Livre d'Or

Yeah, I'm trying to do at least some context, but obviously "context" is 2000+ years of history and scholarship, so not all that is going to fit into even a long-winded DW post.

Primo Levi used to explain the Gemara in the form of an invented, but plausible dialogue: one bloke says to the other, imagine if two chimney sweeps come out of a chimney, and one has a clean face and the other has a dirty face, which one will wash his face? And the straight man says, of course the dirty one will wash his face. No, the dirty man will see that this companion's face is clean, and assume his must be too, so the clean chimney sweep will wash his face as he sees that the other guy is dirty. And then the next day someone else asks the straight man the same question, and he gives the clever answer he's just learned, and his interlocutor goes, what are you talking about? That's just ridiculous, obviously it couldn't happen that two chimney sweeps could be in the same chimney and one could come out clean and the other dirty! And then people argue about the meaning of this parable for the next 20 centuries.

I think R' Zarum was trying to challenge screwed up Western attitudes about body functions from one direction, and that can potentially be valuable. Like, if this is something that can be talked about and even celebrated, that can be liberating for people who can't do their business completely privately in toilets so that everybody can pretend excretion doesn't exist. But equally, I think with this material you have to be really, really careful not to say, isn't it a miracle that we can eliminate body wastes successfully! in such a way that it dehumanizes people who need support to perform those functions.