Plane diverted by tefillin

DonnaL
Sun, 24 Jan 2010 18:55:55 +0000

I’m perhaps being oversenstive, but the continued use of adjectives like strange and weird and odd on this thread bothers me. Unusual, yes, and, as I said, unfamiliar to many, but there’s nothing strange or weird or odd about them. Those terms are a little bit pejorative and condescending, I think, and remind me too much of old pop-anthropological writings about “strange and weird rituals of the Amazon tribes,” etc. People don’t use words like that anymore to describe the peoples of exotic locales around the world, and I don’t see why it’s necessary to use them for a kid putting on tefillin. (This has nothing to do with whether it was necessary to turn the plane around.)