting him. And so he is sort of taking that reinvention and of, you know, like trying to put on this persona for Benjamin and his friends, but he's sort of realizing that like that wasn't really what he needed to overcome. What he kind of needed to overcome was that need to get approval from them.

SPEAKER_01 56:13

Right.

SPEAKER_02 56:13

So I guess that is also a reinvention. Maybe it's a double reinvention for Schmidt.

SPEAKER_01 56:18

No, there is like a circling back feeling to it.

SPEAKER_02 56:20

A little bit, right? It circles back more to who he is on the inside rather than who is he is on the outside. And in Nick's case, he was trying to reinvent himself to be like, oh, I'm super cool. I don't know any of these people, you know, like uh what roommates? I uh, you know, and throughout the whole episode, his reinvention is being slowly torn down piece by piece as he reveals, okay, I have these roommates, okay, yes, I live with them, okay, yes, I do know these people at this party, okay, I do know what bro ju juice is.

SPEAKER_01 56:51

Yeah, I invented it, I'm the inventor of bro juice. Whoops.

SPEAKER_02 56:54

Yeah, yeah. So I also think like to some extent, maybe this theme of double layering the reinventions where it's like you do one change, but that leads you to really recognize this other change that maybe gets at something deeper inside, right? Because like he is able to be himself at the end of the episode talking about Nick, and that works out for him with Julia. You know what I mean? Like, she likes him more for that.

SPEAKER_01 57:18

Right. Yeah, that's really interesting.

SPEAKER_02 57:21

Yeah. And to to go back to what you were saying about tying it into Judaism, do we do we condemn or do we approve of reinvention? I think it's a it's a mix, you know what I mean? I think as are many things in Judaism, that theme of yeah, I was gonna say yes and as if it was improv.

unknown 57:39

It's improv.

SPEAKER_02 57:41

But yes and the the idea that two truths that could be in conflict can both be held as true, you know?

SPEAKER_01 57:50

That's right. Aluva Elu.

SPEAKER_02 57:52

Aluva Elu. And so so I think that reinvention has its places and can be a good thing. I think as a species, right, if we're thinking about Judaism in the context of like our greater humanity as a species, we're sort of moving away from sacrificing animals to a deity in the sky, right? Because maybe that doesn't actually have the outcomes we think it will. Um and uh at least that's the strong stance of this podcast. Hurt here first. We're taking a stand, guys. We we're asserting killing that goat. God doesn't care if you kill that goat, but you know, don't don't kill the goat.

SPEAKER_01 58:35

Don't kill the goat.

SPEAKER_02 58:36

God's indifference is also not a reason to kill the goat, I should say. These and these.

SPEAKER_01 58:44

Consider this. God may still smell the goat, even if you don't burn it up. Maybe you just you can just smell the goat. You want to smell it?

SPEAKER_02 58:52

There you call it. Just smell the goat. Is that why they would burn the goat?

SPEAKER_01 58:57

I don't know. I mean, you always there's all this language about like, oh, may it be a pleasing smell to the Lord, stuff like that. It's weird. You should read it sometime. It's crazy.

SPEAKER_02 59:06

Yeah, no, I I really should. Anyways, those are my thoughts. I hope you'll like that.

SPEAKER_01 59:11

I love that. That was really insightful. I feel like all of the thoughts that had been swimming around in my head were more negative, like not well, they weren't negative, but just like I was thinking a lot about sort of the tension between, you know, like Schmidt. Does he feel like being a douchebag is the price he has to pay for no longer being that Schmidt? And it's weird with him though, because it's like, I do think he's happier, you know? And so I kind of I want to be happy for him in changing his life a little bit, but actually, I think to your point, he might be happier on in certain regards. You know, he feels better about himself, he's I don't know, getting the ladies or whatever, he's confident at work. Right. But but you're right. I think he doesn't actually like the part of him that's a douchebag. And so he's sort of circling back into that deeper part of himself that's like, no, the person I was when I was younger, even though I didn't look as cool, that is still me. That is still like a the real part of me, and I I shouldn't have to Right.

SPEAKER_02 1:00:13

And I do wonder if we see more flashbacks of younger him, if we will get any insight into whether the more douchebag personality traits he has are things that developed over time as he made this transformation throughout his 20s, or if they were there all along and he just happened to not be this like good-looking hotshot get all the ladies guy at the time. You know, like I have to imagine that some of that developed with him physically shaping himself and changing himself and like emotionally and mentally adapting himself to be more of a douchebag because he thinks that goes hand in hand and that you have to have both, you know.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:57

Right. Yeah, that's great. Keep that in mind as we watch, and I'll I'll be curious to hear your thoughts as that plays out as we see more flashbacks of the Schmidt.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:06

Wonderful. Look forward to it.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:08

That's great. Yeah, it's like uh you know, where he's taking bits of the past self that he is. Maybe maybe this is the goal, is you take the seeds of your past self that you like, and you just you don't have to change yourself, but you're sort of folding them into the person that you're becoming because there's nothing wrong with growing, right? Right. And so it's just like you're folding those things in even if you're growing, I don't know. Kind of like uh the sacrifice and how the seeds of the sacrificial system are present even in the fully transformed prayer services. I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:45

Good point.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:45

I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 1:01:46

In a way, looking at Judaism from a many thousand-year viewpoint, vantage point, Judaism is growing too.

SPEAKER_01 1:01:55

Yeah, exactly. It is it has evolved and continues to evolve, without a doubt. Well gosh. Thanks for listening. Jay, thanks for doing this. So fun, as always. If the listeners out there want to get in touch with us, email us at jugirlpodcast at gmail.com. Join us next time, as always, when we will we Frankie Moon is gonna be on the podcast and eating tootsie rolls.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:26

I didn't know who that was. My wife had to tell me that it was Malcolm in the Middle.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:30

Are you serious? How young, sweet baby Jay are you?

SPEAKER_02 1:02:34

Tune in next time when we reinvent the word goosebumps to just be goose. Goose boop. Goose boop.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:46

Tune in next week when we will all be the baritone in our church choir.

SPEAKER_02 1:02:52

Tune in next time when Nick does believe in dinosaurs.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:56

Thank god. Turn that black green. Join us next time when we will throw animal blood on peeps while they joist. Do you ever do peep joisting? We will make peeps joast in the microwave and shower them with animal blood. We will ritually slit the throats of the peeps and take their blood and sprinkle one and one, one and two on the altar on Yom Kippur.

SPEAKER_02 1:03:25

Thank goodness this is an explosive podcast.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:29

Oh yeah. Mumble mum bum mumble.